The armed services have been remarkably disciplined about not fiddling with the requirements of the F-35 strike fighter, said Larry Lawson, executive vice president of Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, in an interview. “They’ve been pretty solid on holding requirements steady,” said Lawson. “Together” with the services, he said, “we’ve had to flex around some of the demands that have manifested themselves in the actual fielding, for example, of the [information technology] systems,” and that has driven some requirements changes. But, “the government’s done a very good job, I think, of sticking with the fundamentals,” said Lawson. Lockheed Martin has added a new facility and 100 new software engineers to stay on top of the millions of lines of code that the F-35 uses, he told the Daily Report June 19.
The defense intelligence community has tried three times in the past decade to build a “common intelligence picture”—a single data stream providing the information that commanders need to make decisions about the battlefield. The first two attempts failed. But officials say things are different today.