The F-35: Flying Symbol of Out of Control Bureaucracy

What are your "sources" for all these insights?

Goure, Linstead and Flynn seem to be on opposite sides of the same debate, one that started about 30 years ago as fighter traditionalists and stealth purists fought tooth and nail over the requirements for the Advanced Tactical Fighter (ATF). One group argued that stealth air combat was like submarine warfare - "the last thing you want to do is surface and use the deck gun" - while the others, with the Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile still in development, maintained that there would always be leakers who survived the first beyond-visual-range (BVR) missile exchange and closed within visual range (WVR) where radar stealth would be irrelevant.

The traditionalists won. The F-22 Raptor was designed to be highly agile with a large usable flight envelope (hence its monster tail surfaces) and it had a complex, space-consuming arrangement that allowed AIM-9 missiles to be fired in lock-on-before-launch mode almost anywhere in the forward hemisphere.

The JSF is not as agile, but program leaders say that it will prevail in BVR because of stealth and situational awareness, and in WVR it will use its 360-deg. target-tracking device- the Distributed Aperture System (DAS) - to cue high-off-boresight air-to-air missiles (AAM) on to its adversaries.

What they don't say as loudly is that it can't do both, at least on the same mission. Unlike the F-22 (and the Chengdu J-20 and Sukhoi T-50) it doesn't have side bays and trapezes for rail-launched AAMs. If the F-35 carries AIM-9s it does so externally, and by Lockheed Martin's own definition it is not stealthy.

This is not an accident, or even a matter of program execution. The F-35 was "70% air-to-ground and 30% air-to-air" at its inception - a direct quote from George Muellner, who was in charge of what was then the Joint Advanced Strike Technology (JAST) program in 1995. The U.S. Air Force, as the biggest customer, called the shots on the requirement. The F-117 Nighthawk had been the hero of the first Gulf War but had three main limitations: it couldn't find targets in-weather, couldn't hit moving targets and had neither the situational awareness nor the armament to survive in daylight. JAST was designed to do all these things as well as having external weapon stations to act as an F-16 on "Day Two" when the defenses had been degraded.

The Air Force in 1995 expected to have 442 F-22s to deal with any fighter threat, and side AAM bays would not remotely fit into the size and weight constraints imposed by the short take-off, vertical landing requirement. Stovl also limited the weight and size of the wing and the length of the body.

But what if the ATF traditionalists were wrong - as Goure and Linstead seem to imply - and WVR combat can and should be avoided? There are two ironies in Goure's citation of Stillion's work. The first is that Stillion was a co-author of the RAND report that drew down Davis' ire in 2008. The second is that Stillion's new study for CSBA suggests that the way to win a future air battle is not to use F-35s or F-22s but to launch AAMs from highly stealthy unmanned air vehicles, controlled from an aircraft that looks like the Long Range Strike Bomber. The logic is powerful: high-performance fighters are almost by definition short-legged, and even if they are not vulnerable, their tankers are. (I'm not the only one to have concluded that the J-20 is aimed directly at tankers and other support assets.)

That view of air combat is bolstered by Stillion's extensive study of air combat history, which shows a steady migration from guns to short-range AAMs to BVR AAMs. But there is an inkling of doubt here. Others have seen different trends - notably, the developers and customers in the MBDA Meteor program predict that BVR battles will involve more maneuvering, at high speeds. History is instructive, but not determinative.

Notably, air-to-air conflicts in the past 30 years have been grossly unbalanced. The U.S. and its allies have had a major advantage in equipment - the West has never faced the Sukhoi family, and the most modern Russian fighter to have been encountered is the early-model MiG-29, which has pitiful range and is locked into the Soviet ground-controlled-intercept doctrine. Training and experience have been on the Western side by a huge margin. And generally, one side has had the support of airborne warning and control, signals intelligence and communications jamming assets and the other has had none of these.

Not surprisingly, then, many engagements have been decided BVR; and adversaries have been given cause to believe that any attempt to get into a WVR engagement is likely to be fatal. But that kind of imbalance is not an eternal reality. Dan Goure's reaction to the F-35's possible lack of agility may be "I say, good," but he's not flying it in combat, is he?

But, the F-22 Raptor will have to support the F-35. And here comes another problem. When the Raptor was produced it was flying “with computers that were already so out of date you would not find them in a kid’s game console in somebody’s home gaming system.” Still, the U.S. Air Force was forced to use the stealth fighter plane as it was, because that was the way the spec was written. But now, the F-22 must be upgraded through a costly service life extension plan and modernisation program because, “If I do not keep that F-22 fleet viable, the F-35 fleet frankly will be irrelevant. The F-35 is not built as an air superiority platform. It needs the F-22,” says Hostage to Air Force Time

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I'd not be surprised if the Century Series fighters proved to be the more maneuverable.

The JSF is not as agile, but program leaders say that it will prevail in BVR because of stealth and situational awareness, and in WVR it will use its 360-deg. target-tracking device- the Distributed Aperture System (DAS) - to cue high-off-boresight air-to-air missiles (AAM) on to its adversaries.

What they don't say as loudly is that it can't do both, at least on the same mission. Unlike the F-22 (and the Chengdu J-20 and Sukhoi T-50) it doesn't have side bays and trapezes for rail-launched AAMs. If the F-35 carries AIM-9s it does so externally, and by Lockheed Martin's own definition it is not stealthy.

But what if the ATF traditionalists were wrong - as Goure and Linstead seem to imply - and WVR combat can and should be avoided? There are two ironies in Goure's citation of Stillion's work. The first is that Stillion was a co-author of the RAND report that drew down Davis' ire in 2008. The second is that Stillion's new study for CSBA suggests that the way to win a future air battle is not to use F-35s or F-22s but to launch AAMs from highly stealthy unmanned air vehicles, controlled from an aircraft that looks like the Long Range Strike Bomber. The logic is powerful: high-performance fighters are almost by definition short-legged, and even if they are not vulnerable, their tankers are. (I'm not the only one to have concluded that the J-20 is aimed directly at tankers and other support assets.)

But, the F-22 Raptor will have to support the F-35. And here comes another problem. When the Raptor was produced it was flying “with computers that were already so out of date you would not find them in a kid’s game console in somebody’s home gaming system.” Still, the U.S. Air Force was forced to use the stealth fighter plane as it was, because that was the way the spec was written. But now, the F-22 must be upgraded through a costly service life extension plan and modernisation program because, “If I do not keep that F-22 fleet viable, the F-35 fleet frankly will be irrelevant. The F-35 is not built as an air superiority platform. It needs the F-22,” says Hostage to Air Force Time

So let me see if I have this: the 180ish f-22's with a 60% evail rate needing 40+ hours of ground maintenance for every air hour has to protect the f-35's, the tankers and the awacs once the 4th generation forces become obsolete...in less than a decade?

That sounds like a huge problem. It would have been nice if the f-35 could protect itself.

oralloy wrote:

I'd not be surprised if the Century Series fighters proved to be the more maneuverable.

On what basis would you be surprised?

None (except perhaps the 106) were very maueuverable.

All were designed as fast "interceptors" or bombers in the case of the F-105.

Quote:

The JSF is not as agile, but program leaders say that it will prevail in BVR because of stealth and situational awareness, and in WVR it will use its 360-deg. target-tracking device- the Distributed Aperture System (DAS) - to cue high-off-boresight air-to-air missiles (AAM) on to its adversaries.

What they don't say as loudly is that it can't do both, at least on the same mission. Unlike the F-22 (and the Chengdu J-20 and Sukhoi T-50) it doesn't have side bays and trapezes for rail-launched AAMs. If the F-35 carries AIM-9s it does so externally, and by Lockheed Martin's own definition it is not stealthy.

I noticed in the official response to the F-35's latest failure (the mock dogfight with an F-16 saddled with external fuel tanks), that they no longer mentioned using the F-35's tracking system to launch a heat-seeking missile at a close range adversary.

Instead they talked of the F-35 making long-range shots only, and sort of pretended that close range combat no longer exists.

Given the way they haven't been filling the obvious gaps in their previously-proposed close range tactics. I guess maybe they are just abandoning close range combat altogether for the F-35.

The original plan was for the Air Force to have a fleet of 750 F-22s to go with their 2000 F-35s.

Rapid growth in the capability and quality of guided missiles — mostly Chinese in origin — is causing the U.S. Navy to rethink the number of surface ships it needs to effectively fight a high-end war.

Early estimates based on ongoing war games could mean the current number of 88 large surface combatants — the Navy’s fleet of guided missile destroyers and cruisers — needs to grow to more than a hundred into the 2020s just to keep to today’s current level of risk, USNI News has learned.

However, increasing a fleet of multi-billion dollar ships by almost 25 percent is highly unlikely given declining U.S. military budgets current funding restrictions and the wind-down from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

However, I haven't seen any commentary here that gives me any confidence in the criticisms so abundant here.

The difference between you and me in this area, is that I have done what I am talking about while you have only imagined it.

To paraphrase Rumsfeld we go to war with the planes we have, not the planes we planned to have.

We are going to decide that we only need enough forces to protect the USA, that giving up being the global policeman

It would be interesting to look at the plans for how the pentagon expects to be able to beat China anywhere near the South China Sea.

Without enough f-22's to protect the rest of the force on their very long flights (due to our lack of basing in the region) we are toast. Without a lot of in the air gas stations we cant do anything, and each gas station needs a host of f-22's to protect them because the f-35 cant do it.

The tradeoffs between the maneuverability of air to air weapons and that of the aircraft that launches them have been around for about 50 years. The lessons learned in the 1970s and 1980s may have different applicability today, as missile design improves and tailchase guidance is replaced by intercept control, and the systems doing this become more compact and reliable. The fact that a guy in an F-16 could get in the six o'clock position on an F-35 doesn't necessarily mean the new aircraft can't do its mission.

Most military aircraft exhibit disappointments and defects relative to the wishes of their users. Some are later successfully upgraded to correct them. The P 51 Mustang involved a then radical new wing cross section, but the initial model was an underpowered dissappointment. Later it was extensively modified to incorporate a much larger Rolls Royce in line piston engine and the rest is an aviation legend.

aircraft carriers, which are huge slow hunks that are likely to be sunk in the first days of a major war against a capable opponent.

Carriers are great for small conflicts, we can get a lot of sorties without needing to negotiate basing, but in a big war against China they are at the bottom of the sea in two weeks.