The United States Air Force is scrambling to protect the F-35 light attack bomber from the threat of cancellation. There has been talk over the past week that the F-35, in the era of budget sequestration, could be a goner.
It's funny how a cash crunch can shake out straight talk. This time it's coming from Major General Steve Kwast who headed the USAF Quadrenniel Defense Review. General Kwast said the air force has a compelling reason for protecting the F-35 from cost cutters:
"We must be able to project power in contested environments (A2/AD) and the Joint Strike fighter is that machine."
Hmm, "A2/AD" - where did that come up recently? Oh yeah, here.
A2/AD is an abbreviation for anti-access and aerial denial environments. It's a term that is used in the context of just one country - China. See, take it from General Steve, that's what the F-35 is all about, projecting power in the contested environment of Chinese airspace. And, when it comes to a first strike against Chinese air defences, "the Joint Strike Fighter is that machine." There, got it?
Now I know some of you are probably wondering why Canada would buy an insanely expensive and marginally performing warplane that's purpose built to attack China when we're obsessed with selling China our Athabasca bitumen? It sounds contradictory, inconsistent, even incoherent. The simple answer is that is what happens when you outsource your military policy, including related foreign policy aspects, to a big brother like the Pentagon. We wind up with an industrial and resource strategy largely divorced from our military (let's not call it "defence") policy. Fortunately we have a government that's never troubled by either facts or inconsistency.
Aviation Week's F-35 oracle, Bill Sweetman, meanwhile reports that cancelling the Joint Strike Fighter, while unlikely, remains on the table.
"If the Pentagon decided to meet sequester requirements by preserving
force structure, without accepting reductions in readiness or its
civilian workforce, the Joint Strike Fighter program would have to be
canceled, representatives of leading Washington think-tanks said on
August 1, and the B-1B bomber force will be retired under any scenario."
5 comments:
Will it even be any good at attacking China? I mean, all it has is half-assed stealth, which the Chinese have countermeasures against and have already had years to deploy them--let alone how long they'll have before there's any prospect of actually having to fight F-35s.
It's like telegraphing a sucker-punch. How is this supposed to work? Ask the Chinese nicely to turn off their L-band radar etc. first?
As best I can understand it, PLG, from the accounts of the full dress rehearsal, Operation Chimichanga,this all based on an improbable assumption of surprise.
The stealth light bombers, the F-35s, backed up by the much more stealthy air superiority fighters, the F-22s, are to initiate the surprise attack into Chinese airspace backed up by a flotilla of supporting aircraft - AWACS, Sentry, tankers, etc., that the Chinese are also supposed to not notice until it's much too late.
The F-35s go in, attack critical targets that bring down the air defence networks, clearing the way for follow-up strikes by B-1s, B-2s and conventional strike fighters.
Of course assembling an armada capable of these ambitious objectives within striking proximity of the Chinese coast is no easy matter. The F-35s, for example, would require forward tanker support which would be readily detectable by the Chinese.
When the Australians war gamed it they split the defenders. Most dealt with the F-35s and F-22s while another group went straight for the tankers and electronic warfare support aircraft. Even if the F-35s survived the fighter screen and SAM batteries they would never have enough fuel to make it to safety without those tankers.
And, of course, the surprise attack itself presumes the Chinese wouldn't recognize the massing armada or, if they did, wouldn't themselves strike pre-emptively. Unlike the American attack on Iraq, China would be within the bounds of international law to launch a missile attack on airfields and carrier battle groups before they could strike the Chinese mainland.
I tried to convey this predicament with the vintage photo of two armed cowpokes in a saloon playing poker.
Huh. "attack critical targets that bring down the air defence networks" eh?
I'm sure that will work well. I know if I were the Chinese, I'd design my air defence networks to be readily brought down from just losing a few key nodes. I wouldn't spend precious money on backups (or keep those backups secret), and after all communications are inherently full of bottlenecks. I heard in the US, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is working on some kind of advanced system designed to connect in a sort of "network" and actually route messages around damaged nodes, but I'm sure that kind of newfangled stuff is beyond the Chinese.
I think you're right about the plan being a bit implausible. I guess they know the old adage about no battle plan surviving contact with the enemy and rather than try to overcome that problem, they're just going with it.
Hey, my sarcasm tags around the second paragraph disappeared.
. . . does that mean they actually got applied to the text as an attribute and it now exudes sarcasm from the screen?
I liked the DARPA line, PLG.
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