F-35 costs
Early promises were made inside the Pentagon for unit cost. There was a $35 million per unit “total program unit cost” promise that was widely circulated in the Pentagon; however, I find today no documentation of it. (“Total Program Unit Cost” includes all RDT&E costs plus Procurement, but does not include Operations and Maintenance [O&M] support, maintenance, spare parts, etc., etc., etc..)
The “Joint Strike Fighter” does not show up in the definitive DOD public cost document (“Selected Acquisition Report” [SAR]; find them all at http://www.acq.osd.mil/ara/am/sar/.) until 1996, and then the SAR cites no quantity numbers and only development, not production, estimates.
The 2001 SAR is the first to cite both RDT&E and Procurement costs and quantity numbers. They are 2,866 F-35s for $177.5 billion in 2002 (no typo) dollars. That comes to $62 million per unit in 2002 dollars or $73 million in 2010 dollars according to the inflators for procurement in the FY 2010 “Greenbook.” (I have used the notoriously unreliable DOD procurement inflators because of their convenience, and a spot check does not show them to be radically different for the years I am using them from OMB’s GDP Chained Price Index in Table 10.1 at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2011/assets/hist10z1.xls.)
Interestingly, the 2002 SAR lowered the unit cost estimate from the 2001 estimate. It predicted the same 2,866 aircraft for $161 billion (2002 dollars) or $66 million per unit in 2010 dollars. A George W. Bush administration product, someone there was clearly even more enthusiastic about the F-35 than the hapless Clinton administration advocates.
So for “original” unit-cost estimates for the F-35, take your pick: $35 million, $73 million or $66 million.
The current cost estimate is no less tricky. The latest SAR is 18 months old. The September 2008 SAR shows $210 billion in 2002 dollars for 2,456 F-35s. That’s $247 billion, or $100.6 million each, in 2010 dollars. (I am not using the “current year” dollar estimate, or $299 billion or $122 million each, a figure many may be more familiar with; I am converting everything to 2010 dollars for comparison purposes below.)
This estimate does not include the new re-estimate (upward) that reportedly will appear in the April 2010 SAR. Some, only some, portion of the extra $16.6 billion said to be predicted by the JET II will be included. Various senior Pentagon types have indicated that this will incur a Nunn-McCurdy “breech” which will cause a flurry of paperwork thrown at Capitol Hill and some predictably “non-oversight hearings,” but very probably not much more than that. (Nonetheless, the Nunn-McCurdy “breech” will be considered a big deal.) Whatever amount of the JET II’s $16.6 billion is included in the new SAR, that amount will only apply to the FYDP years 2011 to 2016; there will be more cost in the years after 2016 based on that re-estimate; the amount is unknown to me. I can also personally guarantee that there will be additional cost grown beyond whatever amount is shown in the new April 2010 SAR.
F-16 costs
The 1970s SARs are a mess and do not cite quantities. I did however find some GAO estimates (from its Desert Storm report at http://www.gao.gov/archive/1997/ns97134.pdf). There, F-16 Total Program Unit Costs are cited as $18.9 million in the air-to-air version and $22.6 million in the air-to-ground (with Lantirn) version in 1994 dollars. In 2010 dollars, that’s $24.9 million and $29.8 million respectively. For comparison to the loaded-down-with-stuff F-35, I recommend the loaded-down-with-stuff version of the F-16, thus $29.8 million per unit cost. (There are today even more expensive versions of the F-16 for export, but without full-rate production as for the F-16 C/D, a cost comparison would be highly biased in favor of the F-35.)
Note that a comparison to the mass produced, highly priced version of the F-16 C/D, the F-35 comes at a minimum of three times the cost. That difference will, however, become larger. In 2010 dollars, it is not unreasonable to anticipate at least a $150 million total program unit cost for the F-35; others predict more.
A-10 costs
As the F-35 also pretends to replace the A-10 (something it is functionally incapable of doing, unless you entertain the delusion that bombing map coordinates from 20,000 feet is Close Air Support), A-10 cost should be compared as well. (The reasons to do so are strengthened by the high use rate and praise accorded to the A-10 in Desert Storm in 1991, Iraq in 2003, and Afghanistan now; it is clearly an important point of reference.) GAO cites A-10 Total Program Unit Costs as $11.8 million in 1994 dollars, or $15.6 million in 2010 dollars.
Thus, the F-35 costs six times an A-10, and yet cannot perform the function that the A-10 has performed to the surprise of some and praise of many.
You asked for the cost of the aircraft the F-16 replaced. It is not an apples for apples replacement, but an obvious candidate is the F-4. Available SARs are silent on it, but Wikipedia cites some costs, which I interpret to mean a $16.9 million unit cost in 2010 dollars, but this does not include most development cost. I strongly suspect that including all F-4 development costs would push F-4 cost above that of the early, more simple version of the F-16, but total costs for the F-4 and the F-16 A are not available to me.
If you ask others, you may have thrown at you “fly-away” costs for the purpose of understanding program costs. In the past U.S. Air Force and Marine Corps advocates of high cost systems have pretended that “fly-away” cost equates to “sticker price.” That is complete hogwash. Not only will these cost estimates exclude development costs, which are a large piece of the puzzle, but people will also select unique dollars to bias the argument in whatever direction they please. Thus, you might get “fly-away” costs in base year (in other words ancient) dollars to understate costs (for the F-35), or fly-away costs in some unspecified late year dollars to overstate costs (for the comparison aircraft). Also, some like to try to define out of programs things like engines and other essentials to try to pretend lower fly-away costs. Avoid using anything called a “fly-away” cost if you possibly can. (Also, if the type of the cost estimate is not clearly defined, discard it immediately.) (The best way to find fly-away costs, if you must, is to turn to any annual appropriations bill and calculate how much each of those aircraft cost then and there, but you must also go to the prior year to get the long lead (“APCY”) costs to add in. And you will only have what the flyaway cost is for that year-stage of the program; they vary tremendously.)
Table summary follows:
[table id=17 /]
