Monday 29th of April 2024
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war games .....

war games .....

The United States is making a gigantic investment in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, billed by its advocates as the next - by their count the fifth - generation of air-to-air and air-to-ground combat aircraft.

 

Claimed to be near invisible to radar and able to dominate any future battlefield, the F-35 will replace most of the air-combat aircraft in the inventories of the US Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and at least nine foreign allies (including Australia), and it will be in those inventories for the next 55 years.

 

It's no secret, however, that the program - the most expensive in American history - is a calamity.

 

Last month, we learned that the Pentagon has increased the price tag for the F-35 by another $US289 million - just the latest in a long string of cost increases - and that the program is expected to account for a whopping 38 per cent of Pentagon procurement for defence programs, assuming its cost will grow no more.

 

How bad is it? A review of the F-35's cost, schedule, and performance - three essential measures of any Pentagon program - shows the problems are fundamental and still growing.

 

First, with regard to cost, the F-35 is simply unaffordable. Although the plane was originally billed as a low-cost solution, major cost increases have plagued the program throughout the last decade.

 

Last year, Pentagon leadership told Congress the acquisition price had increased another 16 per cent, from $US328.3 billion to $US379.4 billion for the 2457 aircraft to be bought. Not to worry, however - they pledged to finally reverse the growth.

 

The result? This February, the price increased another 4 per cent to $US395.7 billion and then even further in April. Don't expect the cost overruns to end there: The test program is only 20 per cent complete, the Government Accountability Office has reported, and the toughest tests are yet to come.

 

Overall, the program's cost has grown 75 per cent from its original 2001 estimate of $US226.5 billion - and that was for a larger buy of 2866 aircraft.

 

Hundreds of F-35s will be built before 2019, when initial testing is complete. The additional cost to engineer modifications to fix the inevitable deficiencies that will be uncovered is unknown, but it is sure to exceed the $534 million already known from tests so far.

 

The total program unit cost for each individual F-35, now at $US161 million, is only a temporary plateau. Expect yet another increase in early 2013, when a new round of budget restrictions is sure to hit the Pentagon, and the F-35 will take more hits in the form of reducing the numbers to be bought, thereby increasing the unit cost of each plane.

 

A final note on expense: The F-35 will actually cost multiples of the $US395.7 billion cited above. That is the current estimate only to acquire it, not the full life-cycle cost to operate it.

 

The current appraisal for operations and support is $US1.1 trillion - making for a grand total of $US1.5 trillion, or more than the annual GDP of Spain.

 

And that estimate is wildly optimistic: It assumes the F-35 will only be 42 per cent more expensive to operate than an F-16, but the F-35 is much more complex.

 

The only other "fifth generation" aircraft, the F-22 from the same manufacturer, is in some respects less complex than the F-35, but in 2010, it cost 300 per cent more to operate per hour than the F-16. To be very conservative, expect the F-35 to be twice the operating and support cost of the F-16.

 

Already unaffordable, the F-35's price is headed in one direction - due north.

 

Running behind schedule

The F-35 isn't only expensive - it's way behind schedule. The first plan was to have an initial batch of F-35s available for combat in 2010. Then first deployment was to be 2012. More recently, the military services have said the deployment date is "to be determined." A new target date of 2019 has been informally suggested in testimony - almost 10 years late.

 

If the F-35's performance were spectacular, it might be worth the cost and wait. But it is not. Even if the aircraft lived up to its original specifications - and it will not - it would be a huge disappointment. The reason it is such a mediocrity also explains why it is unaffordable and, for years to come, unobtainable.

 

In discussing the F-35 with aviation and acquisition experts - some responsible for highly successful aircraft such as the F-16 and the A-10, and others with decades of experience inside the Pentagon and years of direct observation of the F-35's early history - I learned that the F-35's problems are built into its very DNA.

 

The design was born in the late 1980s in the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon agency that has earned an undeserved reputation for astute innovation.

 

It emerged as a proposal for a very short takeoff and vertical-landing aircraft (known as "STOVL") that would also be supersonic. This required an airframe design that - simultaneously - wanted to be short, even stumpy, and single-engine (STOVL), and also sleek, long, and with lots of excess power, usually with twin engines.

 

President Bill Clinton's Pentagon bogged down the already compromised design concept further by adding the requirement that it should be a multirole aircraft - both an air-to-air fighter and a bomber.

 

This required more difficult tradeoffs between agility and low weight, and the characteristics of an airframe optimised to carry heavy loads. Clinton-era officials also layered on "stealth," imposing additional aerodynamic shape requirements and maintenance-intensive skin coatings to reduce radar reflections.

 

They also added two separate weapons bays, which increase permanent weight and drag, to hide onboard missiles and bombs from radars. On top of all that, they made it multiservice, requiring still more tradeoffs to accommodate more differing, but exacting, needs of the Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy.

 

Finally, again during the Clinton administration, the advocates composed a highly "concurrent" acquisition strategy. That meant hundreds of copies of the F-35 would be produced, and the financial and political commitments would be made, before the test results showed just what was being bought.

 

Virtual flying piano

This grotesquely unpromising plan has already resulted in multitudes of problems - and 80 per cent of the flight testing remains.

 

A virtual flying piano, the F-35 lacks the F-16's agility in the air-to-air mode and the F-15E's range and payload in the bombing mode, and it can't even begin to compare to the A-10 at low-altitude close air support for troops engaged in combat.

 

Worse yet, it won't be able to get into the air as often to perform any mission - or just as importantly, to train pilots - because its complexity prolongs maintenance and limits availability.

 

The aircraft most like the F-35, the F-22, was able to get into the air on average for only 15 hours per month in 2010 when it was fully operational. (In 2011, the F-22 was grounded for almost five months and flew even less.)

 

This mediocrity is not overcome by the F-35's "fifth-generation" characteristics, the most prominent of which is its "stealth." Despite what many believe, "stealth" is not invisibility to radar; it is limited-detection ranges against some radar types at some angles.

 

Put another way, certain radars, some of them quite antiquated, can see "stealthy" aircraft at quite long ranges, and even the susceptible radars can see the F-35 at certain angles. The ultimate demonstration of this shortcoming occurred in the 1999 Kosovo war, when 1960s vintage Soviet radar and missile equipment shot down a "stealthy" F-117 bomber and severely damaged a second.

 

The bottom line: The F-35 is not the wonder its advocates claim. It is a gigantic performance disappointment, and in some respects a step backward. The problems, integral to the design, cannot be fixed without starting from a clean sheet of paper.

 

It's time to face the facts: The F-35 is an unaffordable mediocrity, and the program will not be fixed by any combination of hardware tweaks or cost-control projects. There is only one thing to do with the F-35: Junk it. America's air forces deserve a much better aircraft, and the taxpayers deserve a much cheaper one. The dustbin awaits.

 

Winslow Wheeler is director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Centre for Defence Information. Previously, he worked for 31 years on national security issues for Republican and Democratic senators on Capitol Hill and for the Government Accountability Office. He is editor of the anthology The Pentagon Labyrinth: 10 Short Essays to Help You Through It.

 

elsewhere …..

 

The British government has changed its mind over the type of fighter planes it is ordering for the Royal Navy's new aircraft carrier, as suggested by Robert Fox, writing for The Week two days ago.

 

David Cameron has signed off a decision to use the jump-jet variant of the US-built F-35B Joint Strike Fighter, as planned by the previous Labour government. The coalition had wanted to switch to a variant using "catapults and traps" – the F35-C - but costs are believed to have spiralled.

 

The Financial Times writes that Philip Hammond, the defence secretary, will announce in the House of Commons later today that the UK is switching back to the original order in what will be seen as an embarrassing U-turn for the Prime Minister.

 

In the Commons, Hammond will present two arguments to MPs. First, the government has discovered that the cost of installing catapults and traps has escalated significantly, from £1bn to £2bn, making the F35-C unaffordable.

 

Second, by abandoning plans to build catapults and traps, the MoD will get its carrier capability a good deal earlier. Hammond will argue that with vertical take-off and landing, full carrier strike capability will be achieved by 2018, two years earlier than planned.

 

Hammond had hoped to persuade Downing Street to make the move at the end of March, so the MoD could finalise its budget before the new financial year, but Cameron is understood to have blocked the move, insisting the Treasury undertake a new analysis of the costs, while the MoD was told to check its own calculations again.

 

The Guardian writes that Cameron pushed the military to ditch the F35-B, and both he and Nick Clegg pushed for the F-35C, which has longer range and can carry more weapons.

 

Speaking to the Commons in October 2010 to explain his preference for the F-35C, Cameron said: "This is another area where I believe the last government got it badly wrong. The carriers they ordered were unable to work effectively with our key defence partners, the United States or France." · 

Government Makes U-turn On F-35 Aircraft Carrier Jets

 

more war games .....

US servicemembers looking at career options in this era of shrinking military budgets and force drawdowns might want to take a look Down Under.

The Australian government is recruiting experienced U.S. enlisted personnel and officers to fill a range of positions — from submariners to doctors — in its military, according to a posting on the Australian Defence Force website.

“The Australian Defence Force looks to overseas candidates to fill gaps in our Services, which can’t currently be satisfied by standard recruitment,” reads the intro for overseas applicants on the Defence Force’s recruitment website. “We recognise that these candidates can bring skills and attributes to the Navy, Army and Air Force that will strengthen their overall operation and success rate.”

The job offers could be tempting for U.S. troops as the Afghan War winds down and the Department of Defense looks to trim billions of dollars and more than 100,000 uniformed personnel from its books.

At a time when other Western countries have slashed spending, the prosperous Australians have been growing their military. In the past five years, the Australian military has recruited more than 500 personnel from the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. Applicants have to meet certain minimum rank levels, as well as medical and interview requirements, Australian defense officials said in an email this week.

Known as the Lucky Country, Australia has had a booming economy for almost two decades due to rising commodity prices and strong Chinese demand for its mining products. It has also seen the Australian dollar rally against the U.S. dollar in recent years, meaning U.S. veterans — especially enlisted — stand to make more money working for the Australia military.

The U.S. Air Force website lists the annual base pay for an E-5, staff sergeant, with six-years’ service at $31,946. An O-3, captain, with six years’ service makes $63,263.

By comparison, a newly promoted E-5, corporal, in the Australian air force makes $57,277, when converted to U.S. dollars, while newly promoted O-3, flight lieutenant, takes home $66,417.

Squadron Leader Bart Langland has flown under both flags.

Langland served 15 years on active duty for the U.S. Air Force and another five in the reserves before joining the Royal Australian Air Force in March 2008. The veteran F-16 and U2 spy plane pilot is helping train Australian fliers at RAAF Base Williamtown, just north of Sydney.

From an Australian perspective the costs to train and develop fighter pilots are enormous, hence the RAAF greatly benefits from being able to get experienced pilots from the U.S. and other countries, Langland said. Joining the Australian Defence Force took Langland a year and included physical examinations, security checks and getting duel Australian-U.S. citizenship, which the State Department had to approve, he said.

Langland said the job was almost exactly the same as serving with the U.S. Air Force.

“If you walk into an Australian fighter squadron or a U.S. fighter squadron, you would be hard-pressed to tell the difference,” Langland said.

Australia has about 23 million people, less than the population of California, in a country about the same size as the U.S. Naturally, the all-volunteer Australian Defence Force is a lot smaller than the U.S. military but it has dedicated itself to quality over quantity, Langland said.

In recent months, the U.S. and Australia have grown even closer with plans to base thousands of U.S. Marines in the northern Australian town of Darwin.

“Australia has always stood shoulder to shoulder with the U.S.A. and, as such, would count on U.S. support in times of major conflict,” Langland said.

The Australian Air Force trains regularly with U.S. units, although it also trains with partner nations in Southeast Asia, he said.

One notable difference serving in Australia is that the pace of work is slower than in the U.S. Air Force, Langland said, adding that his deployment to Afghanistan last year was voluntary.

Langland’s biggest challenge was moving his wife and three children to Australia, far from relatives. However, he rated the schools near RAAF Williamtown as excellent and the weather and beaches on a par with Southern California.

The family plans to stay in Australia at least five more years, he said.

“I feel that by serving here I am making a difference to Australia and America,” he said.

For more information on the program, go to the Australian Defence Force website.

robsons@pstripes.osd.mil

Serving Down Under: Australia Offers Military Jobs To US Troops Facing Separation

flap flap .....

Grounded yet again by the Pentagon as unsafe to fly, the Air Force's most expensive warplane, the experimental F-35 nuclear-capable stealth bomber, is under increasing attack around the country, but especially in Vermont where citizens trying to protect local health and welfare are taking actions against the Air Force in federal court, in the state legislature, and before a state environmental board.

The F-35, a weapon of mass destruction with a lifetime cost of $1.5 trillion dollars, has already cost the U.S. some $400 billion and is considered a target of opportunity by some budget cutters and deficit reducers. With the March 1 sequester focusing minds across the federal government, a fancy warplane plane with outdated technology and an obsolete mission is looking like an easy way to save more than $500 billion, especially if it can't fly anyway.

Others suggest that the world's most expensive weapons system is "Too Big to Kill," even though it's a decade behind schedule and 100% over budget, with both measures getting worse. And as the Pentagon acknowledges, the country would be getting less for its money with the final plane, since it can't meet its promised performance specifications. For the second time in a year, the Pentagon has lowered F-35 specs to a level the brass hope the plane will be able to meet.

And even as some national media like Time bring more attention to the failures of the F-35 program to live up to its promise in performance, cost, or delivery, a group of dedicated Vermonters are fighting their state and federal leadership to prevent hundred of Vermont homes from being destroyed as surely as if the F-35 had bombed them into oblivion.

Air Force Refuses to Reveal Relevant Data

For almost a year, the Air Force has refused to reveal relevant data that it used to pick Burlington, Vermont, as one of its top choices for basing the F-35, even though the Air Force's own published analysis demonstrates that Burlington will suffer more than any other location socially, economically, and environmentally from any F-35 base established at the Burlington Airport, which is owned by Burlington, but actually located in two other cities that have no say in how it's run.

For almost a year, Vermonters have appealed to the state's Congressional delegation, all Democrats, to meet with them, review the issues, get the hidden data from the Air Force. Both US senators, Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders, as well as Vermont's lone congressman, Peter Welch, have endorsed the F-35 without showing any detailed understanding of the program. They have all refused to meet with opponents who have spent years studying the issue. They have been unwilling or unable to shake loose the information the Air Force holds secret.

Now the issue is before the United States District Court for the District of Vermont, where four plaintiffs are asking a federal judge to order the Air Force to release the relevant material. The complaint describes a pattern of Air Force stonewalling since the plaintiffs' first Freedom of Information Act (FOIA, 5 U.S.C. 552) request in mid-September 2012, as the Air Force delayed, missed its own promised deadlines, and ultimately denied the request, and then repeated the pattern when considering the plaintiffs' appeal.

With the Air Force saying it would decide the F-35 decision in the near future, the plaintiffs waited till mid-February for a decision on their FOIA request appeal. Having heard nothing further from the Air Force since mid-December, the parties took their case to federal court.

Comparison Depends on Seeing All Scoring Sheets

Although the Air Force provided some material in the plaintiffs' initial request, the Air Force has refused to comply with this part of the request:

"Please provide copies of the scoring sheets used to rate each potential site for basing the F-35s, including but not limited to the Burlington Airport."

The Air Force had released the Burlington scoring sheets to Senator Sanders in June 2012, and he had shared them with some constituents, but in response to the FOIA request for scoring sheets, the Air Force provided only blank pages - 205 of them.

Explaining the importance of seeing all the scoring sheets for all the locations, the federal complaint stated:

"… the scoring sheet for the Burlington International Airport was released to United States Senator Bernard Sanders, who provided it to members of the public. The scores assigned included purely factual information such as whether there are homes within the noise and safety areas and such as the total score assigned to each of the other airports.

"The scores released for Burlington are unambiguously erroneous - at the Burlington site, there are thousands of such homes but the scoring sheet erroneously stated there are none.

"The total score Burlington received thus may have put it at the top of the chart - in error. Thus it is necessary for the public to compare Burlington's total score, which was released, to those of its competitors, which have not been."

Air Force Neither Admits Nor Denies Errors

The Air Force has not publicly responded to or corrected its manifest error on the scoring sheet, even though its environmental impact report does not make the same error. The federal complaint also criticizes the Air Force for releasing some scoring sheets but not others, calling this a violation of the law:

"… there is no basis upon which the Air Force may lawfully refuse to produce the scoring sheets or any part of them, having released the Burlington scores….

"The decision to release only the Burlington scores transgresses the rule that 'FOIA was designed to preclude a government agency from cherry-picking the materials to be made public. FOIA operates on the premise that government will function best if its warts as well as its wonders are available for public review.'"

The Air Force is expected to answer the federal complaint by mid-April. The Air Force has also indicated it would announce a decision about the F-35 basing some time in the spring, although it has postponed that announcement twice already.

Meanwhile, it remains a fact on the ground that if the F-35 base were to become a reality, it would be in the in the midst of Vermont's only urban area, where it would render upwards of 1,300 current residences "unfit for residential use."

Vermont's Democratic leadership - Leahy, Sanders, and Welch, as well as governor Peter Shumlin, Burlington mayor Miro Weinberger, and various Democratic state legislators, have all expressed "concern" about the people whose homes will become uninhabitable due to jet noise - but none of them has yet shown any public interest in knowing the exact number of houses or the people who live there.

Committee on Military Considers F-35 Relevance

Appearing before the Vermont House Committee on General, Housing & Military Affairs on February 14, attorney James Marc Leas presented himself as a candidate for the open position of Adjutant General of the Vermont National Guard and addressed the F-35 basing question that affects the future mission of the Vermont Guard. He urged the committee to hold hearings and make recommendations regarding the F-35 before the Air Force announces its decision.

Leas held up a copy of the Draft Environmental Impact Statement that the Air Force paid $2 million to produce, and emphasized that its is this document that provides the fact that are used by opponents of the F-35. Urging the committee to address the facts, he noted that

"It's the Air National Guard that won't discuss the facts that are in here and that are devastating to the people of Winooski, Williston, Burlington and South Burlington….

"The Guard has a mission statement, and I think the challenge for the Guard is to implement its own mission statement, which says that it will protect lives and property in Vermont, and that it will contribute to the community, and that it will protect the health and safety of Vermonters. That's the mission statement of the Vermont National Guard.

"Having a National Guard that is attempting to bring in an airplane, that it knows from its own environmental impact statement - that it refuses to discuss - is going to destroy almost 3,000 homes and is going to tear up the lives of more than 6,000 people in Vermont is not consistent with that mission….

He urged the committee to hold hearings on the issue, as well as two resolutions submitted by legislators and referred to this committee, one resolution supporting the F-35 and the other suggesting that the state take the time to determine the impact of the base before making a decision.

New General Avoids Predecessor's Fear-Mongering

The Committee on General, Housing & Military affairs later decided that the question of the F-35 and its impact on Vermont low income housing was not relevant to the committee. The committee is headed by two Democrats, Helen Head of South Burlington and John Moran of Wardsboro.

Leas was not chosen adjutant general for the Vermont Air National Guard, nor did he expect to be. He did get four votes. As he told the committee somewhat ruefully, "We have the facts. We have the arguments. But somehow our political leaders are immune to facts and arguments unless large numbers of people come out."

The new adjutant general, Brig. Gen. Steven Cray, said publicly after his election that even without the F-35, the Vermont Air National Guard base won't close, though its mission and size might change. This is a sharp change from his predecessor, Gen. Michael Dubie, who frequently warned the public to be afraid that, without the F-35, the base would close.

A little more than a year ago, Senator John McCain, R-Ariz., commented on the F-35, also known as the JSF - Joint Strike Fighter - in remarks on the Senate floor:

"In a nutshell, the JSF program has been both a scandal and a tragedy."

McCain has softened his rhetoric since then, but he hasn't retracted the characterization. And the F-35's performance has not improved.

F-35 Failures Pile Up