The Last Thing an F-35 Driver Will Ever Want to See

It's no secret where the F-35 is intended to operate - in the highly-defended airspace of just two countries, China and Russia.  The F-35 and its big brother the F-22 were designed to defeat sophisticated air defences, at least what would have passed for sophisticated at the turn of the century.

It's hard to fault the intended targets of America's stealth armada for responding to what, for them, is a potentially catastrophic threat.  And so they have.

They had a look, several looks, at what Lockheed and its sub-contractors were up to. It's believed they hacked a lot of computers, stole a lot of code and design secrets. Then the Americans made the incredibly stupid mistake of allowing a state-of-the-art stealth drone, the RQ-170, fall into Iranian hands almost intact.

The "bad guys" know more about America's stealth technology than America's allies do and probably ever will.  That's not a particularly good thing - for us, at least. They figured out a lot of the weaknesses and vulnerabilities in what are now America's "venerable" stealth warplanes. That has allowed them to develop some impressive air defence systems - multi- and broadband radars, long distance electro-optical sensors, multi-sensor anti-aircraft missiles.  They've also fielded their own stealth warplanes.

Here's the Russian entry, the Sukhoi PAK-FA.  This is designed to give the F-22 all it can handle.  It could also give the F-35 absolute fits.



Like the F-22, the Sukhoi is long-range, very fast and features thrust-vectoring nozzles.  Unlike the F-22, the Sukhoi's engines are set well apart to enhance control inputs and the nozzles can rotate through 360 degrees.  At the 5:30 mark in the video the Sukhoi appears to demonstrate a completely controlled flat spin.

Another feature of the Russian plane is that it appears to have a combination leading-edge extension/canard which probably remains fixed in stealth mode but comes into operation for close in air-to-air combat.

And, lest we be tempted to berate the Russians for stealing everything the Americans invented, it was a Russian mathematician who devised the calculations for stealth cloaking - all the ratios and angles, etc.  Some clever American engineers stumbled across the Russian paper, had it translated and turned it into this (which is Russian for "math"):

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?