JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

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Viv S
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by Viv S »

Philip wrote:A few JSF 2014 reports.

http://www.worldtribune.com/2014/04/29/ ... sia-china/
F-35 fails stealth test: Report says JSF vulnerable to tracking by Russia, China
Special to WorldTribune.com

WASHINGTON — The Joint Strike Fighter, plagued by technical flaws and budget overruns, has now failed in achieving stealth capability.
Xcpt:Bill Sweetman, a senior editor at Aviation Week, asserted that the Defense Department decided to reduce JSF’s stealth capability through underestimating the radar capabilities of U.S. adversaries.

“The F-35 is susceptible to detection by radars operating in the VHF bands of the spectrum,” Sweetman said. “The fighter’s jamming is mostly confined to the X-band, in the sector covered by its APG-81 radar. These are not criticisms of the program but the result of choices by the customer, the Pentagon.”

In an analysis that appeared in Aviation Week and the Daily Beast on April 28, Sweetman said the F-35 was also not “particularly good at jamming enemy radar.” He said the Pentagon would be forced to deploy special electronic warfare aircraft to protect JSF.


Lockheed Martin had long touted JSF as a stealth aircraft. But Sweetman said JSF was given an expendable radar decoy to disrupt a missile attack rather than to prevent tracking.
However susceptible as the F-35 is VHF (early warning) radars, the PAK FA and J-20 are more. The F-35 does need to be invincible, just needs to be better than its adversary.
Feb 22 2014
Lockheed F-35 for Marines Delayed as Test Exposes Cracks
By Tony Capaccio Feb 21, 2014

On-the-ground stress testing for the U.S. Marine Corps version of Lockheed Martin Corp.’s F-35 jet may be halted for as long as a year after cracks were found in the aircraft’s bulkheads, Pentagon officials said.

Will bulkhead cracks also influence the F-35A?


Gepubliceerd door JSFNieuws.nl onder Global F35 News

Fatigue tests show problems with the main bulkheads, not only

Source: Bloomberg; 21-feb-2014; F-35 fighter for Marines face year’s test delay
JSFnieuws140222-JB/jb
Already posted. Not relevant to an export customer.
F-35 jet orders and industry, promises fading away……
Gepubliceerd door JSFNieuws.nl onder Global F35 News

Washington Post writes about the trimming back of the F-35 fighter jet orders in FY2015

The fiscal 2015 request, to be released 4-March-2014, will include:
- 26 F-35As (US Air Force model)
- 6 F-35Bs (US Marine Corps’ short-takeoff and vertical-landing jets)
- 2 F-35C (US Navy’s version for aircraft carriers)
This means about 8 less than planned one year ago and more than 40 in comparison with the planning of 2008. As part of the original plan (2002), USAF should have been ordering 110 F-35s this year.
F-35 production rate:

2012 - 30 aircraft

2013 - 36 aircraft

2014 - 35 aircraft

2015 - 35 aircraft

2016 - 57 aircraft

No downsizing whatsover of the final production figure of 2443 units.

Edit: Corrected.
Last edited by Viv S on 08 May 2014 18:09, edited 1 time in total.
brar_w
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by brar_w »

Production rate:

2012 - 30 aircraft

2013 - 36 aircraft

2014 - 35 aircraft

2015 - 57 aircraft
The order status so far is (to the best of my knowledge):

Lot 1- 2
Lot 2- 6
Lot 3 - 21
Lot 4 - 32
Lot 5 - 32
Lot 6 -36
Lot 7 -35
Lot 8 - 35
Lot 9- 57


Thats the order status and not production. They are currently producing Lot6 this year. Next year they will produce Lot7, and in 2016 lot8 and so on. The 57 aircraft LOT 9 will be in production in 2018, although contract would be signed next year. They have already received some 500 million (or more, not sure) dollars to begin purchasing and fabricating long lead items on the Lot 9 aircraft. After that there will be the last Low rate Lot 10 for production and deliveries in 2018. That lot will have more than 57 deliveries. Beyond that will be full rate of production that will start at anywhere from 100-200 per annum and slowly ramp up.
Viv S
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by Viv S »

brar_w wrote:The order status so far is (to the best of my knowledge):
Yeah missed the LRIP 8 orders in that post.
Thats the order status and not production. They are currently producing Lot6 this year. Next year they will produce Lot7, and in 2016 lot8 and so on.
LRIP 6 deliveries start in the 'second quarter' of 2014 IIRC. So main production (as opposed to advanced procurement) presumably started in 2013. So that's the year I associated to the production rate. In terms of delivery rate perhaps 2014 would be more accurate.
brar_w
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by brar_w »

If the program signs a bulk purchase deal for lot 8 and lot 9 (like they did for lot 6 and 7) then the combined numbers would be 92. Thats a sizable chunk for a bulk purchase and should bring the price down. Of course when bulk contracts are awarded closer to 2020 and beyond they will be upwards of 400 aircraft at a time.

That is if the program does not ABORT before that ;)
Austin
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by Austin »

F-35 Lightning II Integrated Test Force 2013 Year in Review

brar_w
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by brar_w »

April Marks New F-35 Flying Records
F-35 Lightning II aircraft fleet, which surpassed 16,000 cumulative program flight hours to date in April, flew a monthly record high for System Development and Demonstration (SDD) with 282 flight hours and 153 flights in April.

“The SDD fleet achieving more than 150 flights in one month speaks to the quality of this aircraft and the commitment of this team,” said J.D. McFarlan, Lockheed Martin's vice president for F-35 Test & Verification. “We’re nearly complete with Block 2B software flight science testing on the F-35As, and we’ll move forward with Block 3 software testing this summer. The SDD program is scheduled to complete Block 2B testing for the F-35B this year in support of the U.S. Marine Corps’ Initial Operational Capability (IOC) in 2015 with its F-35B fleet.”

In April, operational F-35s fleet-wide flew 812 hours, with SDD F-35 aircraft flying 282 flight hours in one month. In 2014, through April, F-35A test aircraft flew 420 hours; F-35B test aircraft flew 281 hours; and F-35C test aircraft flew 222 hours. Operational F-35s of all three variants flew 2,790 hours for the year.

Operational F-35s at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., flew 515 flight hours in April, and operational F-35 at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, Ariz., flew 172 hours. Eglin’s 33rd Fighter Wing is home to 48 F-35A/B/Cs and provides training for U.S. military and program partner nation pilots and maintenance personnel. Yuma is home to the Marine Corps’ first operational F-35B Short Takeoff/Vertical Landing aircraft.

Among the record SDD flights, the F-35B version completed its 700th vertical takeoff and landing sortie, and it began crosswind landings and expeditionary operations.
Philip
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by Philip »

AMRAAM "Achilles heel"? Wonderful! When even US pilots say that the AMRAAM is inadequate,their "Achilles heel",we have the most ardent salesmen for it!

Lockheed Test Pilot Calls For Longer Range AIM-120
by Mike Hoffman on February 18, 2014
Read more: http://defensetech.org/2014/02/18/test- ... z31BrCYsJF
Defense.org

xcpts:
He highlighted the recent advances made by the Chinese and the range of their missile defenses and fighter aircraft.

“When we war game it out, that’s the Achilles heel of the U.S. fighter fleet,” Gigliotti said referring to the AIM-120 at a F-35 panel session at a Navy conference here. Two other Navy F-35 pilots and one Marine Corps F-35 aviator, who also sat on the panel, agreed with Gigliotti.


Gigliotti didn’t challenge the U.S. military to develop an improved variant. He instead challenged the defense industry to start developing one now.

Of course, the Air Force and Navy are in the last stages of operational testing for the AIM-120 D model. Most aircraft are equipped with the AIM-120C3-C7 variants.

Operational testing on the D-model was delayed when the Pentagon halted the program in 2009 to allow Raytheon, the lead contractor, to address four performance and reliability deficiencies. The program was restarted in 2012, but was then again delayed because of sequestration funding levels.

Read more: http://defensetech.org/2014/02/18/test- ... z31BrVcvxU
Defense.org
A comment:
Comments (159)
You mean to tell me this test pilot just said what everyone already knows?

I'll give you guys a hint on why this was not done earlier: "The program was restarted in 2012, but was then again delayed because of sequestration funding levels."

The funds for a longer range AIM-120D were taken and fed to the F-35 program. In fact, those funds are still being fed to the F-35 program right now. The Navy already has been saying for a while that what will matter in the future are payloads more and platforms less, which is why they want more Super Hornets and are still trying to ditch the F-35C against the OSD's wishes.


Let me give you the real translation of what these test pilots just said: "The F-35 is insufficient for future combat without better missiles."

Sound familiar to anyone? The F-35 is so expensive that everything must die in order for it to live.

The Russians are already aware of this dilemma and openly said they are doing something about it a long time ago: http://rt.com/news/t50-missile-advanced-guidance-643/

They have a new version of the R-77 in development for the PAK-FA that will field an AESA radar seeker (essentially the same thing we were probably doing with the AIM-120D AMRAAM). The Russians have found that producing AESA radar guided missiles is extremely expensive, but their conclusion was that if these new missiles can practically guarantee hitting and killing their target from extremely long ranges they're worth the cost. We're not gonna find funds like that in a budget dominated by the JSF. Our F-35 test pilots are only just now talking about this.

Read more: http://defensetech.org/2014/02/18/test- ... z31BrlTQJG
Defense.org
Future aircraft should be "Payload specific,not platform specific",Adm.Greenert,CNO of the USN,said so. This throws the entire concept and validity of the JSF into turmoil,an aircraft which still needs the F-22 without which it is "irrelevant" and n also needs a "Growler for EW protection"!

http://breakingdefense.com/wp-content/u ... report.pdf

Here is a comprehensive DOD report on the JSF programme.Too long to be posted,but one can judge for oneself where the programme is at the moment,major problems,"Weapons integration did not make the planned progress in CY 13",amongst others.


The Pentagon's own report.
Apr 05 2014
New Pentagon Report: F-35 performance problems

Last week the Annual Report of the Pentagon about Systems Engineering was published. One paragraph is about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and gives an interesting insight in the F-35’s ability to achieve defined Operational Requirements.
In a short analysis of the report learns that the F-35 will miss several critical (KPP) and essential performance parameters.

The FY2013 Annual Report conclusion: software most significant threat

The US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Systems Engineering (DASD(SE)) Stephen Welby provided the FY2013 Annual Report addressing the systems engineering capabilities of the Department of Defense (DoD) and systems engineering activities relating to the Major Defense Acquisition Programs (MDAP).

One of the FY2013 Annual Report’s conclusions is: The F-35 program completed subsystem technical reviews to address outstanding program-level technical issues and risks. Delivery of Block 3 software is the most significant threat to completion of SDD on the planned schedule.

The JSF Program Office has acknowledged the findings of the report, but didn’t want to discuss questions with the press ath this moment.

History F-35 operational requirements

The F-35 program plans to develop and field an affordable, common family of next-generation, multi-role strike aircraft for the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and allies. The three variants are the Air Force Conventional Takeoff and Landing, the Navy Carrier Variant (CV), and the Marine Corps Short Takeoff and Vertical Landing (STOVL).
In April 2000 the so called Milestone B Operational Requirements Document (ORD) in were incorporated in Joint StrikeFighter Contract Specification (JCS). During a CY 2013 review, the program reaffirmed that the JCS contained all the ORD requirements. But at this moment there is growing evidence that the F-35 will not be able to fullfil these contractual requirements.

Technical and Risk Assessments.

US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Systems Engineering reports:
DASD(SE) participated in several subsystem technical reviews including a Production Readiness Review (PRR) and a Quick Look Review (QLR) update. The QLR update confirmed that the risk was lower for the helmet, arresting hook, integrated power pack, and lightning protection, but risk remains in other areas including buffet, mission systems software, sustainment software, and tail heating. DASD(SE) also updated software analyses with the support of the JPO
and the contractor, and participated in acquisition/systems engineering planning activities.
Program risks are known and understood. The JSF program has risks in
development, sustainment, and production. Risk mitigation plans are in place, but documentation lags. The program made risk burn-down progress in FY 2013.

Sortie Generation Rate too low

Stephen Welby reveals about the performance of the F-35
The program is on track to meet seven of the eight KPPs. An issue with incorrect analysis/assumptions is hampering the attainment of the sortie generation rate (SGR) KPP. The program office is examining the sensitivity of the SGR KPP to establish more operationally realistic ground rules and assumptions. As a result, the program plans to reassess SGR.

This is remarkable, because the JORD (requirement specifications) of the F-35 the key perfmance parameters (KPP) specifies about the (minimum) sortie rate:
- Sortie rate F-35A: 3 sorties per day
- Sortie rate F-35B: 4 sorties per day
- Sortie rate F-35C: 3 sorties per day

Back in 2012, speaking at an event hosted by the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. the USAF chief of staff Gen Norton Schwartz told the public:
The US Air Force has concluded that the short take-off vertical landing (STOVL) Lockheed Martin F-35B- model aircraft cannot generate enough sorties to meet its needs; therefore the service will not consider replacing the Fairchild Republic A-10 Warthog close air support jet with that variant.

Now the Pentagon reports the SGR will be lower……….What’s next?

Other Key Performance Parameters

One could say: Key Performance Perimeters (KPP) is the basic performance requirement by the F-35. Back in February 2012 the JROC (Joint Requirements Oversight Council) ordered the JSF Program Office to reconsider KPPs that some versions of the F-35 were to miss. This resulted in:
- F-35A combat radius target (objective was 690 miles, down to 580 miles)
- F-35B longer runway allowed for short take-off’s
- F-35C higher maximum landing speed
However, at this moment DASD(SE) concluded that:
Although on track, the combat radius, STOVL performance, and CV recovery KPPs have limited margins.
The sortie generation KPP is not as contracted; the logistics footprint KPP is in danger. The mission reliability KPP (minimum 93%), at this moment, has a long way to go. The DOT&E report FY2013 (January 2014) found ”Reliability is poor and ranges from 30 to 39 percent behind the current objective. The “availability” of the existing fleet is getting worse and has never reached, is receding from, its quite modest threshold of 50 percent at this stage in the program. The amount of time needed to repair failures “has increased over the past year.

Other performance parameters

Stephen Welby has found that 16 of the 62 non-KPP ORD thresholds are not achievable by the end of the JSF-development (SDD). These capability goals also were defined in the April 2000 operational requirements document (ORD).
Another 8 of the 62 non-KPP are at risk of not achieving the threshold. These 8 non-KPP’s are not identified in the report. The JSF Program Office identified corrective actions or has way-ahead recommendations.

Already in the 2003 Selected Acquisition Report to the US Congress on the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) Program of Record, the Pentagon warned:
“Some non-KPP Threshold Requirements will not be met for all variants.”

However, nothing happened to correct this warnings.

In 2012 the Pentagon tried to ease several parameters already, after the DOT&E chief concluded that the F-35’s sustained turn rate requirements and its transonic acceleration requirements could not be met. One exemple: The program announced an intention to change performance specifications for the F-35C, reducing turn performance from 5.1 to 5.0 sustained g’s and increasing the time for acceleration from 0.8 Mach to 1.2 Mach by at least 43 seconds.
Sustained turning performance for the F-35A was being reduced from 5.3G to 4.6G according to the DOT&E FY2012 report.

Schedule

At this moment a Milestone C/Full Rate Production decision is planned for 2nd quarter FY 2019. The JSF development contract was signed on 16 November 1996. Joint Operational Requirements Document for the F-35 program was issued in March 2000 and revalidated by DOD’s Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) in October 2001. On October 24, 2001, the Defense Acquisition Board (DAB) held a Milestone B review for the program. This Milestone B approval would permit the program to enter the SDD phase. USD(AT&L) recertified Milestone B in February 2012 and approved an Acquisition Program Baseline (APB).

In 2012 the JSF program instituted a Block Review Board process to improve software integration with other activities and to support a more realistic SDD Integrated Master Schedule (IMS). The program maintains a technical review schedule, but many of the year’s events were delayed because the program had not met the entrance criteria. It is interesting to read that DASD(SE) plans to conduct an Integrated Master Schedule assessment in FY 2014.

Reliability

Stephen Welby reveals this:
Reliability data are below growth curves for all variants, and the program could face a risk to meeting reliability requirements without dedicated funding for a reliability growth program. Similarly, since O&S costs are based on meeting the required reliability at maturity, there are increasing risks to O&S cost and future aircraft availability. The program does not plan to complete prognostics portion of the Prognostics Health Management (PHM) requirements within SDD.

Software

Welby writes:
Software delivery for the remainder of Blocks 2/3 is a challenge because of the size and complexity (Approx. 28.9 million software lines of code (SLOC), with Approx. 2 million SLOC remaining).
DASD(SE) forecasts a schedule delay for Block 2 and a delay for Block 3. As a result, the program improved software processes but also shifted resources to Block 2 at the expense of Block 3. DASD(SE) plans to conduct a software development review in FY 2014.
However, even in the final “3F” software version, the F-35 will lack ROVER, in spite of having close air support as one of its primary missions. The Inertial navigation system does not work. There is an unknown bug with the AMRAAM. The DAS confuses the aircraft’s own flare launches with incoming missiles. Etcetera.

Manufacturing

Welby reports:
There was steady manufacturing progress in FY 2013, but quality, scrap, rework and repair, on-time part delivery, supplier execution, and reduced funding for future affordability initiatives are issues that may have an impact on costs for LRIP ramp-rate increases and FRP. In addition, there are production risks including part-interchangeability variation and fix schedule, outer-mold-line control, and maturing international capabilities.
DASD(SE) participated in two supplier reviews and the annual prime contractor PRR. There was improvement from the previous year, but there are risks remaining for all eight manufacturing areas assessed. Mitigation plans are in place or in development for all production issues, risks, and PRR findings.

Integration

Also a point of serious concerns:
Interoperability and information assurance (IA) certifications and verification and lab capacities are watch items. IA certification is on the critical path because most interoperability and full joint certifications cannot be completed until Block 3 capability is delivered and verified.
Verification and lab capacity may not support Block 2/3 demands, adding schedule pressure to capability deliveries. The program plans more efficient verification and is evaluating lab-capacity mitigation options. The program has established memoranda of agreement and Interface Control Working Groups with weapon program offices as documented in the SEP.

Source:
Department of Defense Systems Engineering FY 2013 Annual Report
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense; Systems Engineering; March 2014
Philip
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by Philip »

Here is an excellent feature on the entire programme,written not too long ago,borne out by the latest Pentagon/GAO reports.With the "truth" from Gen.Bogdan,head of the project himself.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2013 ... eed-martin
Will It Fly?

The Joint Strike Fighter is the most expensive weapons system ever developed. It is plagued by design flaws and cost overruns. It flies only in good weather. The computers that run it lack the software they need for combat. No one can say for certain when the plane will work as advertised. Until recently, the prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, was operating with a free hand—paid handsomely for its own mistakes. Looking back, even the general now in charge of the program can’t believe how we got to this point. In sum: all systems go!
By Adam Ciralsky Photographs by Stephen Wilkes

I. Situational Awareness

At nearly 500,000 acres, Eglin Air Force Base is not the most unobtrusive piece of real estate along Florida’s Emerald Coast. It is, however, among the best guarded. The base is home to top-secret weapons laboratories, swamp-training facilities for U.S. Special Forces, and the only supersonic range east of the Mississippi. Even from a great distance, bands of quivering heat can be seen rising from the miles of tarmac. At the end of May, I flew into Fort Walton Beach, a civilian airfield that shares a runway with Eglin, a fact that was driven home when the regional jet I was on ran over an arresting wire, a landing aid for fast-moving fighters, while taxiing to the gate.

With F-15s and F-16s circling overhead, I drove to the main gate at Eglin, where I was escorted through security and over to the air force’s 33rd Fighter Wing, which is home to the F-35 Lightning II, also known as the Joint Strike Fighter, and some of the men who fly it. The Joint Strike Fighter, or J.S.F., is the most expensive weapons system in American history. The idea behind it is to replace four distinct models of aging “fourth generation” military jets with a standardized fleet of state-of-the-art “fifth generation” aircraft. Over the course of its lifetime, the program will cost approximately $1.5 trillion. Walking around the supersonic stealth jet for the first time, I was struck by its physical beauty. Whatever its shortcomings—and they, like the dollars invested in the plane, are almost beyond counting—up close it is a dark and compelling work of art. To paraphrase an old Jimmy Breslin line, the F-35 is such a ******** thing that you don’t know whether to genuflect or spit.

When the J.S.F. program formally got under way, in October 2001, the Department of Defense unveiled plans to buy 2,852 of the airplanes in a contract worth an estimated $233 billion. It promised that the first squadrons of high-tech fighters would be “combat-capable” by 2010. The aircraft is at least seven years behind schedule and plagued by a risky development strategy, shoddy management, laissez-faire oversight, countless design flaws, and skyrocketing costs. The Pentagon will now be spending 70 percent more money for 409 fewer fighters—and that’s just to buy the hardware, not to fly and maintain it, which is even more expensive. “You can understand why many people are very, very skeptical about the program,

” Lieutenant General Christopher Bogdan, who has been in charge of it since last December, acknowledged when I caught up with him recently in Norway, one of 10 other nations that have committed to buy the fighter. “I can’t change where the program’s been. I can only change where it’s going.”


Lieutenant General Christopher C. Bogdan talks with members of the F-35 Integrated Test Force on January 2013 at Edwards Air Force Base. As the man now in charge of the Joint Strike Fighter, Bogdan has held the program and its prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, to scrutiny and found both of them deficient on many counts.

The 33rd Fighter Wing’s mission is to host air-force, Marine, and navy units responsible for training the pilots who will fly the F-35 and the “maintainers” who will look after it on the ground. The Marine unit, known as the Warlords, has outpaced the others: the commandant of the Marine Corps, General James Amos, has declared that his service will be the first to field a combat-ready squadron of F-35s. In April 2013, Amos told Congress that the Marines would declare what the military calls an “initial operational capability,” or I.O.C., in the summer of 2015. (Six weeks later, he moved the I.O.C. date to December 2015.) By comparison, the air force has declared an I.O.C. date of December 2016, while the navy has set a date of February 2019. An I.O.C. declaration for a weapons system is like a graduation ceremony: it means the system has passed a series of tests and is ready for war. The Marines have been very explicit about the significance of such a declaration, telling Congress on May 31, 2013, that “IOC shall be declared when the first operational squadron is equipped with 10-16 aircraft, and US Marines are trained, manned, and equipped to conduct [Close Air Support], Offensive and Defensive Counter Air, Air Interdiction, Assault Support Escort, and Armed Reconnaissance in concert with Marine Air Ground Task Force resources and capabilities.”

The chief Warlord at Eglin is a 40-year-old lieutenant colonel named David Berke, a combat veteran of both Afghanistan and Iraq. As we walked around the Warlords’ hangar—which for a maintenance facility is oddly pristine, like an automobile showroom—Berke made clear that he and his men are intently focused on their mission: training enough Marine pilots and maintainers to meet the 2015 deadline. Asked whether Washington-imposed urgency—rather than the actual performance of the aircraft—was driving the effort, Berke was adamant: “Marines don’t play politics. Talk to anyone in this squadron from the pilots to the maintainers. Not a single one of them will lie to protect this program.” During the day and a half I spent with the Warlords and their air-force counterparts, the Gorillas, it became clear that the men who fly the F-35 are among the best fighter jocks America has ever produced. They are smart, thoughtful, and skilled—the proverbial tip of the spear. But I also wondered: Where’s the rest of the spear? Why, almost two decades after the Pentagon initially bid out the program, in 1996, are they flying an aircraft whose handicaps outweigh its proven—as opposed to promised—capabilities? By way of comparison, it took only eight years for the Pentagon to design, build, test, qualify, and deploy a fully functional squadron of previous-generation F-16s.

“The F-16 and F-35 are apples and oranges,” Major Matt Johnston, 35, an air-force instructor at Eglin, told me. “It’s like comparing an Atari video-game system to the latest and greatest thing that Sony has come up with. They’re both aircraft, but the capabilities that the F-35 brings are completely revolutionary.” Johnston, like Berke, is evangelical about the airplane and insistent that “programmatics”—the technological and political inner workings of the J.S.F. effort—are not his concern. He has a job to do, which is training pilots for the jet fighter that will someday be. He was candid about, but unfazed by, the F-35’s current limitations: the squadrons at Eglin are prohibited from flying at night, prohibited from flying at supersonic speed, prohibited from flying in bad weather (including within 25 miles of lightning), prohibited from dropping live ordnance, and prohibited from firing their guns. Then there is the matter of the helmet.

“The helmet is pivotal to the F-35,” Johnston explained.
“This thing was built with the helmet in mind. It gives you 360-degree battle-space awareness. It gives you your flight parameters: Where am I in space? Where am I pointing? How fast am I going?” But Johnston and Berke are prohibited from flying with the “distributed aperture system”—a network of interlaced cameras, which allows almost X-ray vision—that is supposed to be one of the airplane’s crowning achievements. The Joint Strike Fighter is still waiting on software from Lockheed that will make good on long-promised capabilities.

When I spoke with Lockheed’s vice president for program integration, Steve O’Bryan, he said that the company is moving at a breakneck pace, adding 200 software engineers and investing $150 million in new facilities. “This program was overly optimistic on design complexity and software complexity, and that resulted in overpromising and underdelivering,” O’Bryan said. He insisted that, despite a rocky start, the company is on schedule. Pentagon officials are not as confident. They cannot say when Lockheed will deliver the 8.6 million lines of code required to fly a fully functional F-35, not to mention the additional 10 million lines for the computers required to maintain the plane. The chasm between contractor and client was on full display on June 19, 2013, when the Pentagon’s chief weapons tester, Dr. J. Michael Gilmore, testified before Congress. He said that “less than 2 percent” of the placeholder software (called “Block 2B”) that the Marines plan to use has completed testing, though much more is in the process of being tested. (Lockheed insists that its “software-development plan is on track,” that the company has “coded more than 95 percent of the 8.6 million lines of code on the F-35,” and that “more than 86 percent of that software code is currently in flight test.”) Still, the pace of testing may be the least of it. According to Gilmore, the Block 2B software that the Marines say will make their planes combat capable will, in fact, “provide limited capability to conduct combat.” What is more, said Gilmore, if F-35s loaded with Block 2B software are actually used in combat, “they would likely need significant support from other fourth-generation and fifth-generation combat systems to counter modern, existing threats, unless air superiority is somehow otherwise assured and the threat is cooperative.” Translation: the F-35s that the Marines say they can take into combat in 2015 are not only ill equipped for combat but will likely require airborne protection by the very planes the F-35 is supposed to replace.
Software is hardly the only concern. In Norway, where he was addressing the Oslo Military Society, General Bogdan said, “I have a list of the 50 top parts of the airplane that break more often than we expect them to. And what I am doing is I am investing millions of dollars in taking each and every one of those parts and deciding: Do we need to redesign it? Do we need to have someone else manufacture it? Or can we figure out a way to repair it quicker and sooner so that it doesn’t drive up the costs?” This is very late in the game for an airplane the Marines intend to certify in two years.

*(Gen.Bogdan said-as was posted earlier,when replying to the Senate,that it will take "months,and months,and months" to rectify the problems,and at "some cost too".

In January, Berke’s Warlords had a close call of the kind that brings Bogdan’s Top 50 list into sharp relief. As a pilot was taxiing out to the runway for takeoff, a warning light went on in the cockpit indicating that there was a problem with the plane’s fuel pressure. Returning to the hangar, maintainers opened the engine-bay door to find that a brown hose carrying combustible fuel had separated from its coupling. When I asked what would have happened had the defect gone undetected before takeoff, Berke replied with the noncommittal detachment of a clinician: “I think you can easily infer that, from the fact that the fleet was grounded for six weeks, there was no question that the scenario, the outcomes, were not acceptable for flying.” What he meant, General Bogdan told me later, was that it was a very close call: “We should count our blessings that we caught this on the ground. It would have been a problem. A catastrophic problem.” (When asked about this incident, the engine’s prime contractor, Pratt & Whitney, wrote in a statement to Vanity Fair, “The engine control system responded properly when the leak occurred. The pilot followed standard operating procedures when he was alerted to the leak. The safeguards in place on the aircraft allowed the pilot to abort takeoff without incident and clear the active runway. There were no injuries to the pilot or ground crew. For clarification, the grounding was cleared three weeks after the event.”)

General Bogdan, it turned out, would have a lot more to say in the course of a long and forceful interview in which he held up the Joint Strike Fighter program and the prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, to scrutiny and found both of them deficient on many counts.

II. “Acquisition Malpractice”

Washington’s Union Station, modeled in part on the Baths of Diocletian, is a fitting gateway to a city that continues to spend on the military with imperial abandon. Earlier this year, I wound my way through throngs of travelers as I waited for a call. When it came, I was vectored to the top floor of the Center Café, which occupies a circular platform with a 360-degree view of the lobby below. The man I was to meet—I’ll call him “Charlie”—is a well-placed source with a decade’s worth of hands-on experience with the Joint Strike Fighter, both inside and outside the Pentagon. Charlie explained that his choice of meeting location was less paranoid than practical: the J.S.F. program is so large, financially and geographically—and saturated with so many lobbyists, corporate executives, congressional aides, Pentagon bureaucrats, and elected officials—that it takes considerable effort in Washington to avoid bumping into someone connected with the program. And he did not want to bump into anyone. He asked that I conceal his identity so he could speak candidly.

In the course of this and many other conversations, Charlie walked me through the troubled history of the airplane and tried to separate the rosy public-relations pronouncements from what he saw as the grim reality.

“The jet was supposed to be fully functional by now and that’s why they put people down in Eglin in 2010–2011—they were expecting a fully functional jet in 2012,” he said. “But the only military mission these planes can execute is a kamikaze one. They can’t drop a single live bomb on a target, can’t do any fighter engagements. There are limitations on Instrument Flight Rules—what’s required to take an airplane into bad weather and to fly at night. Every pilot out there in civil aviation, his pilot’s license says he can take off and land in perfect weather. Then they have to graduate to instrument conditions. What the program is saying is that the J.S.F., your latest and greatest fighter, is restricted from flying in instrument meteorological conditions—something a $60,000 Cessna can do.”

Charlie cited a news report about Frank Kendall, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for acquisition, who in 2012 had used the words “acquisition malpractice” to describe the design and production process for the Joint Strike Fighter. (In June 2013, Kendall sounded more optimistic during a conference call with me and other journalists: “I think all of us are encouraged by the progress we’re seeing. It’s too early to declare a victory; we have a lot of work left to do. But this program is on a much sounder, much more stable footing than it was a year or two ago.”)

Unfazed by Kendall’s change in tone, Charlie insists that technical problems will continue to bedevil the program. “You can trace the plane’s troubles today back to the 2006–2007 time frame,” he explained. “The program was at a critical point and Lockheed needed to prove they could meet weight requirements.” That, he says, led to a series of risky design decisions. “I can tell you, there was nothing they wouldn’t do to get through those reviews. They cut corners. And so we are where we are.” While acknowledging that weight was a pressing issue, Lockheed Martin spokesman Michael Rein told me that design trade-offs in 2006 and 2007 were made in concert with, and with the blessing of, Pentagon officials. He strenuously denied the company cut corners or in any way compromised safety or its core values.

III. Hands-Off Management

On October 26, 2001, the Pentagon announced that it had chosen Lockheed Martin over Boeing to build what Lockheed promised would be “the most formidable strike fighter ever fielded.” The Pentagon’s ask was huge: Build us a next-generation strike-fighter aircraft that could be used not only by the U.S. military but also by allied nations (which would come to include the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey, Canada, Australia, Denmark, Norway, Japan, and Israel). On top of that: Produce three versions of the airplane—a conventional version for the air force, a short-takeoff and vertical-landing version for the Marines, and a carrier-suitable version for the navy. The idea was that a single stealthy, supersonic, multi-service airplane could entirely replace four existing kinds of aircraft. And the expectation was that this new airplane would do everything: air-to-air combat, deep-strike bombing, and close air support of troops on the ground.

Lockheed Martin won the contract—worth more than $200 billion—after the much-chronicled “Battle of the X-Planes.” In truth, it was not much of a competition. Boeing’s X-32, the product of a mere four years’ work, paled next to Lockheed’s X-35, which had been in the works in one form or another since the mid-1980s, thanks to untold millions in black-budget funds the company had received from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a supersonic short-takeoff and vertical-landing aircraft.

To turn its X-35 prototype into a fleet of F-35 fighters, Lockheed has relied on two seemingly separate but equally controversial acquisition practices. In military jargon, these are known as “commonality” and “concurrency.”

Commonality simply meant that the three F-35 variants would share portions of high-cost components like the airframe, the avionics, and the engines. This was supposed to help ensure that the plane was “affordable”—a term that the company and Defense Department managers invoked with the frequency of a Vajrayana chant. But commonality did not really come to pass. The original plan was that about 70 percent of all the parts on the airplanes would be common; the actual figure today is about 25 percent. Commonality, even at this reduced level, has unintended consequences. When a crack in a low-pressure turbine blade was discovered in an air-force F-35A engine earlier this year, Pentagon officials took the only responsible course, given that the part is used in all models: they grounded the entire fleet of F-35s, not just the ones flown by the air force. In his June testimony, the Pentagon’s Dr. Gilmore revealed another, less public grounding of the entire F-35 test fleet, which occurred in March 2013 after the discovery of “excessive wear on the rudder hinge attachments.”
Last edited by Philip on 09 May 2014 10:44, edited 2 times in total.
Philip
BRF Oldie
Posts: 21537
Joined: 01 Jan 1970 05:30
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by Philip »

Contd:
In January, Berke’s Warlords had a close call of the kind that brings Bogdan’s Top 50 list into sharp relief. As a pilot was taxiing out to the runway for takeoff, a warning light went on in the cockpit indicating that there was a problem with the plane’s fuel pressure. Returning to the hangar, maintainers opened the engine-bay door to find that a brown hose carrying combustible fuel had separated from its coupling. When I asked what would have happened had the defect gone undetected before takeoff, Berke replied with the noncommittal detachment of a clinician: “I think you can easily infer that, from the fact that the fleet was grounded for six weeks, there was no question that the scenario, the outcomes, were not acceptable for flying.” What he meant, General Bogdan told me later, was that it was a very close call: “We should count our blessings that we caught this on the ground. It would have been a problem. A catastrophic problem.” (When asked about this incident, the engine’s prime contractor, Pratt & Whitney, wrote in a statement to Vanity Fair, “The engine control system responded properly when the leak occurred. The pilot followed standard operating procedures when he was alerted to the leak. The safeguards in place on the aircraft allowed the pilot to abort takeoff without incident and clear the active runway. There were no injuries to the pilot or ground crew. For clarification, the grounding was cleared three weeks after the event.”)

General Bogdan, it turned out, would have a lot more to say in the course of a long and forceful interview in which he held up the Joint Strike Fighter program and the prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, to scrutiny and found both of them deficient on many counts.

II. “Acquisition Malpractice”

Washington’s Union Station, modeled in part on the Baths of Diocletian, is a fitting gateway to a city that continues to spend on the military with imperial abandon. Earlier this year, I wound my way through throngs of travelers as I waited for a call. When it came, I was vectored to the top floor of the Center Café, which occupies a circular platform with a 360-degree view of the lobby below. The man I was to meet—I’ll call him “Charlie”—is a well-placed source with a decade’s worth of hands-on experience with the Joint Strike Fighter, both inside and outside the Pentagon. Charlie explained that his choice of meeting location was less paranoid than practical: the J.S.F. program is so large, financially and geographically—and saturated with so many lobbyists, corporate executives, congressional aides, Pentagon bureaucrats, and elected officials—that it takes considerable effort in Washington to avoid bumping into someone connected with the program. And he did not want to bump into anyone. He asked that I conceal his identity so he could speak candidly.

In the course of this and many other conversations, Charlie walked me through the troubled history of the airplane and tried to separate the rosy public-relations pronouncements from what he saw as the grim reality.

“The jet was supposed to be fully functional by now and that’s why they put people down in Eglin in 2010–2011—they were expecting a fully functional jet in 2012,” he said. “But the only military mission these planes can execute is a kamikaze one. They can’t drop a single live bomb on a target, can’t do any fighter engagements. There are limitations on Instrument Flight Rules—what’s required to take an airplane into bad weather and to fly at night. Every pilot out there in civil aviation, his pilot’s license says he can take off and land in perfect weather. Then they have to graduate to instrument conditions. What the program is saying is that the J.S.F., your latest and greatest fighter, is restricted from flying in instrument meteorological conditions—something a $60,000 Cessna can do.”

Charlie cited a news report about Frank Kendall, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for acquisition, who in 2012 had used the words “acquisition malpractice” to describe the design and production process for the Joint Strike Fighter. (In June 2013, Kendall sounded more optimistic during a conference call with me and other journalists: “I think all of us are encouraged by the progress we’re seeing. It’s too early to declare a victory; we have a lot of work left to do. But this program is on a much sounder, much more stable footing than it was a year or two ago.”)

Unfazed by Kendall’s change in tone, Charlie insists that technical problems will continue to bedevil the program. “You can trace the plane’s troubles today back to the 2006–2007 time frame,” he explained. “The program was at a critical point and Lockheed needed to prove they could meet weight requirements.” That, he says, led to a series of risky design decisions. “I can tell you, there was nothing they wouldn’t do to get through those reviews. They cut corners. And so we are where we are.” While acknowledging that weight was a pressing issue, Lockheed Martin spokesman Michael Rein told me that design trade-offs in 2006 and 2007 were made in concert with, and with the blessing of, Pentagon officials. He strenuously denied the company cut corners or in any way compromised safety or its core values.

III. Hands-Off Management

On October 26, 2001, the Pentagon announced that it had chosen Lockheed Martin over Boeing to build what Lockheed promised would be “the most formidable strike fighter ever fielded.” The Pentagon’s ask was huge: Build us a next-generation strike-fighter aircraft that could be used not only by the U.S. military but also by allied nations (which would come to include the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey, Canada, Australia, Denmark, Norway, Japan, and Israel). On top of that: Produce three versions of the airplane—a conventional version for the air force, a short-takeoff and vertical-landing version for the Marines, and a carrier-suitable version for the navy. The idea was that a single stealthy, supersonic, multi-service airplane could entirely replace four existing kinds of aircraft. And the expectation was that this new airplane would do everything: air-to-air combat, deep-strike bombing, and close air support of troops on the ground.

Lockheed Martin won the contract—worth more than $200 billion—after the much-chronicled “Battle of the X-Planes.” In truth, it was not much of a competition. Boeing’s X-32, the product of a mere four years’ work, paled next to Lockheed’s X-35, which had been in the works in one form or another since the mid-1980s, thanks to untold millions in black-budget funds the company had received from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a supersonic short-takeoff and vertical-landing aircraft.

To turn its X-35 prototype into a fleet of F-35 fighters, Lockheed has relied on two seemingly separate but equally controversial acquisition practices. In military jargon, these are known as “commonality” and “concurrency.”

Commonality simply meant that the three F-35 variants would share portions of high-cost components like the airframe, the avionics, and the engines. This was supposed to help ensure that the plane was “affordable”—a term that the company and Defense Department managers invoked with the frequency of a Vajrayana chant. But commonality did not really come to pass. The original plan was that about 70 percent of all the parts on the airplanes would be common; the actual figure today is about 25 percent. Commonality, even at this reduced level, has unintended consequences. When a crack in a low-pressure turbine blade was discovered in an air-force F-35A engine earlier this year, Pentagon officials took the only responsible course, given that the part is used in all models: they grounded the entire fleet of F-35s, not just the ones flown by the air force. In his June testimony, the Pentagon’s Dr. Gilmore revealed another, less public grounding of the entire F-35 test fleet, which occurred in March 2013 after the discovery of “excessive wear on the rudder hinge attachments.”
Continued (page 3 of 7)

From the outset, Lockheed assured Pentagon officials that technological innovation, including heavy reliance on computer simulation, which could take the place of real-world testing, would keep costs down. The Pentagon bought those assurances and allowed the company to design, test, and produce the F-35 all at the same time, instead of insisting that Lockheed identify and fix defects before firing up its production line. Building an airplane while it is still being designed and tested is referred to as concurrency. In effect, concurrency creates an expensive and frustrating non-decision loop: build a plane, fly a plane, find a flaw, design a fix, retrofit the plane, rinse, repeat.

Vice Admiral David Venlet, who managed the J.S.F. program until late last year, acknowledged the absurdity in an interview with AOL Defense: “You’d like to take the keys to your shiny new jet and give it to the fleet with all the capability and all the service life they want. What we’re doing is, we’re taking the keys to the shiny new jet, giving it to the fleet, and saying, ‘Give me that jet back in the first year. I’ve got to go take it up to this depot for a couple of months and tear into it and put in some structural mods, because if I don’t, we’re not going to be able to fly it more than a couple, three, four, five years.’ That’s what concurrency is doing to us.”

Adding to the problem has been the Pentagon’s hands-off management policy, a stepchild of the deregulation frenzy of the 1990s. At the time the F-35 contract was written, the Pentagon was operating under a principle called Total System Performance Responsibility. The idea was that government oversight was unduly burdensome and costly; the solution was to put more power in the hands of contractors. In the case of the Joint Strike Fighter, Lockheed was given near-total responsibility for design, development, testing, fielding, and production. In the old days, the Pentagon would have provided thousands of pages of minute specifications. For the Joint Strike Fighter, the Pentagon gave Lockheed a pot of money and a general outline of what was expected.

Nailing down the true cost of the Joint Strike Fighter is a maddening exercise as various stakeholders use different math—along with byzantine acronyms—to arrive at figures that serve their interests. According to the Government Accountability Office (G.A.O.), which is relatively independent, the price tag for each F-35 was supposed to be $81 million when the program began in October 2001. Since that time, the price per plane has basically doubled, to $161 million. Full-rate production of the F-35, which was supposed to start in 2012, will not start until 2019. The Joint Program Office, which oversees the project, disagrees with the G.A.O.’s assessment, arguing that it does not break out the F-35 by variant and does not take into account what they contend is a learning curve that will drive prices down over time. They say a more realistic figure is $120 million a copy, which will go down with each production batch. Critics, like Winslow Wheeler, from the Project on Government Oversight and a longtime G.A.O. official, argue the opposite: “The true cost of the airplane—when you cast aside all the bullshit—is $219 million or more a copy, and that number is likely to go up.”

IV. The Helmet

The F-35 is a flying computer tricked out with an impressive array of sensors and outward-facing cameras stitched together—through a process called sensor fusion—to give the pilot what Lockheed’s Bob Rubino, a former navy aviator, calls “a God’s-eye view of what’s going on.” Under Rubino’s guidance, I test-drove the helmet at the company’s Fighter Demonstration Center, located in Crystal City, Virginia—a stone’s throw from the Pentagon and home to scores of corporate contractors for the Defense Department.

For decades, American fighter pilots have achieved air dominance with the help of a heads-up display, or HUD. This is a sloping glass plate affixed to the dashboard that projects flight data as well as the bombsight and gunsight displays, called “pippers.” HUDs allow pilots to fly and fight without peering down at their instruments. They are ubiquitous. They appear in civilian and military aircraft, in video games, and in the recently unveiled Google Glass.

For fighter pilots, a HUD is not a gimmick. It is a lifesaver. Even so, when the time came to design the F-35’s cockpit, Lockheed Martin dispensed with the HUD in favor of a complex helmet-mounted display (H.M.D.), which in many ways is the centerpiece of the Joint Strike Fighter. The new system displays mission systems and targeting data inside the helmet’s visor and gives the pilot something akin to X-ray vision thanks to the “distributed aperture system” that weaves together disparate feeds from those outward-facing cameras embedded in the airframe and projects a single image inches from a pilot’s eyes.

It is impossible to wrap your head around the system until the system wraps itself around your head. Rubino helped me put on the helmet. It took time to adjust to the reality projected in front of my eyes. In an instant, I had left Crystal City and was flying over Maryland, close to Baltimore Washington International Airport. The world in front of me possessed a greenish glow and was “biocular,” meaning that instead of looking at an image through two separate eyepieces, inside the helmet my eyes had a circular view of the world.

Along with that artificial world I could see data: altitude, bearing, speed, and other information. Testing my newfound powers, I peered down at my legs and saw right through the floor of the aircraft. Looking down to my left I could see the runway at B.W.I. as though the interfering wing did not exist. The system wasn’t perfect, however. When I turned my head quickly from side to side, the stitching that weaves six cameras into a single portrait appeared to fray ever so slightly. When I removed the helmet after 20 minutes, I had the somewhat unsettling feeling you might get after a day spent riding roller coasters.

At first blush the helmet-mounted display struck Charlie and his colleagues as a major advance. But they were left with a nagging question: what happens if something goes wrong with the helmet? The answer: without a HUD as a fail-safe, pilots would have to fly and fight using the plane’s conventional heads-down displays.

Visibility is critical to pilots of every stripe. It has proven to be a problem for some F-35 pilots. In February 2013, the Pentagon’s chief weapons tester, Dr. Gilmore, reported that the cockpit design impedes pilots’ ability to see their “six o’clock”—that is, directly behind them. According to Gilmore, who collected the bulk of his data down at Eglin, one air-force pilot reported on his evaluation form that lack of aft visibility in the F-35 “will get the pilot gunned [down] every time.” What is more, the distributed aperture system, which is supposed to compensate for structural impediments to visibility, itself has blind spots, which, according to Charlie and others, preclude its use during airborne refueling.

The helmets are manufactured by RCESA, a joint venture between the Cedar Rapids–based Rockwell Collins and the Israeli company Elbit, and they cost more than $500,000 apiece. Each helmet is bespoke: a laser scans a pilot’s head to ensure optical accuracy when his eyes interface with the display. To understand the sensory impact of an H.M.D., imagine if, instead of having a rearview mirror in your car, you saw the same imagery projected onto the inner surface of your sunglasses, along with data from the speedometer, tachometer, fuel gauge, and global-positioning system. Now imagine driving forward, and as your eyes glance down toward the pedals, the video feed in front of your eyes changes to reveal the road beneath the vehicle.

Like other parts of the plane, the helmet-mounted display—with its newfangled gadgetry—works better on paper than in practice. According to Charlie, some test pilots have experienced spatial disorientation in flight serious enough that they have disabled the data and video streams to the helmet and landed using the plane’s conventional flight displays. Spatial disorientation is a potentially lethal condition in which a pilot loses his bearings and confuses perception with reality. A 2002 joint U.S.-U.K. review of Class A mishaps in the U.S. Air Force between 1991 and 2000 found that spatial disorientation was implicated in 20 percent of cases, at a cost of $1.4 billion and 60 lives. (Class A mishaps are defined as incidents that result in a “fatality or permanent total disability,” destruction of an aircraft, or $1 million or more in damage.) The report’s authors worried that, with the advent of helmet-mounted displays, mishaps involving spatial disorientation “will continue to pose a significant threat to aircrew.”

One cause of spatial disorientation is latency—when what is displayed lags behind what the plane does. In much the same way that video lagged behind sound on early Blu-ray players, the F-35’s onboard computer takes time to figure out where the pilot is looking and to display the appropriate camera feed. Another problem is “jitter.” Unlike a heads-up display, which is bolted to the airplane, the F-35’s helmet-mounted display is designed to be worn by pilots whose heads bounce around in flight. The image created by projectors on both sides of the helmet shakes in front of the pilot’s eyes.

Pierre Sprey, who began working in the Pentagon in the 1960s as one of Robert McNamara’s “whiz kids” and spent decades helping design and test two of the airplanes the F-35 is supposed to replace (the A-10 and F-16), contends that, even if designers can deal with latency and jitter, the resolution of the video is “fatally inferior” compared with the human eye when it comes to confronting enemy aircraft. “Right from the start, they should have known there would be a huge computation problem and a huge resolution problem,” says Sprey. “Why do drones shoot up wedding parties in Afghanistan? Because the resolution is so poor. That was knowable before the helmet was built.” The helmet-mounted display, says Sprey, is “a total ****** from start to finish.”

In a statement to Vanity Fair, Lockheed maintained that “we have addressed the helmet’s three primary areas of concern—green glow, jitter and latency—and remain confident that this capability will provide F-35 pilots a decisive advantage in combat.”

V. A Plane for Some Seasons

From the outset, critics have worried that by trying to meet so many missions for so many masters, the Joint Strike Fighter would end up being, as Charlie—one of the plane’s earliest proponents—put it, a “jack of all trades, and master of none.”

Take the matter of stealth technology, which helps an airplane elude detection. Charlie explained that while stealth is helpful for deep-strike bombing missions, where planes must remain unobserved while going “downtown” into enemy territory, it doesn’t serve much purpose in a Marine Corps environment. “The Joint Strike Fighter’s forte is stealth,” he said. “If it’s defending Marines in combat and loitering overhead, why do you need stealth? None of the helos have stealth. The Marines’ obligation is not to provide strategic strike. Look at Desert Storm and the invasion of Iraq. Marine aviators did close air support and some battlefield prep as Marines prepared to move in. Not deep strike. Ask the commandant to name the date and time the Marines struck Baghdad in Desert Storm. Sure as hell wasn’t the start of war. Why invest in a stealth aircraft for the Marines?”

Charlie’s question resonates with others in the aerospace community who argue that stealth may actually inhibit the Marines’ ability to carry out their primary mission: close air support. To remain low-observable—military-speak for stealthy—the F-35 must carry fuel and ordnance internally. That, in turn, impacts how long it can loiter over the battlefield (not exactly a stealthy tactic to begin with) and how much weaponry it can deploy in support of Marines below. Consider this: the air force’s non-stealthy A-10 Thunderbolt II—a close-air-support aircraft that the Marines routinely call upon and which the F-35 is replacing—can carry 16,000 pounds worth of weapons and ordnance, including general-purpose bombs, cluster bombs, laser-guided bombs, wind-corrected munitions, AGM-65 Maverick and AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles, rockets, and illumination flares. It also has a 30-mm. GAU-8/A Gatling gun, capable of firing 3,900 rounds a minute.
Lieutenant Colonel David Berke stands next to the engine of the F-35B.

By comparison, the F-35B, which the Marines insist they will field in 2015, will carry two AIM-120 advanced air-to-air missiles (which protect the F-35 from other aircraft, not grunts on the ground) and either two 500-pound GBU-12 laser-guided bombs or two 1,000-pound GBU-32 J.D.A.M.’s. In other words, a plane that costs at least five times as much as its predecessor will initially deploy carrying one third as much ordnance and no gun whatsoever. Lockheed maintains that the F-35 is outfitted with a series of hard points that will eventually allow the plane to carry up to 18,000 pounds of ordnance for the air-force and navy variants and up to 15,000 pounds for the Marine version. However, carrying external ordnance will eliminate the plane’s stealth signature—which is routinely touted as one of the plane’s primary advantages over legacy aircraft.

Having built the F-117A Nighthawk and F-22 Raptor, Lockheed Martin has plenty of experience with the highly toxic coatings and svelte surfaces that help stealth aircraft go undetected. The company also knows that the technology is finicky and has the capacity to turn a cutting-edge fighter into a hangar queen. A significant portion of an F-22 Raptor’s downtime is spent in hangars with maintainers mending its stealthy coating, which has a tendency to wear off during certain meteorological conditions.

When the time came to cover the F-35 with a radar-absorbing material, Lockheed changed its technology, covering the plane with a rigid coating applied in sections. Unfortunately, prolonged use of the plane’s afterburners causes the F-35’s stealthy outer layer—as well as the skin underneath—to peel and bubble near the tail. As a result, the F-35 is prohibited from supersonic flight while Lockheed Martin comes up with a fix—one that will require retrofitting the 78 planes that have already come off the production line. The fact that this could have occurred at all, much less on the Pentagon’s biggest and most important weapons program, baffles Pierre Sprey. “Everyone knows that the faster a plane goes, the warmer the skin gets,” he says. “All they had to do was test a one-square-foot portion in an oven. Yet again, we’re finding this stuff out on planes that are already built.”

When asked how two signature elements of the same program—stealth and supersonic speed—could have come into such direct collision, a senior Pentagon official with access to F-35 test data explained, “This is not rocket science. When you let a contractor do whatever he wants to do, and you don’t watch him very carefully, he’s going to trust his engineering analysis as opposed to doing what you just said—building a piece and putting it in an oven. Because he looks at a piece of paper and he’s got his engineers and he says, ‘Oh, this is good; we’ve got margin there. We’ve got an extra 10 degrees and an extra five minutes on the coatings. We’re good. We don’t have to test that.’ Government oversight would say, ‘Show me.’”

Among the F-35’s current limitations, perhaps the most surprising involves inclement weather. As I witnessed during my second day at Eglin Air Force Base, when storm clouds loomed over the Gulf of Mexico, the Pentagon’s supposedly “all weather” F-35 Lightning II, ironically, cannot fly within 25 miles of lightning. I watched as pilots gathered around a computer and tracked the weather, trying to decide if it was safe enough to go aloft. While this prohibition has been publicly reported, the reasons behind it have not.

“Every airplane flying today—civilian and military—has static-electricity dissipation built into it. That’s because there’s lightning all over the planet,” Charlie explained. To guard against an onboard fire or explosion caused by lightning, static electricity, or an errant spark, modern planes carry something called an onboard inert-gas generation system (OBIGGS), which replaces combustible fuel vapor with non-combustible nitrogen. As important as these systems are to civilian aircraft, they are indispensible to military planes, which carry ordnance and must also contend with incoming bullets and missiles. Yet when the time came to outfit the F-35 with such a system, certain fasteners, wire bundles, and connectors inside the plane that ordinarily help dissipate electrical charges were replaced with lighter, cheaper parts that lacked comparable protection.

VI. Pushback

Spend even a brief amount of time with members of the J.S.F. program and you’ll hear the basic sales pitch over and over again: The F-35 is a fifth-generation fighter-bomber. It is a quantum leap over legacy aircraft that are nearing the end of their natural lives. Fourth-generation planes like the F-16 and F/A-18 cannot easily be upgraded. You can’t change the shape of the plane. You can’t just keep bolting on new pieces of equipment. Fifth-generation characteristics—like stealth, sensor fusion, and increased maneuverability—must be baked into the plane from the start.

Still, when they think about the F-35 simply as an airplane—leaving aside the delays, the defects, the costs, the politics—military pilots tend to like what they see, or at least what they imagine will come. Pilot-speak is typically uninflected, but enthusiasm pokes through. I spent many hours with Berke and Johnston at Eglin and discussed many of the issues that have provoked criticism of the F-35. The pilots invoked the “above my pay grade” response to some questions. On others they offered explanations or pushback.

I asked, What about that comment, from an evaluation, about how lack of aft visibility in the F-35 will “get the pilot gunned [down] every time”?

Johnston: Well, you come back from flying and you get 100,000 questions and they’re like, What do you think of the rearward visibility? I’m not thinking, O.K., this is on the cover of The Washington Post. I’m thinking, like, O.K., yeah, visibility’s more limited than what I’m used to. Uh-huh. Copy. It was designed that way for a reason. But I’m not going to sit there and write this paragraph on it. I’m just going to say the aft visibility is not as good as it was in a [F-16] Viper. And if that pilot was sitting here with you, you’d be like, O.K., I see that you would write something like that. But you’re thinking you’re talking to a bro, and you’re trying to write as quickly as you can because you have a million questions to go.

So the visibility issue isn’t a concern?

Berke: Not even a tiny bit. The convenience factor of looking from a Viper is really nice, and I’ve flown that jet. But if you put it in context—of all the systems on the airplane and how you fly fifth-generation fighters—a minor reduction in visibility in the F-35 does not concern me. I wouldn’t even spend a brain cell on that.

I asked, What about General Bogdan’s remark about the “50 top parts that break more often than we expect them to”?

Johnston: Things are going to happen. There has never been a program with more end users and shareholders than this. You’re asked to develop the most sophisticated go-to-war system ever. Then you’re told you’ve got to make it take off from an aircraft carrier, take off near vertically, then land vertically on a small boat, which I can’t even believe the Marines land on. Oh, and we’ve got international partners that all get a say in this. So I will say I’m not surprised that we have parts that don’t work and things like that.

Critics point to several publicized episodes when the discovery of design or technical problems has grounded the entire fleet. I asked, Are you troubled?

Berke: The idea of grounding a fleet is not something new to aviation. It’s happened in every airplane I’ve ever flown. Many, many, many, many times.

Berke and Johnston aren’t policymakers or engineers. They’re pilots, and they believe in their work. A more disturbing assessment came from perhaps the most improbable source: Christopher Bogdan, the general who heads the Joint Strike Fighter program. A few weeks after I saw him in Norway, we sat down at his office in Crystal City. The plate-glass windows offered views of the Jefferson Memorial and the Washington Monument, and if Bogdan had been wearing a dress uniform with his ribbons and his three stars, the scene would have looked like a cartoon or a cliché. But Bogdan, 52, wore a green flight suit. He too is a pilot, one who has logged 3,200 hours in 35 different military aircraft. When answering questions, he frequently thumped his fist on a conference table.

With dry understatement he took issue with the bedrock concept of the Joint Strike Fighter—that a single airplane could fulfill the different missions of three different services—calling it “a little optimistic.”

He felt that the way the program had been set up with Lockheed at the outset made absolutely no sense.
His first target was the concept of Total System Performance Responsibility: “We gave Lockheed very broad things that said the airplane has to be maintainable, the airplane has to be able to operate from airfields, the airplane has to be stealthy, the airplane has to drop weapons—without the level of detail that was necessary. We have found over the 12 years of the program that the contractor has a very different vision of how he interprets the contractual document. We go, ‘Oh no, it needs to do X, Y, and Z, not just Z.’ And they go, ‘Well, you didn’t tell me that. You just told me in general it needed to do something like Z.’”

His second target was the payment structure: “Most of the risk on this program when we signed this contract in early 2001 was on the government squarely. Cost risk. Technical risk. Perfect example: in the development program, we pay Lockheed Martin whatever it costs them to do a particular task. And if they fail at that task, then we pay them to fix it. And they don’t lose anything.” Bogdan explained that, since taking office, he has made burden-shifting a priority. Beginning with more recent batches of F-35s, Lockheed Martin will cover increasingly larger shares of cost overruns as well as a percentage of “known aircraft retrofit requirements”—that is, the cost to fix flaws discovered on planes that have already come off the assembly line.

Bogdan made it clear that he is tired of business as usual.
“Sometimes industry is not accustomed to what I call straight talk. It can get cozy sometimes. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve been there,” he said. “I’ve seen senior leaders on both sides of the fence. And I can tell you that when you take over a program that has had problems like this, being cozy is not an advantage.” He continued, “We awarded the original contract in 2001. We’ve been at this for 12-plus years, and we should be a lot further on in the program and in our relationship than where we are in 12 years.”

Strains in that relationship were evident when I asked about various issues dogging the program. Lockheed, for example, describes the problem of the afterburner essentially cooking portions of the F-35’s stealthy skin as “a minor issue that has been resolved.” The company insists that “[t]here is no structural retrofit needed for the F-35. This was an issue with the adhesive used on the edge of the horizontal tails of test aircraft. A new adhesive is being incorporated in current production aircraft.”

General Bogdan, to whom Lockheed reports, told me that supersonic flight (or any prolonged use of the afterburner) “creates a thermal environment on the back tail portion of the airplane where over time that heat kind of starts disbonding the coatings we have. That’s just not good.” If he had his druthers, salvation would not lie with Lockheed Martin. “If I needed a 911 number or a pick-up-and-call-a-friend, it will be a company like DuPont who builds chemical sealants and those kinds of things.” Continuing on, he said, “Our desire is that we will fix this problem. But that’ll cost us money because we have to cut in the new fix to the production line, and all the airplanes out there have to be retrofit. So there’s a cost there, and we bear that cost. Remember how I told you we took too much risk on this program? Well, there’s some of it.”

When it came to questions about the helmet-mounted display, Bogdan said he was unaware of any instance in which pilots reported spatial disorientation. That said, he conceded that problems with the helmet were real and ongoing, though design solutions had been found for most of them: “But we haven’t put them all together yet in the helmet. Now I’ve got to put it in the helmet and produce the helmet so that I can build 3,000 helmets that all work. Instead of just one helmet that’s been handcrafted with solutions.” Bogdan’s gone one step further, sourcing an alternative helmet from aerospace giant BAE in case the current RCESA helmet is beyond redemption. “Lockheed Martin would very, very much like to influence my decision-making here in favor of the Rockwell helmet. I’m not letting them do that,” he explained. As if to punctuate that he remains open to another solution, Bogdan told me that the BAE helmet is “$100,000 to $150,000 less.”

As for the prohibition against flying the F-35 in inclement weather, Bogdan explained that the OBIGG system “wasn’t up to snuff when it came to protecting for lightning, because it couldn’t keep up with diving and climbing and keeping enough nitrogen in the fuel tanks. So we had to beef up the OBIGG system and that is part of the redesign that’s causing us not to be able to fly in lightning right now. Until that OBIGG system gets redesigned for that purpose and becomes more robust, I guess, we don’t fly in lightning. Now we’re going to have that fixed by 2015.” The bottom line amounted to: this is a fixable problem, it shouldn’t have happened in the first place, and in normal circumstances it would have been fixed during testing, so it’s too bad that airplanes are already rolling off the assembly line and will all have to go back for repair. That’s what concurrency does. “It makes the program very complicated. It adds cost. I hate to armchair-quarterback. And today I may be making decisions that another three-star seven years from now may look back and say, ‘What the hell was Bogdan thinking?’ It’s frustrating. But I just have to play the cards I’m dealt.”

He was philosophical about his situation, wishing he could change a lot of the Joint Strike Fighter’s history and knowing he could not. “I look in the rearview mirror to understand where we’ve been, so I don’t make those same kinds of errors. But if I look in the rearview mirror too much, one, I don’t keep my eye on the road in front of us, and two, it would drive me nuts, and I wouldn’t be in this job very long.”
VII. Political Engineering

By the time Pierre Sprey left the Pentagon, in 1986, he had come to a conclusion: “The level of corruption had risen so high that it was impossible for the Pentagon to build another honest aircraft.” In 2005, a Pentagon procurement official, Darleen Druyun, went to prison after negotiating a future job with Boeing at the same time she was handling the paperwork on a $20 billion tanker deal the company was competing for (and won). Boeing’s C.E.O. and C.F.O. were ousted, the contract was canceled, and the company paid $615 million in fines. The man called in to clean up that mess was Christopher Bogdan.

The political process that keeps the Joint Strike Fighter airborne has never stalled. The program was designed to spread money so far and so wide—at last count, among some 1,400 separate subcontractors, strategically dispersed among key congressional districts—that no matter how many cost overruns, blown deadlines, or serious design flaws, it would be immune to termination. It was, as bureaucrats say, “politically engineered.”

Founded in 1912, Lockheed earned its stripes during World War II when its twin-engine P-38 Lightning fighter helped the Allies gain air superiority. After the war, the company built a string of aircraft that changed the course of aviation history, from the SR-71 Blackbird to the F-22 Raptor. In 1995, Lockheed merged with Martin Marietta to form Lockheed Martin, which employs 116,000 people worldwide and recorded $47.2 billion in sales last year. The company receives more federal money—nearly $40 billion in 2012—than any other company. Lockheed’s corporate motto is, “We never forget who we’re working for.”

The company employs a stable of in-house and outside lobbyists and spends some $15 million on lobbying each year. When it comes to the F-35, which accounts for one of its largest revenue streams, Lockheed takes every opportunity to remind politicians that the airplane is manufactured in 46 states and is responsible for more than 125,000 jobs and $16.8 billion in “economic impact” to the U.S. economy. Signing up eight allied countries as partners provides additional insurance. “It’s quite frankly a brilliant strategy,” said General Bogdan, acknowledging that it is effective even if it is not admirable. Political engineering has foiled any meaningful opposition on Capitol Hill, in the White House, or in the defense establishment.

During the 2012 campaign cycle, Lockheed—either directly or indirectly through its employees and political-action committee—doled out millions in campaign cash to virtually every member of Congress. The company’s lobbyists included seven former members of Congress and dozens of others who have served in key government positions. According to Charlie, Pentagon officials involved with the Joint Strike Fighter routinely cycle out of the military and into jobs with the program’s myriad contractors, waiting out intervening fallow periods required by ethics laws at Beltway “body shops” like Burdeshaw Associates. Until recently Burdeshaw was led by Marvin Sambur, who, as assistant secretary of the air force for acquisition, oversaw the F-35 program. (He resigned in the wake of the Boeing tanker-lease scandal, for which his subordinate Darleen Druyun went to prison.) The firm itself lists dozens of generals and admirals as “representative associates,” and on its board it boasts none other than Norman Augustine, a former chairman and C.E.O. of Lockheed Martin. When asked about the Lockheed Martin connection, Burdeshaw’s vice president, retired air-force major general Richard E. Perraut Jr., wrote in a statement to Vanity Fair, “It is our company policy to not comment on questions about clients, projects, or Associates” (emphasis in the original). For his part, Dr. Sambur wrote in a separate statement: “I never consulted for Lockheed on the F35 or F22, and while I was at Burdeshaw, we had no contract with Lockheed for any consulting with respect to these programs.”

Enter “F-35” as a search term in the House’s Lobbying Disclosure database and you will find more than 300 entries dating back to 2006. Lockheed is hardly the only company trying to influence congressional action on the Joint Strike Fighter. According to congressional filings, West Valley Partners, a coalition of Arizona cities organized to preserve the long-term viability of Luke Air Force Base, near Glendale, has paid the aptly named lobbying outfit of Hyjek & Fix more than $500,000 since 2010 to influence “F-35 Basing Plans for the US Air Force.” In August 2012, Secretary of the Air Force Michael Donley announced that Luke A.F.B. had been chosen to house three F-35 fighter squadrons as well as the air force’s F-35A pilot-training center.

The Beaufort Regional Chamber of Commerce, in South Carolina, has paid the Rhoads Group $190,000 since 2006 to help ensure “East Coast basing of F-35 mission.” In December 2010, the Pentagon announced its decision to base five F-35 squadrons at Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort. Senator Lindsey Graham, a beneficiary of Lockheed campaign contributions, issued a statement that said, “Christmas came early this year.”

These efforts pale in comparison to the $2.28 million that Cleveland-based Parker Hannifin has paid its lobbyists, the LNE Group, since 2007. Parker Hannifin expects to receive revenues of approximately $5 billion over the life of the Joint Strike Fighter program. Working with aerospace giant Pratt & Whitney, which is overseeing construction of the F-35’s engine, Parker Hannifin is producing, among other things, fueldraulic lines for the short-takeoff and vertical-landing version of the airplane. It was the failure of one of these fueldraulic lines that led to the grounding of the Marines’ entire fleet of F-35Bs earlier this year. (In a statement to Vanity Fair, Pratt & Whitney said it is working to ensure that “no costs associated with the inspection and replacement of the hoses are borne by the taxpayer”).

VIII. Ready for Combat?

“I ask you to buckle down your seat belts and snug your harness up nice and tight,” Marine Corps Commandant James Amos announced last November, welcoming what he described as the first operational F-35 squadron at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, “because you are about to take a ride of a lifetime in a great airplane at an important point in America’s history.” Ten months later, the squadron is by no means operational. Like its sister squadron at Eglin, it lacks the Block 2B software that would allow the planes to drop real bombs, engage enemy aircraft, or do much besides fly in good weather. Moreover, the planes at Yuma, like the entire fleet of F-35s, are hobbled by design flaws, some of which, according to General Bogdan, will require retrofitting. Nevertheless, the Marine leadership remains bullish. At a recent Marine Aviation Dinner, General Amos declared that the F-35 would be ready to fight in the next campaign the U.S. faces.

As if to bolster that case, on May 31, 2013, the Marines, at Amos’s direction, reported to Congress that their own airplane “will reach the I.O.C. milestone” between July and December 2015. Amos’s declarations have both angered and baffled many J.S.F. insiders. “Neither the F-35B nor the other variants have begun much less completed operational testing, which can take up to two years,” says Charlie. “And that can’t begin until they get at least the Block 2B software, which won’t even happen until 2015.”

I asked General Bogdan about the Marines’ decision to declare their planes combat-capable without adequate time for operational testing (O.T.)—or, as the Pentagon used to call it, “field testing.” His answer was straightforward—yes, that was what the Marines are going to do, and yes, they have the power to do it. “By law,” he said, “we have to do operational testing. But by law, the service chiefs, the secretaries of the services, get to decide I.O.C. and when the airplane can go into combat. There’s nothing that says the results of the O.T. must be used, factored in, to determine what the services do. I can tell you that’s why, when you look at the real letter of the law, the U.S. Marine Corps intends on declaring I.O.C. before we start O.T.” In other words, the commandant of the Marine Corps plans to announce that his planes are ready for combat before operational testing proves they are ready for combat. (Despite repeated queries over a period of nearly a month, including requests for an interview and the submission of written questions, the office of the commandant of the Marine Corps would make no comment.)

One can argue—as General Bogdan does, and as some opponents concede—that given enough time, and given copious yet unspecified amounts of additional money, the Joint Strike Fighter could become the airplane its creators dreamed of. But how much is too much and can we afford three variants of an airplane whose flaws are still being uncovered?
The Department of Defense is on the hook to serve up $37 billion in sequestration savings this year alone. Those cuts, however, have yet to hit the F-35. Instead they are being visited upon hundreds of thousands of civilian employees—including some of those who work in the F-35’s Joint Program Office—in the form of furloughs.

Near the end of my interview with General Bodgan, I thanked him for his candor. His reply was a broad one, not directed at any branch of the military or any particular company. “It is unfortunate,” the general said, “that you can’t get straight answers, because we’re at a point in this program where transparency leads to trust, leads to advocacy or at least support. People have committed to this program. We’re not walking away from the program. Something catastrophic would happen to walk away from that. So just tell everybody the truth. It’s hard.”
Viv S
BRF Oldie
Posts: 5301
Joined: 03 Jan 2010 00:46

Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by Viv S »

Philip wrote:AMRAAM "Achilles heel"? Wonderful! When even US pilots say that the AMRAAM is inadequate,their "Achilles heel",we have the most ardent salesmen for it!
The Aim-120D has a range of upto 180km.


The latest model, the D-model, can fly Mach 4 with a range of about 180 kilometers or about 97 nautical miles. William Gigliotti, Lockheed Martin’s lead test pilot at the Fort Worth site, said he wants to see that range extended to take advantage of the advanced radars inside the F-22 and F-35. (link).


And yes they want to extend it even further because that's how good the APG-77 and APG-81 are.

The Russians are already aware of this dilemma and openly said they are doing something about it a long time ago: http://rt.com/news/t50-missile-advanced-guidance-643/
Russia is finalizing an advanced air engagement system combining “fire-and-forget” guidance and “single-shot kill” ability within a single air-to-air missile. The system aims to frustrate any missile evasion maneuvers enabling a target to escape.

'Fire-and-forget' - 'Active' missiles have been around for about 25 years

'Single-shot kill' - Given the low pk of Russian munitions, that's a change.

They have a new version of the R-77 in development for the PAK-FA that will field an AESA radar seeker (essentially the same thing we were probably doing with the AIM-120D AMRAAM). The Russians have found that producing AESA radar guided missiles is extremely expensive, but their conclusion was that if these new missiles can practically guarantee hitting and killing their target from extremely long ranges they're worth the cost. We're not gonna find funds like that in a budget dominated by the JSF. Our F-35 test pilots are only just now talking about this.

Dual IR-RF seeker, multi-pulse motor: Stunner


The Stunner missile component of the David's Sling system, codeveloped with Raytheon, has several unique features. It is a hit-to-kill weapon and consequently needs no fuzing system. It has a dual-mode seeker combining a millimeter-wave AESA with an imaging infrared seeker. A multipulse motor (plus first-stage booster) and 12 control surfaces combine Mach 5-plus speed with endgame energy—the last pulse can be saved for the final intercept.

David's Sling has multiple missile-defense roles. Against intermediate-range missiles, in conjunction with Arrow, it can provide a shoot-look-shoot option rather than launching two of the costlier Arrows in salvo. It can provide stand-alone site or base defense against shorter-range weapons and could be adapted for terminal defense at sea. Seeker, propulsion and aerodynamics are also suitable for cruise-missile defense.

However, the missile is being developed with a second role in mind. Rafael's view is that in the future, AAMs will be derived from SAMs and not the other way around, as in the past, because of the larger volumes in the SAM market. Minus the booster, Stunner is smaller than the AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile but is claimed to have greater range and lethality—at least comparable to the MBDA Meteor. Known informally as Future AAM, the Stunner-derived AAM will be designed for both ejector and rail launch, with rail lugs jettisonable to reduce drag.



http://aviationweek.com/awin/mobile-air ... roliferate
brar_w
BRF Oldie
Posts: 10694
Joined: 11 Aug 2016 06:14

Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by brar_w »

Philip wrote:Here is an excellent feature on the entire programme,written not too long ago,borne out by the latest Pentagon/GAO reports.With the "truth" from Gen.Bogdan,head of the project himself.


http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2013 ... eed-martin
Will It Fly?

The Joint Strike Fighter is the most expensive weapons system ever developed. It is plagued by design flaws and cost overruns. It flies only in good weather. The computers that run it lack the software they need for combat. No one can say for certain when the plane will work as advertised. Until recently, the prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, was operating with a free hand—paid handsomely for its own mistakes. Looking back, even the general now in charge of the program can’t believe how we got to this point. In sum: all systems go!
By Adam Ciralsky Photographs by Stephen Wilkes

I. Situational Awareness

At nearly 500,000 acres, Eglin Air Force Base is not the most unobtrusive piece of real estate along Florida’s Emerald Coast. It is, however, among the best guarded. The base is home to top-secret weapons laboratories, swamp-training facilities for U.S. Special Forces, and the only supersonic range east of the Mississippi. Even from a great distance, bands of quivering heat can be seen rising from the miles of tarmac. At the end of May, I flew into Fort Walton Beach, a civilian airfield that shares a runway with Eglin, a fact that was driven home when the regional jet I was on ran over an arresting wire, a landing aid for fast-moving fighters, while taxiing to the gate.

With F-15s and F-16s circling overhead, I drove to the main gate at Eglin, where I was escorted through security and over to the air force’s 33rd Fighter Wing, which is home to the F-35 Lightning II, also known as the Joint Strike Fighter, and some of the men who fly it. The Joint Strike Fighter, or J.S.F., is the most expensive weapons system in American history. The idea behind it is to replace four distinct models of aging “fourth generation” military jets with a standardized fleet of state-of-the-art “fifth generation” aircraft. Over the course of its lifetime, the program will cost approximately $1.5 trillion. Walking around the supersonic stealth jet for the first time, I was struck by its physical beauty. Whatever its shortcomings—and they, like the dollars invested in the plane, are almost beyond counting—up close it is a dark and compelling work of art. To paraphrase an old Jimmy Breslin line, the F-35 is such a ******** thing that you don’t know whether to genuflect or spit.

When the J.S.F. program formally got under way, in October 2001, the Department of Defense unveiled plans to buy 2,852 of the airplanes in a contract worth an estimated $233 billion. It promised that the first squadrons of high-tech fighters would be “combat-capable” by 2010. The aircraft is at least seven years behind schedule and plagued by a risky development strategy, shoddy management, laissez-faire oversight, countless design flaws, and skyrocketing costs. The Pentagon will now be spending 70 percent more money for 409 fewer fighters—and that’s just to buy the hardware, not to fly and maintain it, which is even more expensive. “You can understand why many people are very, very skeptical about the program,

” Lieutenant General Christopher Bogdan, who has been in charge of it since last December, acknowledged when I caught up with him recently in Norway, one of 10 other nations that have committed to buy the fighter. “I can’t change where the program’s been. I can only change where it’s going.”


Lieutenant General Christopher C. Bogdan talks with members of the F-35 Integrated Test Force on January 2013 at Edwards Air Force Base. As the man now in charge of the Joint Strike Fighter, Bogdan has held the program and its prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, to scrutiny and found both of them deficient on many counts.

The 33rd Fighter Wing’s mission is to host air-force, Marine, and navy units responsible for training the pilots who will fly the F-35 and the “maintainers” who will look after it on the ground. The Marine unit, known as the Warlords, has outpaced the others: the commandant of the Marine Corps, General James Amos, has declared that his service will be the first to field a combat-ready squadron of F-35s. In April 2013, Amos told Congress that the Marines would declare what the military calls an “initial operational capability,” or I.O.C., in the summer of 2015. (Six weeks later, he moved the I.O.C. date to December 2015.) By comparison, the air force has declared an I.O.C. date of December 2016, while the navy has set a date of February 2019. An I.O.C. declaration for a weapons system is like a graduation ceremony: it means the system has passed a series of tests and is ready for war. The Marines have been very explicit about the significance of such a declaration, telling Congress on May 31, 2013, that “IOC shall be declared when the first operational squadron is equipped with 10-16 aircraft, and US Marines are trained, manned, and equipped to conduct [Close Air Support], Offensive and Defensive Counter Air, Air Interdiction, Assault Support Escort, and Armed Reconnaissance in concert with Marine Air Ground Task Force resources and capabilities.”

The chief Warlord at Eglin is a 40-year-old lieutenant colonel named David Berke, a combat veteran of both Afghanistan and Iraq. As we walked around the Warlords’ hangar—which for a maintenance facility is oddly pristine, like an automobile showroom—Berke made clear that he and his men are intently focused on their mission: training enough Marine pilots and maintainers to meet the 2015 deadline. Asked whether Washington-imposed urgency—rather than the actual performance of the aircraft—was driving the effort, Berke was adamant: “Marines don’t play politics. Talk to anyone in this squadron from the pilots to the maintainers. Not a single one of them will lie to protect this program.” During the day and a half I spent with the Warlords and their air-force counterparts, the Gorillas, it became clear that the men who fly the F-35 are among the best fighter jocks America has ever produced. They are smart, thoughtful, and skilled—the proverbial tip of the spear. But I also wondered: Where’s the rest of the spear? Why, almost two decades after the Pentagon initially bid out the program, in 1996, are they flying an aircraft whose handicaps outweigh its proven—as opposed to promised—capabilities? By way of comparison, it took only eight years for the Pentagon to design, build, test, qualify, and deploy a fully functional squadron of previous-generation F-16s.

“The F-16 and F-35 are apples and oranges,” Major Matt Johnston, 35, an air-force instructor at Eglin, told me. “It’s like comparing an Atari video-game system to the latest and greatest thing that Sony has come up with. They’re both aircraft, but the capabilities that the F-35 brings are completely revolutionary.” Johnston, like Berke, is evangelical about the airplane and insistent that “programmatics”—the technological and political inner workings of the J.S.F. effort—are not his concern. He has a job to do, which is training pilots for the jet fighter that will someday be. He was candid about, but unfazed by, the F-35’s current limitations: the squadrons at Eglin are prohibited from flying at night, prohibited from flying at supersonic speed, prohibited from flying in bad weather (including within 25 miles of lightning), prohibited from dropping live ordnance, and prohibited from firing their guns. Then there is the matter of the helmet.

“The helmet is pivotal to the F-35,” Johnston explained.
“This thing was built with the helmet in mind. It gives you 360-degree battle-space awareness. It gives you your flight parameters: Where am I in space? Where am I pointing? How fast am I going?” But Johnston and Berke are prohibited from flying with the “distributed aperture system”—a network of interlaced cameras, which allows almost X-ray vision—that is supposed to be one of the airplane’s crowning achievements. The Joint Strike Fighter is still waiting on software from Lockheed that will make good on long-promised capabilities.

When I spoke with Lockheed’s vice president for program integration, Steve O’Bryan, he said that the company is moving at a breakneck pace, adding 200 software engineers and investing $150 million in new facilities. “This program was overly optimistic on design complexity and software complexity, and that resulted in overpromising and underdelivering,” O’Bryan said. He insisted that, despite a rocky start, the company is on schedule. Pentagon officials are not as confident. They cannot say when Lockheed will deliver the 8.6 million lines of code required to fly a fully functional F-35, not to mention the additional 10 million lines for the computers required to maintain the plane. The chasm between contractor and client was on full display on June 19, 2013, when the Pentagon’s chief weapons tester, Dr. J. Michael Gilmore, testified before Congress. He said that “less than 2 percent” of the placeholder software (called “Block 2B”) that the Marines plan to use has completed testing, though much more is in the process of being tested. (Lockheed insists that its “software-development plan is on track,” that the company has “coded more than 95 percent of the 8.6 million lines of code on the F-35,” and that “more than 86 percent of that software code is currently in flight test.”) Still, the pace of testing may be the least of it. According to Gilmore, the Block 2B software that the Marines say will make their planes combat capable will, in fact, “provide limited capability to conduct combat.” What is more, said Gilmore, if F-35s loaded with Block 2B software are actually used in combat, “they would likely need significant support from other fourth-generation and fifth-generation combat systems to counter modern, existing threats, unless air superiority is somehow otherwise assured and the threat is cooperative.” Translation: the F-35s that the Marines say they can take into combat in 2015 are not only ill equipped for combat but will likely require airborne protection by the very planes the F-35 is supposed to replace.
Software is hardly the only concern. In Norway, where he was addressing the Oslo Military Society, General Bogdan said, “I have a list of the 50 top parts of the airplane that break more often than we expect them to. And what I am doing is I am investing millions of dollars in taking each and every one of those parts and deciding: Do we need to redesign it? Do we need to have someone else manufacture it? Or can we figure out a way to repair it quicker and sooner so that it doesn’t drive up the costs?” This is very late in the game for an airplane the Marines intend to certify in two years.

*(Gen.Bogdan said-as was posted earlier,when replying to the Senate,that it will take "months,and months,and months" to rectify the problems,and at "some cost too".

In January, Berke’s Warlords had a close call of the kind that brings Bogdan’s Top 50 list into sharp relief. As a pilot was taxiing out to the runway for takeoff, a warning light went on in the cockpit indicating that there was a problem with the plane’s fuel pressure. Returning to the hangar, maintainers opened the engine-bay door to find that a brown hose carrying combustible fuel had separated from its coupling. When I asked what would have happened had the defect gone undetected before takeoff, Berke replied with the noncommittal detachment of a clinician: “I think you can easily infer that, from the fact that the fleet was grounded for six weeks, there was no question that the scenario, the outcomes, were not acceptable for flying.” What he meant, General Bogdan told me later, was that it was a very close call: “We should count our blessings that we caught this on the ground. It would have been a problem. A catastrophic problem.” (When asked about this incident, the engine’s prime contractor, Pratt & Whitney, wrote in a statement to Vanity Fair, “The engine control system responded properly when the leak occurred. The pilot followed standard operating procedures when he was alerted to the leak. The safeguards in place on the aircraft allowed the pilot to abort takeoff without incident and clear the active runway. There were no injuries to the pilot or ground crew. For clarification, the grounding was cleared three weeks after the event.”)

General Bogdan, it turned out, would have a lot more to say in the course of a long and forceful interview in which he held up the Joint Strike Fighter program and the prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, to scrutiny and found both of them deficient on many counts.

II. “Acquisition Malpractice”

Washington’s Union Station, modeled in part on the Baths of Diocletian, is a fitting gateway to a city that continues to spend on the military with imperial abandon. Earlier this year, I wound my way through throngs of travelers as I waited for a call. When it came, I was vectored to the top floor of the Center Café, which occupies a circular platform with a 360-degree view of the lobby below. The man I was to meet—I’ll call him “Charlie”—is a well-placed source with a decade’s worth of hands-on experience with the Joint Strike Fighter, both inside and outside the Pentagon. Charlie explained that his choice of meeting location was less paranoid than practical: the J.S.F. program is so large, financially and geographically—and saturated with so many lobbyists, corporate executives, congressional aides, Pentagon bureaucrats, and elected officials—that it takes considerable effort in Washington to avoid bumping into someone connected with the program. And he did not want to bump into anyone. He asked that I conceal his identity so he could speak candidly.

In the course of this and many other conversations, Charlie walked me through the troubled history of the airplane and tried to separate the rosy public-relations pronouncements from what he saw as the grim reality.

“The jet was supposed to be fully functional by now and that’s why they put people down in Eglin in 2010–2011—they were expecting a fully functional jet in 2012,” he said. “But the only military mission these planes can execute is a kamikaze one. They can’t drop a single live bomb on a target, can’t do any fighter engagements. There are limitations on Instrument Flight Rules—what’s required to take an airplane into bad weather and to fly at night. Every pilot out there in civil aviation, his pilot’s license says he can take off and land in perfect weather. Then they have to graduate to instrument conditions. What the program is saying is that the J.S.F., your latest and greatest fighter, is restricted from flying in instrument meteorological conditions—something a $60,000 Cessna can do.”

Charlie cited a news report about Frank Kendall, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for acquisition, who in 2012 had used the words “acquisition malpractice” to describe the design and production process for the Joint Strike Fighter. (In June 2013, Kendall sounded more optimistic during a conference call with me and other journalists: “I think all of us are encouraged by the progress we’re seeing. It’s too early to declare a victory; we have a lot of work left to do. But this program is on a much sounder, much more stable footing than it was a year or two ago.”)

Unfazed by Kendall’s change in tone, Charlie insists that technical problems will continue to bedevil the program. “You can trace the plane’s troubles today back to the 2006–2007 time frame,” he explained. “The program was at a critical point and Lockheed needed to prove they could meet weight requirements.” That, he says, led to a series of risky design decisions. “I can tell you, there was nothing they wouldn’t do to get through those reviews. They cut corners. And so we are where we are.” While acknowledging that weight was a pressing issue, Lockheed Martin spokesman Michael Rein told me that design trade-offs in 2006 and 2007 were made in concert with, and with the blessing of, Pentagon officials. He strenuously denied the company cut corners or in any way compromised safety or its core values.

III. Hands-Off Management

On October 26, 2001, the Pentagon announced that it had chosen Lockheed Martin over Boeing to build what Lockheed promised would be “the most formidable strike fighter ever fielded.” The Pentagon’s ask was huge: Build us a next-generation strike-fighter aircraft that could be used not only by the U.S. military but also by allied nations (which would come to include the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey, Canada, Australia, Denmark, Norway, Japan, and Israel). On top of that: Produce three versions of the airplane—a conventional version for the air force, a short-takeoff and vertical-landing version for the Marines, and a carrier-suitable version for the navy. The idea was that a single stealthy, supersonic, multi-service airplane could entirely replace four existing kinds of aircraft. And the expectation was that this new airplane would do everything: air-to-air combat, deep-strike bombing, and close air support of troops on the ground.

Lockheed Martin won the contract—worth more than $200 billion—after the much-chronicled “Battle of the X-Planes.” In truth, it was not much of a competition. Boeing’s X-32, the product of a mere four years’ work, paled next to Lockheed’s X-35, which had been in the works in one form or another since the mid-1980s, thanks to untold millions in black-budget funds the company had received from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a supersonic short-takeoff and vertical-landing aircraft.

To turn its X-35 prototype into a fleet of F-35 fighters, Lockheed has relied on two seemingly separate but equally controversial acquisition practices. In military jargon, these are known as “commonality” and “concurrency.”

Commonality simply meant that the three F-35 variants would share portions of high-cost components like the airframe, the avionics, and the engines. This was supposed to help ensure that the plane was “affordable”—a term that the company and Defense Department managers invoked with the frequency of a Vajrayana chant. But commonality did not really come to pass. The original plan was that about 70 percent of all the parts on the airplanes would be common; the actual figure today is about 25 percent. Commonality, even at this reduced level, has unintended consequences. When a crack in a low-pressure turbine blade was discovered in an air-force F-35A engine earlier this year, Pentagon officials took the only responsible course, given that the part is used in all models: they grounded the entire fleet of F-35s, not just the ones flown by the air force. In his June testimony, the Pentagon’s Dr. Gilmore revealed another, less public grounding of the entire F-35 test fleet, which occurred in March 2013 after the discovery of “excessive wear on the rudder hinge attachments.”
Are you seriously going to bring out the Vanity Fair article at this stage? If you do not know about it, the things it brings out, and their rebuttals then you are just trolling.

What is really funny is that Viv or Nrao called out the article even before you posted it. Given the dated nature of the information the article provides, it would be a waste on my part (and for everyone else) to rebut the article since most of the issues in that report do not exist any more.
AMRAAM "Achilles heel"? Wonderful! When even US pilots say that the AMRAAM is inadequate,their "Achilles heel",we have the most ardent salesmen for it!

Lockheed Test Pilot Calls For Longer Range AIM-120
by Mike Hoffman on February 18, 2014
Read more: http://defensetech.org/2014/02/18/test- ... z31BrCYsJF
Defense.org
First of all, Had you read the article properly, (or actually watched the One hour long video I had posted where F-35 pilots are discussing this very issue; and from where this article takes its information from) you would have realized that the person that made the comment is not a US pilot. He is an Ex pilot who now works for Lockheed Martin. Lockheed has an active missile development program for a hit to kill BVR weapon. As explained to you earlier that missile is called the CUDA. So yes, its in Lockheed's interest to promote a new missile. The USAF and the USN is developing the Aim-120D missile that has a significant range increase from the Aim-120C7. That missile will IOC this year. They have plans to continue onto this BVR path and seek a new missile for the future. That program will obviously launch when the Aim-120D goes operational. CUDA will no doubt be a contender for any such a missile, but others especially raytheon would have to say something about what they have. The US Department of defense is a bit different from Russia's MOD in the sense that their missile development programs were fully funded post the cold war. They do not need to develop a new missile every time they go out and develop a new fighter. The Aim-120 program which is the most successful BVR missile program on earth has had robust funding as it evolved from the A to the B and from the B to the C5, C7 and now onto the D. In the interim they even had the NCADE missile which is essentially the bigger cousin of the Stunner missile. The future for the AMRAAM replacement is farther out. Since the D is not available for export (only the C5 and C7 are) many europeans decided to develop the meteor for they required a missile with longer range and better performance than the AIm-120B's and C's they had in their inventory. The US that has huge stockpiles of latest gen C's (C7's) and is set to move the entire annual procurement to the D does not need to begin procuring a new missile until later in the future (Perhaps closer to the mid 2020's). In the meantime, they have developed the D and are spending a lot of money on the block 3 aim-9x that is for all practical purposes a MRAAM and not a WVR weapon in the traditional sense of the word.

From an export perspective, the F-35 will have the ability to launch the Meteor from block 4 software onwards. Given the fact that all FMS sales so far are with users that use the AMRAAM any new user coming without huge AMRAAM inventory can have a choice to pick the meteor if they want to do so. How many programs can provide that? The ability for a customer to choose weapons from different sources (US BVR missile or European BVR missile, US Anti ship weapon, or Norwegian anti ship weapon, US Cruise missile, or European Cruise missile. At least 2 Short range weapons that will soon become 3, bombs from multiple sources etc) with ZERO upfront integration cost.
Last edited by brar_w on 09 May 2014 16:14, edited 2 times in total.
Viv S
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by Viv S »

Philip wrote:Here is an excellent feature on the entire programme,written not too long ago,borne out by the latest Pentagon/GAO reports.With the "truth" from Gen.Bogdan,head of the project himself.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2013 ... eed-martin
Does the link work? If so, you could have posted the relevant excerpts instead of uploading the entire seven page article.

FYI already posted. Already discussed. Old news.

Can't go supersonic. Can't shoot a missile. Can't fly at night. Helmet doesn't work. - All outdated information.

At first blush the helmet-mounted display struck Charlie and his colleagues as a major advance. But they were left with a nagging question: what happens if something goes wrong with the helmet? The answer: without a HUD as a fail-safe, pilots would have to fly and fight using the plane’s conventional heads-down displays.
Pilots forced to fly without a working HUD. Hmm.. now why does that sound familiar?
Last edited by Viv S on 09 May 2014 17:20, edited 1 time in total.
NRao
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by NRao »

Here is an excellent feature on the entire programme,written not too long ago,borne out by the latest Pentagon/GAO reports.With the "truth" from Gen.Bogdan,head of the project himself.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2013 ... eed-martin
Desperado.

My *all* time fav article on the F-35.

Philip ji,

I *think* we are making a boat load of progress here. I like this development .............................. going backwards in time. Soon there will be no F-35 to talk about.
brar_w
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by brar_w »

NRao wrote:


Philip ji,

I *think* we are making a boat load of progress here. I like this development .............................. going backwards in time. Soon there will be no F-35 to talk about.
The curious case of the Joint Strike fighter.
Philip
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by Philip »

Read the 2014 forwards-in-time reports of the Pentagon/GAO,posted earlier.It very well may be"Back to the Future"!

PS:The Ukraine crisis is really hotting up with the Mariupol assault and Putin's visit to the Crimea.Will revisit the td. later on.
brar_w
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by brar_w »

Philip wrote:Read the 2014 forwards-in-time reports of the Pentagon/GAO,posted earlier.It very well may be"Back to the Future"!

PS:The Ukraine crisis is really hotting up with the Mariupol assault and Putin's visit to the Crimea.Will revisit the td. later on.
Read and understand all the points made. Also know of counters to those points that help explain the bigger picture. Talk to you when the F-35B IOC's next year.
Philip
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by Philip »

Here are some details of the "bigger picture" delaying the programme.Will wait patiently for it to arrive.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/aer ... er-program
Software Testing Problems Continue to Plague F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program
By Robert N. Charette
Posted 27 Mar 2014
The U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO) earlier this week released its fifth annual report on the state of the F-35 Lightning II, aka the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), aka the “most costly and ambitious” acquisition program ever. What the GAO found was foretold by a report earlier this year by the Department of Defense’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation. The upshot: the F-35 operational and support software development continues to be the major obstacle to the program's success.

In addition, the GAO report states that the projected cost of acquiring the planned 2443 F-35 aircraft (which comes in three flavors) threatens to consume some 20- to 25 percent of annual defense program acquisition funds for the next twenty years or so. The GAO doesn’t explicitly say so, but the operations and maintenance costs of the program—currently estimated to be between $800 billion and $1 trillion dollars or more over the next 50 years—will also consume a significant chunk of DoD’s annual weapon-system related O&M budget as well.

The GAO report states that, “Challenges in development and testing of mission systems software continued through 2013, due largely to delays in software delivery, limited capability in the software when delivered, and the need to fix problems and retest multiple software versions.” Further, the GAO notes that the F-35 program continues to “encounter slower than expected progress in developing the Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS),” which is the F-35’s advanced integrated maintenance and support system (pdf). In the latter case, Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, the F-35 Program Executive Officer, conceded last month that the ALIS system was “way behind” where it should be and was “in catch-up mode.” This, the GAO indicates, was apparently at least partly because of a lack of testing facilities that remains a problem years after ALIS development began.

The GAO notes that as a result of the on-going software problems with the aircraft's mission and support systems, F-35 program officials and contractors alike believe that software development will continue to be the F-35 program’s “most significant risk area.”

Software-testing related issues involving the development and fielding mission systems were the main thrust of this year’s GAO report. The F-35, you may recall, is delivering its mission capabilities in a series of incremental “software blocks,” designated as Block 1A/B, Block 2A, Block 2B, Block 3i, and Block 3F. Each block builds on the mission capability developed in the preceding block. As described by the report, “Blocks 1 and 2A provide training capabilities and are essentially complete, with some final development and testing still underway. Blocks 2B and 3i provide initial warfighting capabilities and are needed by the Marine Corps and Air Force, respectively, to achieve initial operational capability. Block 3F is expected to provide the full suite of warfighting capabilities, and is the block the Navy expects to have to achieve its initial operational capability.” According to Flightglobal, a software Block 4 is being planned as an eventual mission capability upgrade for which development will begin late this year or more likely early next.

However, the GAO report states that, “Developmental testing of Block 2B software is behind schedule and will likely delay the delivery of expected warfighting capabilities,” required by the Marines for their variant of the F-35 (the F-35B) that is scheduled for delivery by July 2015. As of January of this year, “the program planned to have verified the functionality of 27 percent of the software’s capability on-board the aircraft, but had only been able to verify 13 percent,” says the GAO report. In more than a bit of an understatement, the GAO says that, “This leaves a significant amount of work to be done before October 2014, which is when the program expects to complete developmental flight testing of this software block.”

The GAO notes—and seems to agree with—the Operational Test and Evaluation Director's view that a more realistic estimate for when Block 2B’s software functional verification will be completed is sometime closer to November 2015. The report also notes that such a delay would create a knock-on effect to the subsequent F-35 software blocks as well, increasing the cost of the acquisition, not to mention delaying the planned initial operational capability (IOC) of the aircraft (2016 for the Air Force F-35As, and 2018 for the Navy F-35Cs).


Yet, despite everything it saw, the GAO indicates that the F-35 program office and contractors, and especially the Marines, seem to be all whistling along to Bobby McFerrin’s song, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” The GAO states that, “Program and contractor officials have stated that while they recognize that the program faces software risks, they still expect to deliver all of the planned F-35 software capabilities to the military services as currently scheduled.” Why do they think so? Why, they are now going to introduce new approaches to gain “testing efficiency.” The plan: mainly by using “test results from one F-35 variant to close out test points for the other two variants in instances in which the variants have common functions.” However, Bloomberg News quoted a recent RAND assessment of the F-35 program as stating that, “As of this writing, it is not clear how common the mission systems, avionics, software and engine will be among the three service variants,” so how much efficiency will in reality be gained remains to be seen.

In fact, in testimony before Congress yesterday, Lt. Gen Bogdan was reported by Reuters as saying he was “pretty confident” that Block 2B software would be delivered within 30 days of its current target date to allow the Marines to get to initial operational capability by July next year, as the software is “80 percent complete.” However, Bogdan also indicated that he was not as confident that even ten Marine F-35Bs would be IOC ready given that most of the 40-plus Marine F-35Bs will require some 96 engineering modifications by then.

Lt. Gen. Bogdan also disclosed at the hearing that “Block 3F [software] is dependent upon the timely release of Block 2B and 3I, and at present, 3F is tracking approximately four to six months late without taking steps to mitigate that delay.”

One does hope the program’s Block 2B software testing efficiency strategy is successful, since the GAO indicates the F-35 is scheduled to undergo operational testing in June of next year, “to determine that the aircraft variants can effectively perform their intended missions in a realistic threat environment.” If the new testing strategy is not successful, the GAO's view is that the cost of the F-35 acquisition and its future sustainment costs will just keep on escalating.

In response to the GAO report, the F-35 program office has agreed to deliver to Congress an assessment of the “risks of delivering required capabilities within the stated initial operational capability windows for each military service.” The GAO wants that assessment completed and the risks reported by July 2015, but the program hasn’t committed itself to any specific timetable to deliver a detailed assessment. As a Marine Corps Times article seems to suggest, future disclosures on the part of the program office concerning the risks of possible program schedule slips or cost increases will more than likely happen only in piecemeal fashion and by accident.

Of course, even if the F-35 Block 2B software is late—or one or more of the other software blocks are delayed for that matter—it really presages very little change in the general future direction of the program. Why? Well, in a CBS News 60 Minutes interview in February, Lt. Gen. Bogdan was asked, “Has the F-35 program passed the point of no return?” to which he replied, “I don't see any scenario where we're walking back away from this program.”

The GAO is officially scheduled to conduct one more annual review of the F-35 acquisition. The only purpose of it that I can see is merely to warn current and future U.S. taxpayers, many who are not yet born, how much more money they will have to shell out for the next 50 years or more.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/ ... ID20140124
Xcpt:
(Reuters) - A new U.S. Defense Department report warns that ongoing software, maintenance and reliability problems with Lockheed Martin Corp's F-35 stealth fighter could delay the Marine Corps' plans to start using its F-35 jets by mid-2015.

The latest report by the Pentagon's chief weapons tester, Michael Gilmore, provides a detailed critique of the F-35's technical challenges, and focuses heavily on what it calls the "unacceptable" performance of the plane's software, according to a 25-page draft obtained by Reuters.

The report forecast a possible 13-month delay in completing testing of the Block 2B software needed for the Marine Corps to clear the jets for initial combat use next year, a priority given the high cost of maintaining current aging warplanes.
Need for Growlers:
F-35′s Stealth, EW Not Enough, So JSF And Navy Need Growlers; Boeing Says 50-100 More

By Colin Clark on April 10, 2014
http://breakingdefense.com/2014/04/f-35 ... -100-more/
WASHINGTON: Stealth is being outpaced by software, radar and computing power, so electronic warfare and cyber attacks are growing in importance. While the F-35 may possess excellent — if circumscribed — electronic attack and cyber capabilities, it needs help from the Navy’s EA-18G Growler electronic attack aircraft.

That means, Boeing and the Navy are arguing, that the Navy needs more of the electronic attack versions of the F-18, known as the Growler, to fly with the F-35 on the first day of combat to protect the F-35 and to help protect the service’s precious carrier strike groups.
*Not to mention the F-22s without which it is "irrelevant"!

PS:Did not know that the VF article was posted earlier.Apologies.Was posted in full becos it is of a narrative nature,unlike Pentagon/GAO reports.

http://bestfighter4canada.blogspot.in/2 ... s-bad.html
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
GAO F-35 Report: It's bad.

The United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) released its report on the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter earlier this week, and the results were fairly predictable to anyone who has been paying attention to the program in the last few years.

The report can be found here.

The general gist of it? The F-35 is going to be late, and it's going to take a lot more money. The very first page states, in big letters:

Problems Completing Software Testing May Hinder Delivery of Expected Warfighting Capabilities

It's not all bad, however. The report actually praises the "flight sciences" aspect of testing, meaning that the aircraft is meeting most of the goals associated with hardware, like taking off, flying, dropping bombs, and landing.

The program accomplished nearly all of the flight sciences testing, including weapons testing, it had planned for 2013.

Progress has been made on the troublesome tail hook, the STOVL system seems to work well, and the aircraft has no issues with high angle-of-attack flight. Bulkhead cracks in the F-35B are still an issue, with questions regarding to how long, and how expensive they will be to fix.

Where the F-35 runs into trouble, however, is software.

The JSF's finicky ALIS (autonomic logistics information system) is prone to errors, and worst still, impossible to override. Technicians are having go out of their way to find work arounds, adding time and money to the maintenance bill.

The F-35's fancy helmet mounted display is showing improvement, but it still has issues with its night vision camera.

The "Block 2B" software, required to enable initial operational capability (IOC) for the USMC, is "behind schedule and will likely delay the delivery of expected warfighting capabilities." As of January, 27% of the software was to be verified, only 13% was ready. This could lead to a possible 13 month delay, pushing it August 2016.

Delays in getting the software right will lead to the need for additional testing. Additional testing means higher costs and slower production.

Not that the JSF needs the additional costs.
The report states that: "Program funding projections and unit cost targets may not be achievable". At its current rate, the JSF acquisition program will require $12.6 billion per year, every year until 2037. This gobbles up ¼ of the Pentagon's procurement budget. The sustainment cost exceeds $1 trillion (triple that originally planned). Both figures are completely unaffordable in the current fiscal climate. It would also severely jeopardize other large scale projects, like the KC-46 tanker and the Next Generation Bomber.

GAO does state that F-35 unit costs have come down since initial production started, but the price still needs to drop. "Anywhere from $41 million to $49 million in unit costs reductions". While the F-35A and F-35C dropped in unit price, the STOVL F-35B actually increased in price by nearly $10 million.

As for its long term costs, both the F-35A and F-35B were unable to meet reliability targets. If this persists, maintenance costs will increase further, or flying hours will need to be cut.

The software is buggy, and the aircraft is unaffordable as things currently stand.

The GAO Report's recommendation?

Due to the uncertainty surrounding the delivery of F-35 software capabilities, we recommend that the Secretary of Defense conduct an assessment of the specific capabilities that realistically can be delivered and those that will not likely be delivered to each of the services by their established initial operational capability dates.

That means it is time to have a cold hard look at the F-35.
The software troubles need to be fixed, and the costs need to come down. Soon.

If not, the F-35 could very well be doing the Zombie Shuffle
.
brar_w
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by brar_w »

Growler : Stand off jamming platform for EW support. Equipment : Wide band , Mid Band and Low Band Next Generation Jammer (latest Gallium Arsenide AESA jammer)

If the F-35 needs protection through EW means then the growler is the absolute worst platform for it. It is Too much jamming for a stealth fighter, making surprise impossible. F-18 Growlers have the sort of power and wideband jamming to open up the RF environment for the entire legacy fleet but this is the worst solution for a stealth fleet. As has been mentioned to you before the F-35's EW spectrum, much like the F-22 has been designed in a totally opposite manner to the F-16Blk60, F-18G and other high end legacy US jets (F-15 Silent Eagle). Articles and a detail write up has been provided to you to try to grasp why this approach was taken by the pentagon for both the F-22 and the F-35. In a nutshell, the basic premise behind Electronic Jamming defeats the idea of stealth and the surprise element. The enemy sees Jamming, but does not get a radar return therefore automatically knows that stealth is attacking it. Using Home on Jam missiles and passive sensors the enemy can vector its fighters or ground assets to search in the designated area. The Approach to the F-22 and F-35 Electronic attack relied very heavily on passive EW suite ( 30 sensors on the F-22 in addition to the FCR operating in many bands, from L band to VHF and around a dozen sensors on the F-35 in addition to the apg-81) and threat geolocation so that it could be located, avoided or targeted. Active jamming was restricted to only that sensor/ability that could be controlled, steared and had a very low probability of intercept (Apg-77 and Apg-81 radars). This is the basic approach to jamming on a stealth platform, and has been since the B-2 program. It still is the best strategy to go about doing a stealthy mission. And the US AF would know, they are the only force in the world with cold hard experience of operating stealth in war. One cannot simply put a Next gen jammer on the F-35, unless one wants to make it into a non penetrative stand off jammer (which the Marines want at a future date: For them the F-35B is a better investment even at the risk of stealth, than acquiring growlers). If the F-35 requires a jammer to further boost survivability then the Next Gen Jammer is also ill suited for it. A stealth fighter by definition requires less emission to create the "noise" levels required to slip through undetected. The Next gen jammer has been designed to (required to) pass through so much noise into the air that it masks the giant RCS crafts (E-2D's, F-18's F-18EF's etc ) survivable . As a matter of physics, the less the RCS of the strike group the less RF output the jammer needs to emit to achieve the desired effect. Its a trade off that even Boeing was required to make (In the X-32 program), and something the USAF has spent a greater part of 25 years researching (Right mix of EW protection, jamming and Emcon for stealth fighter fleet). Boeing knows, it hence one can clearly see that their PDF was clearly made by the PR and marketing departments as they well know of what the US strategy has been since the 90's since they made the YF23 and the X-32 (both designed around the same strategy). One must keep in mind here that while Russians are just now flying their 5 stealth fighter prototypes, the US has been actively flying stealth since the 80's, and has actually taken the technology to war. The EW suite on stealth fighter debate in the US circles has been going on when such solutions were being conceived in the 70's and 80's. They have added them to the F-117, the B-2 the F-22 and the F-35. The US is simply not now waking up from a post-cold-war-collapse and increasing its investments in threat counters or stealth. They have been making them all along. They also don't have to fall back on Stand off weapon maker's claims for SEAD (Shiny brochure says that IAD threat can be picked off from 200 km using "unmissable" missile that flies at mach 4). They have accumulated hard lessons learnt from going to war and having conducted SEAD missions with both legacy jets and stealth fleet.


But what's to stop boeing from using this pretext to push for F-18E/F sales and for media to run away with the story with a spin that because USN wants more growlers this means that F-35's stealth is inadequate (A laughable conclusion). The thing about the growler is that it is an essential tool for the navy to project air power. Given that the US Navy would be tasked with operating wide ranging aircraft that do not have the F-35's ability and also supporting Marines on the ground etc. As the Navy has tried to mention, to win effective air campaigns and to counter IAD threats, one must do two things.

First, one must reduce RCS, saturate the battlefield with first day stealth aircrafts so that the detection ranges of the enemies radars and air defenses shrink to a fraction of their original size/scope.

Second, you create enough Noise in the airspace so as to effectively render the detecting sensors useless (thats your jamming). Unless you invest very heavily in stealth, from fighters, to bombers, to stealthy support aircraft you will find it extremely difficult to totally eliminate the Air defense threat from stealth alone. The solution is a mix of stealthy assets and wide band long range jammers that attack the problem from both ends of the spectrum. Having said that, your F-35 is still required to go in alone and without support from growlers, as the growler cannot keep up with the F-35. Its a dead give away. As the Navy Lt Colonel explained in the Video I had provided, for Anti Access Area Denial missions the Navy expects the F-35 to go in alone and take care of the AD to open up the air for other legacy assets. With regards to VHF vulnerabilities, they exist for all stealth fighters (its a compromise that all 5th gens have made) and even more so for the PAKFA/FGFA. The Bae,MDD design for the early JSF trade studies was perhaps the best overall stealth design as far as multi-band stealth was concerned. It appears to be the best suited for VHF stealth as well. Unfortunately it sucked as a strike aircraft and was eliminated early on, and the shake up lead to the acquisition of MDD by Boeing and Northrop grumman and Bae moving over to the Lockheed Martin team for the X-35.

Image

6th gen fighters, have the most promising wideband stealth characteristics. But out of the 5th gen jets the F-22 and F-35 offer the greatest amount of stealth.

Image
Image


One must also look at the USN Navy's ambitions here. They have always put less emphasis on Tacair, and more on ships (as most navies around the world do). They have relied on the USAF to open up the gates for them in most conflicts with the F-117's and B-2's. They see that in the Pacific they would lose relevance if they have to maintain this reliance. Hence they have committed to buy F-35's for long range penetrative missions in IAD threat zones, but do not want to invest heavily in other stealth assets (Bombers, UCAV's, etc). The ISR fleet is totally non stealthy (P-8's , Global Hawks) and so is the entire support fleet. The Hornet and Super Hornet are also un stealthy. Therefore for the Navy, the Next gen jammer is one program that would enable them to stay relevant in the pacific. There is a joke on US forums that the USN boasts of the best and most capable pilots (in the US) but the worst tac air planners and strategists. Its not that they are bad, they just do not want to spend a lot of money on tacair. Admirals want SHIPS, not strike fighters. The Navy was extremely reluctant to absorb Precision Munitions when they were coming out, only after some public embarrassment by the congress did they change their views and started buying PGM's.

Is it not interesting that all the articles about EW requirement vs stealth prop up just a few days before the US congressional committee was to rule on extending the F-18E/F and Growler production line? Coincidence much?

As far as your third link is concerned.

Do you not see the "special interest" tag in its name?
Last edited by brar_w on 10 May 2014 18:14, edited 4 times in total.
NRao
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by NRao »

My fear is that if these guys say, often enough, that the sun rises from the South, that it actually will.

Axe, Sweetman, Sprey, now Charette, Colin Clark, GAO, etc are a very powerful group of people/s.

The thing that makes me feel good is that they have at least moved from cannot fly, cannot fire missile, etc. Now it is late, expensive, more late, more expensive....
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by brar_w »

NRao wrote:My fear is that if these guys say, often enough, that the sun rises from the South, that it actually will.

Axe, Sweetman, Sprey, now Charette, Colin Clark, GAO, etc are a very powerful group of people/s.

The thing that makes me feel good is that they have at least moved from cannot fly, cannot fire missile, etc. Now it is late, expensive, more late, more expensive....
The point is that the articles should be fair and expand on the readers own knowledge of "what is going on". No one ever claimed that The F-22 or the F-35 will render all RF threat useless. Nor anyone ever said that the RF spectrum could be tackled with stealth alone. Saying so is an insult to all those that designed stealth aircrafts like the f-117, B-2, F-22 and the F-35. If stealth would eliminate EW altogether then why bother putting one of the most complex EW suites on the f-22 and f-35? The concept to "grasp" for our friend is that EW solutions are Tailored to a platform. The F-22 and F-35 employ a solution that is a departure to what was done on 4th gen fighters (even 4.5 gen fithers such as the Super Hornet, F-16blk 60 and F-15K, Silent eagle) and the architecture and conops for EW deployment on these fighters has been an ongoing refinement since the 90's. The ATF and JAST/JSF programs spent a ton of money to test out various solutions, and adopted one that would ensure the most mission success. That the F-35 (JSF) program used an extension "model" of the basic F-22 EW architecture (the f-35's solution is more refined in some areas to the f-22, but overall the same concept) goes to show how solid the original plan was in the 90's, and what the US Department of defense feels about its soundness. The problem is that people are increasingly starting to look at expanding their knowledge on aviation and defense products by reading news articles and editorials, rather than picking up technical books on the matter.

http://higherlogicdownload.s3.amazonaws ... 20Game.pdf

http://www.infibeam.com/Books/b-2-goes- ... wUsedItems
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by NRao »

Philip
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by Philip »

Of course Boeing want to sell more Growlers,etc.,taking advantage of the JSF's perceived weaknesses,esp in EW,WVR combat ,etc.The problem is that the JSF can carry a very small arsenal in its internal bays,2+2 for air defence plus strike ordnance to remain stealthy.The war between Boeing and Lockheed has commenced.

http://www.f-16.net/forum/viewtopic.php ... 2&p=270271
The battle begins
Currently, the Defense Departments 2015 budget doesn't included funding for the Growler. More importantly, Military.com reports that if the DoD doesn't include funding for the Growler, Boeing may have to shut down its production line in Missouri.

Understandably, Boeing is arguing that it's a mistake not to include funding for its Growlers, because without it, the F-35 will be vulnerable to detection. Additionally, Breaking Defense reports that Navy and Boeing officials believe that without the Growler, the F-35 can't be expected to survive attack missions at the start of a war.

The reason for this, Boeing believes, is that search radars have advanced to the point where stealth is being outpaced. So, while the F-35 is a stealth aircraft, Breaking Defense reports, "Infrared sensors, low and variable frequency radar, and networked radar and other sensor systems built or used by Russia and China make spotting a stealthy aircraft a virtual certainty."

Lockheed fights back
In response to Boeing's attack, Lockheed spokesman Michael Rein, told Military.com: "The stealth capabilities in the F-35 are unprecedented in military aviation. ... Extensive analysis and flight test of the survivability of the F-35 with its combination of stealth, advanced sensors, data fusion, sophisticated countermeasures, and electronic attack demonstrate conclusively its superior advantages over earlier generation aircraft." In other words, Boeing is wrong according to Lockheed.

Who will win?
What this fight basically boils down to is funding. Thanks to automatic budget cuts, otherwise known as sequestration, defense companies are feeling the pinch. For example, the Pentagon requested $8.3 billion for 34 F-35s. While that's a significant number, it's eight less than the Pentagon planned on.
Post25 Apr 2014, 14:37
Boeing Builds the Navy an F-35C Exit Strategy

Published April 25, 2014Military.com
"A rival aircraft manufacturer has worked not so quietly this past year to offer the Navy an escape hatch from the costly Joint Strike Fighter program.

The Navy's decision to reduce its F-35C five-year acquisition plan from 69 to 36 aircraft over the past year raised questions about the service's commitment to the fifth generation fleet. More questions have been asked since the Navy included 22 EA-18G Growlers on its unfunded priorities list....."

"For its part, Chief Naval Officer Adm. Jonathan Greenert has repeatedly said the Navy remains committed to the Joint Strike Fighter program and intends to buy more over the next five years.

However, defense analysts have said the recent actions taken by the Navy run counter to the promises offered by the CNO -- specifically the Navy's choice to add 22 Growlers to the 2015 defense budget's unfunded priority list and the push to increase the number of Growlers aboard each aircraft carrier...

"[Stealth] is needed for what we have in the future for at least 10 years out there and there is nothing magic about that decade," Greenert said. "But I think we need to look beyond that. So to me, I think it's a combination of having aircraft that have stealth but also aircraft that can suppress other forms of radio frequency electromagnetic emissions so that we can get in..."

"The Joint Strike Fighter does have electronic attack sensors built into it, but few question the Growler's superiority in the realm, especially once the Growler receives the Next Generation Jammer in 2020. Instead of merely sending electromagnetic signals in a particular direction, the Next-Generation Jammer will be able to much more precisely identify, locate and engage specific threats.

Industry sources say the Growler is particularly well suited to counter emerging air defense system threats due to its ability to both jam and detect enemy signals. Air defenses have become more mobile, digital and computerized, industry experts said, making them more difficult for stealthy aircraft to avert, they say...."
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2014/04/25/ ... -strategy/
Therefore,"kicking down the door" first to allow the legacy fighters to pour in would require large amounts of JSFs too.If they are also detected by enemy stealth aircraft and lose the BVR battle,as has been feared by US analysts themselves,then the poor WVR capability of the JSF -performance stats posted before ,will be a severe handicap in its fight to survive,esp. when faced with superior numbers as Rand has wargamed.It's going to be quite a war party though,if Growlers,F-22s,etc. are joining the posse.And then there is UCLASS.

The advent of UCLASS though is going to be a huge asset to the USN,which will see it used for the unmanned strike role,but the USN's plans to operate it mainly in lightly defended airspace is causing some controversy with Congress which wants its strike role enhanced.
Instead of a stealthy deep penetrating strike aircraft that many in the national security establishment had called for, the Navy had instead tailored the requirements for the UCLASS to conduct intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) missions over uncontested airspace with only a light secondary strike capability.
Meanwhile Canada has deferred its decision "to buy or not to buy" the JSF to perhaps 2016-elections are on the way and heavy US pressure is being reported,
(http://cdfai3ds.wordpress.com/2014/03/2 ... -pressure/),
while Denmark has opened up a contest which also includes the Typhoon,SH and Gripen.

Watch the video clip.
"Failure waiting to happen",with the very same critics mentioned like Pierre Sprey,etc.
http://www.ecnmag.com/blogs/2014/02/f-3 ... ing-happen
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by brar_w »

Of course Boeing want to sell more Growlers,etc.,taking advantage of the JSF's perceived weaknesses,esp in EW,WVR combat ,etc.
JSF's perceived weakness is not a weakness at all. If you try to study the matter the approach USN is wanting it does not apply to the F-35, F-35 only shows up in Boeing's marketing. They are asking for more Growlers for fleet protection. This is an ongoing need for the USN exclusive of any efforts to buy the F-35. The Growler opens up the RF dommain for non stealthy jets to operate. If you bothered watching the video i had posted, the USN Lt Colonel clearly says that in anti access areas they expect the F-35 to go it alone to open up the airspace for the legacy fleet.

The Growler demand from the USN is not something that is unjustified. Look at their fleet numbers. As the JSF trickles in beginning 2018, they will still be left with huge numbers of legacy jets, support aircraft, ISR assets etc The Growler is needed to protect those assets, and also protect the ship fleet from air attack. Earlier the USN could ofload such a mission to the USAF. The USAF however is planning to use over a thousand stealthy F-35s, 185 F-22's, B-2's, UAV's, UCAV's and 150 or so Next Generation Bomber, therefore for them standoff EW is not required as the stealth RF target is extremely low (Massive reduction in SAM rings) and that the USAF can tackle with inbuilt organic EW ability that is more tactical in nature as opposed to being stand off. The Navy does not want to rely on the AF to open the door for it in the pacific, which means a reduction of the carrier fleet because they cannot be positioned anywhere near the pacific threat areas. The Navy will never see that happening therefore for them the strategy is:

* Purchase the F-35C for stealthy anti access missions
* Purchase As many growlers as possible to protect legacy fleet, plus tackle the RF problem from both ends of the spectrum (stealth+EW)
* Develop cutting edge broad area ISR capability ( Navy Global Hawk+P8+F-35+Navy UAV program)
* Set up a separate weapons procurement (and development) fund for threats originating in the Pacific (read: CHINA). This covers, AshM, Hypersonics, Cyberwarfare, Satellite networks, Datalinks and increased capability in GPS denied corridors.

Collectively many of these things are covered in the Air sea battle concept (ASBC)
The problem is that the JSF can carry a very small arsenal in its internal bays,2+2 for air defence plus strike ordnance to remain stealthy.
The problem is that you do not pay any attention to FACTS. The JSF carries exactly as much as the USN and USAF wanted it to carry. The USAF in fact wanted it to carry 2 missiles plus 2x1000lb bombs. The Navy insisted on 2 missiles+2x 2000lb bombs (Deeper weapons bays) and the air force had to compromise. The F-35 could have been made bigger, but for what? The demand was set by the services and for the USAF and USN it met the demand, and for the USMC weight savings meant a loss of 2000lb internal carriage but the MC did not want that in the first place (it was a requirement on which the USN was rigid) as for them the demand is to support Marines on the ground, not bomb C2C targets for the Air force that are buried.

Lets look at other stealth fighters:

- Do let me know what the PAKFA's internal capacity is as far as 2000lb bombs and air defense missiles are concerned
- The F-22 cannot even carry the bunker buster 2000lb capacity internally. Its bomb bay maxes at 1000lb and with 2x 1000lb bombs internally it is limited to carrying only 2 AMRAAM missiles internally. The Aim-9's are irrelevant as a bomb laden strike mission does not require the fighter to dogfight (not CONOPS) The strategy in such a case is to use the BVR weapon and escape the engagement and live to fight another day. In fact the F-35's internal capacity in a mixed strike configuration is the exact same as the F-22's as far as bombs and BVR weapons are concerned. The F-35 just carries larger bombs. Thats a remarkable capability for a stealthy single engined multi-role fighter.

- What's the internal capacity for the J20 and the J31? How many BVR missiles do those fighter carry with 1000lb and 2000lb bombs internally?

The F-35C for the US Navy is a replacement of the F-18 Hornet (Classic hornet). The emphasis for the Navy as far as the strike mission was to use the nearly 20,000 pounds of internal fuel to look to double the TOS at the same range over the hornet and Super Hornet or to considerably extend the range of the jet with the same TOS. Just ask the F-18 Hornet (Classic or super) to match the F-35C's range and TOS with a 2x2000lb bomb plus 2 missiles plus one IRST pod and one FLIR pod and see them GIVE UP. Its simply not possible. The Super hornet to do so would require EFT's plus external jugs and to carry the same sensor suite it would require an external IRST pod plus an external FLIR pod, just to get to the same strike zone where the the F-35 can Get on internal fuel and weapons (and have enough fuel in reserve). The key point is TOS as that is very important when things such as SEAD is the mission. Now ask the F-18E/F to do the same mission (Range + TOS) in a contested airspace and it will ask for an ingress tanking (Refuel) and an egress tanking as it would have to stay low and have reserves to put on the thrusters if a pop threat shows up to the fight.



The war between Boeing and Lockheed has commenced.
No it has not. Boeing is trying to save the Super Hornet production line for long enough for some middle eastern competition and a possible canadian competition to determine its fate. The Navy has sequestration to worry about. The demand for Growlers is a genuine one and has nothing to do with the F-35 or any other stealth assets they may have in the future. It is simply required to tackle the RF problems especially when combined with the Next generation jammer. The Navy has intelligently deferred deliveries of the LRIP F-35's to past 2018 ( around 30), this enabled them to free up huge amounts of money to buy things such as virginia class submarine and fund R&D and advanced development of things like the AMDR and the Direct energy weapons. Sequestration is expected to slow down or end towards 2017 or so. The Navy slots will be (and have been) picked up by the South Korea, Turkey and Israel (order coming soon) so the path for production ramp up is not affected. The Navy would have liked to defer growler purchases if they could but because the Super Hornet did not win in Brazil they are forced to deal with its acquisition NOW or lose it forever. Even then (given such a desperate situation) they still did not budget the 22 or so extra Growlers. They left that in the "unfunded" area of the budget, which is essentially a message to congress that "this is what we wanted but we cannot afford so look into the matter and release funds for the same".

Boeing's plans with the Growler are for SURVIVAL, it will have absolutely no effect on the USN's purchase of the F-35 or their commitment towards a 5th gen platform.
Therefore,"kicking down the door" first to allow the legacy fighters to pour in would require large amounts of JSFs too
And Large amounts of JSF's they are getting (Biggest operator after the USAF). Not only that they will also be incorporating other stealth assets into their fleet from ISR to the Next Generation Fighter that replaces the F-18E/F starting the 2030's or so. No doubt the F-18G would contribute in this as I explained the solution for the Navy is to attack the RF problem from both ends of the spectrum (stealth end for shrinking SAM RINGS and the EW rings to create NOISE to clutter the AD's). The E/F (the fighter version of the Super Hornet) offers little value to the navy other than the fact that its CHEAP. The resources required for the E/F to accomplish F-35C's strike missions are huge, and once it gets there it is less survivable and lacks the performance.
f they are also detected by enemy stealth aircraft and lose the BVR battle,as has been feared by US analysts themselves,then the poor WVR capability of the JSF -performance stats posted before ,will be a severe handicap in its fight to survive,esp. when faced with superior numbers as Rand has wargamed.It's going to be quite a war party though,if Growlers,F-22s,etc. are joining the posse.And then there is UCLASS.
Of course the JSF will LOSE the battle every time despite being shown to be a competent stealth fighter given its unique abilities and requirements. Its a key member of the A2A element of the USAF AEF and even within the AEF will outnumber the F-22 raptor in the Air superiority mission. Not to mention that it would be the front line fighter for the RAAF , ROKAF, Japan, USMC and the potent IDF.

Dream on !
The advent of UCLASS though is going to be a huge asset to the USN,which will see it used for the unmanned strike role,but the USN's plans to operate it mainly in lightly defended airspace is causing some controversy with Congress which wants its strike role enhanced.
Its causing absolutely no controversy. Congressman Forbes is wanting it to be something like a Mini-B2 bomber. The Navy can only squeeze about 2.5-4 billion Dollars between 2014 budget and 2020 budget (6 years) to develop it. Within that budget they are seeking a capability that is tried and tested, and where UAV's do well. No UCAV to date has been designed to operate in Anti access area denial missions and no one has operational experience with the same in GPS and SATCOM Denied environments. The USN has widely published PACIFIC demands that emphasise on GPS and SATCOM denied missions (Long Range Anti ship missile, SDBII, F-35C, Growler/E-2D data linking, Aim-9X Blk 2 and 3 etc.) The USN is the absolute last service that will try to develop such a capability. Such a capability has traditionally come from the air force (that developed cutting edge technology be it the SR71, F-117, B-2 or the first and second stealth fighter) and so it will this time around too. The USN rightly has demanded for an organic ISR capability (very important in the pacific context as INFORMATION is the key over such a wide ocean) with some light attack in light-moderated defended areas. The biggest capability that the USN has demanded is the REFUEL capability, where a stealthy to semi-stealthy UCLASS can refuel the F-35C and allow it to do its penetrating missions along with other USAF and allied assets. Randy Forbes is a Naval aviation guy and a champion of the carrier fleet. He wishes to have the navy transform into an organization that champions ground breaking aviation technologies, something that the navy has little experience with (like I explained they were late to PGM's and late to stealth) and little money to do. The Navy spends a ton of R&D money on ships (as it should) subs etc. Cutting edge aviation capability such as an autonomous UCAV that can operate in heavily defended areas where SATCOM and GPS cannot be taken for granted is a project worth 10's of billions of dollars, and the only organization that can afford to undertake such a task is the USAF that may well consider it in the planned 150 billion or so they will spend to develop and procure the B-3 bomber. The USN did initially want such a capability (Back around 10 years ago) but that was because they were partnered with the USAF for the project (A project from which the X-47 was born) and expected the USAF to take over much of the development and technical risks of such a venture. The USAF decided that a tactical strike UCAV was not what they wanted as the requirements for them were to replace the Strategic strike fleet (B-1 and B-2's) so the navy was left with the offshoots of the program, out of which they developed the X-47B.

The American Navy is great running technically high risk programs such as this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK7-xFR_dsg

or this

http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/us-navy-u ... -rail-gun/

But have absolutely no track record of trying to do something in modern aviation as their A-12 disaster showed quite clearly. Then there is also another problem of the Admirals, of which America has way too many, and whom just want to have the largest number of ships they can get into a budget. The Navy lacks the will or capability to run a program that would be required to transform the UCLASS (successfully) into a modern day Mini B-2 bomber. Congressman forbes probably knows it, but he has built himself an image of being a champion of naval supremacy therefore has to hammer away at them. The Navy has listened to him, but not as far as aviation is concerned, more towards weapons (long range anti ship missile, JHMCS Aim-9x development, Hypersonics). Their Next gen program would be interesting to follow. Do they finally set up for funding of a high risk high cost 6th gen fighter (R&D cost estimated at 20 billion or so) or simply buy more F-35's till a time when the US 6th gen fighter is ready and piggy back on them.
Meanwhile Canada has deferred its decision "to buy or not to buy" the JSF to perhaps 2016-elections are on the way and heavy US pressure is being reported
And rightly so. Canadian opposition wants a competition, and they should get it. Canada still gets some of the development work and gets to have a competition where the likes of Boeing, EADS/Airbus and Lockheed can compete. Competition is not a bad thing at all especially for air forces such as canada that will always play second fiddle to the US and not go it along in any war. And why would the US not put pressure on Canada? Canada's security is intricately linked to the US, and its a NATO member and a key ally of the US. Any war where Canada actually needs to go fight, would be a war where the US will be at its side.

The only nations that are iffy on the F-35 are Denmark, Canada and Italy. Canada has a very tight budget, and the delays and rise in the cost of the initial LRIP f-35's has called for that democratic country to hold a competition. It should. Italy on the other hand has seen its economy go down in the dumps and current unemployment for the younger generation stands at 40%. They are looking to reduce a buy or defer the buy. But since Italy has its "jobs" at stake since it is one of the countries that plans to support its aviation industry through assembling and servicing the F-35, there orders are more likely to be deferred and made up in the future years. Meanwhile others have stepped up and filled in the shoes nicely. Japan and South Korea have come in through the FMS route. Israel is also coming in a big way, Singapore is a strong possibility and Finland is also looking at the f-35.
while Denmark has opened up a contest which also includes the Typhoon,SH and Gripen
which is also not a bad thing. That the air force's want a competition is good for their budget and to do a cost/capability analysis. Its also good for the f-35 since it is yet to lose a competition.

This video is quite old, seen it, and it has plenty of rebuttals littered around the net.
Last edited by brar_w on 11 May 2014 09:39, edited 6 times in total.
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by NRao »

Watch the video clip.
"Failure waiting to happen",with the very same critics mentioned like Pierre Sprey,etc.
http://www.ecnmag.com/blogs/2014/02/f-3 ... ing-happen
Sprey lost his 401K. Recouping.
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by NRao »

http://www.f-16.net/forum/viewtopic.php ... 2&p=270271
The battle begins
Currently, the Defense Departments 2015 budget doesn't included funding for the Growler. More importantly, Military.com reports that if the DoD doesn't include funding for the Growler, Boeing may have to shut down its production line in Missouri.

Understandably, Boeing is arguing that it's a mistake not to include funding for its Growlers, because without it, the F-35 will be vulnerable to detection. Additionally, Breaking Defense reports that Navy and Boeing officials believe that without the Growler, the F-35 can't be expected to survive attack missions at the start of a war.

The reason for this, Boeing believes, is that search radars have advanced to the point where stealth is being outpaced. So, while the F-35 is a stealth aircraft, Breaking Defense reports, "Infrared sensors, low and variable frequency radar, and networked radar and other sensor systems built or used by Russia and China make spotting a stealthy aircraft a virtual certainty."

Lockheed fights back
In response to Boeing's attack, Lockheed spokesman Michael Rein, told Military.com: "The stealth capabilities in the F-35 are unprecedented in military aviation. ... Extensive analysis and flight test of the survivability of the F-35 with its combination of stealth, advanced sensors, data fusion, sophisticated countermeasures, and electronic attack demonstrate conclusively its superior advantages over earlier generation aircraft." In other words, Boeing is wrong according to Lockheed.

Who will win?
What this fight basically boils down to is funding. Thanks to automatic budget cuts, otherwise known as sequestration, defense companies are feeling the pinch. For example, the Pentagon requested $8.3 billion for 34 F-35s. While that's a significant number, it's eight less than the Pentagon planned on.
:)

So, Boeing says something technical, LM counter technical. The real problem - of course - is funding, a non-technical problem.

And, this basic logic is posted on BR as the truth.
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by brar_w »

So, Boeing says something technical, LM counter technical. The real problem - of course - is funding, a non-technical problem
The discussion (hypothetically of course)

Boeing: F-35's stealth inadequate, its jamming not as extensive as the growler
Lockheed: US Department of defense sent us Stealth requirements through the JPO, we have met them. EW prowess is classified and you only have access to unclassified elements of it
Boeing: What were the Program required stelath requirements
Lockheed: They are classified, but we have met them, the air force and the navy required us to go into an IAD threat alone and we have shown it to be possible
Boeing: What was the IAD threat
Lockheed: Well, since you worked with us as a junior partner on the F-22 program, you must realize that stelth performance even for that program are yet to be declassified. Why would the AF and Navy declassify these requirements
Boeing: Silence
Lockheed: We have solutions in place if more Active jamming is to be added to the F-35. Our partners in Israel are already developing such solutions, and we have ourself worked with northrop grumman to deliver such sollutions to United Arab Emirates. But the USAF or the USN do not want these solutions as they have spent more than 20 years defining the EW capability of stealth jets and active elements of suppression are limited by design (so as to limit emission control)
Boeing: We know, we offered the same solutions for the YF23 and the X-32 but we have to compete YAAR.
Lockheed: We know you have to compete but just shut up and stop talking out of your a$$.

Meanwhile the US Navy: We want to up the Growler fleet to cover the RF threat index. We are spending billions to develop the Next Generation Jammer with cutting edge technology much ahead of its time. We need a cheap platform to carry that Jammer. The growler is non-stealthy therefore perfect for a stand off jammer, it has EW missions systems already integrated which saves us cost of allocating this mission to the F-35. Meanwhile, we would have loved to kept our promise to acquire the f-35's had the politicians not cut the budget for our services that forced us to make tough choices and forcing us to cut some of the F-35C we were to purchase in the next 5 years. We have deferred those f-35's to a time when they get cheaper, and when the budget restrictions are lifted. We see the F-35C as an integral aspect of our anti access strategy. We have published our vision for the future recently, the F-35 is integral to it. We are currently performing DT and will take the F-35C to the carrier between august and october of this year.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/218992925/Nav ... ion-Vision
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by Philip »

LM can only tout their bird to prevent the programme from tanking.Why not read what the latest pentagon report spelt out? The performance stated exists only on paper at the moment,has not been borne out in testing parameters,which have been reduced and the relaibility factor and huge number of major developmental issues remaining before it can be truly combat capable.

http://www.jsfnieuws.nl/?p=1140
Xcpt:
Technical and Risk Assessments.

US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Systems Engineering reports:
DASD(SE) participated in several subsystem technical reviews including a Production Readiness Review (PRR) and a Quick Look Review (QLR) update. The QLR update confirmed that the risk was lower for the helmet, arresting hook, integrated power pack, and lightning protection, but risk remains in other areas including buffet, mission systems software, sustainment software, and tail heating. DASD(SE) also updated software analyses with the support of the JPO
and the contractor, and participated in acquisition/systems engineering planning activities.
Program risks are known and understood. The JSF program has risks in
development, sustainment, and production. Risk mitigation plans are in place, but documentation lags. The program made risk burn-down progress in FY 2013.

Sortie Generation Rate too low


Stephen Welby reveals about the performance of the F-35
The program is on track to meet seven of the eight KPPs. An issue with incorrect analysis/assumptions is hampering the attainment of the sortie generation rate (SGR) KPP. The program office is examining the sensitivity of the SGR KPP to establish more operationally realistic ground rules and assumptions. As a result, the program plans to reassess SGR.

This is remarkable, because the JORD (requirement specifications) of the F-35 the key perfomance parameters (KPP) specifies about the (minimum) sortie rate:
- Sortie rate F-35A: 3 sorties per day
- Sortie rate F-35B: 4 sorties per day
- Sortie rate F-35C: 3 sorties per day

Back in 2012, speaking at an event hosted by the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. the USAF chief of staff Gen Norton Schwartz told the public:
The US Air Force has concluded that the short take-off vertical landing (STOVL) Lockheed Martin F-35B- model aircraft cannot generate enough sorties to meet its needs; therefore the service will not consider replacing the Fairchild Republic A-10 Warthog close air support jet with that variant.

Now the Pentagon reports the SGR will be lower……….What’s next?

Other Key Performance Parameters

One could say: Key Performance Perimeters (KPP) is the basic performance requirement by the F-35. Back in February 2012 the JROC (Joint Requirements Oversight Council) ordered the JSF Program Office to reconsider KPPs that some versions of the F-35 were to miss. This resulted in:
- F-35A combat radius target (objective was 690 miles, down to 580 miles)
- F-35B longer runway allowed for short take-off’s
- F-35C higher maximum landing speed

However, at this moment DASD(SE) concluded that:
Although on track, the combat radius, STOVL performance, and CV recovery KPPs have limited margins.
The sortie generation KPP is not as contracted; the logistics footprint KPP is in danger. The mission reliability KPP (minimum 93%), at this moment, has a long way to go. The DOT&E report FY2013 (January 2014) found ”Reliability is poor and ranges from 30 to 39 percent behind the current objective. The “availability” of the existing fleet is getting worse and has never reached, is receding from, its quite modest threshold of 50 percent at this stage in the program. The amount of time needed to repair failures “has increased over the past year.

Other performance parameters

Stephen Welby has found that 16 of the 62 non-KPP ORD thresholds are not achievable by the end of the JSF-development (SDD). These capability goals also were defined in the April 2000 operational requirements document (ORD).
Another 8 of the 62 non-KPP are at risk of not achieving the threshold. These 8 non-KPP’s are not identified in the report. The JSF Program Office identified corrective actions or has way-ahead recommendations.

Already in the 2003 Selected Acquisition Report to the US Congress on the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) Program of Record, the Pentagon warned:
“Some non-KPP Threshold Requirements will not be met for all variants.”

However, nothing happened to correct this warnings.

In 2012 the Pentagon tried to ease several parameters already, after the DOT&E chief concluded that the F-35’s sustained turn rate requirements and its transonic acceleration requirements could not be met. One example: The program announced an intention to change performance specifications for the F-35C, reducing turn performance from 5.1 to 5.0 sustained g’s and increasing the time for acceleration from 0.8 Mach to 1.2 Mach by at least 43 seconds.
Sustained turning performance for the F-35A was being reduced from 5.3G to 4.6G according to the DOT&E FY2012 report.
Increasing acceleration from 0.8M to 1.2 by "at least" 43 seconds! Turn rate reduced,tch,tch. "39%" behind mission reliability parameters of "93%".Availability of the fleet ,50%,"reducing" by the year,sortie rate "too low",Bogdan said that "too many parts were falling off",new helmet required,the principal air defence weapon,AMRAAM,has a nagging fault that hasn't be fixed as yet,EW lacking requiring Growlers says Boeing AND the CNO of the USN Adm.Greenert (surely a higher ranking officer than a Lt.Col.?) ,"irrelevant without the F-22" another general (only the head of the USAF's Air Combat Command!),more and more structural components cracking,to fix these it will take "months,and months and months..." said Bogdan to the Senate,and the software-the most critical component upon which the combat capability of each block and variant is way behind schedule.


One can vividly imagine the JSF "breaking down the doors" of the Chinese air defences.With this track record,The Chinese must be laughing! In fact,the PRC news item about the Liaoning being worried about the JSF may in fact be a devious ploy by the inscrutable Chinamen to get the US to beggar itself with the JSF ,which is cannibalising other programmes starved of funds,and thus weaken its overall defence capability.
brar_w
BRF Oldie
Posts: 10694
Joined: 11 Aug 2016 06:14

Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by brar_w »

LM can only tout their bird to prevent the programme from tanking
Yes tanking for sure. They do not need to tout it. It is securing orders from multiple nations and inter services in America. Its even managed to win 3 customers outside of the program even before the first version has IOC'd. In fact its Boeing that is touting, Lockheed is simply saying, go speak to the customer that PROHIBITS us to talk about either the stealth, or the EW ability of the F-35 in a fashion that may perhaps counter your points. The Head of the RAAF (much better and seasoned then the editor of jsfbaddeal ) has spoken on that capability of course. Boeing knows that Lockheed has to stay silent, so they are having their PR wing do the work. The problem with the dumb move by boeing is that its taking the discussion away from a genuine need for the growler, which exists for the Navy. The Navy probably hates the boeing approach, as it pits them directly in conflict with its own vision document and that of the pentagon which has vowed at all costs to protect the F-35 program.
Why not read what the latest pentagon report spelt out?
Perhaps because I've read it multiple times, and understand it rather well and have rebutted some of the points, while pointing other links to valuable rebuttals.
The performance stated exists only on paper at the moment
As a matter of fact, all performance exists only on paper until the jet has IOC'd. At a more technical level, performance only exists on paper until it has been demonstrated to a sufficient degree so as to "check - off" that from the testing parameters sheet. Many aspects of the f-35 have been "checked off" after key point verifications.

Some of the reports are rather vague and dated. The F-35 STOVL varient takes longer to take off. Well, it can take off vertically if so required. It can also take off from the WASP and will be able to take off from the 45K class (Mini carriers) USS Americas. The Marine core has proven this not once, but twice by taking the jet out to sea. Even Brits had been invited to fly it off the ship and they loved it.

Range shortfalls are there. YES. They were there even for the F-22 raptor, and still exist for it. Significance, Yes and No. Yes that the services could have used those jets. No because the ranges are quite a bit more than the aircraft they are replacing especially given mission profiles.

Enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW28Mb1YvwY

USS America (LHA6)

Image
Image

Increasing acceleration from 0.8M to 1.2 by "at least" 43 seconds! Turn rate reduced,tch,tch. "39%" behind mission reliability parameters of "93%".Availability of the fleet ,50%,"reducing" by the year,sortie rate "too low",Bogdan said that "too many parts were falling off",new helmet required,the principal air defence weapon,AMRAAM,has a nagging fault that hasn't be fixed as yet,EW lacking requiring Growlers says Boeing AND the CNO of the USN Adm.Greenert (surely a higher ranking officer than a Lt.Col.?) ,"irrelevant without the F-22" another general (only the head of the USAF's Air Combat Command!),more and more structural components cracking,to fix these it will take "months,and months and months..." said Bogdan to the Senate,and the software-the most critical component upon which the combat capability of each block and variant is way behind schedule.
- Turn Performance difference: Explanation provided, kindly re-read the link posted earlier.
- EM and Acceleration:

http://www.elementsofpower.blogspot.in/ ... ility.html

Fleet availability: Issue to be sorted out pre-IOC. F-22's Fleet readiness/availability was quite bad also, but then it caught up by IOC. Marines are confident of IOC for Aug-dec 2015. So confident in fact that their premium squadron will take the fighter to Japan early 2016. Clearly they have not read your statements, especially the BOLD ones. Other technical issues with fleet availability, readiness reporting have been provided to you in the rebuttals to the DAVID AXE nonsense and the canadian special interest rebuttal (trash).


Cracking, issues occur with many program. F-16 had wing and bulkhead cracks.So did the F-18. Why else do you think stress testing is conducted? For the purpose of an experiment? Or for fun? just to film an episode of myth busters perhaps? No computer models are perfect, hence long term stress testing is performed in which the airframe is stressed to levels that go beyond normal stress on the frame and the hours tested are throughout the life of the aircraft.
said Bogdan to the Senate,and the software-the most critical component upon which the combat capability of each block and variant is way behind schedule.
Most recently he has said that the 2b and 3i he is quite confident on. 3F may see a 4-6 month delay. Hardly something that is EARTH SHATTERING if you know anything about software programs for complex systems. P8 software development is behind, F-22's was way behind, the V22 was behind as well. Software is a challenge even for US which is home to some of the top software minds from across the world. One could do a 4.5 gen program and the software would be quite easy (such as for the block 60 viper) but then the F-35's software and level of integration is unprecedented for the US and so is challenging.
One can vividly imagine the JSF "breaking down the doors" of the Chinese air defences.With this track record,The Chinese must be laughing! In fact,the PRC news item about the Liaoning being worried about the JSF may in fact be a devious ploy by the inscrutable Chinamen to get the US to beggar itself with the JSF ,which is cannibalising other programmes starved of funds,and thus weaken its overall defence capability.
Another, jem to keep ! It makes it 4.

EDIT: Your entire last post, minus the first paragraph was a repeat.
Philip
BRF Oldie
Posts: 21537
Joined: 01 Jan 1970 05:30
Location: India

Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by Philip »

Absolutely,"the proof of the pudding is in the eating".Whether it be the JSF,FGFA or any other bird.One would be more understandable and sympathetic to the JSF if it was just a couple of years late,but it is already 7 years late and dates for IOC,etc. are slipping badly.The USMC IOC is being pushed back.Some of its problems are increasing,fixing requiring huge extra funding which is not in the budget,despite performance parameters being lowered.Yes,there are orders from allies,but look at the numbers reduced,both from allies as well as US procurement.Increased costs per unit if orders further dropped or cancelled as with Canada.It's availability and reliability % is so poor that some call predict it to become a "hangar queen".

You mention that you've read the various reports.One analyst/involved in the programme stated that the JSF's major problems started around 2007 (?) when it was found to be too overweight and sizes of key components were reduced,leading to the increasing cracks being experienced as of now,esp. in the limited production aircraft requiring expensive and time consuming repairs.Bogdan himself said that it was a wrong decision to order production before development was complete."Fly before you buy",the Reagan era mantra.Contrast this with the LCA.As of now only 40+ aircraft have been ordered,despite decades of development,thousands of hrs. of flight testing,etc.The IAF has (in the past) been a most critical customer.While the potential is there for about 300 aircraft to be produced,and should be, further orders will depend upon the initial evaluation of the end-user.This is a more conservative and safer way to go.Unfortunately,as in some reports,there is such a strong JSF lobby in the US establishment,so many jobs dependent,money to be made,that despite the truth of the matter,it is being procured at the expense of other programmes,assets being retired so that JSF funding can be maintained.While Boeing has a healthy profit line tx to its civilian sales,LM is cash strapped and depends upon fed. funding to sort out its JSF problems. The poor US taxpayer is going to be saddled with the trillion $$$ bill.

Please add the gems up.My pleasure.It might make a nice necklace one day!

This report,though a trifle old,spells out the USN's dilemma.How much progress has been made since that report,is illustrated by the fact that the USN's JSF 2015 procurement numbers have dropped....by almost 50%,36 instead of 69!
(http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/ ... px?ID=1436)

http://www.informationdissemination.net ... place.html
Navy Stuck Between the Rock and Hard Place on Joint Strike Fighter

National Defense Magazine blog has what appears to me to be the most insightful tidbits of information to date on the Navy perspective of the F-35C. At the March 12 Credit Suisse/McAleese defense programs conference in Washington, D.C. Air Force LT. General Christopher C. Bogdan, program executive officer of the Joint Strike Fighter, and Admiral Jonathan Greenert, Chief of Naval Operations, both made comments that in my opinion, gives the current view of the F-35C program from DoD perspective. The implications of these comments are worth consideration.

Throughout his presentation, Bogdan repeatedly hammered the point that the F-35’s eight international partners — the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Italy, Turkey, Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands — are losing patience and becoming increasingly alarmed by the trends in the program.

“The cost is up by tens of billions,” Bogdan said. “Our partners are starting to put really big dollars into this program.” By the time F-35 reaches lot 8 low-rate production, more than half of the aircraft will be for non-U.S. customers. “They need to know where their money is going,” he said.


Adding insult to injury, the JSF program office classified all documents as “U.S. only,”
which upset partner nations. Even if they are all buying the same aircraft, each country has its own air-worthiness qualification processes and other administrative procedures that require they have access to the aircraft’s technical data. JSF officials are working to re-classify the documentation, Bogdan said. “These airplanes are important to them [our partners], politically.”

Pressure to keep allies happy might be one reason why the U.S. Navy will not be allowed to dump the F-35C. It has been known for years that some Navy leaders would prefer to continue to buy the F/A-18 Super Hornet, and not have to bother with the expense and trouble of having to bring a new type of aircraft into the inventory.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert insisted that the Navy is fully on board.

“We need the F-35C,” he said at the Credit Suisse conference. “It has to be integrated into the air wing.” He said the Navy has not yet decided how many it will buy, however. And he recognized that the Navy ultimately has no choice but to buy the F-35C. “If we bought no C's, it would be very detrimental to the overall program” and to international partners, he said.

As most of you know, the F-35A is the Air Force version of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), the F-35B is the Marine Corps version of the Joint Strike Fighter, and the F-35C is the Navy carrier launched version of the Joint Strike Fighter. Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor, and in order for all three versions of the Joint Strike Fighter to reduce costs per unit, the schedule for all three must improve. Scheduling delays and design flaws have turned the JSF program into the biggest runaway train wreck in modern DoD acquisition, if not of all time. The only version of the F-35 that everyone appears to agree is truly needed is F-35B, the vertical takeoff and landing version. The F-35A is the single most important of the three versions because current plans call for building thousands of these aircraft, and alliance interest is primarily for this version of the aircraft. The US Navy is the only purchasing client in the world for the F-35C, and my sense for the last year is that the US Navy would bail out of the program if they could.

In public statements, it has become very common to hear Admirals say the Navy 'needs the F-35C,' but it has become uncommon to hear any Admiral praise the aircraft. Why the Navy needs the F-35C is never addressed in context, primarily because the well documented problems of the F-35C make it clear that the Navy needs are not yet met by the F-35C at this time, and it is unclear if some of those problems can ever be truly fixed. Anyone who has read the latest annual report released by the Pentagon’s director of test and evaluation, J. Michael Gilmore, - not to mention the latest GAO report on the Joint Strike Fighter, knows that the Joint Strike Fighter program still has very serious problems. The GAO report in particular is the kindest report to date for the Joint Strike Fighter program, but after reading that report my primary takeaway is that the Joint Strike Fighter is at least as technologically and electronically complicated as even our most sophisticated Unmanned Aviation platform concepts. Quite honestly I find it hard to believe that any aircraft with so many technological moving parts will ever be reliable on any modern battlefield. The Joint Strike Fighter is a logistical nightmare, and is literally a helmet malfunction away from being a mission kill during wartime - with hundreds of proverbial helmets built into the aircraft.

LT. General Christopher C. Bogdan is emphasizing the multinational partnership of the program for a good reason, and the reason is specific to bringing down the cost of the F-35A. Stable funding across all 3 models of the Joint Strike Fighter is required if the F-35A price is going to have any chance to drop to $90M per aircraft. That means the Navy must stay completely invested in the R&D of F-35C, and must - at least initially - buy F-35C aircraft at the scheduled rate to maintain stability in the production schedule. When Adm. Jonathan Greenert mentions the Navy still hasn't determined how many F-35Cs the Navy will purchase, the implication is the CNO is looking for the bare minimum threshold the Navy must spend to stay invested in the program.

What is important about the comments of both LT. General Christopher C. Bogdan and Admiral Jonathan Greenert is that when it comes to the F-35C, the F-35C is now being purchased by the Navy primarily for reasons of National Security Policy and not for any reason related to maritime policy or strategy. The Navy is now required to continue to pay for the F-35C for purposes of cost consideration of the entire program - all variants, and that consideration is primarily being driven by the multinational character of the program. It is now fair to say that Navy budget spending for the Joint Strike Fighter is now more important to the Department of the Air Force and the Department of State than it is for the Department of the Navy, because it is more important for the National Security Policy of the United States for the F-35A to be affordable to multinational partners than it is for the F-35C to fly off US Navy aircraft carriers.

While it is extremely frustrating that the Navy is essentially being forced to spend huge sums of money on an aircraft the Navy no longer appears to want, it is also valid that the Navy be forced to continue investment in the Joint Strike Fighter for National Security Policy purposes - even when that purpose is primarily for insuring the cost of the platform is affordable to allies. It is completely legitimate that the Navy buying the F-35C is the right thing for the National Security interests of the country even while buying the F-35C itself is not good for advancing naval aviation. This is not a zero sum game.

It would be a mistake to interpret validity and legitimacy as good or bad, because the context matters. National Security Policy trumps maritime strategy, even if I would like to see maritime strategy have more influence in the crafting of National Security Policy. In my opinion if (and this is a BIG "if") the cost of the F-35A comes down to $90 million per aircraft because the Navy spends money on the F-35C, and if international partners ultimately buy a bunch of F-35As at that price, then the Navy's investment in F-35C is simultaneously a poor investment for the Navy and a good investment for the country. What makes all of this really frustrating though is that a poor investment for the Navy and a good investment for the country is the best case outcome of the Joint Strike Fighter as things are today, and it should be noted there is no evidence to date that this represents the most likely outcome. At this point, all it takes is one country to bail out and the whole plan falls apart.
Navy 2015 Budget Nearly Halves LCS, F-35 Buys
By Dan Parsons
Xcpts:
The Navy’s 2015 budget request cut two of its most high-profile and troubled acquisition programs nearly in half even as the service continues its refocus to the vast Pacific Ocean.

The F-35 joint strike fighter and the littoral combat ship paid heavy prices so the Navy could shoehorn its desire to be a global presence into a bleak fiscal reality.

“We are in a very challenging fiscal environment at the same time that we’re still dealing with a dynamic threat environment,” Rear Adm. William Lescher, deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for budget, said March 4 during a press conference at the Pentagon.

Still, the budget and accompanying 2014 quadrennial defense review — also released March 4 — both prioritize the Defense Department’s commitment to refocusing on the Asia-Pacific region, where the Navy and Marine Corps will do much of the heavy lifting. To achieve its goals as an international police force in the region, the Navy’s fleet will grow in total number over the next five years even as some major programs were cut in the short term, Lescher said.

“We bought what we could afford,” he said. That list includes dozens fewer F-35s and LCSs.

The Navy requested the purchase of 36 F-35Cs — designed to land on aircraft carriers — which is a 33-jet reduction from the 69 originally planned.
LCS, which is the Navy’s newest class of ship, was reduced from 52 ships to 32 and the entire program will be reevaluated before the fiscal year 2016 budget submission.

The Defense Department’s $496 billion budget supports a Navy of 283 ships rising to a total 309 by fiscal year 2019. The fleet now stands at 291 total ships. The Navy’s cut is $148 billion, of which $38.4 billion will go toward procurement, a $2.8 billion reduction from the current fiscal year.

It provides investments in attack submarines, guided missile destroyers, afloat forward staging bases, and maintains a carrier fleet of 11 ships though a carrier could be scuttled if across-the-board sequestration cuts are allowed to take hold beyond fiscal 2015.

The Navy’s budget request includes $5.9 billion for two Virginia-class attack submarines in FY 2015 and $28 billion for two submarines a year through fiscal 2019. The service also requested $2.8 billion next fiscal year and $16 billion over the next five years to acquire two DDG-51 destroyers per year through 2019. The Navy budgeted $1.5 billion in FY 2015 to buy three littoral combat ships for a total of 14 LCS through 2019 at $8.1 billion.

The Defense Department also plans to spend $3.3 billion for eight joint strike fighters – two for the Navy and six for the Marine Corps in fiscal 2015, and $22.9 billion for 105 total aircraft over the next five years. The 2015 budget calls for an overall reduction of 111 aircraft to also include 10 E-2D airborne early warning planes and 10 P-8 Poseidons, Lescher said.

The reduction in F-35C purchases was based solely on affordability, Lescher said. The decision had nothing to do with ongoing developmental issues like a faulty tailhook design that has kept the jets from properly landing on a carrier. The aircraft is still on track to achieve initial operating capability in fiscal year 2019, he said.
brar_w
BRF Oldie
Posts: 10694
Joined: 11 Aug 2016 06:14

Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by brar_w »

Absolutely,"the proof of the pudding is in the eating".Whether it be the JSF,FGFA or any other bird
But it is clearly not. You treat the completely OPEN auditing, transparent media including a sizable tabloid defense media as proof of a failed program. Yet you view an OPAQUE, secretive program run by a country that is quite intolerant of any negative defense reporting as being hunky dory. We get a ball-by-ball coverage of the JSF program, just like we did of the Virginia class Sub, F-22 raptor etc. Media has reported falsely, irresponsibly and special interest groups are free to do whatever they like in the US (including attacking the president, MIC, quite opposite to what happens in russia).
One would be more understandable and sympathetic to the JSF if it was just a couple of years late,but it is already 7 years late and dates for IOC,etc
Delays are there to a lot of reason. Programs get delayed, and thats a rather unfortunate aspect of advanced defense development. You can try the conservative approach (Super hornet, Block 60 F-16 etc) and get a reasonable capability with little risk of delay or cost over run. Yet even then you can only reduce the risk (as the super hornet wing issues showed). The bigger the technical challenges the bigger your risk appetite.

The PAKFA aims to counter an air superiority fighter that was flying in the 90's and that had its IOC in 2004-05. Russia has 4 prototypes (or 5) flying, full mission systems are still in development and the engine is not set to be out for some years. We do not even know the internal performance requirements (as we do for the JSF) to compare progress too. Russia for all practical purposes can take a vanilla version and IOC and declare it a success. We have no reference to compare the IOC version to the KPP documents as we can with the f35. We have no avionics, sub-systems or propulsion schedule documents (hard documents (audited) and not media reports) to compare and see whether things are going on schedule or not. The F-35 cannot even be compared to the PAKFA as far as development programs are concerned. We have very little (if any) in terms of offical auditor reports on the PAKFA to compare performance to spec.
The USMC IOC is being pushed back
Stop spreading this non sense. The USMC expects to IOC between August 2015 and December 2015. They are deploying the first squadron to Japan in 2016. Plenty of evidence has been provided to you, including interviews and videos from the squadron itself. Congressional documents claiming the same and dated 29th April of this year. Just stop!

[/quote]Some of its problems are increasing,fixing requiring huge extra funding which is not in the budget[/quote]

The JPO head has said that whatever problems arise will have to be solved without any more budget (since sequester). They are doing it. Concurrency is budgeted. All concurrency changes are being split 50 50 between lockheed and the JPO, quite different from the F-16 where the USAF was responsible for all concurrency changes.
Yes,there are orders from allies,but look at the numbers reduced,both from allies as well as US procurement
Some allies have reduced. Europeans mostly. They have also reduced their rafale purchases, such as France lowering the 5 year procurement for the rafale. Its an economic thing and not the either the f-35 or the rafale's fault. The reduction for some has been more than countered by orders from outside especially the IDF, Japan and South Korea.

The USAF , USN and the USMC have NOT reduced the f-35 requirement. The USN has laid off 30 odd F-35C's from the last few LRIP batches to post sequester full rate of production batches (its a procurement intensity shift, 100% like what france has done with the rafale 5 year purchase). Most of those slots have gone to South Korea, Japan and Israel therefore not disrupting the ramp up. If sequester is lifted in 2016 or 17, the Navy will buy 10-12 of those 30 as per the original schedule thereby ensuring a faster ramp up.
Increased costs per unit if orders further dropped or cancelled as with Canada.It's availability and reliability % is so poor that some call predict it to become a "hangar queen".
Reliability number paradox has been explained to you. Its a reporting issue, and a testing and software validation issue. A common PRE IOC problem, that is not exclusive to the F-35. It occurred with the F-22 and F-15 as well.
You mention that you've read the various reports.One analyst/involved in the programme stated that the JSF's major problems started around 2007 (?) when it was found to be too overweight and sizes of key components were reduced,leading to the increasing cracks being experienced as of now,esp. in the limited production aircraft requiring expensive and time consuming repairs.
Here we go again. Let me explain. Weight is the no. 1 enemy of fighter development. All the teen series fighters suffered weight issues, heck even commercial projects such as Boeing 787 suffered from weight creep. What you do with weight creep is to go out and solve the problems. You implement the fix after extensive computer modeling. The testing shows promise and you incorporate that design change. Then you build the jet. When you enter stress testing, you make sure that you are thorough with testing so that you validate your model. This was done with the F-16 as well and the bulkhead cracked. So did the wings. They were redesigned and concurrency changes implemented fleet wide in the hundreds of aircraft produced. Same thing happened with the F-35B, bulkhead modifications were performed and off they went.

Anti-concurrency brigade was in full swing when the concurrency cost estimates were HUGE. GAO's own estimates on concurrency are far closer to the initial estimates than the blown up estimates that existed a few years ago. Bogdon speaks from a JPO perspective. Concurrency is a SERVICE issue and has been since the first jet fighter was developed in the US. Every defense project post ww2 has had concurrency work. F-16 had more than 1000 fighters produced while concurrency changes were still being incorporated in "delivered" jets. Time and time again the USAF has found that the best way to replace 1000's of fighters is to follow the concurrency approach. Your concurrency cost is a tiny fraction of the overall procurement cost and as such the reduction IN APUC through fast ramp up saves more money. I do not want to get into this much as I already have previously.
"Fly before you buy",the Reagan era mantra
Every aircraft developed during Reagan had a concurrency model, though the extent varied depending on the volume of production.
LCA.As of now only 40+ aircraft have been ordered,despite decades of development,thousands of hrs. of flight testing,etc.The IAF has (in the past) been a most critical customer.While the potential is there for about 300 aircraft to be produced,and should be, further orders will depend upon the initial evaluation of the end-user.This is a more conservative and safer way to go
For a 400 order size YES. For a 3000 order size NO.
Unfortunately,as in some reports,there is such a strong JSF lobby in the US establishment,so many jobs dependent,money to be made,that despite the truth of the matter,it is being procured at the expense of other programmes,assets being retired so that JSF funding can be maintained.
You do realize that the profit margins on US defense procurement is fixed?
While Boeing has a healthy profit line tx to its civilian sales,LM is cash strapped and depends upon fed. funding to sort out its JSF problems. The poor US taxpayer is going to be saddled with the trillion $$$ bill.
Why would the US have to pay 1 trillion dollars as per you, the program will Abort.
Please add the gems up.My pleasure.It might make a nice necklace one day!
Will do, and present the "gems" to you when the Marine Core IOC's next year and the USAF the following year, unless the program aborts before that!
brar_w
BRF Oldie
Posts: 10694
Joined: 11 Aug 2016 06:14

Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by brar_w »

This report,though a trifle old,spells out the USN's dilemma.How much progress has been made since that report,is illustrated by the fact that the USN's JSF 2015 procurement numbers have dropped....by almost 50%,36 instead of 69!
(http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/ ... px?ID=1436)
Do you even bother reading my posts? At all? I have previously said that the navy has cut its F-35 purchase by around 30 over the next few years. I have explained it to you as to why this is. France has also cut its purchase of the Rafale over the next few years. Is the rafale crap?

The Navy has deferred LRIP slots to FPC slots, in order to meet sequester deadlines. If sequester lifts in 16 or 17 they will buy back some of the F-35's as per the original plan. The Navy can relax and do this "deferment" because others are coming up and picking up slots so that the ramp is unaffected (or least affected). The reduction has ZERO effect on the testing parameters allotted to the Integrated Test force at Patuxent river, and the navy still expects to IOC in its 2018-early 2019 time frame.

Repeating the same thing over and over again, posting the same links every few days won't make the absurd conclusions true.
Viv S
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by Viv S »

brar_w wrote:Repeating the same thing over and over again, posting the same links every few days won't make the absurd conclusions true.
Well... you're dealing 'wide band whiteout jamming' here. Volume over substance. Logic goes only so far to counter that and I can guess at how frustrated you'd be right now. But relax, you've made your point and made it well.

On a different note, those are some voluminous posts that you've clearly put effort into. I strongly suggest you start a blog. It'll make them much easier to reference. ( :idea: Then I can start reposting them here. Wide band. :wink: :lol: )
Philip
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by Philip »

No matter how wonderful the aircraft is,whether it is the JSF,T-50 (and even the T-50 will have to make the grade-no illlusions here,but the Russians are on firmer ground with no STOVL version that affects its performance like the JSF),Rafale,whatever,if it is unaffordable,sales plummet.The entire JSF programme is littered with reduced numbers affecting its cost,acquisition plus operational and maintenance which is NOT going down.Pl. read the open info put out by the Pentagon,GAO,etc.This is "substance",hard info on the testing regime,flaws encountered,etc.,not speculation.The flaws are widespread across the programme,especially the software-the key to the aircraft's capability,not related to a few issues .The problem is that you read but cannot understand the precarious state of affairs.Eventually,the numbers bought and fielded may not be sufficient for the task and the force,Navy,USAF,will have to depend upon upgraded legacy aircraft,the "exit route" which was posted.From the CNO's statements,the USN expects IOC only by 2019.The USMC's planned 2015 IOC is at risk from the software dev. delays.

http://www.defensenews.com/article/2014 ... rine-Corps
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is often touted as the most advanced fighter in the world, whose complex systems are held together by millions of lines of code. So when the Pentagon’s top weapons tester declares the current software “unacceptable,” it tends to make waves in the defense world.

That’s what happened this week, as the Department’s Office of Test and Evaluation (OT&E) released its annual report on the status of the F-35 with a strong rebuke of the progress F-35 supporters touted in 2013, including a warning that software development has lagged so far behind that it may cause the Marines to miss their initial operating capability (IOC) date in 2015.

“The program plans to complete Block 2B fight testing in October 2014; however, there is no margin for additional growth to meet that date,” the report found. “Projections for completing Block 2B fight testing using the historical rate of continued growth ... show that Block 2B developmental testing will complete about 13 months later, in November 2015, and delay the associated feet release to July of 2016.”

The Marines intend to go to IOC with the Block 2B software; the Air Force is scheduled to follow with its F-35A in December 2016 with Block 3I, which is essentially the same software on more powerful hardware. The Navy intends to go operational with the F-35C in February 2019, on the Block 3F software.

Additionally, the testers warn that the F-35’s Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) is “immature and behind schedule.” Any further delays to the software development, which is at the core of operations, maintenance and supply-chain management for the platform, could prove problematic for the program going forward.

Software, particularly ALIS, has been identified by top Pentagon officials as a major challenge moving forward.

Despite hopes from outside groups who view the F-35 as a legendary waste of taxpayer funds, the Pentagon seems unlikely to move away from the plane, regardless of how poorly it comes out in testing reviews like the one put forth this week.

Because the F-35 is so close to IOC and escaping a dreaded “death spiral” of partner nations dropping from the program, hence raising the cost per plane to an unaffordable level, proponents would also argue against any slow-down on the rate of production.

“I am fighting to the end, to the death, to keep the F-35 program on track,” said Gen. Michael Hostage, head of the Air Force’s Air Combat Command. “For me, that means not a single airplane cut from the program, because every time our allies and our partners see the United States Air Force back away, they all get weak in the knees. This program will fall apart if the perception is that the Air Force is not committed to this program
.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/ ... nnel=11563
Exclusive: Pentagon report faults F-35 on software, reliability
BY ANDREA SHALAL-ESA
WASHINGTON Thu Jan 23, 2014 2:18pm EST

"(Reuters) - A new U.S. Defense Department report warns that ongoing software, maintenance and reliability problems with Lockheed Martin Corp's F-35 stealth fighter could delay the Marine Corps' plans to start using its F-35 jets by mid-2015.

The latest report by the Pentagon's chief weapons tester, Michael Gilmore, provides a detailed critique of the F-35's technical challenges, and focuses heavily on what it calls the "unacceptable" performance of the plane's software, according to a 25-page draft obtained by Reuters.

The report forecast a possible 13-month delay in completing testing of the Block 2B software needed for the Marine Corps to clear the jets for initial combat use next year, a priority given the high cost of maintaining current aging warplanes...."

"The current software generated too many nuisance warnings and resulted in poor sensor performance. Further work on software had been slowed by testing required to validate earlier fixes, the report said.

It said Lockheed had delivered F-35 jets with 50 percent or less of the software capabilities required by its production contracts with the Pentagon...."

The computer-based logistics system known as ALIS was fielded with "serious deficiencies" and remained behind schedule, which affected servicing of existing jets needed for flight testing, the report said. It said the ALIS diagnostic system failed to meet even basic requirements.

"But the most immediate concern involved the Block 2B version of the software that must be completed in order for the Marines to start using the jets from July 2015.

"Initial results with the new increment of Block 2B software indicate deficiencies still exist in fusion, radar, electronic warfare, navigation, electro-optical target system, distributed aperture system, helmet-mounted display system, and datalink," the report said, noting the problems could delay efforts to complete Block 2B development and flight test.

The report cited projections that the 2B software would not be completed until November 2015, 13 months later than planned. This would delay release to the F-35 fleet until July 2016, a year after the Marines want to start using the jets.
"
Pl. Tell the Pentagon to stop its nonsense!

Increasing costs:

http://breakingdefense.com/2014/04/dod- ... t-whitney/
UPDATED: Adds Pratt & Whitney Responses To Bogdan; Adds Lockheed Statement Correction (April 18 at 10:55 am)

CRYSTAL CITY: Pratt & Whitney got a public drubbing from the sharp-tongued head of the F-35 fighter program, Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, when the Pentagon released a new cost estimate for the military’s biggest weapons program.

“Pratt’s not meeting their commitment, it’s as simple as that,”
he told reporters this afternoon at the Joint Program Office’s headquarters here. “They told us years ago that the engine was going to come down at a certain rate in terms of price and they haven’t met it. Not good. Not good at all.”

But the three-star general’s harsh words for the jet engine maker — undoubtedly designed in part to pressure Pratt in ongoing negotiations for the next two lots of F135 engines — were his one negative note in an otherwise upbeat briefing on the F-35′s Selected Acquisition Report (SAR) for 2013. The question is whether the good news numbers actually hold up.

But a Hill aide who reviewed the numbers for us was quite skeptical.

The GAO estimates that, for aircraft programs, investment costs are roughly 30 percent of an aircraft’s total life-cycle costs, the aide notes. The remaining 70 remaining of costs are for operations, maintenance, sustainment and disposal.

“So using rough math, add up all the R&D and procurement costs planned for F-35 and multiply by three,” the staffer said. “That would give you a total cost of $971 billion (in 2012 dollars). That’s well in excess of the SAR estimate, which relies on more optimistic figures for operations and sustainment. “Given the reliability and availability metrics, they’re a long way from realizing those,” said the staffer. “The life cycle cost is likely to be much higher.”

Bogdan admitted there are plenty of unknowns left. “We’re only about 55 percent done with the flight test program,” he told reporters today. (The Pentagon’s top procurement official once called this concurrency of testing and production “acquisition malpractice“). That means there are undoubtedly more problems to find and more fixes to make.

Just recently, for example, the program had to redesign the nitrogen injection system that keeps the gas tanks from exploding when the plane is struck by gunfire or lightning. The next lot of aircraft to be built, LRIP 7, will have a more powerful nitrogen system, but the ones already built and currently under construction do not, he said: “Some day, they’re going to have to come back and get that retrofitted so they can fly in lightning.” *(What will they do till then in bad weather,scuttle home scared of lightning?!)

Then there’s the Pratt & Whitney problem. The company says their costs simply reflect the lower-than-planned production rate, he said: “The answer they have given me [is], ‘this is all tied to economies of scale, Gen. Bodgan, when you buy more engines the price will come down.’ [But] that’s only part of the answer.”

Pratt & Whitney has lost jet engine business on both the commercial and military sides, Bogdan said, so “they’re spreading their overhead costs” in ways that bump up costs to the government. “I don’t like that.” (The termination of the F-22 line by former Defense Secretary Robert meant an enormous reduction in engine purchases from Pratt, for example. And those cuts are just beginning to be felt.)

The Navy now plans to buy 33 fewer aircraft in the current Future Year Defense Plan (FYDP), the Air Force to buy four, and, if Congress does not grant the president’s request for significant spending above the current sequestered budget caps, another 16 or 17 US planes are going to go away. Meanwhile Turkey, Canada, Holland, and Italy have all slowed or reduced their purchases of F-35s.

“The cumulative effect of all of that movement is about on the order of a couple of a percent in the price of each airplane,” Bogdan said. “Worst case scenario there is about 4 percent.”

Bogdan’s solution? Find more foreign customers to get back those efficiencies of scale – and he’s strikingly optimistic on that front. “None of these numbers include 40 airplanes I’m pretty sure South Korea is going to buy starting in LRIP 10. None of this includes Singapore,” he said. “[And] we’re pretty convinced Israel is not going to stop at 19 airplanes.”

If the SAR had accounted for all the likely foreign sales, said Bogdan, “[we] would have driven that acquisition cost down instead of up.”

But CAPE can’t base its estimates on deals that haven’t actually been signed. Until the hoped-for foreign sales materialize, we have to price the bird we have in the hand, not however many we estimate are in the bush.
http://breakingdefense.com/2014/03/gao- ... 5-billion/
GAO Predicts F-35 Software Troubles May Drive Annual Costs Up To $15 Billion
By Colin Clark on March 24, 2014 at 5:05 PM

F-35 Japan conceptWASHINGTON: The Government Accountability Office, Congress’ watchdog, says the Pentagon will have to sharply increase annual funding for the Joint Strike Fighter should projected software delays persist.

Here’s the rub in this latest GAO report. It’s based on the director of Operational Test and Evaluations finding that the program won’t be able to make up lost time and deliver planes to the Marines on time. The Marines have already said they do not think the delivery of planes ready to go to war, known as Initial Operational Capability, will be affected by the software problems. Since software is so important to all of the the F-35′s three versions, the plane cannot handle some weapons considered crucial unless the right software version has been loaded.

One of the key software problem areas is the F-35′s Autonomic Logistics Information System, which monitors the plane’s systems and is crucial to managing its repairs and maintenance. If ALIS cannot be fixed quickly, that may delay the Marine’s IOC.

The most intriguing part of the GAO report is its estimate that the annual costs for the F-35 could rise to as much as $15 billion.

“To execute the program as planned, the Department of Defense (DOD) will have to increase funds steeply over the next 5 years and sustain an average of $12.6 billion per year through 2037; for several years, funding requirements will peak at around $15 billion. Annual funding of this magnitude clearly poses long-term affordability risks given the current fiscal environment,” the authors note with some understatement.
Some niggling problems:
http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articl ... ts-395397/
...Although the teams are making progress, the F-35’s engineers are still struggling with overcoming the aircraft’s tendency for transonic roll-off and buffet, according to the report. The condition affects all supersonic fighters to some degree, but has appeared particularly acute on the carrier variant F-35C. Programme engineers have exhausted options for altering the flight control laws to compensate. Testing is still under way to decide if using leading edge spoilers on the F-35C will be necessary, the report says."
So what will we see in 2015? A "Stars and Stripes" tamasha IOC with aircraft "commissioned" that cannot perform their tasks simply to meet a deadline,or one that meets all its scheduled planned parameters expected of it?

Going back to a point made earlier by Viv about Chinese S-400s,NCW,etc.,in the "fog of war",with cyberwarfare speculated as being the spearhead of Chinese attacks,even a few successful attacks by the Chinese against enemy assets,would bring one into uncharted territory,where individual aircraft and assets would not be able to entirely depend upon NCW in combat.Here is an old article on the same,but the fears remain.

http://www.thefastertimes.com/defensesp ... e]Cyberwar: How China’s Hackers Threaten the U.S. Armed Forces

The U.S. Department of Defense network structure is reported to be constantly subjected to probes by a multitude of Chinese hackers hoping to overwhelm the system. Disruption of U.S. systems in time of war – principally a short Chinese offensive against Taiwan in which U.S. response time would be delayed – and the narrowing of the technological divide between the two countries are the primary goals of the PLA. Such activity also provides th PLA with an offensive reach extending into the heart of the U.S. at very little nominal cost.

For the perpetrators, the beauty of cyberwarfare is not just the favorable cost-versus-benefits ration, but the inability of the victim to provide solid proof of their involvement. Because cyberwarfare occurs in an unregulated battle-space and tracing attacks back to the original source remains so elusive, as the Chinese have shown, states can hide behind ‘rogue’ hackers and utilize massed attacks on networks.

From PLA employment of “cyber militia units” and the activities of private “patriotic hackers”, China has no shortage of persons working to gather U.S. intelligence or plant dormant bugs. The use of computer hackers not directly serving in the PLA provides China with plausible deniability when approached by government officials from countries subjected to Chinese cyber attacks.[/quote]
Philip
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by Philip »

How software,ALIS, is affecting USMC induction.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/aer ... er-program
Software Testing Problems Continue to Plague F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program
By Robert N. Charette
Posted 27 Mar 2014

Photo: U.S. Department of Defense

The U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO) earlier this week released its fifth annual report on the state of the F-35 Lightning II, aka the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), aka the “most costly and ambitious” acquisition program ever. What the GAO found was foretold by a report earlier this year by the Department of Defense’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation. The upshot: the F-35 operational and support software development continues to be the major obstacle to the program's success.

In addition, the GAO report states that the projected cost of acquiring the planned 2443 F-35 aircraft (which comes in three flavors) threatens to consume some 20- to 25 percent of annual defense program acquisition funds for the next twenty years or so. The GAO doesn’t explicitly say so, but the operations and maintenance costs of the program—currently estimated to be between $800 billion and $1 trillion dollars or more over the next 50 years—will also consume a significant chunk of DoD’s annual weapon-system related O&M budget as well.

The GAO report states that, “Challenges in development and testing of mission systems software continued through 2013, due largely to delays in software delivery, limited capability in the software when delivered, and the need to fix problems and retest multiple software versions.” Further, the GAO notes that the F-35 program continues to “encounter slower than expected progress in developing the Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS),” which is the F-35’s advanced integrated maintenance and support system (pdf). In the latter case, Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, the F-35 Program Executive Officer, conceded last month that the ALIS system was “way behind” where it should be and was “in catch-up mode.” This, the GAO indicates, was apparently at least partly because of a lack of testing facilities that remains a problem years after ALIS development began.

The GAO notes that as a result of the on-going software problems with the aircraft's mission and support systems, F-35 program officials and contractors alike believe that software development will continue to be the F-35 program’s “most significant risk area.”

Software-testing related issues involving the development and fielding mission systems were the main thrust of this year’s GAO report. The F-35, you may recall, is delivering its mission capabilities in a series of incremental “software blocks,” designated as Block 1A/B, Block 2A, Block 2B, Block 3i, and Block 3F. Each block builds on the mission capability developed in the preceding block. As described by the report, “Blocks 1 and 2A provide training capabilities and are essentially complete, with some final development and testing still underway. Blocks 2B and 3i provide initial warfighting capabilities and are needed by the Marine Corps and Air Force, respectively, to achieve initial operational capability. Block 3F is expected to provide the full suite of warfighting capabilities, and is the block the Navy expects to have to achieve its initial operational capability.” According to Flightglobal, a software Block 4 is being planned as an eventual mission capability upgrade for which development will begin late this year or more likely early next.

However, the GAO report states that, “Developmental testing of Block 2B software is behind schedule and will likely delay the delivery of expected warfighting capabilities,” required by the Marines for their variant of the F-35 (the F-35B) that is scheduled for delivery by July 2015. As of January of this year, “the program planned to have verified the functionality of 27 percent of the software’s capability on-board the aircraft, but had only been able to verify 13 percent,” says the GAO report. In more than a bit of an understatement, the GAO says that, “This leaves a significant amount of work to be done before October 2014, which is when the program expects to complete developmental flight testing of this software block.”

The GAO notes—and seems to agree with—the Operational Test and Evaluation Director's view that a more realistic estimate for when Block 2B’s software functional verification will be completed is sometime closer to November 2015. The report also notes that such a delay would create a knock-on effect to the subsequent F-35 software blocks as well, increasing the cost of the acquisition, not to mention delaying the planned initial operational capability (IOC) of the aircraft (2016 for the Air Force F-35As, and 2018 for the Navy F-35Cs).

Yet, despite everything it saw, the GAO indicates that the F-35 program office and contractors, and especially the Marines, seem to be all whistling along to Bobby McFerrin’s song, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” The GAO states that, “Program and contractor officials have stated that while they recognize that the program faces software risks, they still expect to deliver all of the planned F-35 software capabilities to the military services as currently scheduled.” Why do they think so? Why, they are now going to introduce new approaches to gain “testing efficiency.” The plan: mainly by using “test results from one F-35 variant to close out test points for the other two variants in instances in which the variants have common functions.” However, Bloomberg News quoted a recent RAND assessment of the F-35 program as stating that, “As of this writing, it is not clear how common the mission systems, avionics, software and engine will be among the three service variants,” so how much efficiency will in reality be gained remains to be seen.

In fact, in testimony before Congress yesterday, Lt. Gen Bogdan was reported by Reuters as saying he was “pretty confident” that Block 2B software would be delivered within 30 days of its current target date to allow the Marines to get to initial operational capability by July next year, as the software is “80 percent complete.” However, Bogdan also indicated that he was not as confident that even ten Marine F-35Bs would be IOC ready given that most of the 40-plus Marine F-35Bs will require some 96 engineering modifications by then.

PS: A titbit on UCLASS:
Sunday, May 4, 2014
CNAS EVP, Former Obama NSC Official, Shawn Brimley on UCLASS

Here's a piece on the Defense One site by Shawn Brimley, who used to work at the Obama White House and now helps run the Center for a New American Security. In it, Brimley takes the same position I've been advocating here for months, that the Navy was moving in the wrong direction on UCLASS. In his words:

"The Navy made a mistake by issuing requirements that guarantee the fleet will receive a lesser drone than it could be getting. The Navy is asking for a carrier-version of non-stealthy surveillance drones that operate in uncontested (friendly) airspace. That costly decision will prevent the development of a true, surveillance-strike drone that can operate where they truly will be needed, in enemy airspace."

So, it seems that I share the same position as a Democratic national security thought leader who used to be in the Obama White House. And that opinion is shared with the Republican Chairman of the HASC Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA). And a good bit of the intellectual energy behind all three of our opinions comes from the thinking of recently installed Deputy Secretary of Defense, Bob Work, while at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
http://www.informationdissemination.net/
Last edited by Philip on 12 May 2014 02:46, edited 1 time in total.
NRao
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by NRao »

littered with reduced numbers
I know, a terrible thing, but Saint Anthony, I thought, explained it - nothing in the budget.

Else the Rafale would have been signed for by now and the IAF would have got 240 odd dual seat FGFAs too.

What a shame. Peoples have to do better with their economies. Else their Services also suffer.
NRao
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by NRao »

by Robert N. Charette
Bob ought to visit Down Under. Where the bugs found in the US are fixed and deployed .................... slowly and without issues (as I hear).
Mihir
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by Mihir »

The Comanche and the Albatross, About Our Neck Was Hung.
- Col Michael W. Pietrucha, USAF

A critique of the F-35 from inside the USAF. Pietrucha makes the case that:
  • Replacing every specialised aircraft type with the F-35 is bound to lead to a less effective air force.
  • The Air Force is so committed to the F-35, that it's acqusition has practically become an end in itself, preventing a re-evaluation of the program.
  • The considerations that led to the F-35 may not be all that relevant anymore, and an alternative structure (that still utilises the F-35, albeit in smaller numbers) may make US airpower more responsive to modern threats.
And here's an interesting, though unrelated, factoid:
In 2013, 17 fighter squadrons were grounded for lack of flying hours while the Air Force simultaneously attempted to increase the production rate of the F-35. The drive for large numbers of increasingly expensive F-35s has taken its toll on flying hours and upgrades for both the legacy fleet and the F-22. Hours for fighter aviators are roughly half of what they were in the Gulf War, placing the service’s aircrews in the unenviable position of flying less than the Chinese and some European allies.
Mihir
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by Mihir »

The USAF however is planning to use over a thousand stealthy F-35s, 185 F-22's, B-2's, UAV's, UCAV's and 150 or so Next Generation Bomber, therefore for them standoff EW is not required as the stealth RF target is extremely low (Massive reduction in SAM rings) and that the USAF can tackle with inbuilt organic EW ability that is more tactical in nature as opposed to being stand off.
If there is a more succinct paragraph outlining the root of the problem, I have yet to see it. A fighter-centric culture that obsesses over tactical fighters and fighter pilots to a point where it begins to get ridiculous.

C-130s aren't stealthy as far as I know. Neither are Apaches. Or Blackhawks. Or... you get the point. How do these aircraft operate in or near contested airspace without stand-off jammers and dedicated Wild Weasel birds providing support? Not every problem can be solved by a stealth fighter flying at 35,000 feet dropping a GPS-guided bomb on a stationary target or loosing of a long-range AAM at an unsuspecting enemy. But when all you have is a hammer...

The recent problems in ICBM squadrons can also be traced back to this phenomenon. The problem is doctrine, organisational culture, and the USAF's self-image; it won't be solved by throwing technology at it, that's for sure.
Viv S
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by Viv S »

Mihir wrote:The Comanche and the Albatross, About Our Neck Was Hung.
- Col Michael W. Pietrucha, USAF

A critique of the F-35 from inside the USAF. Pietrucha makes the case that:
  • Replacing every specialised aircraft type with the F-35 is bound to lead to a less effective air force.
  • The Air Force is so committed to the F-35, that it's acqusition has practically become an end in itself, preventing a re-evaluation of the program.
  • The considerations that led to the F-35 may not be all that relevant anymore, and an alternative structure (that still utilises the F-35, albeit in smaller numbers) may make US airpower more responsive to modern threats.
Its an interesting article but the article has several mistakes.


1. The F-35's payload is low and range is short - Both are as per the DoD's stated requirements.

2. Costs have doubled since 2001 - Cost in 2001 was $50M or $67 million (2014 dollars). Current cost is pegged at about $75M (2014 dollars) post SDD. 11% rise in flyaway cost.

3. The USAF's SEAD capabilities have dwindled since the F-4G and F-111A retirement - They haven't. Between the B-2, F-22 and F-16CJ they're better.

4. The USAF has given up the EW capability - EW warfare is a critical part of the F-35's mission set. And once integrated with the NGJ it'll carry out escort jamming as well if needed.

5. A decade from now the F-22 will still outnumber all foreign stealth fighters combine - [J-20] + [J-31] + [PAK FA] < 187 unit in 2025? Unlikely.



His recommendations are pretty wonky as well -


1. Upgrade fourth gen fighters with fifth gen tech - The F-35 is a highly unified system not a mere conglomeration of distinct technologies. Iterative upgrades are already ongoing.

2. Restore AF's SEAD fighters - Sending legacy aircraft against new gen SAM systems is a disastrous proposal.

3. Outside of Russia and China no massive IADS threat exists - China and Russia aren't going anywhere.

4. Build new F-16s and F-15Es - Israel, Japan & South Korea all had the option of buying highly upgraded legacy fighters. Russia and China had the option of sticking to the Su-35, J-10 and J-11. All have opted for a fifth gen platform (albeit of varying capabilities).

5. Built a low cost light combat aircraft - The US isn't going to stick around in Afghanistan. Little utility in peacetime. Can be carried out by drones.


The colonel doesn't appear to have analysed the shellacking that the F-22s handed out to legacy platforms in combat exercises. The decisive factor was its VLO characteristics and integrated avionics suite both of which are shared by the F-35.

And here's an interesting, though unrelated, factoid:
In 2013, 17 fighter squadrons were grounded for lack of flying hours while the Air Force simultaneously attempted to increase the production rate of the F-35. The drive for large numbers of increasingly expensive F-35s has taken its toll on flying hours and upgrades for both the legacy fleet and the F-22. Hours for fighter aviators are roughly half of what they were in the Gulf War, placing the service’s aircrews in the unenviable position of flying less than the Chinese and some European allies.
Purely a result of the budget sequestration NOT of consumption in the F-35 program.

The decision to wall off F-35 funding was eventually the US Congress' decision. While the Europeans might be willing to defer deliveries, F-35 programs has made commitments in Asia that its obliged to uphold; Israel, Japan, South Korea.

The USAF can shoulder short term cuts in its training budget (along with its allies it still has a lopsided qualitative & quantitative advantage against potential foes). But the F-35 program affects the long term capability of the USAF. Having finally turned the corner, it would be unwise to risk destabilization through cuts in the development budget (SDD procurement OTOH has been scaled back).
TSJones
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Re: JSF,"turkey or talisman"?

Post by TSJones »

Mihir wrote:
The USAF however is planning to use over a thousand stealthy F-35s, 185 F-22's, B-2's, UAV's, UCAV's and 150 or so Next Generation Bomber, therefore for them standoff EW is not required as the stealth RF target is extremely low (Massive reduction in SAM rings) and that the USAF can tackle with inbuilt organic EW ability that is more tactical in nature as opposed to being stand off.
If there is a more succinct paragraph outlining the root of the problem, I have yet to see it. A fighter-centric culture that obsesses over tactical fighters and fighter pilots to a point where it begins to get ridiculous.

C-130s aren't stealthy as far as I know. Neither are Apaches. Or Blackhawks. Or... you get the point. How do these aircraft operate in or near contested airspace without stand-off jammers and dedicated Wild Weasel birds providing support? Not every problem can be solved by a stealth fighter flying at 35,000 feet dropping a GPS-guided bomb on a stationary target or loosing of a long-range AAM at an unsuspecting enemy. But when all you have is a hammer...

The recent problems in ICBM squadrons can also be traced back to this phenomenon. The problem is doctrine, organisational culture, and the USAF's self-image; it won't be solved by throwing technology at it, that's for sure.
You completely underestimate the US don't you?

http://www.raytheon.com/capabilities/products/sdbii/

hammer indeed........
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