Aviation Week Market Supplement September 10, 2007

F-35 Lightning II: The World’s First Truly Global Weapon System Alliance Alliances Require New Processes and Skill Sets for Next-Generation Programs Seven years ago, the teams bidding on the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program spent the majority of their time and effort debating the best design for the fighter aircraft and its new weapons. Today, the winning team’s leaders—Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems—say the issues surrounding the international partnership and ongoing life-cycle sustainment have been just as daunting as designing the aircraft and weapon systems were. Charles T. (Tom) Burbage, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co. executive vice president and general manager for F-35 global integration, is candid about the challenges the F-35 team has faced: • Compliance with multiple governments’ import/export and arms trafficking regulations. • Reducing the number of variables required to meet partner nations’ fighter aircraft requirements. • Ensuring best-value selection of suppliers, instead of relying on a workshare-based supply chain. • Preventing/mitigating requirement creep and migration. www.aviationweek.com/awst • Avoiding decisions by committee, which would yield mid-level results, instead of the best possibilities. • Shortage of expertise, including precision machining, in both Europe and the U.S. • Using the multinational partnership to gain stability in funding and program planning among the governments. While running the largest international alliance in U.S. defense history, Burbage says he’s learned numerous lessons during the past seven years. The most important ones are to set a defined decision-making process; to have a prime contractor with a vision that gives direction and that doesn’t allow committee decisionmaking; to establish a set of over-arching behavioral principles and expectations and then hold each member of the team accountable. “And relationships really matter. [You need to] build strong stakeholder relations at all levels [and] work those relationships hard, but always consistently,” he says. Couple these leadership and organizational issues with the demands of allnew technologies, and Burbage still believes international alliances will be the vehicle for creating weapon systems. “We expect our allies to fight with us. We expect our allies to share the peacekeeping burden. We have the needed technology. They generally don’t. So we all benefit from the economics of joint-coalition development.” ESTABLISHING RULES The requirements surrounding export/import laws and International Trafficking in Arms Regulations (ITAR) vary by country, agency and, at times, the individuals involved. In 2004, the F-35 leadership team made it clear that this was a major hurdle to be cleared. Burbage and then-Joint Program Office Executive Officer Maj. Gen. John L. Hudson told a group of industry leaders in November 2004 that remedying the approval sequence for some type of consistent licensing and ITAR process was a top need. Burbage notes that the bid process involved the exchange of technical data that resulted in hundreds of requests that traditionally would take months to process. Instead, the team came up with a Global Program Authorization, an umbrella agreement among the eight partner nations that included a list of companies that would provide information needed to AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY MARKET SUPPLEMENT/SEPTEMBER 10, 2007 S1 http://www.aviationweek.com/awst

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