Air supremacy by stealth
The RAAF is about to unveil its cutting-edge F-35 fighers.
In three months Australia will take delivery of the first of 72 Joint Strike Fighters, a fifth-generation fighter plane that will replace the country’s ageing fleet of Super Hornets.
Depending on who you listen to, the JSF is either the most formidable fighter on the planet or an expensive boondoggle the likes of which this country has never seen.
Either way, it is coming.
The debate that has dogged the JSF ever since its inception in 2002 — a debate that has largely focused on cost and capability — has been superseded by events.
On December 11, the Royal Australian Air Force will unveil the first two aircraft at Williamtown air base near Newcastle in NSW, and by 2023 the RAAF will have taken delivery of all 72 JSFs, also known as F-35s.
At a projected cost of $17 billion it is Australia’s largest defence acquisition.
The JSF global program, which will ultimately see the jets sold to more than nine countries, is the largest defence collaboration in history.
“People need to accept the fact that this is happening,’’ says Marcus Hellyer, a senior analyst for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and an expert on the JSF.
“I can’t see this government or any government changing the plan. We’re now really at the pointy end of the JSF program.’’
The JSF has been a bold leap into the unknown, a trillion-dollar gamble by allied governments around the world that the JSF’s stealth capabilities and advanced avionics will hold their own against the emerging technologies coming out of Russia and China.
For Australia, a country that has long relied on superior technology to maintain a strategic edge in the region, it is crucial this gamble pays off.
China’s rise has been accompanied by an intense modernisation of its military. Beijing’s strategic doctrine is shifting from a land-based defence of the homeland to one that will allow the People’s Liberation Army to project force beyond the South China Sea and into the Pacific and the Indian oceans.
China’s long-term strategic priorities are unclear but it is obvious that Beijing sees a more assertive role for itself in the Pacific. It produced its first indigenous aircraft carrier in 2012 and has made great strides in stealth technology in its fighter planes.
The JSF is a multi-role fighter, meaning it can hit land and sea targets and engage in aerial combat. It is Australia’s first stealth aircraft.
A key question for Australia is not how the JSF will perform against the so-called “legacy’’ fighter planes operated by most air forces in the region, but how it will fare against comparable stealth technologies that China and Russia are working on.
Beijing’s answer to the F-35, the Chengdu J-20, is a twin-engine stealth fighter with the range to strike far afield from Beijing.
While analysts question the quality of the plane’s stealth technology, it is what experts call a “near-peer’’ competitor to the JSF and the F-22 Raptor, the US’s air- superiority stealth fighter. In the arcane and secretive world of fighter plane technology, “near peer’’ might be good enough. While few would argue the Chinese or the Russians are producing aircraft on a par with the Americans, who have been refining stealth technology for decades, the Chinese might not have to win to win.
If Chinese fighter aircraft can achieve kill ratios of three to one, that might be enough to deter the Americans from engaging in a full-scale air war in Asia. But experts are doubtful.
ASPI’s director of defence and strategy Michael Shoebridge says that unlike the F-35, which has been subject to ongoing and rigorous public analysis, little is known about the Chinese and Russian planes. The F-35 has 150,000 hours of flight time and has flown successful combat missions in the Middle East, a fact revealed by Israel this year.
“Various analysts toss out comparisons between the JSF, the PLA’s J-20 and Russia’s Su-57, and usually combine this with a healthy serving of analysis of JSF developmental problems over time,’’ Shoebridge tells The Australian. “What they miss in their analysis, though, is that the US government, through congress, the US Department of Defence and the Government Accountability Office, has provided reams of data and disclosure on the development path of the JSF, while, in contrast, there is almost no disclosure of the developmental difficulties in the Russian and Chinese programs.’’
Lockheed Martin’s director of international business development Steve Over says the company has performed its own assessments of Russia’s latest stealth aircraft the Su-57 and the J-20. The J-20 is “moderately stealthy’’ but no match for the F-35, he adds. “With enough time and money, could an adversary get there? Perhaps. I would never want to be presumptuous and think … we’re the only people who could do something like that. But we’re confident that the F-35 capability that we’re fielding right now — stealth, sensors and sensor fusion — are at least a decade, even more, beyond the capabilities of the adversaries that are out there.’’
This is probably true. But long delays in the JSF program have allowed the Chinese and the Russians to hone their own fifth-generation aircraft.
The first JSFs were originally due to arrive in late 2013 but a blowout in the program saw that deadline pushed out to late this year.
This delay has cost more than money. It has effectively narrowed the capability gap between Australia and its potential adversaries.
For the F-35’s defenders, many of the criticisms levelled at the plane — that it is slower and less manoeuvrable than other aircraft — are true, but misplaced. Gone are the days when fighter aces duelled in the skies, mowing each other down with guns and missiles.
Stealth, range and combat systems that integrate air, land and sea forces are the goal. That, and next-generation weapons that can be fired from virtually any angle and can track and kill enemy aircraft.
JSF pilots are not taught to dogfight but to identify an enemy from beyond visual range and destroy it before being detected.
“That’s what the JSF and F-22 is all about — to shoot the other guy down before he can detect your existence,’’ Hellyer says. “That’s what the JSF is being designed for. The evidence coming out of the US, admittedly in structured war games, is that it’s extremely good at that. It’s wise to take that with a grain of salt, but the messages are that it’s achieving 20:1 kill ratios.’’
Shoebridge says the JSF will provide the RAAF with “an integrated set of capabilities’’, a network that other platforms can lean on to make themselves smarter and leaner.
For example, the JSF could assist navy frigates in targeting enemy vessels while remaining out of range. The pilot’s sensors are also said to be top of the line.
Lockheed Martin says that in fusing so many systems JSF pilots have less to think about. The helmet design is said to be particularly cutting-edge. Pilots can see through the cockpit via a series of cameras mounted on the exterior of the aircraft and synched to the pilot’s helmet.
Hellyer says these features will change air-to-air combat.
“It’s because of its sensors and its ability to fuse the information from those sensors, meaning a human being can absorb it,’’ he says.
“It can also share that information and co-ordinate with other platforms, whether it’s a Wedgetail early warning or the battlespace awareness on the ground.’’
What is less clear is how much it will cost to maintain the JSF.
The plane’s operating system — Autonomic Logistics Information System — is designed to feed non-proprietorial information from each plane into a collective database.
The idea is to give partner countries access to information about how the aircraft performs under various conditions. For example, data on how often an F-35 based in Israel requires new tyres can be used by partner countries whose planes find themselves deployed in similar environments. That, at any rate, is the theory. But the history of aircraft maintenance suggests the planes will cost a fortune to keep.
Next to the Collins-class submarines, the RAAF’s Super Hornets are the single biggest charge on the defence budget, costing about $414 million to maintain in 2018-19. Its hard to imagine the F-35 coming in under that.
“At the moment, the best focus of discussion is about how to do implementation as efficiently and effectively as possible,’’ Hellyer says.
“It’s not really about whether JSF is the answer or not. One thing both the critics and supporters have said is that we don’t really know how much it’s costing to maintain the JSF.’’
Paul Maley travelled to Lockheed Martin’s US facilities as a guest of the company.
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