The F-35, one of the most advanced aircraft ever built, and an ambitious attempt to make
a 5th generation fighter the mainstay of the American fighter fleet.
Such an accomplishment would be tantamount to another of America's famous 'offsets',
or technologies that set the US apart from the rest of the world and make it a dominant
military power.
A fully 5th-generation fighter fleet would put every air power in the world at serious
risk, and guarantee the continued domination of any air space, over any nation, by the
United States’ air forces.
Yet the F-35 has proven to be as troublesome as it is ambitious, and while some initial
problems are always expected of new aircraft, some of the F-35s crippling deficiencies may
end up turning the US from the most dominant air power on earth, to the most vulnerable.
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Infographics Show- today we're taking a look
at why the F-35 isn't ready for war.
Originally billed in 2001 as a cheap multi-role fighter that could fulfill a variety of combat
roles, the F-35 was as many now fear, too good to be true.
The aircraft would be stealthy- not as stealth capable as the B-2 bomber or even the F-22
Raptor, but far stealthier than any 4th generation platform.
In a world with ever-improving anti-air defenses, vastly improving targeting computers, and
more accurate radars, stealth was seen by the US Pentagon as the only way for a future
fighter to remain survivable over hostile airspace.
The F-35 would also be designed to fulfill various mission roles, including ground attack
capabilities to support troops in need of air support, air to air superiority, amphibious
assault, and electronic warfare, and it would do all these things for the incredibly cheap
price tag of $38 million per plane.
With the Air Force's F-15 Strike Eagle averaging a cost of $31.8 million, this price tag was
a steal for congress.
Yet today the F-35 is averaging $158.4 million per plane, and while that figure will inevitably
drop as production moves to full rate, it is still way over cost and will never come
close to the original $38 million price tag.
Not only is the plane way over price, but despite some units achieving initial operational
readiness status, the plane continues to severely underperform in several critical areas such
as availability and reliability, cyber-vulnerability, and life-expectancy.
Perhaps even more troubling, the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation's 2018
report on the aircraft showed an incredible lack of transparency and absolutely no updates
on crippling vulnerabilities identified in earlier annual reports.
As a result the American taxpayer is in the dark about the status of the most expensive
weapons program in history, but about the only thing that's clear is that its much-vaunted
5th generation fighter is in no way ready for war.
The most important measure of an aircraft's readiness for combat is its “fully mission
capable rate”, or the percentage of aircraft that have fully functional, non-degraded vehicle
systems such as flight controls and engine, electronic mission systems such as radar,
electronic warfare systems, and its computers, and weapons employment capabilities In 2017
the F-35 had a 26 percent fully mission capable rate across the entire fleet, not entirely
unexpected as the aircraft was still very much in late stages of development.
However the 2018 Director of Operational Test and Evaluation's report failed to mention
what readiness was across the entire fleet, leaving many to suspect that readiness has
decreased rather than increased.
So what exactly is wrong with the F-35, or at least what do we know that is wrong with
it?
The F-35 is armed with a 25mm gun for use both in close air support for ground troops,
and in dogfighting situations should the plane find itself in one.
Yet the F-35's gun has famously not been able to shoot straight for years.
In a ground attack role, strafing with a gun is preferred over missiles or bombs because
guns are more accurate and less dangerous to friendly forces when used on enemy troops
in close contact, or when civilians are in the area.
Yet while the Navy and Marine Corps' F-35s have had their guns fixed, the Air Force's
F-35A still cannot shoot straight, and instead shoots long and to the right of targets when
pilots aim using cues projected inside their helmets.
Despite repeated attempts to patch this software bug over the last two years, the Air Force's
F-35As still seem to be no closer to a fix, and will be banned from using their cannon
in ground-attack roles for the foreseeable future.
Should an Air Force F-35A find itself in a dogfight scenario, the glitch may just prove
fatal for the pilot.
It's not just the gun's accuracy that is in question though, so is the amount of ammunition-
typically 182 rounds- as well as the type of ammunition that it fires.
Though the F-35 is slated to replace the venerable and much feared A-10 Warthog as the Air Force's
ground-attack aircraft, the F-35A carries about one tenth the ammunition of a Warthog,
which carries 1,350 rounds.
Testing of the various ammunition types fired by the F-35 also throws into question its
efficacy, for while the Warthog is famously able to penetrate the top armor of modern
tanks with its 30mm cannon, the F-35's 25mm cannon has only been tested in limited quantities
against lightly armored and plywood targets.
Most worrisome is the fact that there seems to be no further gun-effectiveness testing
planned for the future.
The F-35 is also showing key failures in durability testing.
Each new aircraft is supposed to have a service life of 8,000 flight hours, the standard for
any military aircraft.
To ensure that a new air frame is designed to last, each model is put through rigorous
testing that simulates three lifetimes' worth- or 24,000 hours- of structural load testing.
This intense testing is meant to simulate the massive stresses placed on the air frame
during landings, takeoffs, and flight maneuvers, yet during this testing engineers working
on the F-35 have found several key vulnerabilities.
In 2010 an attachment joint between the vertical tail and the airframe on an Air Force F-35A
failed, and forced a redesign of the joint which was later incorporated into the manufacturing
process.
While such early failures are expected and even planned for, nine years on serious deficiencies
in the airframe continue to plague the aircraft.
So far the Marine's F-35B has been unable to complete the three lifetimes' worth of
testing, and no fix has been incorporated into the design.
This means that when the F-35B goes into full-rate production later this year, the aircraft will
only have a lifetime of 2,100 hours.
The Marine Corps will have to start retiring the first of its F-35s in just seven years,
and may never receive an aircraft capable of carrying out an 8,000 hour service life.
The Navy's F-35C managed to make it further along in testing, but tests were cancelled
halfway through the third lifetime iteration after damage to several structural components
was discovered.
The damage proved too costly to repair, and just like the F-35B, there are currently no
plans to address the faults before the aircraft goes into full-rate production.
At least the Navy's F-35s will last longer than the Marine Corps, but both versions of
the aircraft will fall far short of the 8,000 hour service life requirement imposed by the
Pentagon.
The F-35's infamous Autonomic Logistics Information System- or ALIS- is also under intense scrutiny.
Operated by Lockheed Martin who boasted that the system would reduce operating costs and
increase aircraft availability, this global network is supposed to integrate maintenance
diagnosis and scheduling with supply chain management and combat-mission planning and
threat analysis In plainspeak, ALIS was meant to automate the F-35's supply chain by gathering
data on what maintenance various planes needed, what missions they were slated for, and what
threats they were expecting to fly against.
This way Lockheed Martin and other defense contractors could instantly and proactively
respond to the maintenance needs of the F-35, preparing and shipping parts and fixes as
needed and taking a lot of the stress off the military.
Yet the system has been plagued with false positive maintenance diagnoses, overworking
aircraft maintainers with cumbersome data entry procedures, and slow uploads and downloads
between the aircraft and ALIS.
The system has so many flaws and failures that Lockheed Martin itself didn't use the
system on their manufacturing floor until March 2018.
Perhaps one of the most serious problems with the entire F-35 program is that there still
exists no programming capacity to create the F-35's critical Mission Data Loads.
These are computer programs which include up-to-date information on enemy ground and
air radar signals, missiles and jammers, and similar information for friendly units.
Before flying each mission, an F-35 must be loaded with a Mission Data Load that is specific
to its current threat environment, and yet the United States Reprogramming Laboratory
at Florida's Eglin Air Force Base is not only well behind schedule creating these vital
files, but lacks adequate equipment to test and optimize MDLs under conditions stressing
enough to ensure adequate performance against current and future threats.
Current F-35s are flying with old or incomplete information on enemy and friendly platforms,
and this is a huge vulnerability for an aircraft who's advanced computers run powerful sensors
and make use of the F-35's stealth features in order to keep a pilot safe.
In order to ensure the onboard computers can keep an F-35 safe, its various sensors must
be tested against accurate enemy radar signals, and yet current testing facilities are far
inadequate for the task.
While the US government has allocated funding for the acquiring of eight high-fidelity signal
emulator channels in each of its two test lines by the end of 2019, the F-35 program's
own office stated that it needs 16 to 20 such high-fidelity channels in each test line in
order to adequately replicate near-peer threat signal environments for MDL testing.
That means that F-35s are currently, and will continue to be deployed for years to come
with inadequate testing of its various sensors against realistic threats.
This could potentially place F-35 pilots in serious risk, and jeopardize mission success.
Touted as a “computer that happens to fly”, the F-35 has more brains than any other aircraft
to date- yet all those cyber brains are critically vulnerable to being hacked, much the same
as any other computer system.
A Government Accountability Office released a report in 2018 showing that nearly every
software-enabled weapon system tested between 2012 and 2017 could be hacked by an enemy,
and often by simple means such as looking up default passwords online for commercially
available software.
Some parts of the F-35 program use such commercially available software, ALIS for instance runs
on Windows.
Yet while cybersecurity testing has long been a part of the F-35 program, and the testing
office has kept any specific issues discovered secret, reports in 2018 showed that some of
the vulnerabilities identified early on in testing still had not been fixed.
Call for more cyber testing of the aircraft, and more importantly it's supply chain, have
been made, yet concerns over ALIS in particular are so significant that officials warned the
US military should find a way to operate the F-35 entirely without it in case the network
was compromised.
While the F-35 has shown promising combat capabilities in flight exercises against 4th
generation aircraft from around the world, it's clear that the most ambitious aircraft
ever created is also turning out to be one of the most difficult to actually field.
While these are no indication of how the aircraft will perform in 10 years time, the F-35 is
enroute to one of the most troubled rollouts in military history, and some have already
called into question the continued superiority of the United States’ Air Forces not just
in the near-term, but in the long-term as well.
Only time will tell how the F-35 performs in future conflicts, but what is clear is
that after billions invested, the Pentagon is committed to making the aircraft a success.
Should the entire F-35 program be canceled?
Why or why not?
Let us know in the comments!
Also, be sure to check out our other video US F-35 vs Russian Su-35 Fighter Jet - Which
Would Win?
- . Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.