The Problem with the F-35

The desire for the "Swiss Army Airplane" that does everything has been a tendency in militaries since the advent of military aviation. The result tends to be a design that is not particularly good at anything. Think of it as the "Jack of all trades, master of none" adage.

The F-35's primary asset is its networking capacity with theater land/air/sea assets to provide cohesive situation awareness and an integrated response through remote acquisition of hardware. An erstwhile enemy would seek to take away the technical advantage of the networking and force the F-35 to fight at their level. With this networking interrupted, the F-35 is not comparable in air superiority capacity to mission specific designs such as our own under-produced F-22 or the Russian Su-57 or even the Chinese J-20 as the later enjoy greater maneuverability and engagement capacity at close range.

Many will remember the fallacy of the original F-4 Phantom II deployment without internal cannon because planners believed that the age of the dog-fight was over and that future air combat would be at a distance using missiles only. This proved not to be the case in the skies over Vietnam and is likely still not the case today.

Remember, too, that America's potential peer adversaries will likely be operating closer to home base along shorter logistic lines providing faster turnaround. This portends to local numerical superiority in the struggle for air superiority over, say, the Taiwan Straight or North Korea. Without air superiority over a contested region (and even sometimes with it) martial gains are hard to come by. Electronic countermeasures can be a powerful force multiplier particularly when employed against a system reliant on electronic networking. It is fair to say that China knows a thing or two about electronics and the Russians as well. Americans and their Allies may be impressed by the marketing of a trillion dollar multirole warplane, but determined opponents may rightfully not be - and hubris has historically been a poor foundation for war planning.

To exasperate this issue, the manufacturers spread their facilities into as many congressional districts as possible, thus providing jobs to constituents of politicians who now cannot vote to kill the procurement no matter how awful it is or they will not be reelected. Eisenhower warned us of this trap in his "Cross of Iron" speech when he left office. He originally called it the Military-Industrial-Congressional establishment but then dropped the "congressional" reference due to political sensitivities.

With these thoughts in mind, regardless of the political repercussions, it may well behoove us to consider more mission specific designs in future procurement plans.

{Opinion piece: Timothy Wayne Burford]