What is the F-35B and Why is the UK Buying It?

Over the past few years, the F-35 Lightning II – the fifth-generation, Lockheed Martin wunder-plane set to eventually take over from almost every fighter jet in the US and UK militaries – has received a public relations kicking. It’s expensive – the total cost for the programme so far is an incredible, not-even-hyperbolic trillion dollars. It’s had some embarrassing technical stumbles – engine fires, a non-functioning cannon and a half-million dollar helmet that fits comfortably in the cockpit or on a pilot’s head (but reportedly not both). And while it’s designed as a multirole, do-everything plane that will see the West through the next three decades of air combat, critics have been queuing up at the online pulpit to explain why it’s not as capable in each mission role as the plane it’s supposed to be retiring. Though they’re usually not that polite about it.

But despite the media bellyaching, the UK is committed to purchasing an as-yet unknown number of F-35s, primarily to fly off its two new aircraft carriers. Committed to the tune of about £5 billion (so far), which covers the first 14 UK F-35s and their maintenance up to 2020 (but not the larger bulk purchase expected in 2017, which would bring the UK’s F-35 fleet up to the stated 2020 target of 48 planes). The final total, however, is likely to be much higher.

That’s a lot of zeroes to spend on something that critics claim doesn’t work. So why are we doing it? How do the criticisms hold up? And what does the F-35 mean for the UK in particular?

The uncertainty about the sorts of missions the RAF and the Navy will have to fly in the future is what makes a multirole aircraft so appealing. Compared to the US, Britain is in no position to buy a fleet of specialised aircraft – between 1990 and 2014, we reduced our number of operational fast jets by more than two thirds, with smaller numbers of Typhoons and Tornados stretching to take up the slack. Of the two, the Tornados are the pressing concern – they were introduced in 1979, and the ones we still have flying are due for retirement in 2019. If we want to keep getting involved in overseas air campaigns, we need something to take their place.

The F-35 is the only so-called ‘fifth-generation’ fighter being produced in the West. The choice, then, was either to buy into the F-35, or to look for planes similar in capability to the Typhoon. The promise that makes the F-35 such an appealing purchase (at least on paper), however, is that it can do everything: air support, bombing runs, air-to-air combat – three planes for the price of one.

The UK doesn’t have a dedicated plane for close air support. While the US has the purpose-built monster that is the A-10 Thunderbolt, the UK’s manned air support duties have been divvied up largely between the Tornados, Typhoons and the Apache helicopters. The F-35 claims to have one clear advantage over all three in this role.

“The big advantage that the F-35 gives you is its stealth,” says Philip Sabin, professor of strategic studies in the War Studies department of King’s College London, and an expert in air power.

“With both air-to-ground and air-to-air, the idea is that it will not be safe for fourth generation aircraft – or even really heavily armoured things like the A-10 – to operate in the future. They’ve done it in the past, in a fairly permissive environment against Cold War era air defence threats… and of course they’re more efficient in that case, because if no-one’s shooting back effectively, then it’s a wholly asymmetric contest.”

In addition to not being shot down, the three key elements in the close air support mission are ordnance, loiter time (the amount of time a plane can hang around looking for and engaging targets before it has to refuel), and the ability to reliably spot those targets from the air.

The bad news is that the F-35Bs that the UK will purchase – one of the three models that are being produced – is the least capable at the first two of those. The F-35B is the model designed for short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) – if you’ve seen a picture of an F-35 hovering, that’s the B model you were looking at. Without catapults to fling planes off the end of aircraft carriers and catch them when they land (which Britain’s new Queen Elizabeth class carriers don’t have), this is the only way to get planes into the air and to get them back again.

The problem is the extra hardware that goes into the B variant to make STOVL possible. Not only does the engine have to tilt down 90 degrees, but to balance the lift (and provide more of it), the F-35B has to incorporate a giant fan in the front half of the plane that pushes air downwards. The fan doesn’t have a use outside of take-off and landing, which means while the F-35B is flying, it’s lugging around that extra weight to no benefit.

But the fan is also taking up space in the body of the plane which the other two non-STOVL variants (the F-35A and F-35C) can use for other things. As a result, the F-35B has to use a smaller fuel tank, limiting range and loiter, but also has less space for ordnance. The B’s internal weapons bays, tucked into the body to maintain its stealth profile, are limited to two 1000-pound bombs and two air-to-air missiles, while the A and C variants can carry bombs that are twice that size. To cap it all, all that extra gadgetry also makes the B variant the most expensive option of the three.

The good news is that all that isn’t the death knell that some opponents of the F-35 would have you believe. For one thing, modern fighters (including the F-35) aren’t necessarily restricted to burning what they can take up in their tanks.

“We’re seeing very clearly in the current operation over Iraq… the difficulty of having to operate at range. Also, if we’re effectively in a reactive environment where air[craft] have to loiter, not just deliver the weapons at the time of its choosing, then the F-35 is going to have problems in that regard.

“[But it’s not] like the old days, where it was just a matter of ‘how far can you get an aircraft,” he clarifies. “Air-to-air refuelling has changed that, and it’s so routine, now.”

As for the F-35B’s limited payload, that’s only a factor for as long as you prize stealth over firepower. The F-35 is adaptable – if what you want is more bombs, you can hang extra ones from pylons under the wings. Doing so, however, compromises the F-35’s stealth capability – but if the mission is to hit targets that aren’t protected by aircraft or anti-air defences, that’s not necessarily something you have to worry about.

As for ‘only’ carrying two bombs, Sabin argues it’s a concern that’s been overblown.

“[People] talk about, ‘oh, it can only carry a couple of bombs,’ [but] we don’t usually drop more than that,” he says.

“We usually drop less than that, in a sortie. If the limitations are that you don’t want to release the bombs until you’re sure of the target, and you don’t want to put your pilot in any peril at all, then those are the things which are going to constrain you, rather than, ‘oh, we haven’t got ten 2000lb bombs to plaster the enemy with.’”

The two bombs that a stealthy F-35 can carry are also only half the story of a bombing mission. Not only is an F-35 doing so-called ‘deep interdiction’ (hitting things deep inside enemy territory) hard to see, its weapon bays also hold two air-to-air missiles, which means it has some ability to take care of itself as it sneaks about in enemy airspace. Two missiles doesn’t sound like a lot, but this brings us neatly to one of the other great promises of the F-35: that it can identify and destroy other planes before they get close to visual range. If the system works as advertised (and that is definitely still an ‘if’), then defending pilots are looking for a plane that can’t be reliably tracked on radar, that won’t let them get close enough to see it, but can see and engage them just fine.

That’s the third role that the F-35 is supposed to fill: air-to-air combat, replacing specialised fighters like the F-16. This is the area in which, recently, the F-35 has received the biggest credibility body blow – down to a leaked report from an F-35 pilot who was pitted against an F-16 for a simulated dogfight. The results were, on the surface, pretty bleak: the F-35 pilot’s report was that the fifth-generation fighter simply didn’t have the power or the manoeuvrability to take on a nimble, dedicated fighter like the F-16 at close range and survive.

That’s not the sort of result you want when you’re pitching the F-35 as, among other things, the F-16’s successor. But again, there’s an argument to be made that the test isn’t a good measure of the F-35’s abilities. Yes, the F-35 might perform poorly in a Top Gun-style contest – but the idea is that the F-35 should never allow itself to get into that situation in the first place.

“And the answer there seems to have a lot to do with how far [an expected encounter will be] a dogfight – a traditional turning, manoeuvring dogfight – as opposed to long-ranged engagement with smart missiles, where you don’t even get into the fight at all, [and] the enemy doesn’t know you’re there until it’s too late and they’re being blown out of the sky.

“That’s the area where, arguably, the F-35 excels, because it can get its missiles in the air without the F-35 needing to illuminate the target with its own radar and put the enemy in danger before the enemy can get any kind of lock on the F-35. So in this kind of classical, head-on engagement, there are major advantages to the F-35. Certainly over non-stealthy aircraft, like the [Russian] Sukhois for example.

“Certainly if you set [an F-16 and an F-35] against each other, and they’re turning round to go off on each other’s tails, I’m not surprised the F-16 did pretty well – especially in daylight. But, in other circumstances, in perhaps more realistic circumstances of networked warfare, rather than artificial one-on-one tactical duels, it may well be another thing altogether.”

Critics of the F-35 like to bring up the F-117 ‘stealth fighter’ shot down over then-Yugoslavia during the 1999 NATO bombing campaign. How could a relatively under-developed force shoot down a stealth aircraft if stealth is as effective as the military and the defence contractors say it is? And if stealth doesn’t work, why are sacrificing so much in pursuit of it?

“[The F-117 case] shows that it’s not invulnerable. What it does, is that it complicates the task of the opposing air defence. It’s all very well saying, ‘in certain circumstances, we could think of ways in which to defeat the stealth.’ The current situation is that opponents find it difficult to use their air defences to effectively fight even fourth generation aircraft. Moving beyond that and being able to target effectively a stealth aircraft [is even more difficult].”

The stealth criticism also assumes that, on a given operation, the F-35s are the only planes Britain will have in the air. But that needn’t be the case. One strategy that Sabin identifies for the F-35 is the same as was used by the US in the 1991 bombing of Baghdad during the first Gulf War, in which the F-117s were sent in ahead of a larger bombing force to soften up the Iraqi air defences. In the case of the RAF and the Navy, the equivalent would be sending in F-35s with their two-bomb payload and electronic warfare capabilities, destroying and jamming an enemy’s air defences, and then rolling in with heavily-armed Typhoons. It also assumes that, in this hypothetical air campaign, Britain is fighting without the support of its allies – something it hasn’t done since the Falklands.

Then there’s the practical question of whether we would risk pilots on missions without stealth.

“[Whether stealth is worthwhile] depends how you feel when you’re sitting in the plane and your life’s at risk,” says Sabin. “We know how sensitive Western nations are to any loss of their own pilots. Any risk of that may well lead to the operation not being conducted at all. Stealth can give you at least some… not insurance, but reason to think that it’s not as dangerous as it would be if you were going in with just Typhoons.”

It will be – although the UK government won’t say exactly how much the first bulk order of planes will cost, or what it’s expecting the lifetime operating cost to be for each aircraft. You’ll also get a different cost estimate for every person you ask – though Defence Secretary Phillip Hammond (who seems like a good source) did say in 2013 that the first 48 UK F-35s would cost around £100m each. Of course, that could go up or down in the four or five years between now and the first UK delivery date of 2019/20.

So, the programme will be pricey, which has two negative effects on the planes themselves: numbers and value.

“And that therefore reinforces the problem which the Royal Air Force in particular has, [which is] the lack of combat mass. Once the Tornados go, we are going to have a very small number of combat [jets]. They’re going to be very precious, [and] they’re going to be really hard-pressed if we need to take part in any kind of serious, attritional air campaign. That’s the biggest problem.”

However, the high cost of the F-35 does come with one, tiny silver lining. It means that any creases in the plane’s design – the cannon, the fires, the helmet – really, really have to get ironed as soon as possible. Too much money and time have been spent now to let bugs like these shoot the F-35 project down.

“One great asset that the F-35 has is that it’s almost too big to fail,” Sabin concludes.

“So many nations now are in the programme, and the numbers of aircraft overall are so significant… that they’re going to have to solve these problems – or it’s going to be an absolute catastrophe for the future of Western aerospace power.”

Philip Sabin is a professor of strategic studies in the War Studies department of King’s College London with a specialisation in air power. He has held research fellowships at Harvard University and the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and is a consultant for the Ministry of Defence.

True. A very balanced article, and one that provides a 'real-world' overview of the aircraft. I know many have criticized the F-35 (and there is a lot of merit to that view) and claimed that it will be a dog, but the truth of the matter is that, as used by the West and against the 'high-probability pipeline' of countries* that the West may be facing, the F-35 will be a resounding success story.**

* These countries include the likes of Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Panama, Grenada, Bosnia, Libya, and countries similar to those, which match the countries the US has been involved against over the last several decades. These are countries that would not be able to provide a cogent defense against a concerted Western attack, with only Iraq, Bosnia and Libya in that list being the best able to provide some sort of action. Of those the strongest was Iraq, but even for it its integrated air defense system, called KARI, was a primarily Soviet-French sourced system that was oriented towards a limited threat from 80s-style Iran and/or Israel and not the USAF.

** Obviously if the F-35 is utilized in a campaign against a near-peer adversary like China or Russia the results may be different than when used towards the likes of Libya or Afghanistan, but the likelihood of a hot shooting-war against near-peer adversaries is very low. For the matter, even a shooting war against the likes of Pakistan, Iran and North Korea appears to be a hard ask, let alone thoughts of ingress against the Chinese IADS around Shanghai and Beijing. While not impossible, I just don't see it happening. What if it were to happen? Well, even then the F-35 would do good for itself. Why? Because it is never about one plane vs one plane. It would be a wholly stacked array of assets and options, starting with massed cruise missile attacks and electronic attack, and the likelihood of a plane-to-plane encounter that would lead to a USN F-35 flying off against a Chinese Sukhoi-knockoff is nil.

The plane may be capable of stealthy intrusions now, but with fast computers and networked radars how long will it stay stealthy? It costs much less to take countermeasures against stealth than the planes cost. Once countermeasures become widely distributed the planes may be too slow and unmaneuverable to fight back. This is a lot of money and a huge risk and that money is taken from other projects that might give better results more cheaply.

My take is that aircraft should be unmanned, cheap and disposable.

Having been in the military industrial complex I’ve seen companies with good marketing and a senator in their pocket take contracts away from better, cheaper alternatives. Often, the military officers in charge want a big, expensive program because that’s were the visibility, promotions and future employment come from.

The VSTOL to me seems to be a very expensive add-on that forces the plane to carry around an awful lot of weight after take off......for the CAS role, it would seem to me first to get damaged by ground fire.

The “Stealth” thing has always amazed me. Whether by shape or cross-section by aspect angle or absorbing material, no platform is invisible to RF over an extended RF range....take your pick, 1 GHZ all the way up to 18 GHz & above. Russians never throw any of their radars away really. The Chinese too, in a lot of respects. They’ve even got UHF radars, and lower frequency OTH radar systems for that really long detection range.

The best you can do is design your “stealth” for a specific band and aspect angle and plan your strikes accordingly.

To me, this plane makes no sense from a 3-role perspective. It is very expensive also. If I had my druthers, I’d be making more A-10s and updating some other planes like F-16s and F/A 18s.

I absolutely get your point, and totally agree that as time progresses the efficacy of stealth will continue to get degraded, particularly as speed of processing coupled with better radar presses hard against viable stealthiness. Not only would the combination of better/cheaper processing and better/cheaper/networked radar enhance the detectable envelop against stealthy aircraft, but it would be orders of magnitude cheaper than enhancing stealth to defeat their evolution. Totally agree.

However, my point remains. Against the countries I spoke of, such improvements would not help them. Take Iraq just before the First Gulf War, when it was at the peak of its strength with an IADS that could give it real protection against Iran and some measure of protection against Israel (then). Against the USAF/USN and the assorted allied nations, it still quickly fell (even though it did succeed in bringing down over 70 Allied aircraft, which is why I say the KARI system was not 'bad' ...for what it was meant to face off against, which did not include the US and its allies dropping almost 90,000 tons of bombs).

Anyway, my first point is that even as radar systems become more effective, for the countries most likely to be the targets of future warfare (the list I gave in my previous post, and similar countries) it will not help them at all. Let's take my home country - Kenya - and add Ethiopia, South Africa and Nigeria. Countries that can fall within the type of country I had mentioned in my list (although I don't know why they would be in such a situation, but let us assume the four of them do something nasty that attracts global steel). Now, Kenya and Ethiopia have good militaries for Africa, as does SA and Nigeria (yes, I know it is all relative ....'good for Africa' does not necessarily translate well, but humor me and let's play along). Now, all four countries are upgrading their militaries, ranging from small arms (e.g. using Kenya, our special forces now use FN SCARS, as can be seen by our special ops that routed Al Shabaab in Somalia that are trained by the US, Israel and Brits, and adopted M4s and SCARs) to helicopters (ironically Russian Mi-28 Havoc attack helicopters, which does make some sense considering we would not be allowed to buy Apaches, and the Havoc is a close enough analogue to do the job ....particularly against Somalis using a pray-n-spray stratagem). So, let's assume Kenya and the other three countries get better radars that can, technically, expand the detection envelop against stealth.

Would those radars help if the USN and USAF decided to send F-35 As,Bs and Cs to pound Nairobi, Addis Ababa, Lagos or Johannesburg?

Not one bit!

The same thing applies to similar countries in the ME, Latin America, SE Asia and Africa that are similar to the likes of Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Somalia, Grenada, Bosnia and Panama. The new radars provide 'more of a chance,' in the same way a sharper and longer knife in your hand would provide you with more of a chance than a smaller duller knife, but against someone armed with a rifle standing 15 yards away it is mostly a theoretical improvement.

Secondly, even the future defense radars work better than expected, the truth is the initial attack would employ massive cruise missile and electronic attack to degrade the system. Thus, while on paper it would be very effective, for MOST COUNTRIES it would be severely degraded within the first 48 hours.

Third, even if it were not degraded, and the F-35 was to find itself in trouble, legacy aircraft like the F-15/6/8/MiG-29/Typhoon/Rafale/Su-30 would find themselves in the same trouble as well. While they may be more maneuverable than the F-35, they are still not maneuverable enough to outrun a modern SAM (or any modern anti-aircraft missile for that matter). Thus, to use my usual silly analogies, it would be like Usain Bolt running away from a lion at 27 MPH, you running away from another lion at 15 MPH, and me being totally oblivious of another big cat bounding up behind me. While Usain is faster than you, and you're faster than me in that scenario, all three of us would become cat poop.

Same thing. Any disadvantage faced by the F-35 in a modern IADS would be equally faced by any legacy fighter in the same modern IADS ...even if the legacy fighter was more maneuverable.

Finally, on the military industrial complex ...totally agree.

This is what happens when computer magazines comment on defense matters. There are so many factual errors in this article that you can't really get to the real issues.

The real issues are exploding costs per airframe, weight on the B reducing the STOVL bomb load, and guns on the B and C model. While the author brings some of these up, he uses errant "facts" to make his case.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned in its favor is that not the A and C model have done quite well in their ship suitability testing. C model carrier testing was delayed due to needed tail hook redesign. When they took it to the boat with the new hook it did so well that they accelerated the testing. Planned for only day landings, the test pilots requested to go straight into night landings.

The issues with the B model aren't so much with the aircraft, but rather STOVL in general. The shipboard mishap rate for Harriers is so high, that it should not be tolerated in this era. Speaking with friends in both the USMC and UK Harrier communities, that plane is on the ragged edge of performance, without enough wiggle room for error. Hopefully, the F-35 will be safer.

“The plane may be capable of stealthy intrusions now, but with fast computers and networked radars how long will it stay stealthy? It costs much less to take countermeasures against stealth than the planes cost.”

Defense always costs more than offense.

What I do not understand is this. Let’s say we have the USS Ronald Reagan 200 miles off the coast of China. Instead of 80 F35’s, we have 300-400 Drones, each capable of carrying a single bomb.

We know if we start launching drones, there is no way China can present the firepower either in 5th generation aircraft or anti aircraft weapons, especially with the Drones small footprint.

A drone for all intent and purpose renders fighter/bombers obsolete. Based on cost alone 300 drones with armament costs 600 million, give or take? That’s 6 F35’s. If 50 drones are lost in the initial onslaught it is still significantly cheaper than losing 1 or 2 planes.

Thanks for posting this.

I'm not ready to write the F-35 off as a failure in the air to air role just yet.

The one report claiming the F-35 lost so badly to the F-16 seemed misleading when I read more about it.

I'm not sure where they were in their flight test program, but I have it on good authority they don't hire John McCains as test pilots these days and, given the costs involved, generally flight tests are designed to test and gather data about something specific and not break anything.

While the company has many reasons to sugar coat everything and downplay anything sour, it sounded like that was a test to explore/verify maneuverability at the currently approved limits at that time using the F-16.

I admit that's almost as sugary as Southern sweet tea, but if it's accurate, then the full performance and flight limitations of the F-35 still remain unexplored and unknown.

Unknown as far as we, the great unwashed, propagandized public, know...and, as a general rule, I hope it stays that way until we show it off for real.

What I do not understand is this. Let’s say we have the USS Ronald Reagan 200 miles off the coast of China. Instead of 80 F35’s, we have 300-400 Drones, each capable of carrying a single bomb. We know if we start launching drones, there is no way China can present the firepower either in 5th generation aircraft or anti aircraft weapons, especially with the Drones small footprint. A drone for all intent and purpose renders fighter/bombers obsolete. Based on cost alone 300 drones with armament costs 600 million, give or take? That’s 6 F35’s. If 50 drones are lost in the initial onslaught it is still significantly cheaper than losing 1 or 2 planes.

I do believe that the future will be heavily denominated in drone technology, but there are still several considerations that will not fully remove manned technology. However, more and more advanced drones will come into play, and the latest iterations of the X-45 and the X-47 (particularly the X-47B) show what is possible.

Note however that having 300-400 drones, each carrying a single bomb, basically replicates the mission of a cruise missile (with the only caveat being that the drones can be reused - although once upon a time decades ago there was a cruise missile concept that was part of Project Pluto that had several warheads and would fly about dropping warheads at different targets, but I digress).

Also, the size of a drone required to fly from a USN Carrier (that has to stay far away from China's coast for safety), and have a chance to make it to target, would be large enough that the carrier couldn't carry 300-400. The X-47, as seen in the photo below, is the size of a F/A-18E/F, and to get to targets in China would require something that size.

It would also cost similar to, and quite possibly even more, than a Super Hornet. The X-45 prototype cost around US$15m a pop, but the X-47B program cost over US$800 million for two flying test vehicles. Obviously the actual fly-away cost for production naval-UCAVs will go down - significantly - but it will definitely be more than the cost of a Reaper UCAV (US$17m), may match the cost of a Super Hornet (US$60m), and as shown below may even be double that.

Whatever the cost, definitely more than cruise missiles.

Particularly if one wants drones that can fly long-distances, can land on a carrier, cannot be jammed or hacked by a near-peer adversary (an important consideration), have some sort of stealthy features (as all large UCAVs outside the Predator/Reaper family have stealthy features, and not just in the US) and are able to carry sufficient ordnance to make a difference. That pushes up unit cost significantly higher than that of a Predator/Reaper, and maybe even higher than a F/A-18.

Case in point for the above was the USN Broad Area Maritime Surveillance program, where they evaluated a navalized Reaper (with modifications to make it operated off carriers), but decided instead to use a navalized Global Hawk. Unit cost? US$130 million fly-away.

Anyway, the future is drones ...but it will never be hundreds of them using swarm logic to flitter all over an enemies air defenses, but rather will be large current-sized super-machines that cost a lot and can do a lot. In the same way manned planes have had cost and performance creep, where more and more is asked of them, the same will be the case for drones. They will get larger, stealthier, more complex, and the space saved by deleting the life-support systems required for manned vehicles will only be filled with advanced technologies (AESA systems with advanced electronic warfare modes).

The final version of whatever the X-45 or X-47B will evolve into will, most definitely, be more expensive than a Super Hornet could ever hope to be, and most probably be expensive enough to give the F-35 a run for its money.

With that said, drones are definitely the future ...just not cheap or numerous.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.