As an American, I am extremely reluctant to presume to offer Canada advice on how to proceed with the purchase of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. However, the airplane is the culmination of such malevolent trends in my own country that I believe all allies and neighbours should be warned about going down the same path.

 

The unit price for each aircraft in that pitch is about $70 million per aircraft. That’s hogwash. The current unit price in the Unites States for the F-35 is $155 million. Even considering the discount Canada will get, your Parliament’s Budget Officer has estimated a unit cost of either $129 million or $148 million, depending on estimating factors. All of those figures are optimistic; both Canada and America should expect to pay more, but neither of us will know the exact amount until all testing is complete in about 2017. If the F-35 price does not increase between now and then, that will be the first time for a combat aircraft in decades, perhaps history.

 

Most of the performance rhetoric about the F-35 centers on the terms “fifth generation” and “stealth.” Far from an ability to fly anywhere “unseen,” as some have said, stealth limits the ability of selected radars to detect the F-35 to lesser distances. In the presence of other radar types—some of them quite old designs—stealth aircraft can be “seen” routinely at long distance. Americans learned this when in 1999 Serbian air defenses in the Kosovo air war shot down one “stealth” F-117 and severely damaged another using quite antiquated radar air defenses.

 

Even if the F-35 lives up to all of its aerodynamic promises—and it won’t—it is so heavy and bulky that its engine gives it less rapid acceleration than American F-18Cs or F-16Cs.  The F-35’s hefty weight and its small wings give it a “wing loading” (and as a result maneuverability) roughly equivalent to a 1960’s era American F-105 fighter-bomber. The F-105 “Lead Sled” was notorious for its inability to defend itself over North Vietnam during the Indochina War. When you put aside all the buzzwords, the F-35’s already high cost buys only a major performance disappointment.

 

It is time to start over. That will require a fly-before-buy prototype competition between affordable and effective designs. That would virtually eliminate the F-35, but it should, nonetheless, be allowed to compete. That is the course I recommend for the United States to end the F-35 fiasco. I urge Canadians to consider the same.

(Source: Winslow T. Wheeler via Embassy)

Winslow T. Wheeler is the director of the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information in Washington DC. He testified about the F-35 before the House of Commons’ Standing Committee on National Defence in December.

Just a heads up for people looking for the book “Angels Three Six” by Col. Chuck Lehman (I wrote a short review in February). He emailed to me let me know that new copies are available, here’s the message. It’s a great book, don’t miss the chance to grab one.

Thanks for your kind comments on ANGELS THREE SIX.  Thought you might like to know that signed copies are available from CALCO, 13811 S Finney St, Medical Lake, WA 99022 for $19.95 plus $3.00 shipping and handling.  I’ll also personalize them if the buyer wishes.

 

Colonel Chuck Lehman

One aircraft conspicuous by its absence over the skies of Libya is the Air Force’s vaunted F-22 Raptor air dominance fighter. The Lockheed Martin-built jet was likely benched due to its inability to communicate with other coalition aircraft and its limited ability to hit ground targets, analysts said.

 

“The designers of the F-22 had a dilemma, which is whether to have the connectivity that would allow versatility or to have the radio silence that would facilitate stealthiness. What they opted for was a limited set of tactical data links,” said Loren Thompson, an analyst and chief operating office at the Lexington Institute, Arlington Va.

 

The F-22 can only connect with other F-22s via an intraflight data link, and can only receive, but not transmit, over the standard Link-16 data link found on most allied aircraft. As such, while the Raptor is the stealthiest operational aircraft in the world, it lacks much of the connectivity found on other warplanes, he said.

 

The aircraft also lacks a significant air-to-surface punch. Currently, the F-22 can only use two 1,000-pound Joint Direct Attack Munitions, which are GPS-guided bombs, against fixed targets. It does not yet have the ability to carry the 250-pound Small Diameter Bomb (SDB) or to create synthetic aperture radar maps, which are black and white photo-quality images of the Earth’s surface, needed to select its own ground targets. By contrast, an F-15E Strike Eagle can carry 24,000 pounds of ordnance.

(Source: Air Force Times)

RCAF (Royal Canadian Air Force) CC-150 refueling CF-18 near the cost of Libya during Operation Mobile (Odyssey Dawn). With Radio Comms.

Canadian CF-18 destroys SCUD launcher storage south of Libya during Operation Mobile (Odyssey Dawn). With Radio Comms.