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ASEE Prism, Mar 2003 by McGraw, Dan

The new Joint Strike Fighter is to the most sophisticated war machines ever conceived and may also change the way engineering is taught.

When the requirements for the Joint Strike Fighter airplane were first proposed by the Pentagon in the early 1990s, many in the defense industry thought the government was asking for the impossible. The next generation fighter jet, worth $200 billion to whomever would build it, needed to be the most flexible war machine ever built.

It needed to fly at supersonic speeds and have enemy radar evading stealth capabilities. It would be the first such fighter rugged enough to land on carriers for the Navy but also with vertical takeoff and landing capabilities for the Marine Corps. The Air Force wanted the latest in digital technology, with a wide range of bombing capabilities-from 2,000 pound air-to-- surface missiles to gun turrets mounted on the wing. And it needed to have a travel radius of 600 nautical miles.

Besides these tech specifications, there were other issues the builder of this plane had to deal with. The JSF would be a true multinational fighter plane. Other countries would not just purchase it; they would help design planes specific to their needs. But the real kicker on the project was cost. Even though the JSF would do much more than any previous fighter jet, the Defense Department wanted the plane at a cheaper cost than the current F-16s and F-22s.

And one more thing. Whoever would get the contract could be assured that their company would survive. In the world of consolidation and mergers among defense contractors, the loser might not be able to keep going.

When Lockheed Martin beat out Boeing in October 2001, and was awarded the $200 billion JSF contract that stretches over 25 years, it was the largest military contract ever awarded. Partly because of the contract, Lockheed Martin is adding 4,500 jobs, while Boeing laid off 30,000 in 2002. From a logistical standpoint, the nextgeneration fighter is one of the most challenging military engineering projects ever attempted. On a number of levels, from manufacturing to cost controls to ever changing software requirements, the JSF program will dominate military aeronautical engineering through the first half of this century. In fact, the JSF may be the last conventional fighter plane built as the military moves toward remote-controlled attack aircraft.

The earliest challenge for Lockheed Martin, which will manufacture the plane in Fort Worth, Tex., is the hiring of so many engineers to make the JSF a reality. In 2002, Lockheed Martin was averaging 30 to 50 engineers hired every week-by the end of the year, the company had hired 3,000 people for the project, most of them engineers.

"Bringing more people on every day continues to be a challenge," says John Fuller, vice president of Lockheed Martin's JSF F-35 Air Vehicle Unit. Fuller says that one way the company is managing such a huge workforce is to group them into integrated product teams (IPTs). Made up of Lockheed Martin's prime contractors on the project-BAE Systems and Northrup Grumman, as well as suppliers and subcontractors-- each IPT unit will have specific tasks. "We feel very strongly about that approach," Fuller says. "You get the best value for the customer if you create a team of multidisciplined folks, put their in a cage together, and let the best ideas come out of that."

Change in Course

The interdisciplinary nature of the project is generating the need for engineers with backgrounds in many areas. Lockheed Martin is hiring mechanical, electrical, aeronautical, and software engineers. The major difference between this fighter jet and its predecessors is not innovation but process. The engineers in this case did not start with a mandate to make a plane fly faster and higher and with certain payload requirements. Instead, the design of the JSF owed as much to the requirements of the factory floor and the ability to fix the plane cheaply in the hangar when it breaks down.

"Every decision we make across the program has to address cost," explains Jim Engelland, the JSF systems integration director. "We've always worked under a performance mantra, that is, get as much performance out of an aircraft as we can. Before JSF, nobody ever said, `If I can add five pounds here, this part will be easier to manufacture and will cost less.' We have asked all of our integrated product teams to design and develop as though they were spending their own money."

The change in philosophy was due to budgetary contractions in the 1990s. During the Cold War, the armed services asked for military hardware and it was delivered with little thought to cost. Though the defense budget is increasing in fiscal year 2003 by 11 percent (to $335 billion), it decreased by 50 percent from 1990 to 1997. In 1993, engineers at MIT formed the Lean Aerospace Initiative (LAI) to help defense contractors deal with the budget cuts. The LAI was a consortium of academics, labor unions, defense contractors, and government agencies that worked to explore better ways to deploy military technology at a reasonable price. Lockheed Martin was one of the defense contractors that participated (and continues to do so) in the LAI.