Posted on 09/11/2008 6:24:33 AM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
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.
"Joint Strike Fighter: The Latest Hotspot in the U.S. Defense Meltdown"
by Pierre M. Sprey and Winslow T. Wheeler
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.
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I’m a recently retired military officer who refuses to look for work involving any government agency or contractor. I’m heading back to school to train for an entirely different life. 25 years was enough - so stuff your insults up your ass!
I saw a copy of the briefing and understand the trade-offs involved in the decisions that needed to be made. There was no good answer possible, only a variety of bad. Since the briefing was classified, I can/will not document or repeat it. However, if you know anything about managing and fielding a weapon system, you can guess the trade-offs pretty easily.
Gates made a reasonable decision, but he had no call to criticize the USAF for doing as directed. He was venting his frustration, but scoring political points while doing it. He was also justifiably pissed at the senior USAF staff - a quick poll in my office of retired and current O-4/5/6s suggested total agreement with firing 50-100 Generals and getting new blood into a clueless bureaucracy.
Still, he is the one who chose what course to follow. The truth is the USAF is grossly under-capitalized for it to do what the country expects - and it isn’t going to get any more with the wars going on.
I am only surprised that Gates, who had been SECDEF for about 18 months when he fired the top of the Air Force, is responsible for the decisions that lead up to that firing. Of course he approved a lot of recommendations from briefings that came up to him but 90% of what a cabinet secretary signs are routine things that he does not have time to pay attention to. That he later questioned something that he previously concurred in is not per se an indication of incompetence, or hypocrisy, but merely the bureaucratic reality that he has to rely on his staff until he has reason that leads him to do otherwise.
That is the sense in which I meant my question about whether you had information that he had deliberately and consciously made a decision (as opposed to a routine approval of a recommendation) which he then welshed on because it turned out badly.
The CDI is a long-time leftist front trying to disarm the U.S. with phony patriots ...former U.S. military who appear to have been Soviet Moles ...paid for on the U.S. Taxpayer dime!
The cost claim on the F-22 is just insane and wrong. The actual unit costs have been dropping dramatically now that they were actually PRODUCING some deployed planes, rather than prototypes. Unfortunately, W and Rumsfeld were hell-bent on killing it at a production run of a measely 185 planes when we could really use about 600.
That said, I am no enemy of the F-35. I think it well worth doing. Here is a really good analysis and a RAND Corp statement in reply to some cockamamie comments out of Australia:
STATEMENT REGARDING MEDIA COVERAGE OF F-35 JOINT STRIKE FIGHTERRAND.ORG News, September 25, 2008
Andrew Hoehn, Director of RAND Project Air Force, made the following statement today:
"Recently, articles have appeared in the Australian press with assertions regarding a war game in which analysts from the RAND Corporation were involved. Those reports are not accurate. RAND did not present any analysis at the war game relating to the performance of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, nor did the game attempt detailed adjudication of air-to-air combat. Neither the game nor the assessments by RAND in support of the game undertook any comparison of the fighting qualities of particular fighter aircraft."COMMENT:
"The historical experience, even in WWII, was that you don't win fights by dogfighting: you win by sneaking up on the opposition, shooting him, and disengaging, whether you're in a Bf 109 or an F-35. It's nice to have maneuverability and a gun so you survive if you get caught in a furball, but it's a lot better to be in an aircraft optimized to hit, disengage, improve your situational awareness, and then hit again. Dogfighting may be inevitable but if you win most of the time without, you win the war. Like: a knife or a pistol is nice, but an assault rifle or a sniper rifle is a lot more useful *most* of the time."
This is absolutely correct and far too often forgotten. A turning fight is by its very nature unpredictable and is never your first choice. Even if you are the greatest dogfighter in the world it is too easy to lose track of who is where and end up getting shot by someone you didn't even see.
"It would be rather depressing if instead of the defenses and maneuvering working, the missiles actually performed as advertised (for once) and both sides launched with 90%+ kill rates on EVERYONE. Oops. Though tactical factors (i.e., surprise, etc.) make that rather unlikely."
Even if the missiles significantly under-perform, a 21st century "dogfight" is generally going to be very short. The majority of the time one participant or both will be able to take a high percentage shot before the merge. The best course of action is to avoid a visual range fight completely, in most cases by the time you can visually ID your opponent you are already well within the no-escape zone of an AA-11, Mica-IR, Aim-9x, ASRAAM, Python-4/5, etc. The pilot with the best situational awareness will almost always win. This has been true since WWI, but it is especially true today.
People who try to judge the F-35 by the standards of previous generations of aircraft are extremely misguided. The F-35 is no less capable "dogfighting" than an F-16, but that isn't how it is intended to fight.
See here for a good explanation about some of the capabilities the F-35 will offer:
Links at:The F-35 will offer its pilot a level of situational awareness that no previous plane has ever approached. No more, "where the heck did the other one go?" or "where is my wingman?" or "who the heck is that guy up there?"
Not only will the F-35 be aware of who/what is around it... it will be able to engage them without so much as pointing its nose at them.
Bump!
Completely agreed.
The entire panoply of forces against the U.S. military, external and internal, seem bound and determined to keep us from preserving our air-superiority.
I agree with all that, especially check out this video here.
Nonetheless, the point about the fog of war meaning we still CAN'T TOTALLY rely on missiles (AMRAAM or not)...especially if you run out of them...and need to be able to truly dog fight...with guns... is one I am taking seriously. I think we all know Boyd and his "fighter mafia" would be taking a dim view of these negatives in the F-35.
We most likely are going to continue to see this chestnut pop up from the West Australian:
The West Australian reported this month that RAND gave a presentation to a secret military exercise in Hawaii last month that workshopped how the US and other nations would respond should China attack Taiwan. RAAF personnel took part.Fortunately RAND denied it all. But there is a a whiff of smoke here...and where there is smoke...The presentation said the JSF was "double inferior relative to modern Russian-Chinese fighter designs in visual range combat", had "inferior acceleration, inferior climb (and) inferior sustained turn capability" and that it "can't turn, can't climb, can't run".
That was a very interesting video. “Let the missiles do the turning.”
The other night the Military Channel had their show about the top ten tanks. The discussion of the German Tiger tank in WWII was reminiscent of this discussion. It was by far the technical superior of any other vehicle at the time, but was so heavy and so expensive and hard to make that they couldn’t make enough of them - an historical example supporting the “Reformers” position.
Regards,
The F-35 has enormous problems as a fighter and as a bomber but lets keep them relative to the moment rather than involve aircraft designed in the 1950s and 60s as normative standards because then you end up using apples to orangutans ‘filters’ (The majority of F-105 losses were to SAMs and AAA and while this -was- wingloading related, because the jet could not fly above 14,000ft with full bombload and retain any kind of specific excess power maneuver reserve, it was also about a doctrine of atomic warfare which did not emphasize the power of sensor driven standoff weapons...).
Radar: The APG-81 is a small array with roughly 2/3rds the TRM count of the APG-77. It is cooling and nose volume restricted and will never grow as the APG-68 grew from the APG-66, purely on software or exciter performance. This will always limit the jet to around a 70nm effective range against 1m2 targets and that is simply not enough to do much tactical maneuvering in the intercept phase. As goes the intercept, so goes the fight...
Fuel: The F-35 actually carries too much of it, internally. This is where the F-16 -can-, instantaneously, improve it’s performance relative to it’s thrust to weight ratio by dumping empty tanks. There are some risks inherent to bumping adjacent stores but generally the system works. All-internal JSF fuel cannot be dumped, because to vent it would be to draw a con miles long. More importantly, one must consider that the F135 core is very ‘hot’ with an upfanned use of all remaining reserve thrust potential adding yet more to it’s F119 precursors 50% increase in military power specific fuel consumption which is why nearly three times the internal fuel fraction only gets you about 250 miles more range than the 450nm of the F-16. The irony here being that the further you go, the less you can afford to use the standard metric of ‘five minutes at full A/B or three circles at .9 Mach and 15,000ft, whichever comes first...’ because you are so far out on the combat radius line that AB use is in fact restricted. Because fuel weight remains a factor in lift at drag and thus engine thrust settings, you cannot go back to flight idle and rumble along at 250-300KTAS to the target area but must maintain high throttle settings to sustain high altitudes, above the midrange S2A threat ceiling. Which further renders all that gas too-fast-burned to be worthwhile. Compare to the X-45C which had some 14,000lbs of fuel being pushed by a 12,000lbst F404 derivative engine yet was designed around an 1,100nm radius with _2 hours_ of pointy end persistence.
Weapons: Everyone clap for the Marines. For it was their obsession with the generally worthless STOVL basing mode (useless in an era of GPS and terminally guided ballistic weapons that can strike any FOL or ship within range) as a means to sustaining this nations third Air Force which is what put a hole in the middle of the F-35 center fuselage which is both likely to become another center barrel disaster for the aircraft’s future fatigue life. And prevented the use of a sensible wideXshallow bay sizing, compatible with a -variety- of small weapons rather than just one large one. Add to this problems with the curled over weapons bay doors whose aeroacoustic behavior has inhibited testing and raised RCS questions and the general stupidity of using ballistic glide weapons to bring a no-see’em-too-good weapons platform into “But now I do!” target terminal area delivery proximity as being the principle reason why the F-35 is at terrible risk. An A-6 with FOG-S has a better chance of safely approaching a target with a 60nm throwaway turbine and jam proof guidance of multiple 500lb class weapons than the F-35 does with GBU-31 dropped from right overhead. To which I would add that our entire approach and inventory status of fast jet smart weapons is falsely predicated upon smarter rifles rather than better bullets. When a 10,000lb MQ-9 Reaper can carry more, more useful, CAS weapons than the initial F-35B will have at IOC, you know there is a problem. And one whose obvious solution: External Weapons Pods with encapsulated semi-LO, low drag, carriage of supplemental ordnance, will largely resolve at a stroke the glaringly obvious carriage defficiencies of the current all-internal approach. Using the F-18E/F International EWP as a guide, we should be able to see as much as 6X AIM-120 + 8X GBU-53 + 2X GBU-31/32 or 10X AIM-120 + 2X GBU-31/32 as options. The question then becomes why we use glide or ballistic weapon when AASM has shown that powered standoff is better. And why we insist on companion SEAD aircraft (raising spectres of the F-100F as an obsolete, ‘more vulnerable than what it escorted’ Weasel) solely because existing AGM-88/ALQ-99 systems cannot be carried stealthily by the F-35. The AIM-120D has a full 11” motor pipe extension with consequent 60-80km (ERAAM) level range point capability, added atop the AIM-120C7 GPS/INS autopilot and digital datalink. It would seem a natural extension of existing carriage clearances to fit this weapon with a tri-mode (JCM) or scab-conformal (ARGM) seeker and use the ASQ-239 to point the weapon into grazing-restrictor acquistion of large S-300/400 class S2A threats. Mixed loads of AMRAAM/ARMRAAM would then provide combat redundancy of engagement for ALL F-35s in a given dispersed formation. Even as the addition of ramjet propulsion as with the Meteor would take range performance to levels (100-120km+) where the F-35s abysmal F-pole boosting capabilities were unimportant. Given another 5-10 billion in black QRC development expenditure, this is perhaps the most readily ‘fixable’ of the JSFs many problems.
Vision/SA: This is actually not a systems problem so much as an ego driven one. The AIM-9X is a 25km seeker resting atop a 10km motor. With an AMRAAM /inner zone/ beginning at 40km in the AIM-120D, there is such a huge ‘missile gap’ between nominal BVR/WVR capabilities that simply pressing into the radar/visual merge condition is asking to be face shot by threats that can see you as an equal, with electrooptics. Despite recent improvements in plume-drawn kinematic flares and potentially TADIRCM, IR weapons also form such a vastly improved terminal G capability that the ability to ‘maneuver aggressively’ just isn’t important. You punch in AB to get energy on a downhill fight to beat one missile and you may or may not (50:50) beat it with expendables but you WILL flat plate the airframe to every other shooter out there, increasing your 2nm raindrop sized visual silhouette to a 60nm planview equivalent. Since DAS will proliferate using commercial imagers and will have been tracking the target/s for anything up to 20km before the man can do so, the notional value of the dogfight as a turning contest to put _HOBS_ capable weapons into cone is unsustainable. If you take a face shot because you’ve used both of your AMRAAMs and foolishly continued to close, you are better off flying 1G level and letting your DIRCM and mechanicals take the threat while running out the other side of the fight as fast as you can and begging your BVR wingmen to shoot the threat off you as it pitches back.
If there is a problem with the present F-35 system, it lies in the simple fact that pilots will naturally -want- to use their head mounted gimbal to track targets rather than admit that (especially under high G where neck movements are dangerous if not impossible) it is better to rely on the electronics to track behind the 3/9 and then hope your 5” motor weapon has enough oomph to do the 180` flip to track with sufficient remaining impulse to run down the threat after a -500 knot starting deficit. I personally believe that the apertures are vastly beyond the SOA of the (helmet especially) display technologies here.
Thanks for your time. Blast Away.
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