U.S. Air Force T-X Procurement Needs To Focus On Time As Well As Cost (from National Interest)

While fixed pricing and the prohibition on concurrent development will protect the Air Force from major cost increase on the upcoming T-X procurements, they do not address the danger of schedule slippage. Any delay in delivering the T-X will cost the Air Force dearly. Not surprisingly, all the potential competitors assert that their offering is sufficiently advanced, or even in production in some form, thus making it unlikely that there will be a schedule problem. As the era of long development periods for major acquisition programs comes to an end, the Air Force needs to make time as important a factor in its procurements as it has cost. I have written more about this subject and the T-X program for National Interest.