1 of 4. The U.S. Marine Corps version of Lockheed Martin's F35 Joint Strike Fighter, F-35B test aircraft BF-2 flies with external weapons for the first time over the Atlantic test range at Patuxent River Naval Air Systems Command in Maryland in a February 22, 2012 file photo.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It's called the "death spiral," and America's newest warplane, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, is in danger of falling into it before the plane has even gone into service.

The term - recently invoked by top brass involved in the F-35 program - refers to a budgeting Catch-22 that plagues the defense industry. To keep the cost per airplane low, you need to build and sell a lot of planes. But in tough economic times, governments cut orders to save money. That pushes up the cost per plane, leading to more cancellations, pushing up the cost, leading to more cancellations. And so on.

The U.S. military is in the process of making tough decisions due to mandatory budget cuts from sequestration which went into effect March 1 and could lop off $46 billion of Pentagon spending this fiscal year.

Earlier this year, Pentagon budgeteers crunched the numbers on Lockheed Martin Corp's F-35 in an exercise that spoke volumes about the troubles facing the world's most expensive weapons system and the Navy's uncertain commitment to it.

Postponing orders for about 40 of the 260 Navy models of the plane, which will take off from and land on aircraft carriers, would save money in the short-term, according to several defense officials familiar with the analysis, which has not been made public.

But it would also add from $1 billion to $4 billion to the eventual price of the F-35 program, already at a record-setting $396 billion.

Seven years behind schedule and 70 percent over early cost estimates, the stealthy F-35 "Lightning II" appears to have overcome myriad early technical problems only to face a daunting new question: is it affordable in an era of shrinking defense budgets?

According to a congressional watchdog agency, the average price per plane has already almost doubled from $69 million to as much as $137 million since the F-35 program began in 2001. Any further price rise could scare off potential buyers -including vital foreign customers.

"It's a house of cards," said one senior defense official who is familiar with the F-35 program, but was not authorized to speak publicly. "We have finally started improving performance on the program and efficiency in testing, and bang, we get this budget challenge."

Steve O'Bryan, one of Lockheed's top F-35 executives, says the company has already cut F-35 production costs by 50 percent, and is making progress on flight tests and software development.

"While there are still challenges and room for improvement, the program is heading in the right direction and we see no insurmountable obstacles to delivering the F-35 and its unprecedented 5th generation capability to our three U.S. service and international customers," he said.

BULLET PROOF?

Built by Lockheed and designed to be the next-generation fighter jet for decades to come for the U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marines, as well as key U.S. allies in Asia and Europe, the F-35 appears bullet-proofed against cancellation.

There are no other new fighter jets in the pipeline; the U.S. military's fleet of warplanes is aging; and 10 allies including Britain, Japan and Israel are deeply invested.

Manufacturing - and jobs - spread across 46 states ensure a vital layer of political protection as well.

With 10 million lines of software code onboard, and another 10 million lines in its logistics and ground systems, the F-35 is a flying computer with radars and other sensors that can see enemy threats 200 miles away in any direction.

In what was meant to be a money-saving move, U.S. officials designed the F-35 as one basic fighter (with three variants) to replace a dozen warplanes flown by the U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, as well as U.S. allies worldwide.

The U.S. armed forces currently plan to buy 2,443 F-35s in total, comprising 1,763 A-models for the Air Force, 420 B- and C-models for the Marines, and 260 C-models for the Navy. Foreign orders are now slated to total 721.

The Marine Corps, under pressure to replace its aging fleet of Harrier AV-8B "jump jets", Boeing Co F/A-18 Hornets, and EA-6B Prowlers, is scheduled to be the first U.S. military service to use the jet, by late 2015.

Given the tight schedule and huge cost of keeping its aging current fleet flying, top Marine Corps officials are vigilant about the program and the budgetary risks it faces.

"Any delay in fielding the F-35 brings added risk to the Marine Corps' ability to execute our mission as the nation's crisis response force and it affects our ability to augment U.S. Navy carrier air wings," Lieutenant General Robert Schmidle, Deputy Commandant of Aviation, said in a statement to Reuters.

Schmidle and other planners at the Pentagon are desperate to avert the "death spiral" that gutted the Air Force's plan to buy 750 F-22 Raptor stealth fighters down to just 187 jets.

Behind closed doors, some U.S. officials fret that sequestration budget cuts could trigger a similar dynamic on the F-35, which has already seen 410 orders pushed back beyond 2017.

Depending on how the cuts are implemented, the purchase of up to nine F-35s could be deferred in fiscal 2013 alone, Navy and Air Force officials have said. That might not seem like much out of more than 3,100 destined for U.S. and foreign clients.

But initial calculations show that while cutting nine jets would save about $1.3 billion, it would also raise the cost of the remaining aircraft by nearly $800 million, said one defense official, who was not authorized to speak publicly.

The Pentagon budget analysis, which Reuters is reporting for the first time, found that postponing the 40 Navy C-model jets would raise the cost of the Navy version by about $4.5 million per plane, and add between $1.5 million to $2.6 million to the per-plane cost of the Air Force and Marine Corps versions, according to several defense officials familiar with the study.

"Cutting tails to pay bills is inefficient. Whether it's nine planes in one year, or 40 across the (future years defense plan), you're going to pay later," said one of the officials. This official and others cautioned that the studies were hypothetical for now.

Air Force Lieutenant General Christopher Bogdan, the often blunt F-35 program chief, invoked the dreaded "death spiral" this week as he pounded on the need to cut costs and keep foreign orders - which will account for half of all F-35s produced through 2017 - on track.

"The one thing that our partners care most about is how much this airplane is going to cost," he said. "If ... we want to sell the 600-plus airplanes to our partners and a couple hundred more projected to our (foreign military) customers, we better be darned sure we keep reducing the price on this airplane."

Even a two-year delay in Turkey's initial order of two jets had added $1 million to the cost of each of the remaining planes in the original order year, Bogdan told a defense conference.

No one knows exactly how much of a price tag will be too much to bear for countries like Australia and Canada, whose F-35 orders are already on shaky ground. "The tipping point will be different for each country," said one U.S. official.

In Australia, defense contractors involved in building the new jets are worried that $5.5 billion in expected orders will be in jeopardy if Canberra cuts its plans to buy 100 jets by 30 to 50 jets, as many experts expect.

Lockheed remains optimistic that international orders will hold up and even grow. South Korea is expected to choose the F-35 as the winner of a 60-jet competition to be decided this summer, and U.S. officials this week said Singapore may order more than a dozen F-35s in coming weeks.

Other allies, like Japan, see no going back on the fighter.

A senior official at Japan's Defense Ministry said it was keeping a close eye on cost and schedule risks, but there were no plans to change Tokyo's order for 42 planes: "If we don't buy until all the glitches are eliminated, it would be too late."

NAVY IS WARY

The Air Force is considering a slightly less capable version of the plane for its initial use, but the Navy is reconsidering the size of its order.

Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jonathan Greenert this week ruled out scrapping the Navy's entire F-35C order, but said the Navy was thinking about how many jets it really needs.

Greenert last year ordered a study on equipping each aircraft carrier air wing with just one squadron of F-35s instead of two, according to defense analyst Loren Thompson. The Navy is also developing several unmanned planes, although military officials insist they will never completely replace manned fighters on carriers.

Bogdan said cutting the Navy's order too far would have serious consequences. "There is actually a 'do not go below' type of calculation, which says, if you get below the minimum production quantity on one of these variants, the price starts shooting up tremendously," he told the conference.

The Pentagon's Cost Analysis and Program Evaluation office recently forecast that the F-35's cost would rise by 9 percent if Washington only bought 1,500 jets and foreign partners stuck to their orders, according to a Government Accountability Office study, first reported by Reuters. The cost would surge 19 percent if Washington bought 1,500 jets and the partners none.

"If you cut any of these aircraft, the cost of each remaining one goes up," consultant Thompson said. "At some point soon, you're at risk of undermining the whole business case for the F-35 as an affordable new fighter."

The F-35's worsening fiscal challenges come just as advocates, and some independent analysts, say the often-troubled fighter development project is getting back on track after years of setbacks - which included two engine-related groundings this year - and expensive retrofits.

The F-35 "is now moving in the right direction after a long, expensive and arduous learning process," the GAO study concluded, although it said long-term affordability remained a big concern.

Top Pentagon officials are vowing to shelter the F-35 from the latest budget crisis, if they can.

"We'll try to protect the F-35," the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer, Frank Kendall, said this week. "There's no question about its priority.

(Additional reporting by Kiyoshi Takenaka in Tokyo and John O'Callaghan in Singapore; Editing By Warren Strobel, Claudia Parsons and Leslie Gevirtz)

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Author J.K Rowling poses for photographers with a copy of her adult fiction book ''The Casual Vacancy'', at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London September 27, 2012.

LONDON | Thu Sep 27, 2012 7:47pm EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - What does the author of the most eagerly awaited book of the year do on publication day?

If you are J.K. Rowling, whose adult fiction debut "The Casual Vacancy" hit the shelves on Thursday, you watch a movie in your hotel, avoid reading newspaper reviews and later in the evening address 900 people at a question-and-answer session.

The 47-year-old read from her new novel and took questions on death, digital publishing and the Olympics opening ceremony at her first public appearance to promote The Casual Vacancy held at London's Southbank Centre (southbankcentre.co.uk).

She engaged openly with fans, at one point accepting a gift from a breathless visitor from Spain whom she embraced and kissed on stage, and later personally signed hundreds of copies of her new book.

Asked by moderator Mark Lawson how she had spent her day, she replied: "I've spent most of the day trying to avoid newspapers. I will read reviews, but I don't like to do it on a day where I've got to go out and talk about the book.

"We sat in our hotel and watched 'Men in Black 3'. I'd never seen it. It was very good".

Rowling, who received mixed reviews for her gritty tale about a small English town, added that she probably would read what critics had to say eventually, just as she did with the seventh and final Harry Potter instalment published in 2007.

"With ('Harry Potter and the) Deathly Hallows' I didn't read any of the reviews at all for ages.

"I kind of felt about Hallows the way I feel about this book. In both cases I felt well, I've done the best I can do, the book is what I want it to be, so, I don't mean it in an arrogant way, that's it. I'm done. So it doesn't really matter.

"I did later. It was months later. It takes the heat out of it if you're not reading them on publication day."

"SOCIALIST MANIFESTO"

The release of The Casual Vacancy is one of the highlights of the publishing calendar this year, with hefty sales expected for a writer whose Potter series sold 450 million copies and who went on to become the world's first billionaire author.

Rowling could not resist mentioning one review, however, which she had clearly either read or been told about.

Jan Moir wrote a scathing assessment in the Daily Mail, a newspaper considered the preserve of the middle class which Moir felt Rowling had unfairly lampooned in her book.

Moir described The Casual Vacancy as "more than 500 pages of relentless socialist manifesto masquerading as literature", a description Rowling, who was an unemployed single mother living on state benefits when she started writing the Potter books, took as a compliment.

"A 500 page socialist manifesto. I high-fived my husband!" she joked. "I thought that's all right. It made me laugh so much. Apart from Men in Black 3 that was the highlight of my day."

Rowling was asked why death was such a prominent theme throughout her work.

"Death obsesses me. What can I tell you?" she said. "I can't really understand why it doesn't obsess everyone. I think it does really, I'm just maybe a little more out about it.

"It's made me much less afraid of it," she added later. "I think things lose their mystique when you think about them a lot and you consider them a lot.

"I'm frightened of leaving my children. It's the thing I dislike most about the idea that I will die, but death itself doesn't frighten me really."

POTTER MISTAKES

She said she understood why her publishers, Little, Brown Book Group, had imposed strict conditions on allowing journalists to read the book before publication.

"The internet really has changed everything. It's the net that's done it," she explained, quoting examples of other leading writers who had seen their manuscripts end up online or proofs being auctioned on eBay.

"As a writer that is a horrible, horrible experience."

On Potter, Rowling admitted she had made mistakes, in particular a mirror belonging to the character Sirius Black in "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix", the fifth book.

The "Marauder's Map" used by Potter was also problematic.

"Half way through the series I cursed myself for giving Harry the Marauder's Map, because it was far too useful an object so I had to take it away from him and then give it back to him.

"That's the trouble. You invent these amazing objects, and then they cause you as much trouble as they solve. So quite a bit of that went on."

In a separate BBC Radio interview broadcast on Thursday, Rowling said that the world of witches and wizards "does sometimes tug at me a little bit," although she had no plans to write anything else Potter-related.

"I've always said never say never purely because I liked it and I might want to do it again, but Harry's stories I am as sure as you can be it is done."

Rowling added that two books for children "are pretty well developed" and she knew what her next one for adults would be, although it was "not very well advanced."

(Editing by Paul Casciato)

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Writer Gore Vidal is pictured at the ''2005 Literary Awards'' hosted by PEN USA in Los Angeles in this November 9, 2005 file photo.

NEW YORK/LONDON | Wed Aug 1, 2012 3:00pm EDT

NEW YORK/LONDON (Reuters) - The death of author Gore Vidal at the age of 86 brought tributes from around the globe on Wednesday, as friends and fans mourned the passing of the man remembered as one of America's literary giants.

Vidal, whose biting observations on politics, sex and American culture in novels, plays and essays made him one of the best-known authors of his generation, died at his home in Los Angeles on Tuesday of complications from pneumonia.

"Gore Vidal was the last surviving giant of a postwar crop of American literary giants," said Gerald Howard, the executive editor and vice president at Doubleday, and Gore's editor for more than a decade.

"He was also that rare American writer who spoke not just to his countrymen but to the entire world, which listened closely to what he had to say."

Howard praised Vidal's many achievements and remembered his dashing persona.

"He can't be replaced and he most certainly will be missed. The world just became a duller place," he added.

Michael Coffey, the editorial co-director of the trade magazine Publisher's Weekly, described Vidal as a prolific writer and an entertaining and rollicking storyteller.

"Despite all that productivity he was able to step outside and into the public arena and comment on politics and culture in a very lucid and entertaining way," Coffey said in an interview.

One of the joys of Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter's career was publishing Vidal's writings in the magazine.

"Whether you agreed with him or not, you always had to concede that he got his point across with the utmost elegance," Carter said.

A MAN OF MANY TALENTS

Vidal, born in West Point, New York, began writing as a 19-year-old soldier stationed in Alaska, where his World War Two experiences provided material for his first work, "Williwaw".

But it was his third novel, "The City and the Pillar," which openly featured one of the first homosexual protagonists, that created a sensation in 1948.

A series of historical novels -- "Burr," "1876," "Lincoln" and "The Golden Age" among them -- as well as the campy transsexual comedy "Myra Breckinridge" also form Vidal's legacy in a publishing career spanning over six decades.

For Jeffrey Richards, producer of a revival of Vidal's "The Best Man" currently on Broadway, Vidal was simply "an original."

"He wrote novels, essays, plays, teleplays and films with grace, distinction, style, wit and wisdom. Not to mention that he was a master raconteur, an accomplished actor, a brilliant gadfly and an impishly gifted impersonator," he said.

"For his contribution to American culture, we will always be in his debt."

Michael Kammen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor emeritus of American History and Culture at Cornell University, said Vidal was "a brilliant intellect, a superb stylist, and a fabulous gossip."

"He was a great controversialist, doing battle on television panel shows with conservatives. He described and explained American political culture past and present and illuminated what we thought we knew, or areas that we had forgotten. He had the most inquiring mind you can imagine and he dared to be outspoken. He will be missed," he said.

LITERARY FRIENDS AND ENEMIES

Vidal, a self-described "gentleman bitch," was just as well known for his caustic comments outside the covers of his books.

He considered Ernest Hemingway a joke and compared Truman Capote to a "filthy animal that has found its way into the house."

His most famous literary enemies were Norman Mailer and conservative pundit William F. Buckley Jr.

Mailer, whom Vidal once likened to cult killer Charles Manson, head-butted Vidal before a TV appearance.

"Gore Vidal dreaded the idea of an afterlife, because it would mean he'd have to see Norman Mailer again. Rest In Peace," said comedian Frank Conniff on the social messaging service Twitter, where tributes to Vidal mainly took the form of quotations from the writer.

Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore and rock singer Courtney Love were among the many celebrities who posted their favorite sayings.

"'Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say and not giving a damn.' quoted by Gore Vidal ... you will be missed, rest in peace Gore," said Love in a Twitter message.

Moore chose: "Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for president. One hopes it is the same half." This quotation was also tweeted by the British Internet entrepreneur Martha Lane Fox.

British writer Owen Jones, who penned the book "Chavs" about British social class, picked a Vidal quote about friendship and death: "'Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies'. RIP Gore Vidal, a great intellectual of our time. No-one did acerbic better."

(Editing by Will Dunham, Gary Hill)

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