By Kelley Sayler
Best Defense guest columnist
The fact that the F-35 Lightning II
isn’t making an appearance at the
Farnborough International Airshow is the latest in a never-ending string of disappointments that have marked the plane’s controversial history. From past challenges with
tail hooks and
tires to
engine cracks and
engine fires, life has never been easy for the F-35, which has even had to confront an embarrassing
vulnerability to its namesake weather phenomenon.
Such setbacks might be acceptable — and expected — in a nascent experimental program, but the F-35 has already been in production
for 8 years. Indeed, largely due to concurrent testing and production, an approach that Under Secretary of Defense for AT&L Frank Kendall memorably
referredto as "acquisition malpractice" (and one that hopefully will not be replicated any time soon), DOD will
spend $1.65 billion merely to bring early-production jets up to standard. Total program acquisition costs will reach $398.6 billion, with 55-year life-cycle costs surpassing the stratospheric $1 trillion mark, thus solidifying the F-35’s legacy as the most expensive weapons program in history.
Supporters of the F-35 are quick to defend the plane’s shortcomings as "the price to be paid" (both literally and figuratively) for a cutting-edge program. The F-35 has, for example, found a staunch protector in Congress despite coming in well behind schedule and so far over budget that it
breached Nunn-McCurdy limits by more than 50%. With the exception of a few vocal outliers like John McCain, who
has called the program a classic example of the "military-industrial-congressional complex," this support seems unlikely to wane any time soon (if for no other reason than, as Kate Brannen has
reported, components of the program have been thoughtfully distributed across at least 45 states).
Likewise, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has remained a supporter of the F-35 in the face of its most recent challenges,
going so far as to term it "the future for our fighter aircraft." (One might have hoped, however, that the secretary would have waited until the plane was at least deemed to be airworthy before making such a pronouncement.)
To be sure, the F-35 is an impressive aircraft. It features revolutionary technologies and some of the most advanced radar, sensors, and weapons in the world — all of which will contribute to the important task of deterring high-end conventional conflict. At the same time, it is not at all clear that the plane is well-suited to actually operate in the threat environment of the future. As a short-legged, tactical aircraft that can carry a relatively limited number of weapons in its much-touted stealthy configuration, its capabilities are
likely to be constrained in a mature A2/AD environment. Nor is it likely to be of much use in urbanized environments or even in the types of environments the United States has been operating in for the past 12 years. (For a variety of reasons, its sister system, the F-22, has
yet to see combat.)
While the F-35 will have its uses, the U.S. military of the future will require a more diverse tool set — including
smaller, less complex, and more numeroussystems — capable of operating across a full range of contingencies. While making substantial cuts in the F-35 buy will increase unit cost and potentially unsettle partner nations, doing so would enable the United States to divert funds to other systems that could provide
increased range, loiter time, and kinetic effects. Given the extent of vested interests in the current program of record, gaining the political traction for such a move will certainly not be easy, but then, doing the right thing never is.
Kelley Sayler is a research associate with the Center for a New American Security’s Responsible Defense Program. Her most recent report, co-authored with Ben FitzGerald, is Creative Disruption: Technology, Strategy, and the Future of the Global Defense Industry. She tweets @kelleysayler.
/SPOILER]
Some Embarrassing Details From the Pentagon’s Latest Stealth Fighter Report
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/so...ns-latest-stealth-fighter-report-2ef94297330d
Delayed, over-budget F-35 still riddled with flaws
An F-35B approaches an aerial tanker to refuel. Lockheed Martin photo
The Pentagon’s latest weapons testing report is not kind to the $400-billion F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the military’s biggest and arguably most troubled program. The annual report by the
Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation includes 20 pages listing the Lockheed Martin-built JSF’s ongoing problems.
A jack-of-all-trades radar-evading jet meant to replace no fewer than 2,400 existing fighters in the U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, the F-35 has been dogged by budget overruns, schedule delays and redesigns. Overly complex in order to
satisfy the diverse needs of three military branches,
the F-35 is slower, less durable and less reliable than many of the planes it’s slated to replace.
Most damningly, the 2013 test report predicts months of delays in the development of the F-35’s millions of lines of software, which could cause the Marine Corps and Air Force to miss their planned first deployments of combat-ready JSFs in 2015 and 2016, respectively.
But the DOT&E report also includes lots of
other embarrassing details.
An F-35B during at-sea testing aboard the USS ‘Wasp.’ Lockheed Martin photo
Only one third of F-35s are flight-ready
The military manages to keep around three quarters of its warplanes ready for flight at any given time. Even the Air Force’s devilishly complex F-22 stealth fighter—another Lockheed product—is ready 69 percent of the time.
But the roughly 50 F-35s in test or training squadrons in Florida, California, Nevada and Arizona are ready just a third of the time, on average. That’s because the jets need frequent design fixes
and because Lockheed’s automated supply system isn’t working.
Now, it’s not uncommon for a new warplane to start out a tad unreliable and get
more ready over time. But the F-35 has been flying in one form or another off and on for 14 years. “The design is becoming more stable and opportunities for reliability growth are decreasing,” the report notes.
“While the relatively low number of flight hours shows there is still time for program reliability to improve,” the report continues, “this is not likely to occur without a focused, aggressive and well-resourced effort.”
Which is to say, making the JSF more flight-ready is going to also make its development more expensive.
An F-35B during night testing aboard USS ‘Wasp.’ Lockheed Martin photo
The F-35 will get you lost
The JSF is designed to fly and fight against the most determined foe—even a foe capable of jamming or destroying America’s Global Positioning System satellites, depriving U.S. forces of their preferred way of knowing exactly where they are in the world.
But the F-35’s independent “inertial” navigation gear—which determines the plane’s position by constantly computing starting point, direction, speed and time—is off by a few degrees. That’s just enough to make it useless in combat. “These errors prevent accurate targeting solutions for weapons employment in a GPS-denied environment,” the Pentagon warns.
A software fix is in the works, but “further flight testing will be required.” Again, that takes time and money.
An F-35 drops a laser-guided bomb. Lockheed Martin photo
The JSF’s main air-to-air missile doesn’t fully work—and it’s not clear why
The F-35 needs three basic weapons in order to be cleared for combat in 2015: a laser-guided bomb, a satellite-guided bomb and the AIM-120 air-to-air missile.
The nav system problems slowed the addition of the satellite bomb—basically, the munition didn’t know where to land. That, at least, was a
known unknown—and engineers were able to solve it with a “fix in the mission systems software,” according to the report.
But the AIM-120 isn’t working on the F-35, either. And in contrast to the bomb problem, testers have not been able to resolve the missile issue because they can’t quite duplicate it. “Problems involving integration of the AIM-120 medium-range missile have been difficult to replicate in lab and ground testing,” the report notes.
It is, in other words, an
unknown unknown. And who can say what the solution is.
Air Force F-15s launch flares. Air Force photo
The F-35 confuses itself
To defend against increasingly sophisticated Russian- and Chinese-made air defenses, the JSF includes a cluster of high-tech cameras and sensors able to detect incoming missiles—and automatically deploy heat-generating flares or radar-foiling chaff to spoof the enemy guidance.
But the so-called “Distributed Aperture System” doesn’t work. “The DAS has displayed a high false alarm rate for missile detections during ownship and formation flare testing,” the testing report reveals. Basically, the system cannot tell the difference between an enemy missile and one of the F-35’s own hot flares.
Imagine the feedback loop that could result. An F-35’s DAS detects an incoming missile and pops flares. DAS then mistakes those flares for another missile and pops more flares, then still
more flares to spoof
them. So on and so on until the F-35 runs out of countermeasures … and is defenseless.
An F-35B in vertical mode. Lockheed Martin photo
It takes just one bullet fragment to shoot down an F-35B
The Marines’ F-35B variant includes a built-in vertical lift fan—a downward-blasting engine—to allow the plane to take off of and land on the Navy’s small amphibious assault ships. But adding a bulky lift fan made the JSF heavier, more complex and easier to shoot down.
That’s especially true for F-35Bs flying low to support Marine infantry on the ground. A lone enemy soldier firing a single bullet could seriously damage an F-35B. “Analysis showed that fragment-induced damage could result in the release of more than 25 percent of a single lift fan blade, resulting in a catastrophic … system failure,” the DOT&E report warns.
And if the F-35B has to fly through high-tech air defenses in order to reach the beachhead, it’s even
more likely to get shot down. “More severe threats, encountered at low altitude or in
air-to-air gun engagements, will likely cause catastrophic damage.”
All this means that even if the JSF manages to meet its 2015 deployment deadline, it could fly into combat unreliable, confused, defenseless, toothless and vulnerable.
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