Posted on 09/11/2008 6:24:33 AM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
Joint Strike Fighter: The Latest Hotspot in the U.S. Defense Meltdown
While its illusion as an "affordable" multi-role fighter-bomber is alive and well in Washington D.C., the F-35 "Joint Strike Fighter" is already a disaster, and the bad news has barely begun to roll in. Internationally recognized combat aircraft designer Pierre Sprey and Straus Military Reform Project Director Winslow Wheeler summarize the many failures in a new opinion piece that appears in the Sept. 10, 2008 issue of Janes Defence Weekly and is reproduced below.
"Joint Strike Fighter: The Latest Hotspot in the U.S. Defense Meltdown"
by Pierre M. Sprey and Winslow T. Wheeler
Politicians in the US are papering over serious problems in the country?s armed forces. Equating exposure of flaws with failure to 'support the troops', Congress, the presidential candidates and think-tank pundits repeatedly dub the US armed forces “the best in the world”. Behind this vapid rhetoric, a meltdown – decades in the making –is occurring.
The collapse is occurring in all the armed forces, but it is most obvious in the US Air Force (USAF). There, despite a much needed change in leadership, nothing is being done to reverse he deplorable situation the air force has put itself into.
The USAF's annual budget is now in excess of USD150 billion: well above what it averaged during the Cold War. Despite the plentiful dollars, the USAF?s inventory of tactical aircraft is smaller today than it has ever been since the end of the Second World War. At the same time, the shrunken inventory is older, on average, than it has been ever before.
Since George W Bush came to office in 2001, the air force has received a major budget 'plus up', supposedly to address its problems. In January 2001 a projection of its budgets showed USD850 billion for 2001 to 2009. It actually received USD1,059 billion – not counting the additional billions (more than USD80 billion) it also received to fund its operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. With the ?plus up? of more than USD200 billion, the air force actually made its inventory troubles worse: from 2001 to today, tactical aircraft numbers shrank by about 100 aircraft and their average age increased from 15 years to 20, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Not to worry, the air force and its politicians assert, the solution is in hand; it is called the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter. It will do all three tactical missions: air-to-ground bombing, air-to-air combat and specialised close air support for ground troops – and there will be tailored variants for the air force, navy and marines. Most importantly, it will be ?affordable? and, thus, the US can buy it in such large numbers that it will resolve all those shrinking and ageing problems.
Baloney. When the first official cost and quantity estimate for the F-35 showed up on Capitol Hill in 2001, the Department of Defense (DoD) predicted 2,866 units for USD226 billion. That is a not inconsiderable USD79 million for each aircraft. The latest official estimate is for a smaller number of aircraft (2,456) to cost more (USD299 billion). That represents a 54 per cent increase in the per-unit cost to USD122 million, and the deliveries will be two years late. The Government Accountability Office reported in March that the US can expect the costs to increase some more – perhaps by as much as USD38 billion – with deliveries likely to be delayed again, perhaps by another year. That is just the start of the rest of the bad news. The price increases and schedule delays cited above are for currently known problems.
Unfortunately, the F-35 has barely begun its flight-test programme, which means more problems are likely to be discovered – perhaps even more serious than the serious engine, flight control, electrical and avionics glitches found thus far.
Take the F-22 experience; it was in a similarly early stage of flight testing in 1998. Its programme unit cost was then USD184 million per aircraft but it climbed to a breathtaking USD355 million by 2008. Considering that the F-35 is even more complex (19 million lines of computer code compared to 4 million, and three separate service versions compared to one), the horrifying prospect of the F-35?s unit cost doubling is not outlandish.
The last tri-service, tri-mission ?fighter? the US built, the F-111, tripled in cost before being cut back to barely half the number originally contemplated. The DoD currently plans to spend more than USD10 billion to produce fewer than 100 F-35s per year at peak production. USAF leaders would like to increase the production rate and add in a few more F-22s. That plan is irresponsibly unaffordable (which contributed to the recent departure of the Secretary of the Air Force and the Air Force Chief of Staff). The unaffordability will become even more obvious when the unavoidable F-35 cost increases emerge.
The inevitable reaction, just as in past programmes, will be a slashing of annual production, the opposite of the increase the air force needs to address its inventory problems. The DoD fix is simple: test the F-35 less and buy more copies before the testing is completed. Two test aircraft and hundreds of flight-test hours have been eliminated from the programme, and there is now a plan to produce more than 500 copies before the emasculated testing is finished. This approach will not fix the programme but it will help paper over the problems and make the F-35 more cancellationproof in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill.
It gets even worse. Even without new problems, the F-35 is a ?dog?. If one accepts every performance promise the DoD currently makes for the aircraft, the F-35 will be: ? Overweight and underpowered: at 49,500 lb (22,450kg) air-to-air take-off weight with an engine rated at 42,000 lb of thrust, it will be a significant step backward in thrust-to-weight ratio for a new fighter. ? At that weight and with just 460 sq ft (43 m2) of wing area for the air force and Marine Corps variants, it will have a ?wing-loading? of 108 lb per square foot. Fighters need large wings relative to their weight to enable them to manoeuvre and survive. The F-35 is actually less manoeuvrable than the appallingly vulnerable F-105 ?Lead Sled? that got wiped out over North Vietnam in the Indochina War.
? With a payload of only two 2,000 lb bombs in its bomb bay – far less than US Vietnam-era fighters – the F-35 is hardly a first-class bomber either. With more bombs carried under its wings, the F-35 instantly becomes ?non-stealthy? and the DoD does not plan to seriously test it in this configuration for years.
? As a ?close air support? attack aircraft to help US troops engaged in combat, the F-35 is a nonstarter. It is too fast to see the tactical targets it is shooting at; too delicate and flammable to withstand ground fire; and it lacks the payload and especially the endurance to loiter usefully over US forces for sustained periods as they manoeuvre on the ground. Specialised for this role, the air force?s existing A-10s are far superior.
However, what, the advocates will protest, of the F-35?s two most prized features: its ?stealth? and its advanced avionics? What the USAF will not tell you is that ?stealthy? aircraft are quite detectable by radar; it is simply a question of the type of radar and its angle relative to the aircraft. Ask the pilots of the two ?stealthy? F-117s that the Serbs successfully attacked with radar missiles in the 1999 Kosovo air war.
As for the highly complex electronics to attack targets in the air, the F-35, like the F-22 before it, has mortgaged its success on a hypothetical vision of ultra-long range, radar-based air-to-air combat that has fallen on its face many times in real air war. The F-35?s air-to-ground electronics promise little more than slicker command and control for the use of existing munitions.
The immediate questions for the F-35 are: how much more will it cost and how many additional problems will compromise its already mediocre performance? We will only know when a complete and rigorous test schedule – not currently planned – is finished. The F-35 is a bad deal that shows every sign of turning into a disaster as big as the F-111 fiasco of the 1960s.
In January the US will inaugurate a new president. If he is serious about US defences – and courageous enough to ignore the corporate lobbies and their minions in Congress and the think-tanks – he will ask some very tough questions. These will start with why an increased budget buys a shrinking, ageing force. After that the new president will have to take steps – unavoidably painful ones – to reverse the course the country is now on.
The man who best deserves to be inaugurated next January will actually start asking those questions now.
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This is the part that worries me because it is obviously true. The F-35 doesn't 'look' like a dogfighter & the engine thrust is just insufficient for the weight (which always increases as an aircraft is developed). I also don't envision the USAF ops planners sending this plane in low to support the troops. Even the low-end cost estimates make this plane too expensive to risk in that manner. It will never replace the A-10.
“If we are not returning to dogfighting why do we need a MANNED fighter?”
Here’s hoping that we we adopt a large cheap drone fleet. 100 million a pop (and likely to double) means this aircraft will never be built in the numbers the services actually want/need.
Does that take all the extra weight into account from more internal fuel than other planes like the F16 which has too short a legs?
Does the wing loading take into account the center fuselage itself which on planes like an F22/35 plays a major role?
The F35 performs incredibly mediocre when you look at things that don't matter, like some top speed over Mach 2, service ceiling over 60,000 feet, which like jumping tank pictures impresses the kids. But..... where it matters, acceleration, sustained turns, endurance, RCS, AESA, avionics/communication, warning and ECM capabilities, sensor fusion/integration.... the plane does very very well. -IMHO
I’d rather see the F35 side talk to these seemingly weak flight characteristics before they attack the study author bias.
Seems like these "experts" have forgotten that the USAF is fighting a war at the moment, and wars are really, really expensive.
I actually agree with their comments about the inventory -- I wish we had 3x more planes than we do. But the fact remains that a huge portion of the USAF budget is being spent on military operations -- which makes that money unavailable for acquisition.
Anyway the Center for Defense Information was founded by Gene La Rocque, a retired admiral and they are gadflys to DOD.
The CDI has a publication, Defense Monitor and they rarely have anything positive to say about US Defense or Foreign Policy. Rear Admiral Eugene James Carroll, Jr was another prominent leader of CDI. Both Carroll and La Rocque appeared often on television and it is amazing to me that either rose so high in the Navy.
At one point, per the Wiki piece, La Rocque received a severe rebuke:
"In August 1983, 575 retired admirals, led by Thomas Moorer, placed an advertisement in The Washington Times criticizing La Rocque for appearing on Soviet television..."
Anything from CDI needs a big grain of salt.
The F-16 has been successful in spite of its design. It was designed to be a point defense, VFR fighter. Light, agile dogfighter. It has never been used for that in combat.
In combat, it has dropped a lot of bombs. It has a good radar - over the objections of some of the original designers - and a good data link. Current versions are heavier and less maneuverable than the original, but they do the F-16 mission better.
You omitted the two largest factors: air force arrogance and incompetence.
About 5 feet from me is a book written in the 70s. It explains why the F-15 is a piece of junk and a boondoggle. According to this respected best-seller, the F-15 will be an embarrassing failure in combat.
How's that "invisible to radar" A-12 working out for your Navy?
The unit cost death spiral is practically a law of nature. For many years the succeeding systems have had much higher unit costs and we have been constrained to buy fewer and fewer units. The same arguments were made about the F-15, 16 and 18 replacing F-4s, A-4s, A-7s, etc., etc.
The authors do not seem to accommodate in their argument the revolution in military affairs that has increased lethality and efficiency by orders of magnitude. The question is, does this increased capability compensate for the decrease in units? Here in amateur-land the answer seems to be yes. The accuracy of bombs and missiles has reduced the number of sorties required to destroy a target by several orders of magnitude. What required hundreds if not thousands of sorties to destroy in WWII now requires 1 or 2. That ought to count for something in their analysis.
Finally, unmanned systems are cheap enough to field lots of units, so we don’t see him complaining about that, do we?
By dogfighting, I refer to maneuvering to the 6 o’clock position to employ heat seeking missiles or guns. It has a different set of requirements than modern air combat, where long range radar and data links and face-shooting radar and heat missiles are used.
There is great need for a very sharp pilot in air combat and bombing. Only the stupid try to dogfight.
It’s next F/A-18. Average at a lot of things. You can draw your own opinion from that.
It was claimed as too expensive, excessive waste, not performing in some areas..........
33 years and a 104:0 kill ratio later, with a projected life out too 2025 and serving highly capably in rolls never originally conceived, this plane did kinda turn out to be anything but the waste CBS reported about decades ago.
:)
While you wrote that I wrote my post below. LOL
I remember all the experts and of course media jumping all over the F15 too.
Interesting,,, 49,500 takeoff weight, with a 42,000 thrust engine is bad in an F-35,,,
The F-16 is known for maneuvering, but it’s max takeoff weight is 42,300 lb. Depending on the options (v6 vs v8?)it’s thrust is 23,770 lbf or 28,600 lbf. How is this a smaller thrust to weight ratio?
Also, a 4000 lb bomb is nothing to sneeze at. Also this “internationally recognized fighter designer” needs to be told about precision munitions. (google is strangely devoid of his skysweeping masterpieces)
The Vietnam-era A-4s, F-4s, A-6s, A-7s, etc,,all practically had sagging wings from their loads of bombs. AND we literally sent swarms of them against things like, A SINGLE BRIDGE,,,A POWER PLANT,, etc,,. Why? To drop 40, 50, or 100 bombs, or more, to do what a single JDAM bomb does today. This is a “fighter designer”?. Maybe he would like a fleet of B-24s, they carry LOTS more bombs.
And to assess it as more vulnerable and less maneuverable than an F-105? Insane. Back it up. Has this man ever heard of vectored thrust?
To say that the F-111 failed, so this will too? It doesnt logically follow. The failure there was trying to make that behemoth into a carrier bomber, and not just to accept it as a magnificent aircraft for the USAF.
I was especially tickled at the assertion of an “internationally recognized fighter designer”, that now that flight testing is beginning we will likely find all kinds of horrible serious problems. See, we invented these fun machines called computers. If the P-38 and P-47 were designed today, compressibility, the proper counter rotating prop set up, the need for dive recovery flaps, the proper setup to run a bubble canopy, etc,, allllll would have been seen and completely understood in virtual testing befor the first one was built.
The days of throwing a bubble canopy on a razorback Thunderbolt, then realizing you lost some lateral stability, so we better throw on a small tail fin extension,,etc,,, are pretty much over.
New fighter designs basically fly right from the beginning. If he’s waiting for major airframe concept teething problems, he’s going to be really dissapointed Sure, there are a lot of things to tweak, systems to better coordinate, and other minor things to fix, but they all pretty much understand it on its first takeoff. It’s already had *thousands* of flights in a simulator that probably cost more than the plane itself, we aren’t talking home computer fighter plane games. The only exceptions are completely new concepts like the V-22, but in truth, the machine still was basically correct, it was just that our wonderful and brave pilots initally tried to fly it like it was a Ch-53.
I hope the F-35 is a success. No, I’m honestly not certain it’s needed. A-10s and F-16s and F-22s seem able to take care of anything looming on the horizon. And I would listen to an argument that its not needed, that the finances in buying it are corrupted,,,etc. But PLEASE, dont pass off this sophomoric drivel as the analysis of a “internationally recognized fighter designer”. This guy isnt a Kelly Johnson. For all i know, a british fabian society meeting clapped for him for trying to stop land mines. I wasnt to know a bit more about his “international recognition”.
It’s a good plane, the only true question is if its needed. This designers skill set seems very dated to me.
They oppose any defense spending and have zero credibility.
The upper military echelons are dominated by very ambitious men. All have advanced degrees. The most common degree in this group is the MBA.
This makes these men, as a group, incompetent. Certainly most experienced men and women will agree, at least privately, that MBAs are a disaster once they take control of any operation. They simply refuse to accept that they are incompetent, refuse to see the actual situation, and refuse to admit to themselves that they are lying to themselves.
There are many individual exceptions to this generalization, of course. They lead frustrating lives. Personal experience talking, here.
It also seem that this will be the last fighter of this type due to cost - so it will reign superior as a manned jet. Resources will be shifted to cheaper, specialized units - leaving the F35 as king.
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