An American Takes on Harper's F-35 Snake Oil

Here's another repost, this from April, 2011, wherein an American expert calls out Harper on his endless F-35 lies.

From Embassy, a preview of remarks to be made tomorrow in Washington by Winslow Wheeler of the Center for Defense Information about Canada's unhinged decision to purchase the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Three simple questions show what a poor choice the F-35 is for the United States—and for Canada.

What will the F-35 cost?

The memorandum of understanding Canada has signed—it’s not a contract—pretends $9 billion will buy 65 F-35s and pay for initial logistics, simulators, spare parts and more. 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.

How well does the F-35 perform?

Canada, and the US, will not know what F-35 performance really is until after all testing is complete—in about six years from now.

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.

[This is a reference to L-band radar.   The F-35 is designed to defeat X-band radars, the type fitted inside the small nosecones of modern fighters.  It will not defeat L-band radars which the Russians have already fitted into the wing leading edges of their new SU-35S "stealth killer."  The long and the short of it is that the F-35's vaunted stealth advantage probably has been countered which leaves the airplane a horribly overpriced underperformer.]

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.

Why not wait?

Like your government’s proposed purchase of F-35s before all testing is complete and all costs are known, the United States has been rushing to “buy” before we “fly” for decades. It has been a disaster.

Since 2000, Americans have added $320 billion to our Air Force’s budget—a 43 per cent increase. Since then, our number of fighter and bomber squadrons declined from 146 to 72, or 51 per cent. This is not a smaller, newer Air Force; it is a smaller older Air Force.

This decay comes from new aircraft-cost-growth above the growth in the Air Force budget. We have been making decisions on the basis of poorly supported “buy-in” promises.

The only way out of this decay is to better understand the future consequences of our contemporary decisions: A challenge that Canada faces on the F-35 in a direct and meaningful sense.

Of course, you are being told to commit now. Your CF-18s are wearing out, and you have industrial incentives. Others face a similar aging problem; some have been offered the very same carrots. But others are also having second thoughts—in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Israel.

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.