Bill Sweetman believes something is very wrong with the F-35.
The F-35 used to have a largely negative public perception, but this seems to have changed with a media offensive in the 2010s, with many public interviews with test pilot Flynn and other pilots enthusing about the F-35’s capabilities for stealth and situational awareness – what do you make of this shift in perception?
Not sure I’d agree that there was a shift. Aside from myself and a few others (APA for instance) there were more enthusiasts, and they were louder. Although there was a change in propaganda around 2008 as LM got ready to ditch support for the F-22 and go all-in on F-35. I think that a lot of people who could have helped form opinions just gave up. It certainly wasn’t career-enhancing.
What does the recent GAO report tell us about the health of the F-35 programme?
The most recent report is a shocker, even for me. It shows that the entire Block 4 upgrade plan has been found unrealistic. In early 2023, delivery of a combat-ready TR3 was expected in ~8 months. Now, more than a year later, it’s 18 months. They have done source selection for the upgraded engine (want to bet it won’t be a new engine by the time they’re done) without a requirement or a plan. Meteor? Spear 3? Don’t even ask.
Is the management of F-35 much worse than all other fighters? How is it compared to say the Typhoon, Rafale or Kaan?
No programme has been this late, or overrun by this much, when it has always been fully funded and the requirements have never been tightened, only relaxed. I go into detail in the book, but it has to do with the power of the mega-contractors that formed in the 1990s, the fact that the JPO doesn’t report to an operational user, and the absence of an alternative.
Typhoon had a lot of trouble, but a lot of it has been political, mostly British-German politics. Germany was ready to scrap it completely in the early 90s. Later, production and upgrade orders kept getting delayed because Germany was in an election year, the British Treasury was on the warpath, “why are you buying these relics when Our Boys need MRAPs?” and so on.
Much respect to the French. The end of the Cold War left the AdlA with a lot of quite new M2000s and the Aeronavale with museum-piece F-8s, so they built their fighter program around those data points, with M2000 upgrades and an F1/F2/F3 process that they had defined in the mid-90s and delivered on time.
I can’t say much about KAAAAAAAN! as William Shatner would call it.
What fighter would you choose to go to war in, and why?
I prefer to use them to deter war. Rafale has a vast range of capabilities available, may not be the best at everything, but is well balanced, has a solid upgrade program, and – I hate to say this is important, but it is – is very free from U.S. content. Gripen E is very close and less costly to operate (so I can field more of them), and may be better in some ways if that Mongo EW system does what it says on the tin.
5I may be wrong, but I feel I recall the JSF being promised as an extremely low-cost easy-to-maintain Mach 2 fighter-bomber*, do I recall this correctly and is it?
It was always M=1.6. But yes, it was advertised as being cheap to maintain and reliable, it is absolutely neither of those things, and it is going to be hard to change that. Far too much faith was placed in automated diagnostics and prognostics, and by the time they admitted that Alis was a failure it was very late.
The reliance on touchscreen has been criticised by some, as losing the eyes-off feel of buttons and switches, what is your opinion?
I don’t have a strong view there. I think it’s something you have to be careful with, because you don’t know what works and what doesn’t until you fly it. I love the incredibly French detail with Rafale touchscreens, which is to give the pilots gloves with seamless fingertips and a chamois back to wipe any hand-prints off the screen. Oh, and I hate touchscreens in cars.
To what extent, if any, has the absence of exportable F-35s and air-to-ground optimised F-35s led to the profusion of non-US fighters currently in development?
Limited. The main factors, I believe, are the strings attached to the F-35, the lack of confidence in the U.S. as an ally, which given the polls is entirely justified, and arrogance. The Japanese MoD insisted on “right of modification” in the FX RFI and the U.S. side ignored it entirely because they absolutely could not conceive of the Japanese ditching them for the Brits.
You have been studying this project for a while, how has your judgement of it changed over time?
Initially, it looked amazing. But around 2008, it was clear that the schedules being published were unattainable, the claims became more fantastical, and the assaults on critics became ruthless. After that, the propaganda became repellent and was clearly hiding failure.
Is the aircraft itself bad or just the programme management?
There are three main things wrong with the aircraft: the features forced in by STOVL, which degrade performance; the centralized and non-partitioned avionics, which make changes and upgrades difficult; and inadequate cooling. There are also what I call “pet rocks” – technologies that made their way in without adequate assessment, like the no-HUD cockpit, electrohydraulic actuation, and the steampunk secondary power system.
Is the F-35 the most survivable modern fighter?
Hard to say without knowing how effective other fighters’ EW systems are. It’s also valid mission engineering to say of some threats, “well that’s why we have Storm Shadow or Taurus.”
1Does price gouging happen with the F-35 suppliers? Additionally, are F-35B peculiar components fairly priced?
Most supply-chain issues involve primes leaning on suppliers’ throats and threatening to recompete. Then the suppliers can’t pay competitive salaries and their best performers go to the primes, while quality gets pared to 0.0001 higher than acceptable. The TR3 problem is rooted in a recompete. Pro-tip: if your original supplier walks away laughing it’s a sign that they think their replacement doesn’t understand the job. They’re most likely right.
What needs to happen?
Very hard to say. I’ve been warning since 2009-10 that the project was in bad shape. At one point I recommended putting the B and C on ice and focusing on fixing the F-35A. But between the programme’s difficulties and the changes in warfare – long-range combat aircraft launching unmanned things might be more important. We also need changes in the way we do acquisition and stop thinking of it as a competitive market, because it ain’t that anymore.
1Some say the lower availability rates of the F-35 are offset by its superior potency, thoughts on this?
If the airplane was really as good, 1-v-1, as the fans say it is, the USAF would have stayed with the adaptive engine vs. revised F135.
Biggest myth?
That it’s cheaper than anything else. Typhoon beat it on procurement cost in Korea. In fact both Typhoon and Rafale are pretty close in real numbers. (Export sales to non-democracies often have bigged-up numbers because it benefits both sides.) And the operational costs are high, partly due to security.
What should I have asked you?
Why has it won all round on exports? I go into that in the new book, but the most basic point is that if you think it doesn’t matter where a nation shops for its largest military procurement, you’re being (to put it kindly) a little naïve at the best of times, and these are not the best of times.
You quoted someone in your first F-35 book about the JSF being the greatest threat to the EU, what did that mean and what do you think of that from a modern perspective?
That was a Frenchman in 2003-04 when everyone expected the F-35 to work as advertised. I don’t think there is any doubt that the programme’s objective was to knock the Europeans out of the business and establish a monopoly – which ultimately would have made Europe entirely dependent on American defense technology in ways that would take decades to reverse.
The next generation of fighters seem to all have greater range, is low range a weakness of 5th gen?
Cold War fighter ranges were measured against Central Europe. The “objective” range for the F-35A and F-35C in the Key Performance Parameters was influenced by Desert Storm, but the customers only got the threshold number. More range is good and worth trading max speed and max g for.
Bill’s new book Trillion Dollar Trainwreck: How The F-35 Hollowed Out The U.S. Air Force is available to buy here.
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*HK note: The design objectives for JSF were very broadly defined, in order to give maximum flexibility to designers. They eventually crystallized into something called ORD3. I think M 1.8 may have been desirable, but suspect 1.6 as essential. In the ASTOVL studies, only the RALS system might have given a Mach 2 capability but was a non-starter due to ground erosion, hot-gas ingestion, and (probably) other aspects as well. I think it must have been the M1.8 figure I recalled.