The F-35's Very Huge and Obvious Achilles' Heel

We know that a lot of top US military types have lost their passion for the F-35 light attack bomber.  A recent report from the Pentagon's Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments put it this way:

[It] will not be able to operate effectively or efficiently against anti-access/aerial-denial (A2AD) weapons and doctrine being developed by China and other adversaries.

Some time ago it became obvious to me that stealth warplanes, other than strategic bombers, were better as defenders than as attackers.  Which leads us to this thing, China's first stealth fighter, the J-20.   By American standards it's not highly stealthy.  Like the F-35 it's limited to frontal aspect only stealth cloaking.  But for its intended role, to counter an American stealth attack, it's more than enough.

Aviation Week's Randy Sweetman explains how the J-20 is a stealth killer.

The J-20 design, therefore, is an air-to-air fighter with an emphasis on forward-aspect stealth, efficient high-speed aerodynamics and range, with a modest internal payload and more than adequate agility for self-defense. The aircraft has considerable potential for development, because of its currently unsophisticated engines. But it is also large and expensive, and continued development of the J-10B shows that China plans to maintain a high-low mix of fighters for a long time to come.

This concept fits very well into an anti-access/area-denial strategy given China’s regional geography and the fact that the nation’s military and geopolitical ambitions are focused on the China Sea and its surrounding island chains. The U.S. has committed its armed forces to concentrate much of their funding on tactical fighters with a combat radius of 600 mi., much less than the distance from their bases to targets on the Chinese mainland, and has persuaded its allies to do the same.

As a result, operations are almost entirely dependent on two groups of aircraft: tankers and large intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft with long endurance. Under the “distributed control” concept favored by U.S. Air Force commanders as a hedge against electronic warfare, including cyberattacks, the ISR aircraft also have a control-and-communications function. However, both tankers and ISR aircraft are vulnerable to attack, and maintaining a defensive combat air patrol (CAP) over them at long range is also difficult.

The J-20’s primary mission, therefore, may be to use stealth and speed to break through the CAP and threaten vital tankers and ISR platforms. Its range gives it a “long lance” advantage—if the tankers, ISR aircraft and escorts have to stay out of the J-20’s range, the tactical aircraft that they support will not have the airborne radar cover or range needed to reach their targets.

Next week the Chinese are scheduled to demonstrate their second, stealth warplane, the J-31, to the public at an airshow in Zhuhai, near Hong Kong.  The J-31 looks eerily similar to the F-35 which some chalk up to the Chinese theft of computer data from American and British defence contractors.

A report from the US Naval Institute newsletter says American pilots fear that the J-31 could prove to be the equal of America's F-22 and F-35.

“They’re still in the glossy brochure phase of development, so they still look ten feet tall and bulletproof,” one senior U.S. fighter pilot familiar with the F-35 program told USNI News.  “I think they’ll eventually be on par with our fifth gen jets — as they should be, because industrial espionage is alive and well.”

Many suspect the J-31 is designed using technology stolen from the Pentagon’s nearly $400 billion Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program.

“They sure look like F-35 and F-22s don’t they?” one Air Force operational test pilot told USNI News.

Look, when the US military are issuing carefully couched statements warning that the F-35 is no longer capable of operating "effectively or efficiently" against the very sort of adversaries it was intended to dominate, its very raison dètre, what compelling reason exists for buying something so costly and yet so incapable of meeting our defence needs at home?

In US circles they describe the F-35 as "too big to kill."  That appears to be the sole remaining justification for saddling the US and her allies with it.  It's like saying "we've gone too far down this road to turn back."  Who says?

How Much American Stealth Technology Does China Already Have?

Recent images of two Chinese stealth fighters, the J-20 that appeared almost two years ago and the J-21 that surfaced this past week, have stymied American observers.   No one knows how advanced these aircraft may be.   They look like carbon copies of America's top stealth fighter, the F-22 (no, not the dog F-35 the U.S. wants to saddle us with).   But there's no way as yet of evaluating whether the Chinese have the keys to the inner temple - the secrets of American stealth coatings that are radar absorbent and the electronic wizardry that is also instrumental in making stealth work.

What is known is that the Chinese have been actively pursuing these technologies.   Since 2009 there have been incidents in which hackers, believed to be Chinese, have broken into American and British computers to filch massive amounts of F-35 data and code.

Chinese Hackers were able to penetrate into computers belonging to BAE Systems, Britain’s biggest defence company, and to steal details about the design, performance and electronic systems of the West’s latest fighter jet, the costly F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The hacking attack has raised concerns that the fighter jet’s advanced radar capabilities could have been compromised and comes few weeks after papers about the future British-French drone were stolen in Paris. 

Three years ago, the Wall Street Journal revealed the F-35 had been compromised by computer spies.

The Joint Strike Fighter, also known as the F-35 Lightning II, is the costliest and most technically challenging weapons program the Pentagon has ever attempted. The plane, led by Lockheed Martin  Corp.  relies on 7.5 million lines of computer code, which the Government Accountability Office said is more than triple the amount used in the current top Air Force fighter.

Six current and former officials familiar with the matter confirmed that the fighter program had been repeatedly broken into. The Air Force has launched an investigation.

And then there's Lockheed Martin's state of the art stealth drone, the RQ-170, that Iran managed to seize just before Christmas.  As expected, the Chinese have pored over the aircraft at length and presumably taken samples of its stealth coatings.

In mid-August, a team from China removed electronic components from the drone that were taken back to their homeland for reverse engineering.

China, it seems, doesn't have to re-invent the stealth wheel.  It can simply steal much of the technology online and can fill in many of the gaps when American forces deliver the latest and greatest stealth drone into their very laps.

While we don't know how stealthy China's J-20 and J-21 fighters will be, the Chinese well may have copied enough of America's secrets to make their aircraft highly capable.   That bodes very badly for the F-35 which was intentionally designed to be far less stealthy than America's super stealth fighter, the F-22.   America's allies are getting stuck with the Plymouth when even the Chinese may be flying around in Corvettes. 

When someone sells you something that is supposedly exclusive or super-secret but you subsequently discover that it's no longer exclusive, no longer super-secret, isn't it time to question the giant size price tag?

So Where's Our Stealth Fighter

According to Wired.com's "Danger Room" China has not one but two stealth fighters.

It's been almost two years since China revealed the Chengdu J-20 stealth warplane.    Now rival Shenyang has apparently produced its own stealth fighter, designated J-21.

It’s unclear whether Beijing intends to compete the J-20 against the J-21 for a single acquisition program. It’s equally possible both jets are meant for production. It’s also conceivable that neither is — that they’re both strictly test vehicles. “Feng,” an analyst writing for Information Dissemination, believes Beijing can only afford to manufacture one of the new planes and will be forced to choose. But that’s conjecture. As with any Chinese weapons initiative, among outsiders there are more questions than answers.

For example, just how stealthy is the J-21 — and for that matter, the slightly older J-20? Both share the general shape of the U.S. F-22. But American stealth design relies on more than shape. Special radar-absorbing materials, sophisticated heat-absorption systems, “silent” electronic gear plus extreme high speed and altitude performance all combine to give the F-22 its so-far unique ability to evade enemy defenses. It’s hard to say whether China has mastered, or even attempted, those techniques.

Of course many of America's  "radar-absorbing materials, sophisticated heat-absorption systems, [and] “silent” electronic gear" secrets fell into 'enemy hands' just before Christmas when a Lockheed RQ-170 stealth drone was hijacked and landed intact by Iranian forces as it flew above that country's nuclear sites.

But if Russia has its own stealth fighter (India too, soon) and China has two stealth fighters of its own, where is our stealth warplane, the one that's been in development since - well, since forever?   The idea, as I understand it, was that we were going to pay megabucks for this overdue, overpriced and under-performing F-35 so we could be the first on the block to have one.