The trillion-dollar defense program F-35. Could it fail ?

F-35 Lightning II

The Trillion-Dollar Defense Program That Can't Fail

The Pentagon, and many other countries, are betting that the new (promising but not combat-tested) air-warfare paradigm will limit the impact of its shortcomings.

The United States spends greater sums on the military than any other country (though some spend a greater percentage of GDP), and it's emphasized air power as its chief military instrument in recent decades. Additionally, different variants of the F-35 are prepared to equip the Air Force, Marines and Navy through most of the twenty-first century, and therefore the type is additionally slated to serve within the air forces or navies of Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Israel, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, South Korea and Turkey—with more countries likely to hitch the list.

However, the F-35 program has been notoriously mismanaged and perpetually over budget, and remains far not on time. The Pentagon was persuaded to buy “concurrent” production of F-35s before it had been developed into a totally operational prototype; today Lockheed is shipping non-feature-complete F-35s, which can got to be expensively upgraded later when new components and systems are finally ready. Listing everything that was and continues to be wrong with the F-35 procurement process might be the topic of the many articles.

But at the end of the day, however mismanaged the program may are , does the F-35 at least amount to a decent jet fighter?

Back within the 1990s, the U.S. Air Force developed the F-22 Raptor fighter , which arguably still reigns as the top air-superiority fighter in service: it's fast, highly maneuverable and very stealthy. However, the Raptor was less optimized for ground-attack roles and deemed too expensive to create and operate to serve as a  replacement of the Pentagon’s large inventory of fourth-generation fighters—so production was cut to just 180 fighters, 120 of which serve in operational units.

The Marines and Navy also needed a new aircraft, therefore the Pentagon committed to putting together a more multirole “joint” fighter that might eventually replace the F-16, F-15, FA-18 and AV-8 Harriers serving in all four branches. The last time an interservice fighter-bomber was pursued, it didn’t compute, but Lockheed and Boeing both gave their best shot anyway, and therefore the former won the competition. The Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) was supposed to a more affordable stealth fighter that could also be marketed to friendly nations, unlike the Raptor.

The trickiest requirement for the JSF was the Marine Corps’ insistence on making its version of the F-35 a jump jet. For historical reasons, the leathernecks want jets just like the Harrier which will fly off smaller Marine-operated amphibious carriers or remote forward bases. However, the compromises needed to form them work leave them significantly inferior to standard fighters. Lockheed actually acquired schematics for a prototype Russian jump jet called the Yak-41, and tried to form the foremost aerodynamic airframe possible.

F-35 Lightning II Sniper, Not a Sword-Fighter:

"Sniper, Not a Sword-Fighter" To cut an extended story short, the extra weight and bulkier fuselage necessary to form the F-35B jump jet version left all variants of the F-35 saddled with performance thresholds that are objectively inferior to the 4th-generation fighters it's intended to exchange.

The F-35 features a maximum speed of Mach 1.6, compared to Mach 2 to 2.5 for the F-16 and F-15, respectively. Its combat ceiling is fifty thousand feet, compared to sixty thousand for the opposite models. In 2015, the Air Force tested the F-35 during a short-range dogfight with an F-16D mounting external fuel tanks, and therefore the pilot complained that it had been simply out-turned and fewer energy efficient than its more agile opponent.

This critique doesn’t mean that the F-35 may be a terrible plane. In one article (keep reading about F-35 fighter), a Norwegian F-35 pilot praises its ability to take care of high angles of attack. Nonetheless, the Lightning remains less kinematically optimized for air-to-air combat than most fourth-generation fighters.

The Air Force and Lockheed Martin, however, insist that the F-35 Lightning II isn’t meant to engage in a within-visual-range dogfight within the first place. After all, low-observable aircraft are stealthier once they are more distant from adversaries—and new beyond-visual-range missiles just like the AIM-120D or British Meteor which will strike enemies up to 100 miles away potentially allow an F-35 to sneak up on enemy aircraft and have interaction them with missiles without having to get close. Such a technique is aided by the superior characteristics of U.S. Active Electronically Scanned Array radars (AESA).

The F-35 would act as a sort of sniper in air-to-air engagements, stalking its prey from a distance until it's a perfect angle for a shot down, releasing its weapons then hightailing it for home before the (possibly maneuverable, more faster) enemy features a chance to return close enough to detect it and retaliate. And if more intense air battles are anticipated, then the more specialized F-22 Raptor could take a number of the heat.

No stealth fighter has ever shot down another jet in actual combat, and long-range air-to-air missiles have only been used a few times in fight, so how the F-35 performs versus 4th-generation fighters depends an excellent deal on theory than operational experience. The Air Force feels this strategy has been validated by the results of repeated air combat exercises during which stealth fighters have racked up kill ratios as lopsided as 15:1 against faster, more maneuverable fourth-generation jets. and since of its low-observable characteristics, the F-35 can pick and choose when to interact and when to withdraw from a dangerous opponents during a good position.

Of course, those exercises are only perfect predictors of performance if they're built around correct assumptions about air warfare will work out. an enormous question remains, concerning how high the hit rate is going to be for long-range air-to-air missiles, which have seen limited use in actual combat. An estimated hit rate of fifty percent may prove optimistic.

Here, F-35 doubters may point out that the Air Force overestimated the hit rate of its air-to-air missiles during the Vietnam War , leading to disappointing kill ratios when pitted against North Vietnamese fighters therein conflict.

Critics also point that stealth wouldn't prevent an F-35 from being detected if an enemy got close, as stealth fighters begin to appear on X-band targeting radars once the space is short enough. Furthermore, though optimized for minimal infrared signature, stealth fighters remain vulnerable to detection by infrared-search and track (IRST) systems.

Finally, the stealth fighters are often tracked using low-bandwidth radars, which are typically found on ground-based installations. Such radars lack the resolution to engage a stealth aircraft with missiles from distance, but they might be used to direct intercepts by aircraft, or to stage short-range ambushes with the targeting radars of (SAM) surface-to-air systems-the latter a technique used to down an F-117 stealth bomber over Yugoslavia in 1999.

Another tactic might be to overwhelm stealth fighters with a swarm of lower-cost jets, accepting some losses while charging into the short-range envelope the F-35 is vulnerable in—a tactic that caused the defeat of F-35s by inferior Chinese jets during a RAND Corporation simulation.

F-35 proponents, in turn, are skeptical that the power to tug off tight maneuvers is as useful because it once was—a view in sharp contrast thereto of Russian aircraft manufacturers, which still produce super-maneuverable jets with vector thrust engines. American air-combat doctrine emphasizes maintaining a high energy level through speed, and altitude which will be traded for speed. Pulling off extremely tight turns may help dodge a missile, but usually at the value of such a lot energy that the aircraft will have little speed and altitude left to evade a follow-up attack.

Furthermore, modern short-range heat-seeking missiles just like the American AIM-9X and Russian R-73 can target hostile aircraft through a helmet-mounted sight without having to point the aircraft’s nose at a target (though doing so still confers additional momentum, of course). Such missiles are believed to possess hit probabilities as high as 80 percent, quite possibly making short-range dogfighting agility a moot issue—though an F-35 configured for stealth can’t carry any AIM-9s.

The insufficient Payload and Range:

There’s another issue in play: can the F-35 carry a worthwhile payload? If a Lightning is to stay stealthy, it cannot carry external weapons, limiting it to only four (or, eventually, six) missiles carried during a stealthy internal-weapons bay, plus a twenty-five-millimeter cannon. This doesn't compare favorably to the eight to 10 hardpoints on most fourth-generation fighters. This issue is even more salient when considering the F-35’s ground-attack capabilities in stealth mode, amounting to 5.700 pounds of internal stores, leaving them at a deficit compared to the roughly 15.000 pounds or more of external stores that can be carried on US 4th-generation fighter.