The flying club

Our friend James Brown has posted an unfortunate piece over at The Interpreter.

It is unfortunate because I would expect better from someone of his calibre. One of the main purposes of air power is to allow the ground troops to do their important work unmolested. The other purpose being not to cost so much as to leave nothing else for the rest of the military. If Australia continues on its current F-18 replacement plan, it looks to end up with a very expensive flying club unable to support the military goals of the nation.

I will go through some of the points raised by Mr. Brown.

Last night's story on the JSF was eerily similar to this story from back in 2007, also by reporter Andrew Fowler. Last night's segment discussing John Howard's 2002 meeting with Lockheed Martin and the shock of Dassault's Daniel Fremont at the JSF decision was largely a re-run from 2007. In both stories, former RAAF officer Chris Mills was on hand to conduct war gaming, though thankfully this time Four Corners left out the awkward Jakarta air strike simulation.

Last nights story and that from 2007 are bookends. For the viewer not knowing anything, the amount of repeat from the 2007 show was necessary. As for Wing Commander Chris Mills AM, RAAF (Retd), BSc, MSc(AFIT) Mr. Brown might learn something from him if he took the time. Mills was around when we had the Mirage fighter aircraft. Important because this gave him the experience of doing dissimilar combat training against one of our allies who just got new American F-5s. So, it might be good to listen to someone who knows what it is like to fly against an opponent who had an over-all, better combat aircraft.

Mills professional experience as a Red force analyst might be worth noting also. As for "gaming", a program that can be setup to show one aspect of threat analysis via Monte Carlo simulations, is valuable and contributes to the total body of work.

The 2007 scenarios against Indonesia should feel awkward or uncomfortable. Like it or not, the RAAF had a strike contingency available should it have been needed during the past unpleasantness.

Four Corners' 2007 program argued that then Defence Minister Brendan Nelson's purchase of the Boeing F/A-18F Super Hornet was flawed because the F-111, in the words of one interviewee, would last 'virtually forever'. Conventional wisdom now is that Nelson's decision was prudent.

Mr. Brown shows that he may need to brush up on the true history of F-111 sustainment. Boeing was the last grand holder for contract management of F-111 logistics. The effort Boeing put on then Defence Minister Nelson was masterful. They saw him for the easy mark that he was. They scare-mongered non-existent structural risk to the F-111 and made the RAAF boss look like a fool for only a month before stating that if there were any delays to the F-35, a "bridging fighter" would be the last resort and that extending the life of legacy Hornets and the F-111 was workable.

Defence responded to this fait accompli by coming up with all kinds of stories of dubious worth being passed off as justification for the bad decision. Mr. Brown may be interested that up to that point, Defence had done no significant analysis on Super Hornet warfighting capability. He can ask Chris Mills about that one.

Congratulations Mr. Nelson, you just stacked additional billions in unwarranted spending on to the new air combat "capability".

Last night's Four Corners also picked up inspiration from this five-month old Canadian story on the JSF, including its star interviewee, Pierre Sprey. Sprey made a lot of comments which were left uncontested throughout the story, including the assertion that 'high cost and low performance was designed into this plane'. Sprey also asserted that the F-16 would beat the F-35 in aerial combat, a point others would debate vigorously. Some of the other assertions put up on the program were very sloppy indeed, including this gem about the JSF: 'the aircraft is designed to rape, pillage, and plunder governments around the Western world'.

Anyone following the Canadian F-35 decision doesn't have to be led too far to reach a conclusion that it (like the Australian F-35 decision) was based on weak to non-existent analysis.

Unfortunately, if one looks at various government reports, and analysis outside the faith-based F-35 camp, the pure project management incompetence is there to see. Many probably intended to make a great aircraft. Massive groupthink produced something which may well be the exact opposite. NASA did not intend to kill  shuttle crews...twice. But dangerous normalization of deviance attitudes in management did just that.

The F-16 is an important mention. First, the F-35 has been sold on the idea that it would cost 20 percent less to own and operate than an F-16. So far, it looks like the F-35 has a good chance of having a cost-per-flying hour double that of an F-16. Reason? The additional complexity of the F-35 and...its' weight. Point F-16.

The F-16 today can actually support Mr. Brown's brothers-in-arms on the ground. When an electro-optical pod is attached to it, the pod has a wider field of view than a Super Hornet, or an F-35. That is that the F-16 can do right and left orbits around a close-air-support event and is easier to work with a ground forward air controller. The Super, can only do left orbits. Look at most OEF and OIF Super combat configs with no drop tank on the left wing in order to give a better field of view for the pod. The F-35, could be in worse shape. Its EOTS field of view was designed more with interdiction in mind. Want to orbit around the ground forward air controllers area of interest? Well, first you need real working F-35 mission systems. So far the F-35 helmet and DAS problems have shown that if we are to believe our esteemed Lockheed friend about USMC 2015 deployment, for it to be anything other than show, they will need to hang an electo-optical pod externally to have a working field of view and may even need... a HUD.

It gets worse. The F-16 (and the Super) have ROVER and Blue-Force-Tracker capability. It is unknown when this may appear on a working F-35. So again, here, the F-16 brings more worth to a joint combat commander because you can actually use it for close air support with current best-practice.

Air-to-air? Neither the F-16 nor the F-35 will be able to stand up to high end threats. The very nature of the Joint Strike Fighter, Joint Operational Requirements Document, created in the 1990s and signed off at the beginning of the last decade, assumed there would be plenty of F-22s to do the dangerous work because it has not only better stealth, but better raw performance. Add to that, today we have two Western aircraft that represent the reference threat coming in the Pacific RIM such as the Russian PAK-FA and big SU aircraft. Those two aircraft are the Typhoon and the F-22. The F-35 is unable to beat those aircraft. It is also difficult to believe it will take on emerging ground threats. That leaves non-high end threats, which the F-16 can do better and cheaper than the F-35.

Mr. Brown's "sloppy" comment? Lockheed Martin is there to win. Regardless.

Houston's explanation for this seems entirely reasonable, and absent anything further must be accepted over a few assertions from a retired defence official not willing to comment publicly.

Houston's explanation could have been "entirely reasonable" had it stood on the kind of mountain of analysis needed to justify spending tens of billions by a country with such a small number taxpayers. Since there is no robust analysis to support Australia's F-35 decision, one could also reach the conclusion that it is "entirely reasonable" that Houston was either asleep at the wheel, deskilled, poorly advised or any combination. With great rank comes great responsibility.

As for the shadowy figure. The Entrenched Defence Bureaucracy has a well known reputation for punishing those that dare speak anything outside of the party line.

Four Corners also made no mention, either in its program or in the accompanying background material on the website, of this September 2012 ANAO report into the JSF procurement process. This seems to suggest that Four Corners was not aware that Australia's F-35 procurement had already been thoroughly audited.

Define "thoroughly audited". The idea of an ANAO report is significant progress. Unfortunately, it had a number of holes in it that disregard the language of engineers (PDF).

The program did make clear that the JSF is very, very late and very, very expensive. But that in itself is not unique among air combat procurement projects. As this ANAO report makes clear (Chapter 2), Australia's 75 F/A-18 'legacy' Hornets were delivered at almost double the budgeted cost.

The try by some claiming that F-35 problems are not "unique" among air combat procurement projects, doesn't address that history shows, some air combat procurement projects have had significant bad endings.

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"The A-12 I did terminate. It was not an easy decision to make because it's an important requirement that we're trying to fulfill. But no one could tell me how much the program was going to cost, even just through the full scale development phase, or when it would be available. And data that had been presented at one point a few months ago turned out to be invalid and inaccurate."

Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, 1991

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Lockheed Martin is certainly sensitive to the ballooning cost of the F-35. Just look at the flight suit patch it is issuing for the F-35 (above). Where normally these kind of patches would be packed with pugnacious slogans, this one highlights that the JSF is 'affordable'. At $135 million a piece, I won't be picking one up on my salary anytime soon.

I don't know how to process the above paragraph other than to say that the JSF patch appears to be a facade. And, that one of the major goals that spawned this project: "affordability" is now unreachable just on the volume buy hopes and dreams. By that and other measures such as capability, we have, a failed project.

The JSF arouses passionate debate here in Australia, and Robert Gottliebsen and Air Power Australia have been prolific in their search for 'truth' on the F-35's capabilities and Australia's possible air combat gap. I don't yet know who is right and wrong in this debate, but these writers have certainly made me curious. Still, if there is a smoking gun to be found that shows we have chosen the wrong aircraft, Four Corners has yet to find it.

With no solid risk-analysis to commit Australia to such an expensive procurement, maybe, not a "smoking gun", but good evidence of who pulled the trigger.

Motive. Opportunity. Witnesses.