Technology readiness and the F-35

The Straus Military Reform Project has a new set of podcasts taking the name of their nice 2011 book, The Pentagon Labyrinth. One episode by Dan Grazier, "The F-35 continues to stumble," provides a good exposition of the F-35's current status. There are so many points, but here is one representative example:

"The cannon in the F-35A sits behind a small door on the side of the aircraft that opens quickly an instant before the cannon is fired—a characteristic intended to keep the aircraft stealthy. Test flights have shown that this door catches the air flowing across the surface of the aircraft, pulling the F-35’s nose off the aimpoint resulting in errors “that exceed accuracy specifications.”"

Read the whole article if you don't listen to the podcast. I won't go on here about well documented troubles of the F-35. But the gun issue reminded me of another matter.

I had recently been reading about what people said about the F-35 program back when it was going through milestone B in 2002. The hot topic of the day was "knowledge-based acquisition," where information on technological readiness drives the progression of program phases. The Technology Readiness Level (TRL) was developed as an industry best practice for measuring knowledge achieved. For example, programs should not enter full scale development (pass Milestone B) until critical technologies reach a TRL of at least 6, where system/subsystems have been modeled or prototyped in a realistic environment.

What's the point? Certainly no one was debating the technical readiness of the F-35 gun, and even if they did, it would be at the highest level of 9. But was anyone thinking about interactions between technologies, and how they would operate in their actual environment? Time and again it is not until a system or subsystem is put to the test that critical problems are exposed, and all our supposed knowledge implied by the TRL means little or nothing.