A short reply to Gottliebsen, Kopp & Goon on the RAAF's F-35s

By now, almost everyone with an interest in the F-35 program has read Adam Ciralsky's article in Vanity Fair about the F-35 program. This past Sunday, his summary on National Public Radio's Weekend Edition was scathing:

      It is plagued by design flaws and cost overruns. It flies only in good weather. The computers that run it lack the software they need for combat. Until recently, the prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, was operating with a free hand, paid handsomely for its own mistakes. Looking back, even the general now in charge of the program can't believe how we got to this point. In sum: all systems go.

His dig that the F-35, a plane named the Lightning II, is currently restricted from flying in a lightning storm, was particularly painful.

But all that said, I think that almost everything in the Vanity Fair article was already public. In short, the plane costs a lot, but the price seems to be coming down. The program is about a decade overdue, but has been more-or-less on-schedule since 2007. The all-seeing helmet doesn't work, but... well, I don't know what the but is in that case. As a function of the design requirements of the F-35B jump-jet version, the plane lacks a bubble canopy for reward visibility, so the see-through-the-plane helmet could be very important. Could be, if its AMRAAM missiles aren't all-dominating in frontal-aspects shots. If they are, then the nature of air-to-air combat will have changed drastically—"everybody dies" was the way one analyst put it to me. And that's what the USAF and others are betting upon.

The one thing in Ciralsky's article that I hadn't seen was the assertion by his shadowy source, 'Charlie', that many of the current problems result from some risky design bets that Lockheed made in 2007 to comply with the program office's insistence that it meet its promised weight target. I simply don't know if that's true, though it seems plausible. But even if it is true, what we have here is not another Watergate. Such was the assertion of Robert Gottliebsen in his own summary of the story—"US Deep Through Destroys a JSF Cover-Up"—in Australia's Business Spectator. Responding to the government's engineering change request isn't criminal, regardless of how badly one does it, and how unlikely success might be.

Gottliebsen writes that he has been opposed to the RAAF's intended JSF purchase for about a decade, and in that context, he puts himself firmly in the camp of Carlo Kopp and Peter Goon of the Airpower Australia think tank. Opposing the JSF project is easy sport, but in proposing an alternative, I do wish that Kopp & Goon (some folks at Lockheed refer to them as if they were a firm) would drop their leading alternative: a notional purchase by the RAAF of F-22s, atop an order by the USAF for another 500 or so. The line is shut down, the suppliers are doing other things, and the US is not going to sell the RAAF the aircraft in any case. Is any of that a good idea? It doesn't matter. It's just the deal.

Rather, if they want to be constructive, they could analyze the plausible alternatives. Australia is not about a embark upon its own Avro Arrow story. If we mean new aircraft, it's a small set: Block 60 Falcons, Silent Eagles, Super Hornets, Typhoons, Rafales, Gripens, and just conceivably Sukhois. Outside China, those are the only active production programs for fighter-bombers. So pick, gentlemen! I'd love to see the plane-by-plane, side-by-side comparison.

Comments

[Dave Foster]

Jim,

The capabilities of the F-22 are still speculative as in unproven in combat so it is beyond me why it would be considered a sensible candidate. I understand that the program still has weak understanding of its weapons bay environment and this is certainly true for the ever-immature F-35. The 5th Gen mafia have nothing but sloganeering on their side. The millions of EEs and computer scientists throughout the world will "see" these archaic form factors soon enough, if not already.

I don't buy the cost-coming-down argument a bit.

The political engineering Ciralsky (and others) speak of is also a sort of crime-proofing. There's no need for a Darlene Drunyan with the insidiousness and too-big-to-fail design of 1400 politically distributed subs.

Good sport, indeed. We'll have decades of dark laughter on the folly.