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.
I can’t comment on whether the F-35 is good, bad or indifferent. Because of the amount of money, prestige and ego involved in any program of this size, it’s almost impossible for anyone, at any level, to make a dispassionate determination of whether any project is good or bad or a waste of money or a priceless asset.
I do know that when you plan for something that you will do ten or twenty ears from now to counter the threat as you see it now is likely to be not be what you will need when the newest thing comes on line.
I was listening to a soldier describe his time in the middle east. He said, above us from, say, 100 feet to the stratosphere, we had absolute air dominance. But the people around me were being killed by tiny drones adapted to drop 40 mm grenades. There must have been a 100 drones and there was nothing, nothing, we could do about it.
While it’s true fighting China or Russia and troops on the ground getting bombed by tiny drones are not the same things, it illustrates how the strategic picture can change. When they started planning the F-35 the idea of a tiny drone that couldn’t be shot down simply didn’t exist. Also, the idea of a single use, cheap and expendable platform didn’t exist. And, because, as Henry Ford said, small cars generate small profits, we live in a world where nobody wants a small defense project because they generate small profits.
The problem isn’t so much that the strategic environment changes with time and technology, it’s that the cost of making a mistake is huge. And, many of the items in that cost are political. We could greatly reduce the risks by reducing the costs. Eliminating needless cost adders on every project, like mandates for woman owned or minority businesses, mandatory diversity programs, mandated LGBT support groups and incredibly horrible cost adders aimed at climate change or biodiversity fuels...all would go a long way towards making mistakes easier to recover from and less war-losing. A contracts manager told me she could cut the cost of every procurement program by as much as half if she could eliminate the insane politics involved. An F-35 that cost half as much, even if it turned out to be the wrong tool entirely, could then just be a test bed for newer technology that could be built into other weapons. As it is, it’s too big to fail, even if it is a flying turkey. (Which it may or may not be. I have no idea.)
But the weapons we buy are much more about politics and political power than they are about defending the nation. I can tell you from spending 33 years in the military industrial complex that no one I ever talked to in upper management gave a dried bean about making a superior weapon. It was always about bonuses and bragging rights. As for politicians, if you just made a map of suppliers on a piece of paper, the dots would show you an outline of the fifty states, because to make a project viable, you have to redirect some amount of money to every state and district to get the votes you need to fund it. That is hugely inefficient.
Not sure about “Air Boss’s” credentials / bias. However a credible counter argument can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD15_k1JXzU
His credentials and “probable” bias are known.
Sorry no Rumble posting found
“The F-16 is the perfect platform.” for air supremacy?
I think the F-15 guys would dispute that.
F-16 was originally envisioned as a day, VFR fighter. It evolved to be a day/night VFR/IFR fighter, but the F-15 was designed from the get-go to be THE air superiority fighter.
Of course, opinions may differ. . . .
“It is the same type of stupidity that rendered our fighter aircraft gun-less because air-to-air missiles made guns obsolete.”
100% absolutely correct.
I completely disagree that the F-35 is a debacle that needs exiting-from. Quite the opposite.
This aircraft is now less expensive than all its 4th gen competitors. We JUST got there. JUST at this moment when it becomes cost effective, now there’s this lust to get rid of it? That’s STUPID. It is time now to crank up the production and get the gain of all the overhead-capital spent.
As for its deficiencies, almost all of them are software. And that software will get tweaked and tweaked for years, constantly fixing things. This is the way of complex systems. Everyone wants perfection - well guess what, with a system this complex all you get is iterative correction. Sorry. That’s how life is.
There is one significant physical problem - burning the tailfeathers if you go afterburner for more than short bursts. If I were in charge, I would tell them to physically fix that. But consider the trade off.
This is the very first main-stream, mass production, supersonic, multi-role fighter, EVER. The F-22 is a very custom air-superiority fighter where they can afford to spend a lot of extra time on it. The F-35 is a mass market item. It’s stealth. It can carry 18,000lb of ordinance.
It was built as a swiss army knife airplane. That’s what it is. You get what you get on that. Are swiss army knives good? Yes they are good. They should be everywhere. I think the complaining is about the fact it does not, in fact, do everything. But a swiss army knife is not a sawz-all, ok? Live with it, and buy a sawzall.
Consider how much better this airplane is than an F-16. It’s stealth. It’s networked. For all the bitching everyone loves to publish about this airplane, all the published reports are that its kill ratio is about 15 or 20 to 1.
That doesn’t sound like a technological defeat.
I think all this bitching that “oh its no good” is all about the companies wanting to make money. This airplane is now in the mass-production mode where the costs of it are now very low, and they keep squeezing more and more airplane per dollar out of the production line. The period of trillions of dollars of overhead research money is over. The taxpayer is now in the profit-taking regime where we could be popping out F-35’s for us and our allies by the thousand and having it cost LESS than an F-15.
So what is the propaganda? Cancel F-35 and buy F-15!. Why?
Because the profit margin on an F-15 is higher!
Look, we need to go to full rate production and crank these things out by the thousand. The Russians and the Chinese cannot target them and cannot shoot them down very well.
Are they perfect? No. They are a stealth replacement for the F-16.
The 2nd thing that should happen is that the pentagon should run a competition like this: Get all the major aerospace companies together and say: Using two of the F-35 engines, create an air-superiority fighter prototype which outperforms the F-22 in every metric that was used to buy the F-22. And? You have one constraint: you will be graded on who uses more of the existing F-35 bill of materials. The entry with the highest quantity of F-35 parts, and the highest performance on the F-22 metric list, wins. You will be graded by F-35 parts by volume, by mass, and by dollars, as a percent of your total finished airplane.
The major major major issue right now, the crucial issue, is that we keep F-35 production up, and increase it. We have massively aging airframes in the fleet, and it is CRITICAL to produce airplanes now. We are right at the point where we could completely dominate China if we replace each of the pieces of antiquity with a new F-35. But if we suddenly scrap F-35 production, we will be at a serious disadvantage. If you ramp up the F-15EX production line, you are talking about a hopped up fighter FROM THE 1970’s that COSTS MORE than the F-35.
In the dogfights F-35 v. F-15, who wins? The F-35 completely wipes out the F-15 over and over and over again.
These idiots who are advocating producing F-15’s in place of F-35 are from China-Joe. They are trying to gut the USA from within by info-war.
It is collapsing because China is involved.
As likely does, comparatively speaking, the F-15EX with all those awesome missiles carried externally. Sure, it's baseline RCS is probably pretty low, but...it isn't stealth.
If someone wants to make the argument that "real stealth" doesn't provide much more capability than Gen 4.5 fighters like the F-15EX, that is an argument that should be engaged in. But the assumption that real stealth isn't valuable...well, I would like to talk to pilots who fly in the exercises involving both 4th and 5th generation fighters.
I talked to one such pilot once, and asked him what it was like going up against an F-22 in his F-16, and he said it was like being a "baby seal". While the F-35 is not as capable as the F-22, I have no doubt its characteristics might (and do by all accounts) render a similar comparison from 4th Generation fighter adversaries.
It is true the F-35 may be the last new manned fighter aircraft we procure. It is still in early stages of deployment. It is important to keep in mind what happens to weapons systems throughout their lives. The B-29 is a good example as a ridiculously expensive platform that had monumental teething problems but was pushed into front line use due to combat exigencies. And fixed as they went along. I have no doubt they will do the same for the F-35.
And is it any wonder that we are getting “Cancel this debacle” as the new mantra, ten seconds after the Socialists take over the government?
They don’t care about the F-35 one way or the other. They just want to cancel big defense department programs because they want to gut defense period. The F-35 is just their focus because its a big ticket item. AND because it is American superiority and American exceptionalism. OF COURSE they want to cancel it.
Yes, there are big differences between a “national security” interest, and a “national interest.”
National Interest: encourage democratic rule, advance human rights and economic freedoms. . .not worth dying for
National Security Interest: Something that directly affects the peace and security of the US and its people and institutions, thereby something worth dying for.
Right. How few of our weapons platforms come off the line and are instant successes in combat? There are some, but most are decent-pretty good coming in, but become outstanding and even immortal with further development. Look at the P-51. Even it was not bad when it came out, but with the addition of a bubble canopy and Merlin engine, REALLY became a legendary fighter.
Heck. Imagine what advice and direction we will get from Israel as they use their F-35’s. They are pretty good at THAT.
I just believe in giving these things time before throwing them in the trash. I don’t believe it is always about “throwing good money after bad”, although, as in the case with the Copperhead rounds and the Zumwalt Class, it kind of...is.
I would also point out that we are on the verge of being able to create drone AI “loyal wingman”. The critical need in that era is that your human pilot “disappear”. The F-35 doesn’t need to dogfight or all this other stuff. It needs to be in the air, invisible, with all the data fusion, to be able to command half a dozen drone bomb-truck fly-alongs. And everybody agrees that the F-35 does the disappearing act and the sensor fusion act very very well.
The writer’s reasoning is why only 187 F-22s were built and there is no production line or tooling available today.
Should have picked the Boeing X-32 it even has a Smile
Air Force chief defends F-35A against critics, boasting kills at Red Flag (February 20, 2019)
"The F-35, a fifth-generation aircraft designed to replace aging F-16 Fighting Falcons and A-10 Thunderbolt IIs, should be thought of as “quarterback of the joint team," and not simply another stealth fighter, said Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Goldfein at a Brookings Institution event Tuesday.
...
Goldfein, who flew the F-16 Fighting Falcon and F-117 Nighthawk, compared the aircraft’s future benefit to that of a quarterback — able to call audibles and deciding what to do at the last second after seeing all possible complications.
The fifth-generation fighter flew in this year’s Red Flag — the Air Force’s premier combat air exercise that includes allied air forces.
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Even in 2017, the F-35 reportedly dominated the competition with a 20:1 kill ratio.
...
During Red Flag, which ended Friday, Goldfein said the aircraft was "exceeding our expectations when it comes to not only being able to survive, but to prosecute targets.”
One pilot who flew in the exercise reported that even novice pilots were quickly “killing” fourth generation aircraft during air-to-air combat.
“My wingman was a brand new F-35A pilot, seven or eight flights out of training,” Col. Joshua Wood, 388th Operations Group commander, said in a news release. "He gets on the radio and tells an experienced, 3,000-hour pilot in a very capable fourth-generation aircraft: ‘Hey bud, you need to turn around. You’re about to die. There’s a threat off your nose.’”
The younger pilot “killed” the simulated enemy aircraft and was able to rack up three more kills over the next hour."
Sadly, the problem is not the state of our preparedness or unpreparedness, that is a proposition that is identifiable and actually fixable, the problem is our state of mind which is far, far more difficult to deal with.
Before the election I wrote several times, the election will turn on trivialities but in a generation historians will write that the election determined whether or not we would survive the existential threat of China.
So long as Joe Biden is corrupt and the major players in the Democrat party, Feinstein, Pelosi etc. profit from China, sleep with China and house spies, that party will waive the barbarians through the gate when the time comes. So long as Republicans like Mitch McConnell are literally married to companies profiteering directly from the Chinese communist political party, the Republican party will go along all the way to the bank.
There is not a single institution in America that is reliably conservative and very few that have not already been co-opted by China and that list is not limited to Wall Street or academia
You don’t need to tell me, I know what the deal is. Russia came out of the Cold War with their nukes intact and has modernized EVERYTHING since then, and China now has a larger economy than we do, and who really knows what China spends and what they’re getting for it, other than it’s FAR MORE than what we get, far more (they’re outbuilding us on navy ships, 5 to 1 now).
I just do my posting as sarcasm, trying to leave as many clues as possible - because I’ve heard that same argument here, on FR, that our ‘much higher’ military spending assures us of victory and we have ‘nothing to worry about’. And they do have a point, after all we spent far more than our enemies in Vietnam and, oh, never mind...
I watched a video lecture by Capt. Tal Manvel who was a professor in Naval Architecture at the USNA in this video: VADM Ralph L. Frances Shifly Lecture Series: Designing the Navy's Newest Aircraft Carrier which is interesting to watch, and in it, he pretty confidently states the F-35 is the last manned fighter the US Navy is going to purchase.
So, to anyone who thinks the military isn't trying to think ahead on these things...they very much are. (The lecture is from 2015 I think)
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