F-35 Lightning II: News thread

Not that any country in its right mind should want association with this farce of a project, let alone Russia.

New Setback: F-35s Won’t Be Able to Conduct Close-Air-Support Until 2020

The Department of Defense’s much maligned F-35 Joint Strike Fighter ran into yet another setback Tuesday when it was announced that the aircraft will not reach full close-air-support potential until 2022.
Unlike previous precision-guided air-dropped weapons, the Small Diameter Bomb II (SDB II) has the ability to track and hit moving targets from up to 40 miles. It will enter service in 2017.

The F-35 however, will not have the software package required to operate the bomb until 2022.

The proposed $585 billion Defense Department budget includes $10.6 billion in funding for the procurement of 57 F-35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft

The delay will reduce the F-35’s ability to provide close-air support to ground troops, and raises questions about the aircraft’s ability to adequately replace the A-10 Warthog if Congress allows the Air Force to retire it.

Air Force leaders want to retire the A-10 by February 2019 so it can transfer the resources supporting the aircraft to the development of the F-35, which will be one of many aircraft that will backfill the A-10.

The SDB II will not even fit onto the F-35B – the Marine Corps variant – without modifications to the aircraft’s weapons bay. But the Pentagon is in no rush to make those changes, because the weapon still will not work until the correct software package is installed.

“When we get to the (software upgrade) of the F-35s those are going to be great CAS (close air support) platforms – when we get there. So we’ve got to continue to move down that with respect to the systems,” Air Force Gen. Herbert “Hawk” Carlisle, Commander of Air Combat Command, told reporters on March 6.

The SDB II uses a guidance system known as a “tri-mode” seeker, which can direct the weapon using millimeter wave radar, uncooled imaging infrared guidance and semi-active laser technology.

“Really, in the close-in CAS fight, and the most challenging being danger close where you have adversaries and friendlies in very close proximity – we have to be able to support the ground component at that point. We need the ability to deliver weapons rapidly. We need the high magazine, we need precision and we need to be able to control the yield,” Carlisle said.

Part of the Joint Strike Fighter program’s developmental strategy includes a series of incremental software drops, each of which adds new capability. The drop that will make the F-35 capable of operating the SBD II is not scheduled to take place until 2022.

The Marine Corps’ F-35B is slated to reach operational status following a software drop later this year. The Air Force plans to reach operational status with its F-35A in 2016 using the next software update.

During an interview on 60 Minutes, Air Force Lt. Gen. Chris Bogdan, who is in charge of the program, said, “Long gone is the time when we will continue to pay for mistake after mistake after mistake. Lockheed Martin doesn’t get paid their profit unless each and every airplane meets each station on time with the right quality.”

However, a new progress report from the Defense Department casts serious doubts on the progress of the program.

How to Build a $400 Billion F-35 That Doesn’t Fly
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By Brianna Ehley,
The Fiscal Times
March 15, 2015

The Pentagon’s embattled F-35 Joint Strike Fighter continues to be plagued with so many problems that it can’t even pass the most basic requirements needed to fly in combat, despite soaring roughly $170 billion over budget.

As the most expensive weapons program in the Pentagon’s history, the $400 billion and counting F-35 is supposed to be unlike any other fighter jet—with high-tech computer capabilities that can identify a combatant plane at warp speed. However, major design flaws and test failures have placed the program under serious scrutiny for years—with auditors constantly questioning whether the jet will ever actually get off the ground, no matter how much money is thrown at it.

Related: How DOD’s $1.5 Trillion F-35 Broke the Air Force

Last year, military officials faulted contractors for all of the mistakes. Contractors claimed they had corrected the issues and that there wouldn’t be more costly problems down the road.

During an interview on 60 Minutes, Air Force Lt. Gen. Chris Bogdan, who is in charge of the program, said, “Long gone is the time when we will continue to pay for mistake after mistake after mistake. Lockheed Martin doesn’t get paid their profit unless each and every airplane meets each station on time with the right quality.”

However, a new progress report from the Defense Department casts serious doubts on the progress of the program.

The DOD’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation cites everything from computer system malfunctions to flaws with its basic design—it even found that the jet is vulnerable to engine fires because of the way it’s built.

A separate report from Military.com unearthed another embarrassing issue with the jet that suggests it won’t take off on time.

Related: 5 Expensive Weapons Programs No One Wants

The “precision-guided Small Diameter Bomb II doesn’t even fit on the Marine’s version of the jet," according to Military.com. On top of that, the software needed to operate the top close-air support bomb won’t even be operational until 2022, inspectors said.

The Defense Department’s report also suggested that the program’s office isn’t accurately recording the jet’s problems.

“Not all failures are counted in the calculation of mean flight hours between reliability events, but all flight hours are counted, and hence component and aircraft reliability are reported higher than if all of the failures were counted,” the report said.

The Project on Government Accountability summed up the report in an independent analysis, concluding that the program isn’t realistically going to meet its goal of being operational for the Marines by this summer.

“The F-35 is years away from being ready for initial operational capability. To send this airplane on a combat deployment, or to declare it ready to be sent, as early as the Marines’ 2015 or the Air Force’s 2016 IOC dates, is a politically driven and irresponsible mistake. DOT&E's report shows that the current plans for the F-35A and B should be rejected as unrealistic. Without meaningful oversight from the Department of Defense or Congress, however, these IOC declarations will go unchallenged,” POGO said on its website.

While more problems with the program are identified, the costs keep climbing.

Last year alone, the JSF was $4 billion over budget, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office. At the same time, the program was scaled back to include fewer jets. The GAO noted the Pentagon was spending more for less.
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How DOD’s $1.5 Trillion F-35 Broke the Air Force
The F-35 program has failed in its purpose to save U.S. taxpayers money, and has received widespread criticism, according to Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC). Many in the Navy point out that the existing fleet of F/A-18E/Fs can perform the F-35’s ai
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By David Francis,
The Fiscal Times
July 31, 2014

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is the most expensive, and possible the most error ridden, project in the history of the United States military. But DOD has sunk so much money into the F-35 - which is expected to cost $1.5 trillion over the 55-year life of the program - that the Pentagon deemed it “too big to fail” in 2010.

Now, the Air Force has taken steps to make sure that the unmitigated disaster that the F-35 has become does not happen again.

The Air Force, in its 20-year strategic forecast entitled “America’s Air Force: A Call to the Future,” has called for an end to big-ticket programs like the F-35. Instead, it plans to invest in what DOD officials have called more “agile” weapons that can be adapted for multiple uses.

Related: 5 Expensive Weapons Programs No One Wants

The report paints a future of the Air Force that resembles an innovative 21st Century company as opposed to a traditional fighting force. The document says that it’s now impossible for the United States to build a strategy advantage with large, expensive programs that take years – in the case of the F-35, 14 years and counting to complete.
Pentagon Approves Limited Flight For F-35 Ahead...
Daily Caller

“We believe rapid change is the new norm and has serious implications for the Air Force,” the document states. “The pace at which disruptive technologies may appear and proliferate will result in operational advantages that are increasingly short-lived. Dynamic and increasingly frequent shifts in the geopolitical power balance will have significant implications for basing, posture, and partner capabilities that may favor flexibility over footprint.”

The F-35 isn’t mentioned by name in the forecast, but the program’s greasy fingerprints are all over it. The Air Force is apparently concerned that it is pricing itself out of the weapons market because it is spending so much time and money on large programs.

“Agility is the counterweight to the uncertainty of the future and its associated rapid rate of change. We learned from sequestration that our brittle system often leads to suboptimal decisions that are difficult to reverse,” the document reads. “Huge, long-term programs limit our options; we are too often left with ‘all or nothing’ outcomes and ‘double or nothing’ budget decisions.”

“Large, complex programs with industrial-era development cycles measured in decades may become obsolete before they reach full-rate production,” the authors added. “The system is cumbersome, as the cost and complexity of these large programs draw additional layers of oversight and scrutiny.”

The strategy shift is also a recognition of the shrinking budget environment at DOD, which is expected to lose $600 billion over the next decade. According to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, the change is also a reflection of compensation for members of the Air Force rising dramatically over the last 16 years.

Related: World’s Most Lethal Drone Just Flew over Florida

More than anything, the shift in strategy is an indictment of the way that the Air Force and the rest of DOD have been doing business for years. The F-35 has come to symbolize all that’s wrong with American defense spending: uncontrolled bloat, unaccountable manufacturers (in this case, Lockheed Martin), and an internal Pentagon culture that cannot adequately track taxpayer dollars.

It’s no small irony that on the same day the change in Air Force strategy was revealed, Winslow Wheeler, a staff member at the Project On Government Oversight and a long-time critic of the F-35 program, reported that American taxpayers will pay between will pay between $148 million and $337 million per jet in 2015, depending on the model.

“A single Air Force F-35A costs a whopping $148 million. One Marine Corps F-35B costs an unbelievable $251 million. A lone Navy F-35C costs a mind-boggling $337 million. Average the three models together, and a ‘generic’ F-35 costs $178 million,” Wheeler wrote.

Related: Flawed $1.5 Trillion F-35 Misses Its Global Debut

“It gets worse. These are just the production costs. Additional expenses for research, development, test and evaluation are not included,” he added.

Of course, this price tag is up dramatically from 2014.

“The cost of an F-35B grew from $232 million in 2014 to a bulging $251 million by 2015,” Wheeler wrote. “The cost of the Navy’s F35C grew from $273 million in 2014 to a wallet-busting $337 million by 2015.”

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“We—the U.S. [Department of Defense]—haven’t been pursuing appropriate methods to counter EA [electronic attack] for years,” a senior Air Force official with extensive experience on the F-22 told The Daily Beast.

“So, while we are stealthy, we will have a hard time working our way through the EA to target [an enemy aircraft such as a Russian-built Sukhoi] Su-35s and our missiles will have a hard time killing them.”

“AMRAAM’s had some great upgrades over the years, but at the end of the day, it’s old technology and wasn’t really designed with today’s significant EA in mind,”

“While we are stealthy, we will have a hard time targeting Russian Su-35s and our missiles will have a hard time killing them.”

“Getting a first shot is one thing,” said a former Air Force fighter pilot with extensive experience with Russian weapons.

“Needing another shot when you have expended your load is another when your force structure is limited in terms of the number of platforms available for a given operation.”

“Look to a new generation of U.S. air-to-air missiles, like Cuda, to neutralize any potential numerical advantage,” one senior industry official said.

“I doubt you can solve range and the need for a large magazine with the same missile,” he said.


Russia Can Outshoot US' Stealth Jets (F-22 & F-35)

higurashihougi wrote:

Airbornewolf wrote:1. F-35 is not "stealth" at all, just at an certain angle. but as an Airforce Tech said "there are various types of Radar's, just because it does not show up on one does not mean another one cant detect it". and stealth only works at a certain angle and like Serbia's F-117. you get detected and painted when you open your bomb-bays.

Fighters like F-22/35, MiG 1.44 and Su T-50 cannot be completely "stealth" like F-117, B-2 or RQ-170. A fighter has to achieve a good level of maneuverability and retain a good aerodynamic shape. That means, the aircraft's shape cannot be maximized for stealth.

Furthermore, Russian-type radars have used low band long wavelength (L-band or even lower) to scan and track for a long time. Current stealth techs cannot cover the aircrafts against Russian L-band or VHF band or even lower.

Actually stealth aircrafts can do well against nose-mounted radars which have to be small (biggest one in MiG-25/31 is only 1,4 metre in diameter) and do not have enough resolution to use low band. But now the T-50 has a 10 metre L-band radar, thanks to AESA techs. And the ground radars can provide the information for fighters, too.

Zhukov-Patton wrote:Okay so I have heard that the F-35 is to have super data link thingy to make it so it can call a local destroyer or something with SAMs to a location and guide the shot kind of like a arty spotter. So questions one is this tech that wonderful? Two can a hacker possibly get into the F-35s system and use the data link against itself? I mean the F-35 is almost like a flying super computer from what I have read from pilots he flew the thing. and Three is this a good idea of just crazy?

Airbornewolf wrote:

Mike E wrote:I thought that the "hacking incident" was just made up...

well, i did not want to jump to conclusions either at the time.

but i asked some airforce guys i knew from Afghanistan's KAF.

appearantly according to them all those TU-95 excursions into europe and last time the U.S coastline is to precisely test such Electronic Warfare equipment out by "passive testing". their electronics "suck-up" NATO millitary electronic signals and by way of DFRM (digital radio frequency Memory) its stored for later use. Dutch F-16 technicians have concerns that with all the TU-95's the F-16's "intercepted" that the Russians can now "chew" trough any encryption they use because the encryption just changes codes...but never the encryption tech itself. and its not just the F-16's. they fly over naval bases, radar stations, airfields...etc.

and what happened in the story of the Cooke trying to lock-on on the SU-24's is an textbook DFRM attack. the ships fire control radar attempts to lock on the SU. but receives and friendly signal from the Electronic warfare module. the crew reported the fire control refused to lock on, and when it got closer the CIWS just ignored the order to lock-on.

and it pretty much escalated from there, the Cooke lost all control over its systems from there. fire control, radar, sonar, EAGIS, BMS. the crew said they just had basic navigation control of the ship itself as one after another just "went dark".

i wondered myself a lot about how DFRM could eat its way trough an entire ship, but before i excited service we had our own "modernisation" program called BMS. that stands for Battlefield Management system. it allows individual units to see the battlefield on an Command and Conquer-style view in real time. where enemy units are , friendly units. etc etc.

but, and here is the snake in this high tech gadget. the BMS system shares data to any sensor/fire computer on board that allows targeting an target outside the firing's unit detection. for example, this Eagis cruiser might not see enemy missiles on its radar. but trough another radar-station like an AWACS it can use its radar data to target its weapons nonetheless and do not get an "invalid target" feedback from its firing computer. it just accepts the incomming remote data as if it was its own to target its weapons. awesome in theory, but clearly as the Russians showed its an deadly mistake in weapon design. its like giving an program on your own computer Admin rights to share data computer-wide from the outside. couple that with DFRM and you are asking for the apocalypse.

in my opinion, its just arrogance of NATO to never even consider someone can use such networked systems against you.

Basically, the Russians "chewed" their way trough the Cruiser its network and all it takes is sending something like an virus to one of its linked computers to eat its way trough its electronic heart.