Notepad

CQ's Josh Rogin broke something other than his arm today: Informed congressional aides tell Josh that an internal Pentagon oversight board has concluded the Joint Strike Fighter is two years behind the publicly announced schedule for its rollout.

It will be interesting to see what effect the story has on the administration's efforts to kill the F-22,which got a powerful boost when the Senate voted to curtail the program.

Here's an excerpt of Josh's story from CQ's subscription-based site.

The Pentagon's Joint Estimate Team (JET), which was established to independently oversee the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, is at odds with the fighter's Joint Program Office, the aides said. The oversight panel's calculations determined that the fighter won't be able to move out of the development phase and into full production mode until 2016, rather than 2014 as the program office has said. That's assuming there are no further problems with the program, which has already faced cost overruns and schedule delays. The Government Accountability Office said the delay could cost as much as $7.4 billion.

"In every parameter and in every respect, the Joint Program Office's projections were always a hell of a lot rosier than what the Joint Estimate Team found," said one Senate aide who was briefed on the findings.

As Congress has debated the future of the F-22 fighter program, lawmakers have used the promise of the F-35 plane's completion as a key plank in their argument that the F-22 line could be ended without a significant risk to national security.

The F-22's varied problems -- and the promise held by the F-35 -- have been detailed in various reports by government agencies and defense experts over the years.