The Disappointment That Is the F-35: Why this military program will die of embarassment

American Thinker ^ | 03/21/2015 | David Archibald

[SeekAndFind]

First of all, be aware that strange things happen in the U.S. military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about. Take the example of the M1 Abrams tank. The U.S. Army has an inventory of 6,300-odd of these tanks, including 4,000 in storage in desert. It doesn’t need any more, but Congress keeps voting to keep the production line going, churning out unwanted tanks. Ironically, that means that funds aren’t available to upgrade the gas turbine engines of its existing tanks to make them more efficient. The M1 Abrams gets half the fuel mileage of the German Leopard II tank of similar capability.

But this is a tale about the F-35. It has been said that the story of the F-35 begins in 1942 in the Battle of Guadalcanal. The U.S. Marines, doing the ground fighting, were upset that the other services weren’t providing enough air cover. The pounding they got from the lack of air cover is part of their institutional memory.

So when the U.S. Defense Department decided to build a 5th-generation stealth fighter to replace the F-16, the U.S. Marines insisted that this include a short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) variant. The trade-offs necessary to effect this fatally compromised the whole project so that none of the variants do their job adequately. Specifically, the requirement to have a lift fan 1.27 meters in diameter on the centerline of the aircraft behind the pilot resulted in two bomb bays instead of just one on the centerline. This made the aircraft wider, draggy, slower, and less maneuverable. In short, the F-35 can’t turn, can’t climb, can’t run.

In fact, it isn’t a fighter aircraft in the first place. It is really a light bomber, designed as such from the get-go.

[lurk]

Couldn’t the A-10 be modified for carrier duty?

The A-10 is successful. It must be cancelled.

[PIF]

And it cannot carry some of the ordinance it needs to do the job ...

[Arm_Bears]

Where do the taxpayers go to get their money back?

[VTenigma]

Obola has an uncanny ability to always pick the loser. One of his first orders was to scrap the F-22 in favor of the troublesome F-35. Almost as if he planned it to create the most chaos

[Fraxinus]

Part of the problem is that we no longer buy special purpose weapons. Since every weapon must perform every mission each customer, marines, fighter squadrons, bomber squadrons insist that the next vehicle must perform their mission before all others. The compromises are just that, compromises, in all senses of the word. You end up, every time, with a camel instead of a race horse.

There are places for special purpose weapons, then there are the places for Generalists. I think the Airforce should go for 5 primary Airframes. 1)Large bomb truck (eg. B-52) 2)Large Cargo (e.g. C-5A) 3)Small bomb truck/Fighter/Recon (I believe this is the current role of the F-15 and F-16) 4)Close air support (eg A-10) 5)Small/medium cargo, Mid air refueling (e.g. C-130) Close Air support has requirements that preclude using that airframe for most other missions. The Navy would have some additional requirements, and only use some of these roles. The Harrier that the Marines want so much was the result of the need for a fighter that could operate off of small carriers, this reduced performance as a fighter, but brought some air to air capability to where the fleet was.

[OneWingedShark]

Good observation.

[OneWingedShark]

There’s no air superiority in that list.

[Fraxinus]

Fighter is Air superiority

[Gen.Blather]

I had a small piece of Future Combat Systems, a gargantuan procurement. The Army did not make critical decisions until (as I recall) a few weeks before the Preliminary Design Review. That’s a major milestone. Questions like will the engine be in the rear, the middle or the front? What would the basic frame look like and do? Nobody in procurement had the guts or perhaps the power to decide which of the competing customers would be satisfied and which would have to get further funding to turn the vehicle into something they could use. This failure caused the vendors to simply bill time without having the necessary design documentation to actually do anything productive. It was a huge waste, doomed before it began by politics at every level. The final design of the slab sided, lightly armored vehicles would have been easy targets. The whole program was a crazy waste of money.

[USAF80]

I always wondered why the placed the lift fan horizontal instead of vertical. It would have saved space being vertical and they could have used the thrust in normal flight mode. They could have had swiveling nozzles for the fan just like they have for the main exhaust.