Our Gold-Plated Hangar Queen

First of all, be aware that strange things happen in the US military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about.  Take the example of the M1 Abrams tank.  The US Army has an inventory of 6,300-odd of these tanks, including 4,000 in storage in desert.  It doesn’t need any more but Congress keeps voting to keep the production line going, churning out unwanted tanks.  Ironically that means that funds aren’t available to upgrade the gas turbine engines of its existing tanks to make them more efficient.  The M1 Abrams get half the fuel mileage of the German Leopard II tank of similar capability.  Fortunately Australia has only 59 of the gas-guzzling M1 Abrams. Our near neighbours to the north, Singapore and Indonesia, are more sensible about military procurement and have 212 and 103 Leopard tanks respectively.

But this is a tale about the F-35.  It has been said that the story of the F-35 begins in 1942 in the Battle of Guadalcanal.  The US Marines, doing the ground fighting, were upset that the other services weren’t providing enough air cover.  The pounding they got from the lack of air cover is part of their institutional memory.  So when the US Defense Department decided to build a 5^th generation stealth fighter to replace the F-16, the US Marines insisted that this include a short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) variant.  The trade-offs necessary to effect this fatally compromised the whole project so that none of the variants do their job adequately.  Specifically, the requirement to have a lift fan 1.27 metres in diameter on the centreline of the aircraft behind the pilot resulted in two bomb bays instead of just one on the centreline.  This made the aircraft wider, draggy, slower and less manoeuvrable.

In short, the F-35 can’t turn, can’t climb, can’t run.

Fact is, it isn’t a fighter aircraft in the first place.  Australia might think it is buying a fighter than can hold its own against the Su-30, J-11, PAK-FA, J20, J31 and others, but it is really a light bomber.  It was designed as such from the get-go.  The recently retired head of Air Combat Command for the US Air Force, General Mike Hostage has been quoted as saying,“The F-35 is geared to go out and take down the surface targets.”

The original requirement that evolved into the F-35 was “Battlefield Interdiction and Close Air Support” with the intent being to deal with lightly defended ground targets after the F-22 knocks out the really dangerous air defences. That assumes that a lot of F-22s are available.  They aren’t because of one of President Bush’s poorer staff choices, that of Robert Gates as Defense Secretary.  Retained by President Obama in that role, when he noted that the F-22 wasn’t being used in Afghanistan, that was the beginning of the end.

In the air combat role, Hostage says that it takes eight F-35s to do what two F-22s can handle.  He has said further of the F-35: “Because it can’t turn and run away, it’s got to have support from other F-35s. So I’m going to need eight F-35s to go after a target that I might only need two Raptors to go after. But the F-35s can be equally or more effective against that site than the Raptor can because of the synergistic effects of the platform.”  He has also been quoted as saying that an F-35 pilot who engages in a dogfight has made a mistake. Further from General Hostage,” 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. Because I got such a pitifully tiny fleet (of F-22s), I’ve got to ensure I will have every single one of those F-22s as capable as it possibly can be.”  It therefore follows that Australia, not having F-22s, has an irrelevant air combat capability in the F-35.

The F-35’s primary role in ground attack is confirmed by its weapons bays, which each have room for a 2,000 lb bomb and one air-to-air missile.  It could carry more bombs and missiles on its wings at the cost of stealth.  At the same time, stealth against radar isn’t the be-all and end-all of aerial combat.  The F-35 can be spotted by low frequency radar a couple of hundred kilometers away, as all aircraft can be.  Infrared detection can also work at a considerable distance under the right atmospheric conditions.  For example, all Sukhois after and including the Su-27SK  have Infra Red Scan and Track (IRST) that keeps getting better.  The latest IRST – the OLS-35 – will detect, track and engage the F-35 at about 70 km.

The F-35 has one system, still in development, that has considerable potential if it ends up working as promised.  This is the Distributed Aperture System that allows the pilot to see all around the aircraft in every direction.  The view is displayed inside the pilot’s visor using data from cameras around the aircraft.  Each helmet is made to fit the head of the pilot who will use it.  The system allows the pilot to see through the floor of the aircraft and see the ground underneath.  It also analyses all the other information coming in from the radar and the infrared cameras also around the aircraft and presents it on the field of view, along with similar data from other F-35s our pilot is flying with.  The system determines what each threat is, ranks them in priority and recommends what countermeasure should be used.  The F-35 can fire air-to-air missiles against aircraft flying behind it that the pilot cannot see.

Flying as a pack of at least eight, F-35s in theory should be able provide mutual fire support and do pretty well.  The situational awareness of the F-35 could be good enough that the aircraft could be a sort of mini-AWACS directing 4^th generation fighters such as the F-18 onto targets.  That said, other aircraft, already in service, do the same thing.  All the Sukhois and the Swedish Gripen have intra-flight data sharing and are truly mini-AWACS.  Gripens are optimized for ‘cloud shooting’ so one aircraft targets and another passive aircraft shoots.

The F-35 is a complicated aircraft though and may prove to have been just too ambitious.  Its software includes over 30 million lines of code which is six times more than that of the F-18E/F Super Hornet.  There are plenty of bugs in the software and the aircraft’s other systems which will take years to work through.

One of the more important bugs is the helmet vision system which isn’t as seamless as it needs to be and produces too many false alarms.  And if the helmet isn’t fixed, it definitely won’t be a fighter because the aircraft’s bulkhead behind the pilot continues at the same height as the canopy.  The pilot wouldn’t be able to see what’s behind him if the helmet is not working.  He also wouldn’t be able to see below him because the aircraft is too wide.  Most fighters have the pilot sitting up where he can see as much as possible.  The F-35 pilot’s head is down in the fuselage, like a bomber.

Australia’s recent acquisition of a couple of large LHD ships, the Canberra class of 20,000 tonnes, has raised the notion that they could be equipped with the STOVL version of the F-35 to provide combat air patrol and close air support (CAS).  With respect to CAS, the A-10 aircraft, dedicated to that role, carries 1,350 rounds of 30 mm ammunition.  By comparison, due to the compromises necessary to get the STOVL version to fly, the gun of the F-35 STOVL version is carried externally in a pod.  It will hold 180 rounds of 25 mm ammunition weighing about 90 kg.  The gun could burn through its ammunition load in three seconds.

The STOVL F-35 is an expensive way of carrying 90 kg of ordnance into battle.  It carries two 1,000 lb bombs instead of the 2,000 lb bombs on the air force version, once again due to weight limitations.  There are likely to be far more cost efficient ways of providing fire support to the troops landed from our LHDs.  While we are the subject of the F-35’s gun, the software for the aircraft to be able to fire it won’t be ready until 2017, and possibly 2019 by some reports.  The software to enable the STOVL F-35 to drop the Small Diameter Bomb II (short enough to fit the bomb bay) won’t be uploaded until 2022.

A good summary of the current status of the F-35’s bugs and shortcomings is provided by the US-based Project on Government Oversight (POGO), from a Department of Defense report.  The US defence procurement system requires that weapons development programs remain on schedule or they become in danger of being scrapped.  The F-35 is well behind schedule but production has begun before testing has been completed.  POGO’s analysis shows that Lockheed Martin, the aircraft’s developer, has been cooking the test results to meet project milestones.  The effect of that will be an expensive retrofitting of completed aircraft estimated at US$60 billion.  For Australia, that might mean a further $30 million per aircraft delivered.

There is an incident in the POGO report which suggests that the F-35 might be fatally flawed because of the compromises made to get the thing to fly in the first place.  In June, 2014, there was an engine fire in an taxiing F-35, resulting in the aircraft being lost.  The aircraft that blew up had been damaged, three weeks earlier, during two seconds of flight when the test pilot, operating well within the safety envelope of the aircraft’s abilities in a ridge roll maneuver, put G forces, yaw and roll stresses on the aircraft all at the same time.

The F-35’s engine is said to have the problem of being too flexible.  That may be because the airframe is too light, in which case this is a problem that is baked in the cake.  There are severe flight restrictions as a result.  If you put a fighter into a snap-turn to (say) avoid a missile, the gyroscopic forces are huge.  Both the engine and the aircraft have weight problems, and beefing up either or both compromises the already overweight aircraft.  The practical outcome of that will be that the F-35 will be restricted in its maneuverability by its software.

Another restriction is a limit of Mach 0.8-0.9 at low altitude because the F-35 cannot dissipate its heat.  Its competitors are limited to about Mach 1.2, so if there is a low-altitude engagement, ‘can’t run’ becomes a serious threat to its survival.  In fact, in battle simulations of the F-35 against the Su-35, 2.4 F-35s are lost for each Su-35 shot down.  Pitting Saab’s J-39 Gripen against the Su-35 results in 1.6 of the Sukhois shot down for each Gripen lost.  The loss exchange ratio of the Gripen against the F-35 is said to be breathtaking — in the Gripen’s favour.

There is potentially a big positive outcome out of all this.  Australia has a great need for an aircraft that can fly long distances straight and level without stressing the airframe – to fulfill the maritime strike role.  We need an aircraft that can deliver anti-ship cruise missiles.  The F-35 is already being prepared for that role with our Department of Defence and the Norwegian firm Kongsberg collaborating on fitting the latter’s Joint Strike Missile to the aircraft internally and externally.  This missile will have a range of 240 km which means that the F-35 could launch it beyond the range of most ships’ anti-aircraft missile systems.  For the same role, the US is concentrating on its Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) which has a range of 930 km.  These could be launched from our F-18 Super Hornets as well as the F-35.

There is one view in the defence community that the F-35 program will die of embarrassment before the production of about 500 aircraft.  This will leave a gaping hole in many countries’ procurement schedules and there will be a mad scramble for supply from the European fighter makers.  Australia started to buy F-18 Super Hornets when it became apparent that the F-35 schedule was slipping, first 24 and then another 12.  We should keep that process up until the Super Hornet production line closes.  We should also buy, before the rush, the latest Gripen fighter variant which has comparable capabilities but a much lower operating cost.  Any F-35s that do turn up can be usefully applied to the maritime strike role.

David Archibald, a visiting fellow at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C., is the author of Twilight of Abundance (Regnery, 2014)