The F-35 doesn't make sense for the USAF, however people are going forward with the plan to field it. How will the USAF operate and sustain the troubled F-35A in a slim budget time?
I will look at this in a future post which details a very small "Fighter Group" with one squadron and various thin support squadrons. This will make up a stateside basing.
Due to high operating costs, the squadron will only have around 12 fighter aircraft. This higher operating cost for the F-35 points more to the number of airframes you see in some large-airframe airlift squadrons.
For ISO/phase, an aircraft is flown off to another base that not only has a Fighter Group, but Wing HQ which oversees 4 Fighter Groups.
Again, the goal is to take today's operating budgets and live within some kind of an organisational structure that can exist due to the high F-35 operating cost.
Because of such slow F-35 production and unpredictable annual budgets, USAF has no real way of knowing how many operational Wings/Groups/Squadrons it will have to stand up.
Like the effort of not declaring IOC because no one knows, not declaring a total number of F-35s for the USAF, for now, is OK.
Standing up 1 F-35 Wing with the above mentioned structure, is at least a start, and, unless there are more serious discoveries in F-35 development, something that the USAF can actually achieve with reasonable certainty.
Taking the illogical to its logical conclusion and all that.
1 comment:
Eric,
Why all the doom and gloom? Why the pessimism?
From what I've read and heard from officials involved with this project.... the F-35 will be a jet which will have fairly affordable support costs and be very affordable to buy - thus bought in very high numbers accordingly!
The USAF will get at least 1700 of these babies. That's the word on the street. Why should we doubt that?
Post a Comment