Bharat Rakshak

In the strategic defence and security review (SDSR), the prime minister insisted the carriers would have to be converted to include "cats and traps" to allow a version of the new Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) to be catapulted from the decks and caught by arrestor wires on landing. But the Guardian has been told the cost of the modification has spiralled out of control, to between £1.9 and £2bn.

With the "carrier variant" version of the JSF also beset by technical problems, the MoD has concluded the carrier programme could be delayed by at least another seven years – to 2027 – unless it abandons the plan.

Though he knows the U-turn will be humiliating for the coalition, Cameron has been told the best option is to switch back to another version of the JSF, which was ruled out in the review because it was likely to cost more and do less.

The bigger it gets.... the bigger its cross section, and the bigger its unmaintainability....
Ref: Raptor

I will personally throw eggs on the guy who touts the AMCA as the worlds smallest and lightest 5th gen strike a/c.
that would be missing the biggest lesson from Tejas and JSF - size matters.

in strike role:4 x 1000lb/8 x 1000lb/ 2 x ALCM cruise missiles2 x wvr aamupto 4 bvr aam (though none or only 2 may be carried to save weight & fuel burn)

Aeronautics giant Lockheed Martin will today give evidence on the troubled Joint Strike Fighter project. Tim Lester reports.

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the supposed backbone of the Pentagon’s future air arsenal, could need additional years of work and billions of dollars in unplanned fixes, the Air Force and the Government Accountability Office revealed on Tuesday. Congressional testimony by Air Force and Navy leaders, plus a new report by the GAO, heaped bad news on a program that was already almost a decade late, hundreds of billions of dollars over its original budget and vexed by mismanagement, safety woes and rigged test results.

At an estimated $1 trillion to develop, purchase and support through 2050, the Lockheed Martin-built F-35 was already the most expensive conventional weapons program ever even before Tuesday’s bulletins. The Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps are counting on buying as many as 2,500 F-35s to replace almost every tactical jet in their current inventories. More than a dozen foreign countries are lined up to acquire the stealthy, single-engine fighter, as well.

In its report the GAO reserved its most dire language for the JSF’s software, which agency expert Michael Sullivan said is “as complicated as anything on earth.” The new jet needs nearly 10 million lines of on-board code, compared to 5 million for the older F-22 and just 1.5 million for the Navy’s F/A-18 Super Hornet. “Software providing essential JSF capability has grown in size and complexity, and is taking longer to complete than expected,” the GAO warned.

Software delays plus continuing mechanical and safety problems prompted JSF program chief Adm. David Venlet to back away from a firm schedule for the new fighter’s frontline introduction. When the F-35 was conceived in the late 1990s, it was expected to begin flying combat missions as early as 2010. Lately military officials have mentioned 2018 as a likely start date. In his Congressional testimony, Venlet declined to even mention a possible timeframe for the JSF’s service entry.

The GAO predicts the JSF’s $400-billion combined development and production cost will grow later this year, once the Pentagon computes a new program “baseline” — something it’s already done no fewer than five times since 2001. Aside from a 400-plane reduction in 2003, the Pentagon has always opted to increase the program’s budget rather than cut production numbers. That’s no longer possible, Air Force Secretary Michael Donley told Congress. “To the extent that there continue to be cost growth or challenges … we’ll have to take down the number of aircraft,” he said.

Air Combat Command, which oversees most of the Air Force’s fighter squadrons, seconded Donley’s view. “We cannot simply buy our way out of our problems or shortfalls as we have been able to do in the past,” the command stated in a report last week.

If cuts do occur, the U.S. will be in good company. Australia, Canada and Japan have already begun backing away from the troubled JSF as the new plane has gradually exceeded their budgets. For these countries, alternatives include the Super Hornet and an upgraded F-15 from Boeing, Lockheed’s new F-16V and the European Typhoon, Rafale and Gripen fighters. But so far the U.S. military prefers the F-35, even if the stealthy jet is more than a decade late, twice as expensive as originally projected and available in fewer numbers. “We will remain committed to the long-term success of the F-35 program,” Air Combat Command asserted.

Austin, give me a reliable trustworty rar open software so I can open it.

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I soooooo wish that Canada had done a competitive comparison for this next aircraft, like the IAF did with the MMRCA. That was a process that I think represents the professionalism of the IAF very well, and which I believe has resulted in the perfect choice for India, the Rafale. I think that the Rafale might just be a good bird for Canada too, IMHO (although, I would like to see an independent and professionalized process that would reach its own conclusion).

The F-35 is a boondoggle. It's time to throw it in the trash bin.
BY WINSLOW WHEELER | APRIL 26, 2012

The United States is making a gigantic investment in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, billed by its advocates as the next -- by their count the fifth -- generation of air-to-air and air-to-ground combat aircraft. Claimed to be near invisible to radar and able to dominate any future battlefield, the F-35 will replace most of the air-combat aircraft in the inventories of the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and at least nine foreign allies, and it will be in those inventories for the next 55 years. It's no secret, however, that the program -- the most expensive in American history -- is a calamity.

This month, we learned that the Pentagon has increased the price tag for the F-35 by another $289 million -- just the latest in a long string of cost increases -- and that the program is expected to account for a whopping 38 percent of Pentagon procurement for defense programs, assuming its cost will grow no more. Its many problems are acknowledged by its listing in proposals for Pentagon spending reductions by leaders from across the political spectrum, including Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), President Barack Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, and budget gurus such as former Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) and Alice Rivlin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office and Office of Management and Budget.

How bad is it? A review of the F-35's cost, schedule, and performance -- three essential measures of any Pentagon program -- shows the problems are fundamental and still growing.

First, with regard to cost -- a particularly important factor in what politicians keep saying is an austere defense budget environment -- the F-35 is simply unaffordable. Although the plane was originally billed as a low-cost solution, major cost increases have plagued the program throughout the last decade. Last year, Pentagon leadership told Congress the acquisition price had increased another 16 percent, from $328.3 billion to $379.4 billion for the 2,457 aircraft to be bought. Not to worry, however -- they pledged to finally reverse the growth.

The result? This February, the price increased another 4 percent to $395.7 billion and then even further in April. Don't expect the cost overruns to end there: The test program is only 20 percent complete, the Government Accountability Office has reported, and the toughest tests are yet to come. Overall, the program's cost has grown 75 percent from its original 2001 estimate of $226.5 billion -- and that was for a larger buy of 2,866 aircraft.

Hundreds of F-35s will be built before 2019, when initial testing is complete. The additional cost to engineer modifications to fix the inevitable deficiencies that will be uncovered is unknown, but it is sure to exceed the $534 million already known from tests so far. The total program unit cost for each individual F-35, now at $161 million, is only a temporary plateau. Expect yet another increase in early 2013, when a new round of budget restrictions is sure to hit the Pentagon, and the F-35 will take more hits in the form of reducing the numbers to be bought, thereby increasing the unit cost of each plane.

A final note on expense: The F-35 will actually cost multiples of the $395.7 billion cited above. That is the current estimate only to acquire it, not the full life-cycle cost to operate it. The current appraisal for operations and support is $1.1 trillion -- making for a grand total of $1.5 trillion, or more than the annual GDP of Spain. And that estimate is wildly optimistic: It assumes the F-35 will only be 42 percent more expensive to operate than an F-16, but the F-35 is much more complex. The only other "fifth generation" aircraft, the F-22 from the same manufacturer, is in some respects less complex than the F-35, but in 2010, it cost 300 percent more to operate per hour than the F-16. To be very conservative, expect the F-35 to be twice the operating and support cost of the F-16.

Already unaffordable, the F-35's price is headed in one direction -- due north.

The F-35 isn't only expensive -- it's way behind schedule. The first plan was to have an initial bath of F-35s available for combat in 2010. Then first deployment was to be 2012. More recently, the military services have said the deployment date is "to be determined." A new target date of 2019 has been informally suggested in testimony -- almost 10 years late.

If the F-35's performance were spectacular, it might be worth the cost and wait. But it is not. Even if the aircraft lived up to its original specifications -- and it will not -- it would be a huge disappointment. The reason it is such a mediocrity also explains why it is unaffordable and, for years to come, unobtainable.

In discussing the F-35 with aviation and acquisition experts -- some responsible for highly successful aircraft such as the F-16 and the A-10, and others with decades of experience inside the Pentagon and years of direct observation of the F-35's early history -- I learned that the F-35's problems are built into its very DNA.

The design was born in the late 1980s in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon agency that has earned an undeserved reputation for astute innovation. It emerged as a proposal for a very short takeoff and vertical-landing aircraft (known as "STOVL") that would also be supersonic. This required an airframe design that -- simultaneously -- wanted to be short, even stumpy, and single-engine (STOVL), and also sleek, long, and with lots of excess power, usually with twin engines.

President Bill Clinton's Pentagon bogged down the already compromised design concept further by adding the requirement that it should be a multirole aircraft -- both an air-to-air fighter and a bomber. This required more difficult tradeoffs between agility and low weight, and the characteristics of an airframe optimized to carry heavy loads. Clinton-era officials also layered on "stealth," imposing additional aerodynamic shape requirements and maintenance-intensive skin coatings to reduce radar reflections. They also added two separate weapons bays, which increase permanent weight and drag, to hide onboard missiles and bombs from radars. On top of all that, they made it multiservice, requiring still more tradeoffs to accommodate more differing, but exacting, needs of the Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy.

Finally, again during the Clinton administration, the advocates composed a highly "concurrent" acquisition strategy. That meant hundreds of copies of the F-35 would be produced, and the financial and political commitments would be made, before the test results showed just what was being bought.

This grotesquely unpromising plan has already resulted in multitudes of problems -- and 80 percent of the flight testing remains. A virtual flying piano, the F-35 lacks the F-16's agility in the air-to-air mode and the F-15E's range and payload in the bombing mode, and it can't even begin to compare to the A-10 at low-altitude close air support for troops engaged in combat. Worse yet, it won't be able to get into the air as often to perform any mission -- or just as importantly, to train pilots -- because its complexity prolongs maintenance and limits availability. The aircraft most like the F-35, the F-22, was able to get into the air on average for only 15 hours per month in 2010 when it was fully operational. (In 2011, the F-22 was grounded for almost five months and flew even less.)

This mediocrity is not overcome by the F-35's "fifth-generation" characteristics, the most prominent of which is its "stealth." Despite what many believe, "stealth" is not invisibility to radar; it is limited-detection ranges against some radar types at some angles. Put another way, certain radars, some of them quite antiquated, can see "stealthy" aircraft at quite long ranges, and even the susceptible radars can see the F-35 at certain angles. The ultimate demonstration of this shortcoming occurred in the 1999 Kosovo war, when 1960s vintage Soviet radar and missile equipment shot down a "stealthy" F-117 bomber and severely damaged a second.

The bottom line: The F-35 is not the wonder its advocates claim. It is a gigantic performance disappointment, and in some respects a step backward. The problems, integral to the design, cannot be fixed without starting from a clean sheet of paper.

It's time for Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, the U.S. military services, and Congress to face the facts: The F-35 is an unaffordable mediocrity, and the program will not be fixed by any combination of hardware tweaks or cost-control projects. There is only one thing to do with the F-35: Junk it. America's air forces deserve a much better aircraft, and the taxpayers deserve a much cheaper one. The dustbin awaits.

<snip>The United States is making a gigantic investment in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, billed by its advocates as the next - by their count the fifth - generation of air-to-air and air-to-ground combat aircraft.

Claimed to be near invisible to radar and able to dominate any future battlefield, the F-35 will replace most of the air-combat aircraft in the inventories of the US Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and at least nine foreign allies (including Australia), and it will be in those inventories for the next 55 years.

It's no secret, however, that the program - the most expensive in American history - is a calamity.</snip>

Was F-15 cost, even if we take the cost in today's terms, worth it? Yes. A plane is judged based on its capability and what it brings to the table. And what F-15 gave america and its allies was just that.

Yes there are countries, which have cut back or are planning to cut back on F-35 fighter procurement, but that is because a majority of them are undergoing significant economic difficulties. In US also the decision to spend so much money on a fighter, is being questioned because US has an unemployment of 8%, a growth which is barely touching 3% and an economic malaise, which is proving hard to overcome.

If money were the primary driving mechanism in weapon system procurement, we would all be having piston-engine fighters. There is a price to be paid, for being on cutting - edge. There is a cost involved for making something which is better than what others have. It is either we take the risk or dont. We either have the heart or shy away from a challenge.

Amazing,there was this news item just recently about the USN wanting a new carrier strike fighter from 2030 onwards! Does this then signify that for all practical purposes other than national pride,the "turkey" is to be served at Thanksgiving?

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The cost of Lockheed Martin's Joint Strike Fighter has doubled since 2001 to about $162 million per aircraft
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The program called for launching construction at an early stage, at the same time the aircraft was being put through flight tests -- on the assumption that technical hurdles had been worked out in computer modeling.

The approach was supposed to save time and money, but instead "concurrency" has become a vicious circle. Technical glitches force delays in production schedules, resulting in expensive redesigns and cost overruns.

"Fundamentally, that was a miscalculation," Vice Admiral David Venlet, who was appointed last year to oversee the program, said about concurrency.
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Tests have revealed a host of problems, including excessive vibration, a malfunctioning high tech helmet display and a flawed tail hook on the F-35C that fails to catch arresting gear wires on aircraft carriers.

There are also persistent software problems, in an aircraft that has 24 million lines of code, three times the number for the latest model US fighter, the F-22 Raptor.
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. To limit the damage, the Defense Department expects to build 365 planes by 2017, instead of an initial plan for 1,591 in the same period
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Norway’s parliament has voted to approve an order for 52 F-35A Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters for its air force, authorising the acquisition of the first two jets.

Under the order, Norway’s first two aircraft will be operated in the US, along with two others being delivered in 2016 for training purposes. The remaining 48 F-35s delivered from 2017 onwards will be based at Ørland Main Air Station in central Norway.

As part of the deal, Norway has also confirmed that its locally developed Kongsberg Joint Strike Missile anti-ship and maritime strike weapon will be integrated into the F-35 following dialogue with the US Department of Defense.

“The F-35 provides operational capabilities and partnership opportunities that strengthen and enhance Norway’s security, European security and the NATO alliance,” said Lockheed Martin director international business development Jim Latham.

“We consider it a great privilege to work with Norway’s government and industry to build and deliver fifth generation fighter capabilities to the Royal Norwegian Air Force and provide high technology industrial benefits to Norwegian industry.”

The overall cost of the procurement phase of the project is estimated at NOK 60bn (A$9.96bn) in real terms, making it the largest ever military procurement in Norway’s history.

The Joint Strike Missile, which can be carried internally in the F-35′s weapons bays, is of interest to the RAAF in providing its forthcoming F-35As with a naval strike capability.