[Infowarrior] - OT: What Now, Icarus?

[Richard Forno]

(Posted on behalf of friends and in support of efforts toward military  
acquisition reform.....-rick)


What Now, Icarus? Is Western Combat Aviation Falling Out of the Sky?

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/winslow-t-wheeler/what-now-icarus-is-wester_b_337564.html

Winslow T. Wheeler
Director, Straus Military Reform Project, Center for Defense Information
(Pierre M. Sprey, a long time military reformer and a designer of  
extraordinarily successful combat aircraft, helped me write this  
commentary. Both Pierre and I are contributors to the aforementioned  
anthology "America's Defense Meltdown: Pentagon Reform for President  
Obama and the New Congress.")

Posted: October 28, 2009 05:16 PM

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/winslow-t-wheeler/what-now-icarus-is-wester_b_337564.html
The future of Western combat aviation today rests largely on one  
airplane: The Pentagon's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

The Defense Department currently plans to buy 2,456 of these Lockheed  
aircraft for the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps. As a "multi-role"  
fighter-bomber, it will ultimately replace almost all tactical  
aircraft now in our inventory, except for the F-22, for which  
production beyond 187 aircraft was canceled this past summer. Major  
allies, including Britain and much of the rest of Western Europe,  
Canada, Australia, Japan, and Israel, plan to buy the aircraft. Sales  
to many others are postulated, and those who do not intend to buy the  
F-35 plan to copy it to the extent their treasuries, government  
bureaucracies, and technological development permit.

There are, however, a few problems. The F-35 is unaffordable. It is a  
technological kluge that will be less effective than airplanes it  
replaces. And it will increase our own combat losses.

That is not the consensus now; many will vociferously dispute each of  
the assertions stated above, and below. But, in time the finger  
pointing will start. That's when someone will have to pick up the  
pieces to give our pilots a war winning aircraft. The road between  
here and there will be neither smooth nor pretty, but it is time to  
take the first step.

A financial disaster? How can that be? Visiting the F-35 plant in Fort  
Worth, Texas last August, Secretary of D Robert Gates assured us that  
the F-35 will be "less than half the price ... of the F-22."

In a narrow sense, Gates is right. At a breathtaking $65 billion for  
187 aircraft, the F-22 consumes $350 million for each plane. At $299  
billion for 2,456, the F-35 would seem a bargain at just $122 million  
each.

F-35 unit cost will ultimately be much higher. In 2001, the Pentagon  
had planned to buy 2,866 aircraft for $226.5 billion - $79 million per  
airplane. It was in 2007 that the expense increased and the quantity  
went down; resulting in the current - $122 million - unit cost.

In the next few weeks, the program will have to admit to another  
increase. Gates and his Deputy Secretary, William Lynn, have re- 
convened a "Joint Estimating Team" (JET) to reassess F-35 cost and  
schedule. Last year, while a part of the Bush administration, Gates  
basically ignored the Team's recommendations, but the new JET is about  
to reconfirm them: the F-35 program will cost up to $15 billion more,  
and it will be delivered about two years late.

Those findings address only the known problems; there's a huge iceberg  
floating just under the surface. With F-35 flight testing barely three  
percent complete, new problems - and new costs - are sure to emerge.  
Worse, only 17 percent of the aircraft's characteristics will be  
validated by flight testing by the time the Pentagon has signed  
contracts for more than 500 aircraft. Operational squadron pilots will  
have the thrill of discovering the remaining problems, in training or  
in combat. No one should be surprised if the final F-35 total program  
unit cost reaches $200 million per aircraft after all the fixes are  
paid for.

None of these prices is "affordable." The latest version of the F-16,  
heavily laden with complex electronics and other expensive  
modifications, costs about $60 million, twice its original price - in  
today's dollars. The A-10, which the F-35 will also replace, cost  
about $15 million in today's dollars. Thus, to replace the almost  
4,000 F-16s and A-10s built with just over 1,700 F-35s, the Air Force  
will have to pay far more to buy half as many airplanes.

In an age when the Air Force budget looks to increase only marginally,  
if at all, while simultaneously planning to buy several other major  
aircraft (new aerial tankers, new transports, new heavy bombers, and  
new helicopters), this plan to distend the fighter-bomber budget is a  
fool's errand.

While most, but not all, in the Pentagon and Congress remain oblivious  
to the unaffordability of the F-35, some of its foreign buyers are  
becoming horrified. Despite their governments' investment of hundreds  
of millions, parliamentarians and analysts in Australia, Norway,  
Denmark, and the Netherlands are expressing real concerns. The F-35's  
single largest international partner is the United Kingdom. There, the  
Royal Navy and Air Force have just decided to reduce their F-35 buy  
from 138 aircraft to 50. The reason: "We are waking up to the fact  
that all those planes are unaffordable."

The problems with the F-35 are not limited to its cost.

As a fighter, the F-35 depends on a technological pipe dream. Having  
failed to develop in the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s an effective  
(and reliable) radar-based technology to shoot down enemy (not  
friendly) aircraft "beyond visual range," the Air Force is trying yet  
again with the F-35, like the F-22 before it. Both have the added  
development of "stealth" (less detectability against some radars at  
some angles), but that new "high tech" feature and the long range  
radar have imposed design penalties that compromised the aircraft with  
not just high cost but also weight, drag, complexity, and  
vulnerabilities. The few times this technology has been tried in real  
air combat in the past decade, it has been successful less than half  
the time, and that has been against incompetent and/or primitively  
equipped pilots from Iraq and Serbia.

If the latest iteration of "beyond visual range" turns out to be yet  
another chimera, the F-35 will have to operate as a close-in  
dogfighter, but in that regime it is a disaster. If one accepts every  
aerodynamic promise Lockheed currently makes for it, the F-35 will be  
overweight and underpowered. At 49,500 pounds in air-to-air take-off  
weight with an engine rated at 42,000 pounds of thrust, it will be a  
significant step backward in thrust-to-weight and acceleration for a  
new fighter. In fact, at that weight and with just 460 square feet of  
wing area for the Air Force and Marine Corps versions, the F-35's  
small wings will be loaded with 108 pounds for every square foot, one  
third worse than the F-16A. (Wings that are large relative to weight  
are crucial for maneuvering and surviving in combat.) The F-35 is, in  
fact, considerably less maneuverable than the appallingly vulnerable  
F-105 "Lead Sled," a fighter that proved helpless in dogfights against  
MiGs over North Vietnam. (A chilling note: most of the Air Force's  
fleet of F-105s was lost in four years of bombing; one hundred pilots  
were lost in just six months.)

Nor is the F-35 a first class bomber for all that cost: in its  
stealthy mode it carries only a 4,000 pound payload, one third the  
12,000 pounds carried by the "Lead Sled."

As a "close air support" ground-attack aircraft to help US troops  
engaged in combat, the F-35 is too fast to identify the targets it is  
shooting at; too delicate and flammable to withstand ground fire, and  
too short-legged to loiter usefully over embattled US ground units for  
sustained periods. It is a giant step backward from the current A-10.

It is time to start climbing out of the F-35 hole. Needless to say,  
the complexities of Pentagon procurement regulations and especially  
the circle-the-wagons mentality of the Pentagon and Congress present  
serious hurdles to be overcome, most of them ethical.

First is the need is to accept the facts as they exist, rather than as  
Lockheed and self-interested bureaucrats in the Pentagon would prefer  
them to be. That will mean accepting the JET recommendations as  
currently written - not watering them down to make them palatable, or  
ignoring them as they were in 2008 under Gates' first term as SecDef.

Second would be exercising the professed spirit of the new Weapon  
System Acquisition Act, signed into law by President Obama last May.  
While the fine print of the new law is hopelessly riddled with  
loopholes to protect business as usual, the bill purports to control  
costs and inspire competition, especially the "fly-before-buy"  
competitive approach that has worked so marvelously well the few times  
it's been tried.

This is the same vision that President Obama expressed to the VFW in  
Phoenix last August when he said he wanted to stop "the special  
interests and their exotic projects that are years behind schedule and  
billions over budget." Clearly, no one has told the President that the  
F-35 is a leading poster child for the evils he condemned.

Third, the biggest step, would be to suspend further F-35 production  
until the test aircraft, all of them now funded, can complete a  
revised, much more thorough flight test schedule. Once we know the  
F-35's realistically demonstrated performance and problems, and the  
full extent of its costs, we can make an informed decision whether to  
put it into full production. To do that, the upside down F-35  
acquisition plan -- which buys 500 aircraft before the "definitive"  
test report (the one that only flight tests 17% of F-35  
characteristics) is on Gates' desk -- needs to be radically recast  
into real fly-before-buy plan -- just the kind of plan the new  
Acquisition Reform Act advocates, albeit feebly.

In the almost certain event that the F-35 is found by uncompromised,  
realistic testing to be an unaffordable loser, there are viable  
alternatives. If an active consensus develops to reverse the current  
aging and shrinking of the existing tactical aviation inventory (as  
opposed to today's silent conspiracy encouraging those trends to  
worsen), a short term, affordable fix to restore combat adequacy is  
needed: Extend the life of existing F-16 and A-10 airframes for the  
Air Force and to continue purchasing F-18E/F aircraft for the Navy and  
Marine Corps. For the part of the inventory that most urgently needs  
immediate expansion, the A-10 and the close support mission, hundreds  
of airframes now sitting in the "boneyard" can and should be  
refurbished -- at extraordinarily modest cost.

Just a life-extension program will not address long term needs.  
Accordingly, competitive prototype fly off programs should be  
immediately initiated to develop and select new fighters to build a  
larger force that is far more combat-effective than existing the  
F-16s, F-18s, and A-10s. Just such programs -- that lead to an  
astonishing 10,000 plane Air Force within current budget levels -- are  
described in detail in "Reversing the Decay in American Air Power," a  
chapter in the anthology "America's Defense Meltdown: Pentagon Reform  
for President Obama and the New Congress" (Stamford University Press).

You can almost literally hear the howls of protest right now. The F-35  
is too big to fail. Gates himself seems trapped by that logic; he said  
"My view is we cannot afford as a nation not to have this airplane."  
We take the opposite view. The F-35's bloat -- in cost, leaden weight,  
and mindless complexity -- guarantees failure. It will shrink our air  
forces at increased expense, rot their ability to prevail in the air  
and support our ground forces, and will needlessly spill the blood of  
far too many of our pilots.

We have to take the first steps to better understand the extent of the  
F-35 disaster and to reverse the continuing decay in our air forces.





Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/winslow-t-wheeler/what-now-icarus-is-wester_b_337564.html