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The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II showing off its airworthiness.
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 main obstacle to killing the F-35 is Lockheed.
First they lobbied against the F-22 to free up money to keep the pig F=35 alive.
Their hope was a larger market for export and much more profit than for the F-22.
Lockheed execs should at least be tried for treason.
Lockheed should die but they won’t, they grease too many palms.
Remember, Tucker Carlson is the threat, not China.
“Beware the Military-Industrial Complex...” - Dwight Eisenhower
The author fails to mention that the Russian R9 BVR missile has a tested range out to almost 200 miles, well beyond anything in the US inventory. Oh, and they sold the missile to China ...
That we know of...................
Your link is an outstanding video. It really puts this all in perspective. I have met a great number of F-35 pilots and trainers and I have never had one not an avid fan of the platform.
Yep. And Russia has about a dozen SU-57s. Can’t afford to build more unless a “partner” nation underwrites the project. Moscow has been pressing India to pay that bill for more than a decade, but Delhi has blinked, and rightfully so. After their experiences with various MiG and Sukhoi models (more than 100 IAF pilots have been killed flying the MiG-21), India would love to join the F-35 program.
Basically American systems engineering is broken and won't come back until we've lost a major war because of that.
I doubt it's louder than an F-4 barreling down the runway with full afterburners...
(Ears are still ringing 20+ years later)
The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II showing off its airworthiness.
“The author fails to mention that the Russian R9 BVR missile has a tested range out to almost 200 miles”
It also fails to mention that the radar on this missile, or any other missile (high frequency for precise speed, range) cannot target the F-35.
Even when the Russians link multiple VHF, low frequency radars to find the general position of US stealth aircraft, their long range missiles cannot hit the target once they get there.
And the Chinese are even less capable.
Lets see ... there’s the F-35 looking for his refueler but the he’s lost contact with the AWACS - oh drat, that pesky R-9 barrage took them all out, leaving the F-35 with 4 short range AIM missiles and 215 rounds for its cannon.
Out of fuel, down goes the POS F-35.
Declare Covid-19/20 over, not a crisis and redirect a trillion or so toward protecting the nation and future citizens.
Not a lot of true and factual assertions in the entire article.
The only truth here is that there are a lot of people who want to kill the F-35 and those same people are the ones who touted the F-35 as a justification for killing that expensive and fault ridden turkey of a fighter without a mission, the F-22.
This bait and switch argument has been made by the anti military, Marxist Democrats to shut down our most strategic weapons programs since at least the 1960’s.
Almost exactly the same bait and switch argument was made against the F-15, the F-16 and the A-10 back in the 1970’s when the Dems worked overtime to kill those programs.
FWIW, the A-10 was pitched as a procurement disaster that was a too expensive, too complex :-), fatally flawed aircraft without a mission.
The plane they wanted to use to cancel the A-10 and replace it with was an updated WWII era P-51 Mustang with a P&W PT6 gas turbine engine driving the prop called the Piper Enforcer. They actually touted the fact the Enforcer had 8 guns compared to the A-10’s paltry single gun and bragged that the Enforcer was much faster and much more maneuverable than then that heavy, ill conceived pig of an A-10
This bait and switch political hit job delayed program for a fly off and came really close to killing the A-10 program.
To put things in perspective, what aircraft would you would you rather go to war with for the CAS and Anti Tank missions in a modern conflict - an A-10 or a updated P-51 Mustang?
The anti American Left is working overtime making lies to kill the F-35 now that they control the government not because it's a bad strike fighter , they want to kill it because it's very good one and they don't want their allies in China and Iran to have to deal with it.
Biggest lie of all is that the F-35 is a total dog when it comes to air to air. Fact is that an F-35 in dedicated air to air configuration is a pretty capable aircraft that is second only to an F-22 .
The F-35 is a data source for the AWACS.
Not a user of AWACS data.
No effect on F-35 operations.
And the F-35 carries the AIM-12D with a 115mile range. And 90%+ hit probability at 100 miles. And it can be launched based in IR sensor data rather than relying on aircraft radar.
Even though Air combat is not it’s role. It’s a deep penetrator/strike aircraft. That’s still more effective in the AA role than any of our adversaries pretend platforms.
AIM-120D
This is the Biden Administration allowing the aerospace companies sell their vaporware in deference to weapons that actually exist. Many of the F-35’s reported problems were already solved. The USAF is complaining about the cost of flight hours — OK, but you’re just now fielding the aircraft in operational squadrons. Your grown crews haven’t really had a chance to wring out the bugs and lower those costs. This is a coordinated media assault on the plane and we should be suspicious of it.
The project costs of the F-35 program are largely sunk and Lockheed and their competitors are basically looking to get onto the next design Whether it be a Gen 5 (stealth) or only Gen 4.5 they make more money in design & development than they make building. After all when it comes to building the aircraft, none of them have the ability to do the entire air-frame and all its major subsystems. Whoever is selected as prime contractor will have to divvy it up with the other competitors to meet the contractual terms.
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