Posted on 03/15/2021 10:11:00 AM PDT by Red Badger
Air Boss" is a pseudonym. The author has decades of experience in aerospace strategic analysis, planning, and acquisition, as well as assessments of strategic and tactical capabilities.
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Recent public comments by the former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, current Air Force leadership, and House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith illustrate what expert observers have predicted for two decades.
The F-35 program and its basic design concepts are failures.
Much less widely appreciated are some more somber realities. The strategic environment the F-35 was envisioned to defeat a quarter of a century ago no longer exists, making the jet largely irrelevant. Rather than win regional intervention air campaigns such as those over Iraq and Kosovo in the 1990s, or against insurgents, the U.S. military needs to deter and defeat technically smarter and highly adaptable peer competitors. Both China and Russia have heavily invested in military technology specifically designed to challenge and defeat U.S. air power. Much of this technology is new, much of it uniquely original and developed in China or Russia, or collaboratively, and many designs have borrowed U.S. ideas and technology. Many of these developments are also being offered for export to other adversaries, so as to strategically challenge the United States and buy influence. The specifics should alarm us.
China has deployed large numbers of advanced high-performance stealth fighters, long-range surface-to-air missile systems, and counterstealth radar systems. The Chengdu J-20 fighter was built to compete with the F-22, and with its latest engines, is expected to outperform the F-22 in a number of areas. New J-20B variants show stealth features and treatments very similar to the F-22. The formidable Chinese HQ-9 and imported Russian S-300P and S-400 surface-to-air missiles have been deployed in large numbers. These are supported by a new generation of Chinese low-band counterstealth radars and indigenous but capable airborne warning radar systems. Similarly, Russia has developed air defenses to frustrate and defeat U.S. air power. The new Su-57 is a supercruising and extremely agile stealth fighter jet built to challenge the F-22. And both China and Russia are deploying hypersonic missiles to defeat U.S. air defenses at long ranges. Russian and Chinese publications expound on how this lethal cocktail of threats was devised to beat the U.S. Air Force, and specifically kill the mediocre F-35. The current F-22 fleet is too small to deal with this strategic environment. Instead of building the 749 F-22s initially planned, only 187 have been built.
So, what are America's options?
Current thinking centers on keeping the F-35 alive and supplementing that program with the technologically refreshed legacy F-15EX fighter jet. This is supposed to buy time until a next-generation air dominance fighter jet is developed alongside an F-16 replacement jet. But this is a compromise designed to appease F-35 supporters in Congress. And the F-35 is not fixable, burdened with so many design defects and deficiencies that fixing one problem creates others. The idea that an F-35 can stop highly agile supercruising Chinese and Russian stealth fighters penetrating at twice the speed and altitude of an F-35 is absurd. The F-15EX might be competitive against advanced Russian and Chinese "Flanker-class" fighters, but it cannot compete against the F-22 class highly agile supercruising stealth fighters now being deployed. Neither can the F-35 easily penetrate advanced air defenses.
Top line: America and its allies will be confronting a strategic fighter capability gap for a decade or more, precisely when China and Russia are challenging Western democratic interests on every front.
The cleanest exit strategy from the F-35 debacle is thus to build new F-22s instead of F-35s. When former Defense Secretary Bob Gates killed the F-22 production line against bipartisan objections across Congress, the option of a production restart was provisioned for by preserving production tooling. Rand's 2011 study and earlier investigations were widely misunderstood, as they conflated production restart costs with the cost of manufacturing different numbers of F-22s, and assumed very limited production numbers. The 2017 production restart study mandated by Congress found no technological showstoppers but argued that building more F-22s would siphon funding away from the F-35 program. Put simply, the bottomless funding pit for the F-35 program has been the main obstacle to F-22 production.
If Air Force F-35 funding is redirected into building newer F-22s, all of the adverse funding conclusions from the 2011 and 2017 production restart studies collapse and genuine returns on investments can be realized. If the F-35 supply chain, advanced assembly line, and lean production techniques devised for the F-35 program are repurposed, unit prices would be further driven down. Importantly, congressional advocates of the F-35 program would get to keep lucrative production contracts in their districts. Exporting the F-22 to key allies would further improve economies of scale. Most important of all, the F-22s will deter China and Russia. That must be our priority. It's time to abandon the F-35.
The strategy for air superiority was wrong, is wrong... But it will not change because of the money. The F-16 is the perfect platform. All that was needed was better, more modern missiles. Savings- 500 billion dollars.
“many designs have borrowed U.S. ideas and technology”
sold to them by dems no doubt. And I think it is we who have UFO tech. :)
And I was so psyched about the F35 coming to Marine Corps Cherry Point.
It doesnt matter what plane we try to build. Someone is always out there to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. F35 had a lot of requirements creep, and it tries to do a lot, but I dont hear the aviators complaining. But lets drop back and build a 45 year old design from a competing manufacturer and that will fix all our problems until we can design a new plane and spend 25 years trying to get it into production...sheesh.
Be very careful here, because with the Dems in charge, cancelling the F35 is more likely to result in -zero- new aircraft for the Air Force, as they will cancel and then refuse to restart F22 production.
John McCain... the gift that keeps on giving...
I live on the runway slope path to/from Eglin AFB.
The F-35 is SUPER LOUD. Louder than any aircraft before...................
Western democracy has more problems than the F-35, but please tell us what "democratic interests" are being challenged by China or Russia right now.
If they leave Western democracy alone it will collapse within ten-fifteen years if not sooner. Why would they bother?
It is wise to be wary of someone who states that there is no need for something because the cause for it "no longer exists".
It is the same type of stupidity that rendered our fighter aircraft gun-less because air-to-air missiles made guns obsolete.
It is thinking like that which has rendered militaries impotent at times when potency was most needed, at the outbreak of hostilities.
It doesn't mean we shouldn't re-examine things. But neither should we assume that a strategic reason 'doesn't exist' just because someone says it doesn't.
Air superiority=dogfights=wrong.
I love the F-22 and I think it was wrong to kill it.
But the F35 has been shown to be able to “kill” every combatant currently flying. And will be able to for a long time.
The F-16 has limitations, one being a very large radar signature.
A great many of us have been advocating for this very thing for many years. I well over 20 years in Naval Aviation and have known for quite some time that the F-35 concept was an unworkable Turkey. No one military aircraft can be all things for all scenarios. The Swiss Army knife of the skies is an apt analogy. The F-35 is designed to do many many things and not one of those things can it do very well. In many cases, it can’t actually do many of them at all.
And, many of us have known this for quite some time. Politics kept this Turkey on Life Support. Long past time to kill it.
Tell that to the all knowing Congressmen and women who have degrees in Aeronautics and aeronautical engineering................Oh, there aren't any...............
"The F-35 program and its basic design concepts are failures." somewhere, PukinDog is laughing...
Typical BS, we spend 5 TIMES as much as Russia and China combined on out military, therefore we are better than them, and therefore we have NOTHING to worry about, ever.
You think maybe there’s a lot of money involved for this guy — a competitor.
I didn’t see any quotes from F-35 pilots, and this guy has severe limitations on knowledge of air warfare.
“If they leave Western democracy alone it will collapse within ten-fifteen years if not sooner.”
My father said something along similar lines many many years ago. He said to get rid of the Jews, just leave them alone. Each generation will marry outside of their faith until there are few left.
War is the fastest way to galvanize a populace around a belief in god and country. Leaving a populace alone will only result in death from self inflicted wounds.
we spend 5 TIMES as much as Russia and China combined on out military
I know that is the number but does it show the disparity in payrolls?
That aside, check out the movie Pentagon Wars for an old eye opener on who things cost as much as they do IMO. Mission creep is part of it but another part of it is post government employment planning.
The fact that the ChiComs replicated the F22 and NOT the F35 should tell you something.
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