Posted on 05/10/2019 8:11:52 AM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
Two jets from different eras, with different missions, strengths, and weaknesses, face off in a battle for today’s funds.
The F-35 Lightning has been the Air Force’s sole new fighter program since 2009, when the F-22 Raptor program was prematurely terminated. While behind schedule, the program has been a top Air Force priority for more than a decade and until recently, was expected to remain USAF’s only fighter program until a future capability, still undefined, comes online. Now the F-35 faces a new challenge from an old jet design, a variant of the F-15 Strike Eagle; an airplane from an earlier era, built for a different mission. Though the Air Force denies it, the two jets are competing for inevitably limited dollars within the service’s fighter portfolio.
The Air Force’s fiscal 2020 budget request includes $1.1 billion to buy the first eight of a planned 144 F-15EX aircraft. The new airplanes are very similar to the export versions now being built for Qatar. The F-15EX is a two-seat fighter that can be flown by one or two aviators and is meant to replace F-15Cs and Ds that are reaching the end of their service lives.
Under the plan, the Air Force would receive two F-15EX airplanes in 2022, six more in 2023, and a total of 80 airplanes in the next five years. Separately, the 2020 budget request also includes $949 million to upgrade existing F-15s.
Adding new F-15s was not an Air Force idea, but instead came out of the Pentagon’s Cost and Program Evaluation office, or CAPE, and was endorsed by former Defense Secretary James Mattis. While the Air Force’s long-held position has been to invest only in fifth generation fighter technology, it has defended the plan to buy new F-15s as a way to maintain fighter capacity, given the aging of the F-15C fleet and the slow pace of F-35 acquisitions.
While the Air Force is adamant that buying F-15EXs will not reduce the requirement to build 1,763 F-35s, history and the Air Force’s own budget request suggests otherwise. The 2020 budget submission shows the Air Force buying 24 fewer F-35s over the next five years compared to last year’s plan.
The opening for the F-15EX results from the age and condition of today’s F-15Cs. Designed as air superiority fighters and first fielded in the 1970s, the F-15Cs were planned to have retired by now. But the premature termination of the F-22 after acquiring 186 aircraft—less than half the planned production—compelled the Air Force to extend their service. Now, key structural components are reaching the end of their engineered service life—so much so that many F-15Cs must operate today under significant speed and G-loading restrictions.
The Air Force’s arguments for the F-15EX turn on preserving capacity. The F-15Cs will age out of the inventory faster than new F-35s can come on line, reducing the available fighter fleet at a time when the Air Force argues it’s already seven squadrons short of the 62 officials say they need to meet the National Defense Strategy.
The F-15EX, USAF argues, is essentially an in-production aircraft. It has upward of 70 percent parts commonality with the F-15C and E already in USAF service and can use almost all the same ground equipment, hangars, simulators and other support gear as the Eagles now in service. At a unit price roughly comparable to that of the F-35, F-15 squadrons could transition to the F-15EX in a matter of weeks, whereas converting pilots, maintainers, facilities and equipment to the F-35 takes many months, the Air Force says.
The F-15EX, though, is a fourth generation aircraft which lacks the stealth characteristics and sensor fusion of the F-35 and F-22 and therefore won’t be able to survive against modern air defenses for very much longer. USAF has said that 2028 is probably the latest the jet could conceivably operate close to contested enemy airspace. However, CAPE and Air Force officials see viable continuing missions for the F-15EX in homeland and airbase defense, in maintaining no-fly zones where air defenses are limited or nonexistent, and in delivering standoff munitions.
While the Air Force has maintained since 2001 that it will not buy any “new old” fighters, and that it needs to transition as quickly as possible to an all-5th-gen force, proponents argue that buying F-15s and F-35s concurrently would fill gaps in the fighter fleet more rapidly. Moreover, USAF leaders, defending the new F-15 buy, have said that the F-35 still hasn’t proven it can be maintained at the advertised cost (comparable to the F-16, at about $20,000 per hour) and the service prefers to wait to make large bulk buys of the airplane after the Block 4 version starts rolling off the assembly line in the mid-2020s. This approach, they say, will also avoid spending large amounts of money to update earlier versions of the F-35 to the Block 4 configuration.
This isn’t the first time the Air Force has considered buying new F-15s, but the F-15EX isn’t the same as upgraded models previously offered by the jets’ maker, Boeing. The most recent offerings would have required extensive development work. In 2009, Boeing proposed the F-15 “Silent Eagle,” which would have added stealth characteristics. That jet would have carried weapons internally in conformal stations and featured canted vertical fins and surface treatments to reduce its radar signature. Boeing offered another concept, the “Advanced” F-15, or F-15 2040C, last year. That jet would have had a substantially increased payload and advanced avionics.
Instead, the F-15EX requires almost no new development, would be able to execute a test program very quickly, and requires minimal additional development.
Air Force officials say one potential mission for the F-15EX would be carrying “outsize” munitions, such as hypersonic missiles, and as a possible standoff weapons magazine working in conjunction with the F-22.
The F-35 and F-15EX were designed in different eras for different missions.
The F-15C was designed for air superiority in the pre-stealth era; the F-35 to be the battlefield “quarterback,” gathering vast amounts of information from behind enemy lines while executing stealthy strikes and picking off enemy fighters. Yet, as Congress decides how to invest in future aircraft, comparisons are necessary as the two planes compete for resources. Click here for a side-by-side comparison.
USAF Ping.
Don’t mess with my pension funding now. LM needs to provide for me. LOL!
Anyone familiar with the DOD acquisition process would recognize cause and effect here. Top priority means all kinds of bureaucratic attention that contributes nothing to completing a successful engineering program but ensures that nothing will be delivered until the bureaucracy has rung out every possible dime they can from the program to grow and feed the bureaucracy.
It's the way we do things here in the swamp. And the exponential growth of the swamp bureaucracy continues apace, unimpeded by anything.
The F-15EX is a bridge to when the F-35’s get all the bugs worked out. Then they can be sold to 3rd world AF’s................
Eglin just got approved for another F-35 Wing................
Right behind you Brother. 3.5 years away.
Dont worry we are pumping out C-130s like crazy!
Apples vs. Oranges: How They Compare.
Lockheed has delivered over 200 F-35A's to the USAF. They do not need a bridge. The F-35EX will be a bomb truck, carrying a heavier load than the F-35A can.
The USAF will take decades to overcome cancelling the F-22 for air superiority.
The F-15EX is a gift to Boeing to keep the F-15 production line open a few more years from former Boeing executive, the acting Defense Secretary and now Defense Secretary nominee Patrick Shanahan.
The money should be used to update the existing F-15C fleet with AESA radar, as was originally planned for when the F-22 buy was curtailed to 187 airframes.
Go look at the age of the F-15C fleet and check out the increasing number of airframe failures we’re having with them.
Also, the AESA radar is less of an issue today - in the modern battlefield against a peer, near-peer or well equipped by either opponent, you radiate you die.
The Air Force identified 176 F-15Cs with low enough airframe hours to justify upgrading them to "Golden Eagle" standard. The Air Force only funded 42.
Also, the AESA radar is less of an issue today - in the modern battlefield against a peer, near-peer or well equipped by either opponent, you radiate you die.
That makes an AESA radar even more important today. The F-22 and F-35 both have AESA radar, and it is used not only for scan and track, but it is also used as an active jamming emitter that can be shaped into a very narrow beam to only jam the target but not give away its position to off-boresight receivers.
The F-15EX would have the same AESA radar. There is no need to purchase new build F-15EX aircraft when we have plenty of F-15Cs with low enough hours to fly for another decade, or to upgrade with a SLEP at a far lower cost than a new build aircraft.
Again, this is a bone thrown to Boeing from a former Boeing executive.
That $20,000 number is the Operational and Maintenance cost per hour, and includes all costs associated with supporting a fighter wing, including all of the base services.
Costs include direct flying costs, maintenance personnel, hangers, runways, simulators, barracks to house the maintenance troops, and the bowling alley to keep them entertained during off-duty hours.
The direct Cost per Flying Hour, which includes three commodity groups: Consumable Supplies, Aviation Fuel, and Depot Level Repairables, is about $8,000 per flying hour.
Three words: Home On Jam. Yes, that works against even the narrow beam produced by AESA - as demonstrated by our own late mark AIM-120s which do work against AESA in narrow beam jam mode.
You radiate, you die.
IIRC, there are also reports that some of the Golden Eagles are suffering from airframe problems now.
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