Lockheed pitching for F-22 as JSF pilots vote with their feet

Lockheed is quietly pitching a new strategy to the Pentagon to try to get America back in the air power race.

The new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Picture AAP

It was US pilots who finally forced into the open one of the greatest cover ups in the modern world: the disaster that is the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) or F-35.

The JSF/F-35 was proposed as a low cost, flexible fighter to maintain US air superiority. The cover-up has lasted two decades. First was its cost blow out. In our parliamentary cost estimates, the engines were often left out. Then there were the delays, then its technical problems. And then finally the fact that the JSF was an inferior aircraft that did not deliver air superiority was also concealed.

America’s pilots could see that the JSF was no match for equivalent Russian and Chinese aircraft. Add to that bad management in the US air force and the US pilots have been leaving the USAF force in droves. Who wants to fly a death machine into battle?

Like the US, the Canadians and Japanese, have also woken up to the fact that the JSF’s claims of air superiority are simply wrong.

At the weekend one if the world’s best connected defence writers, Marcus Weisgerber, global business editor for Defense One, blew the whistle and revealed that the developer of the JSF, Lockheed Martin, is now pitching to the US Air Force a program that takes F-22 Raptor production facilities out of mothballs and equips the F-22 with the JSF’s modern mission avionics, making structural adjustments as required.

The new Raptor “would aim to answer the next decades Russian and Chinese threats”, Weisgerber says.

An American F22 Raptor fighter plane in action during the 2013 Australia Air Show at Avalon.

The Australian Parliament has been told over and over again that the JSF is the answer to Russian and Chinese threats.

Defence minister after defence minster on both sides has misled the Parliament and the Australian population because they in turn have been misled by defence bureaucrats and didn’t take the time to check the facts.

We now are in a diabolical situation, because we propose to outlay an initial $A28billion for an aircraft that can’t match the Russian and Chinese aircraft. Indonesia is buying the Russian aircraft. As things now stand Australia must rely on the ageing American F-22 for air protection.

How did it get to this?

The massive global cover-up of the JSF disaster goes back to 2001-02.

With the assistance of the Airpower Australia group, headed by Peter Goon and Carlo Kopp, I have been revealing to readers the true situation starting the in The Australian around 2002 when I revealed the false statements that were being made by Australian defence chiefs about the JSF delays and cost overruns.

Then I helped start businessspectator.com.au and again with the help Peter Goon and Carlo Kopp I shared with readers that despite the huge escalation in purchase costs the aircraft would be hideously costly to run and would be no match for the equivalent Russian or Chinese aircraft.

When News bought businessspectator, in The Australian, I continued pursue the truth and even made a submission to the Senate inquiry into the JSF. My submission included the suggestion that the JSF be incorporated into the F22. But I was swamped by the bureaucrats as the false statements kept coming.

I suggested Malcolm Turnbull make Tony Abbott defence minister because Abbott would have uncovered the truth. Turnbull didn’t and the cover-ups continued.

On July 28, 2017 — more than a year ago — I asked “How we can solve the F-35 JSF disaster?”, suggesting that we need to work with the US to incorporate the JSF into the F-22.

Let me emphasise that I am not an aircraft expert.

I just listened to the people who understood the situation and as the years went by I found that in JSF matters that Goon and Kopp were almost always right and the defence chiefs were almost always proved wrong by later events.

So I was able to pass the truth onto readers. And I must thank the readers of The Australian who stayed with me when sometimes what I was writing seemed unbelievable. I also thank the Editor in Chiefs who backed me.

So now let’s document this diabolical mess we in as a result of the truth cover up. Explaining this situation gives me no pleasure whatsoever.

Russia’s Sukhoi Su-35S and Su-57, and China’s Chengdu J-20, are already in the air and fully operational.

All can fly 6km 20,000 feet higher than our F35A version of the JSF. The Russian and Chinese aircraft can also fly 1000kmh an hour faster than the JSF, without using an afterburner. The JSF afterburner requires huge amounts of fuel.

Parliament has been told that we will buy 72 of the JSF aircraft for around $20 billion. Airpower Australia says the costs will be around $28 billion. Airpower Australia has always been a better estimator than defence chiefs, so $28 billion will be closer to the mark.

But we are buying an aircraft the Americans now admit is no match for its rivals.

The F-22 is still a magnificent aircraft, but Lockheed managed to stop production so that all efforts could be concentrated on its highly profitable JSF, which would supposedly deliver air superiority.

Now Lockheed is proposing that the two-engined and much larger F-22 be brought back into production and enhanced by some of the better internal developments in the JSF.

One of those developments, for example, is likely to be the new 360-degree camera system. We are buying our JSFs with the old camera system, which does not work properly and so is being redesigned. So get ready for a big new bill to update our JSFs. Even as it is, maintaining the JSF will cost many times the initial $28 billion purchase price.

The spin of the new development will describe the combined aircraft as a “hybrid”. That’s just another cover up.

The JSF is simply being superseded and replaced with an upgraded F-22 aided by the JSF mission avionics which are recognised as world class.

We are stuck with the superseded JSFs. As I understand it, we are only firmly committed to buying 16 JSF aircraft so we may be able to get out of buying the rest but that involves telling the nation the truth about the cover up.

The last time I visited the Australian war museum there was on display a photo of Australian pilots in Singapore in 1942 rushing to fly Brewster Buffalos against the invading Japanese. The tubby Buffalo was no match for the agile Japanese aircraft and most of the pilots in that photo knew they were racing to their death.

Every Australian politician should visit the museum, look at that photo and hang their heads in shame, because we are doing it again. Thank goodness for the US pilots who brought the cover up to a head.

What’s worse, I fear the Australia’s JSF incompetence has been duplicated in our efforts to buy new submarines and frigates.