Whoa, Tex! Put away your six-shooter. You're mixing apples and ornages and not understanding what SECDEF said or the implications of same. The DoD Budgeting process has a 2-3 year lag time inherent in the time to takes to build a house of cards and work it through multiple kabuki dances at CN/CMC level, SECDEF, White House and finally the 8-12 month gauntlet of Congressional action and back through White House. What's that have to do with standing up of the RAG? To have facilities in place, MILCON (that's Military Construction) requests have to be placed in the Kubuki dance before the normal requests so they had to get the facilities in place based on earliest PROJECTED arrival of people and aircraft. Typically, Fleet Introduction Teams are operating years before an aircraft arrives and JSF has followed the Air Force practice of creating a Special Mission Office (SMO) under auspices of CNAF/CNAL in Norfolk to work all the fielding details. There aren't any aircraft to fly during that timeframe and ALCON know it. When the RAG cadre begin to form there is more paperwork to do before the first article arrives on the ramp so your comments are very naive about need for aircraft and pilots being DIFOP without something to fly.
Regardless, SECDEF is less than a month away from presenting the FY11-15 Budget (goes to hill second week in Feb as President's Budget). His announcement concerned the decision he made (as recommended by his staff review of the service POM submissions late last year) affecting FY-11-15. What that means to your friends at Eglin is far less than you are getting worked up about. The aircraft buy in FY-11 won't show up until FY13 at best so they will likely be rolling by then. As to the aircraft they expect in short term, aircraft showing up now were paid for in FY08 or FY09. It's way too hard to go back and change what's been contracted for already. Now, if the F-35B program discovers a major Safety of Flight issue, that's another story that could delay arrival of aircraft.
As to RAG cadre not having aircraft to fly as expected....it is rare for any program to execute exactly as planned although Growler development and production deliveries were pretty impressive, but they used an existing airframe and a hot production line drastically reducing risk. Even if aircraft get delayed, being assigned to be a stand-up cadre for any aircraft whether it be for developmental/operational test or RAG involves a lot of preparation work and endless meetings so they're going to be busy. Anyone who takes orders to these type assignments needs to be fully aware of that fact so getting worked up about it is a waste of time. As to my comment about the news being no surprise, some of those meetings involve design and status reviews on engineering changes proposed to address issues to either make aircraft safe to fly or reliable or effective. That is far more important than getting an aircraft as predicted several years ago.
JSF is an ambitious program and nobody could know whether it was going to slide or not. Issues come out in design reviews and action determined to address them. Sometimes, the proposed fixes work, sometimes it's back to drawing board. And that's a simplistic view of the complexity of RDT&E involved in fielding a new platform. Any savvy betting person wouldn't wager a dime that a program like JSF will be on time, but the way the budget process works, you have to forecast a timeline and adjust it annually or before major design reviews or acquisition milestones.
None of that has a direct correlation to the state of the Hornet and Harrier communities and it's not because of the JSF pogram. The problems you are describing are a dircet result of the communities being forward deployed far more than originally planned or budgeted for and with utilization rates far exceeding the peacetime forecasts that drive the spares pipeline. This traces back to the Budgeting process. Congress won't allow services to "assume" they will be at war, oops sorry, I mean involved in GWOT, no, I mean Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) when they propose their budgets. They want a baseline peacetime budget proposal when they are put together starting 2 years before they take effect (I was in N88 spaces Friday and asked an old friend what he was working on and he said "You know, POM 12, the future, seen dimly!"). Congress says "Don't worry" if you are operating above that level, we'll entertain a Supplemental Request to cover those costs and they have done that regularly except for time period of the Obama Administration, but Murtha is saying we're overdue for another Supplemental (and we are).
Take that up with your chain of command for action or explanation
What's the Marine say on the Military Channel ad say? Something like "Part of being a Marine is getting dirty" so the jury's out on the paint scheme although that's a new polymer and the semi-sheen will lilkely resist need to spot paint in first place and not absorb grease and other undesirable substances the way the current flat gray paint does. There are several test platforms out there right now (AH-1, UH-1 and a MV-22 as well as the entire F-22 community) checking to see if the paint works as advertised.
