Joint Strike Fighter: The Latest Hotspot in the U.S. Defense Meltdown

While its illusion as an "affordable" multi-role fighter-bomber is alive and well in Washington D.C., the F-35 "Joint Strike Fighter" is already a disaster, and the bad news has barely begun to roll in. Internationally recognized combat aircraft designer Pierre Sprey and Straus Military Reform Project Director Winslow Wheeler summarize the many failures in a new opinion piece that appears in the Sept. 10, 2008 issue of Janes Defence Weekly and is reproduced below.

Politicians in the US are papering over serious problems in the country?s armed forces. Equating exposure of flaws with failure to 'support the troops', Congress, the presidential candidates and think-tank pundits repeatedly dub the US armed forces “the best in the world”. Behind this vapid rhetoric, a meltdown – decades in the making –is occurring.

The collapse is occurring in all the armed forces, but it is most obvious in the US Air Force (USAF). There, despite a much needed change in leadership, nothing is being done to reverse he deplorable situation the air force has put itself into.

The USAF's annual budget is now in excess of USD150 billion: well above what it averaged during the Cold War. Despite the plentiful dollars, the USAF?s inventory of tactical aircraft is smaller today than it has ever been since the end of the Second World War. At the same time, the shrunken inventory is older, on average, than it has been ever before.

Since George W Bush came to office in 2001, the air force has received a major budget 'plus up', supposedly to address its problems. In January 2001 a projection of its budgets showed USD850 billion for 2001 to 2009. It actually received USD1,059 billion – not counting the additional billions (more than USD80 billion) it also received to fund its operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. With the ?plus up? of more than USD200 billion, the air force actually made its inventory troubles worse: from 2001 to today, tactical aircraft numbers shrank by about 100 aircraft and their average age increased from 15 years to 20, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Not to worry, the air force and its politicians assert, the solution is in hand; it is called the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter. It will do all three tactical missions: air-to-ground bombing, air-to-air combat and specialised close air support for ground troops – and there will be tailored variants for the air force, navy and marines. Most importantly, it will be ?affordable? and, thus, the US can buy it in such large numbers that it will resolve all those shrinking and ageing problems.

Baloney. When the first official cost and quantity estimate for the F-35 showed up on Capitol Hill in 2001, the Department of Defense (DoD) predicted 2,866 units for USD226 billion. That is a not inconsiderable USD79 million for each aircraft. The latest official estimate is for a smaller number of aircraft (2,456) to cost more (USD299 billion). That represents a 54 per cent increase in the per-unit cost to USD122 million, and the deliveries will be two years late. The Government Accountability Office reported in March that the US can expect the costs to increase some more – perhaps by as much as USD38 billion – with deliveries likely to be delayed again, perhaps by another year. That is just the start of the rest of the bad news. The price increases and schedule delays cited above are for currently known problems.

Unfortunately, the F-35 has barely begun its flight-test programme, which means more problems are likely to be discovered – perhaps even more serious than the serious engine, flight control, electrical and avionics glitches found thus far.

Take the F-22 experience; it was in a similarly early stage of flight testing in 1998. Its programme unit cost was then USD184 million per aircraft but it climbed to a breathtaking USD355 million by 2008. Considering that the F-35 is even more complex (19 million lines of computer code compared to 4 million, and three separate service versions compared to one), the horrifying prospect of the F-35?s unit cost doubling is not outlandish.

The last tri-service, tri-mission ?fighter? the US built, the F-111, tripled in cost before being cut back to barely half the number originally contemplated. The DoD currently plans to spend more than USD10 billion to produce fewer than 100 F-35s per year at peak production. USAF leaders would like to increase the production rate and add in a few more F-22s. That plan is irresponsibly unaffordable (which contributed to the recent departure of the Secretary of the Air Force and the Air Force Chief of Staff). The unaffordability will become even more obvious when the unavoidable F-35 cost increases emerge.

The inevitable reaction, just as in past programmes, will be a slashing of annual production, the opposite of the increase the air force needs to address its inventory problems. The DoD fix is simple: test the F-35 less and buy more copies before the testing is completed. Two test aircraft and hundreds of flight-test hours have been eliminated from the programme, and there is now a plan to produce more than 500 copies before the emasculated testing is finished. This approach will not fix the programme but it will help paper over the problems and make the F-35 more cancellationproof in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill.

It gets even worse. Even without new problems, the F-35 is a ?dog?. If one accepts every performance promise the DoD currently makes for the aircraft, the F-35 will be: ? Overweight and underpowered: at 49,500 lb (22,450kg) air-to-air take-off weight with an engine rated at 42,000 lb of thrust, it will be a significant step backward in thrust-to-weight ratio for a new fighter. ? At that weight and with just 460 sq ft (43 m2) of wing area for the air force and Marine Corps variants, it will have a ?wing-loading? of 108 lb per square foot. Fighters need large wings relative to their weight to enable them to manoeuvre and survive. The F-35 is actually less manoeuvrable than the appallingly vulnerable F-105 ?Lead Sled? that got wiped out over North Vietnam in the Indochina War.

? With a payload of only two 2,000 lb bombs in its bomb bay – far less than US Vietnam-era fighters – the F-35 is hardly a first-class bomber either. With more bombs carried under its wings, the F-35 instantly becomes ?non-stealthy? and the DoD does not plan to seriously test it in this configuration for years.

? As a ?close air support? attack aircraft to help US troops engaged in combat, the F-35 is a nonstarter. It is too fast to see the tactical targets it is shooting at; too delicate and flammable to withstand ground fire; and it lacks the payload and especially the endurance to loiter usefully over US forces for sustained periods as they manoeuvre on the ground. Specialised for this role, the air force?s existing A-10s are far superior.

However, what, the advocates will protest, of the F-35?s two most prized features: its ?stealth? and its advanced avionics? What the USAF will not tell you is that ?stealthy? aircraft are quite detectable by radar; it is simply a question of the type of radar and its angle relative to the aircraft. Ask the pilots of the two ?stealthy? F-117s that the Serbs successfully attacked with radar missiles in the 1999 Kosovo air war.

As for the highly complex electronics to attack targets in the air, the F-35, like the F-22 before it, has mortgaged its success on a hypothetical vision of ultra-long range, radar-based air-to-air combat that has fallen on its face many times in real air war. The F-35?s air-to-ground electronics promise little more than slicker command and control for the use of existing munitions.

The immediate questions for the F-35 are: how much more will it cost and how many additional problems will compromise its already mediocre performance? We will only know when a complete and rigorous test schedule – not currently planned – is finished. The F-35 is a bad deal that shows every sign of turning into a disaster as big as the F-111 fiasco of the 1960s.

In January the US will inaugurate a new president. If he is serious about US defences – and courageous enough to ignore the corporate lobbies and their minions in Congress and the think-tanks – he will ask some very tough questions. These will start with why an increased budget buys a shrinking, ageing force. After that the new president will have to take steps – unavoidably painful ones – to reverse the course the country is now on.

The man who best deserves to be inaugurated next January will actually start asking those questions now.

The debate over who “owned” the RMA is one that you started by purporting to correct me with the claim that Sprey and Boyd invented the RMA.

This assertion has been shown to be incorrect, and so now the debate you started is a useless exercise.

Well, ok.

Except that if Sprey’s analysis of what constitutes optimal military systems in the 1970’s and 1980’s has been thoroughly repudiated by events, then that is relevant to determining the validity of his current arguments against the F-35. His current arguments proceed from the same premises as the previous arguments that were previously repudiated, and he does not account for the developments which refuted him.

Regards,

Since my experience in anti-Communist warfare consisted primarily of pointing rifles and the “sharp end of the stick” at Communist foot soldiers and their officers and assisting them on their journey to the Happy Hunting Ground as soon and as often as possible, my expertise in anti-submarine warfare is about as limited as your experience in logic and spelling, but, perhaps a few words to the wise... or in this case, to you.

A number of technological breakthroughs make our underwater warfare dominance possible. They included advanced acoustic surveillance techniques, on-board both surface and submerged ships, listening buoys, both fixed and free-floating, the sinusoidal equations that make the towed arrays viable even when not entirely straight in their deployment, the Greenland-Iceland-UK line, the acoustic emissions of our nuclear power plants, particularly the cooling pumps were so much lower than the Sov boats, the work of Drs Sheppard, Leventhal and Kowalsky, our Neuman-based computers that made US acoustic analysis so much more advanced their their, the sound-deadining tiles applied to the submarine hulls, the understanding of the critical speeds of the turning of Sov subs due to their sail design, and of course the pre-deployment information available from the UW taps at Murmansk and in the Sea of Okhotsk, and other items you are not cleared for.

More than anything else, however, it was the failure of the Soviet economic model to produce the financial foundation upon which to build a quality submarine force and the failure of Marxism-Leninism in general to produce a people educated enough and willing enough to crew such submarines on a career basis.

Of course the Soviet “Port Call” in Jacksonville late in the 20th Century and the defection-based intelligence learned from that was critically important, too.

Was there something else you wanted instruction in, Captain (HA!)

Typically, you take an ideological approach to everything, however, actually towards the end of the cold war, the quality of Russian Submarines was pretty high, and their nuclear propulsion and hull technology may have been superior to ours.

But up to the collapse of their economic system, our real advantage was the ability to implement real time digital signal processing on silicone integrated circuits because of rapid developments in integrated circuit technology. That is pretty much our principal technoligical advantage across the warfare spectrum even today, which is not irrelevant to the discussion at hand.

And to get back to basics you both called me a communist, even though you are trying the Obama defense, and you called me a phony.

Your not kidding about the Corp. I was in the Infantry from 85 to 89. The 45’s were literally falling apart. Every time I fired my M60 the butt plate would pop off. In the time I was in all this old equipment was replaced with new gear. The training was still pathetic. It took Al Gray to change that. I'm glad we had 6 months in Kuwait to train before we went in Iraq. It saved a lot of lives. These Marines now are very well trained and very large. I swear they all look like body builders.

Let us review the bidding on this thread. Sprey et. al. wrote an article critical of the F35 JSF. The topic is worthy of debate.

Instead of discussing the points pro and con, a number of folks tried to discredit the article because of where it was published on the claim that CDI is a "communist" publication especially because of its association with the the now long retired Gene La Rocque.

However, Sprey, and another author of numerous publications on this cite, Chuck Spinney, have rock solid credentials, and so that line of attack is not legitimate, if it ever were, both being very much advocates and developers of many of the systems, concepts and doctrines that underpin modern defense strategy, whether or not those who think they are guardians of the RMA flame would accept them as full fledge members of the RMA crowd.

Thus, my argument, instead of the ad hominems, ad communismums, ad intelligentium extremum, ad phonia and other kinds of ad hocos pocos is that the JSF should be debated on its merits, as it should in any case, and not by efforts to smear, as somehow dishonerable, the individuals who have taken a stand against it.

I swear I woke up in a parallel universe where one has to argue every little nit with intellectual Lilliputians.

I presume you, from your comments, are not a USAF veteran and so presume to know how the average serviceman feels about his service - by which I mean the branch that he served in.

My own service, the Navy, is hidebound and unimaginative, and I would not take it personally, or even argue, if someone made that statement because it pretty much reflects an institutional culture that prevails independent of the honor or capability of any individual.

When an organization makes as many stunningly bad decisions as the Air Force has recently, and when it gets cross-wise with SECDEF because it refuses to subordinate pork-bareling acquisition imperatives to the national security needs of the time, and when it loses 6 nuclear weapons in the process, and doesn't even seem to mind very much, then it is as an institution arrogant and incompetent.

That statement takes nothing away from the fine pilots flying combat missions or the crews that prepare for the missions. It is just a statement about an organization.

Just like calling Harvard arrogant, leftist, and out of touch. There are brilliant students and brilliant faculty, but when every day they make the news in a way that brings discredit to the institution, it reflects a culture.

Either you are smart enough that you already know all of that, or you aren't and so I actually don't know why I waste my time.

Well, if you go back and read my comments, you will see that I have confined my arguments entirely to the merits of the issue, and so as between us your post is an evasion of the point on the merits that I’ve made several times now.

So have at the merits already.

The historical record does not permit you to cast the reformers like Sprey and Spinney as the fathers of the RMA - they were diametrically opposed to the systems and technologies that constitute the RMA.

It is a valid substantive point that events appear to have proven them dead wrong, because if their analysis was deeply erroneous before, then the same analysis presented now with respect to the F-35 is also likely to be wrong and for the same reasons.

None of this ultimately proves the F-35 is a good program, or that the Air Force is in good shape. It is a question of whether Spinney and Sprey got it right this time after getting it wrong so many other times, and when they give no credit to the RMA capabilities of this system. Instead, they analyze it strictly according the criteria of visual range dogfighting with guns, as if that were the entire air combat envelope.

Sprey, with Boyd, invented the RMA.

I don't believe that is true. The fighter mafia not only did not invent it, they have in many cases opposed it. If they had their wish, the F-16 wouldn't have a radar, targeting pods, data link, etc - all of which are a crucial part in transforming how a fighter operates.

They never even understood the difference the AMRAAM makes in air-to-air fighting!

You may be pleased to know that, at the end of its life, the F-111 received some MX upgrades (AMP & PACER STRIKE) that fixed the MX problems. During the final 18 months of the F-111F, I never ground aborted and only took off late 1 time - unlike transition training at Mt Home, where I didn’t get a single on time takeoff!

We fixed the F-111 just in time to retire them...

There are plenty of things to criticize the USAF on, but Gates has been a large part of the problem as well. He was presented with options on Predator, made his decision, and then publicly criticized the USAF for doing what he said to do.

Nor is Predator the end-all the Army thinks. Most of the time, the Army uses Predator poorly. Commanders want video, even when they can’t figure out what the video means.

Wasn't the same AMP program applied to the FB-111A cum F-111Gs that the Aussies eventually bought? I always wondered why they never bought the F from us when we retired them. The Pave Tack was a nice weapon system, but I suppose it's been obsoleted by JDAMs, and every Tom, Dick, and F-16 carrying a LANTIRN pod.

When I was at Mtn. Home, I just worked in the Automatic Test Station Shop repairing LRUs. As of 1981 when I left, the F-111As used for your training had the Singer-built analog Nav Computer with the 'odometer' readouts for lat/long. We used to clamp weights onto the knobs so we could slew the longitude and latitude position counters for the various bench tests.

When I spoke about a 25% mission capable rate, I remember in 1980, Mtn. Home went on an extended alert, running 12 hour/7 day shifts. (That was almost like real work!)

Then one night about three weeks later, we had a mass launch. Out of just over 100 aircraft, we managed to launch less than 30 aircraft for forward deployment to Turkey. That was our entire inventory of flyable aircraft. Two days later we found out why they deployed. The news showed the aborted hostage rescue operation disaster at Desert One.

You were a WSO and later an EWO, no? I bet you used up a bunch of orange colored pencils drawing predicted radar target views while at Mtn. Home.

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