“Our nation expects us to make informed decisions about developing and employing the most effective military capabilities to support our national security strategy,”said Lieutenant General Robert E. Schmidle, the Marine Corps’ deputy commandant of aviation.
All true, Sir. Unfortunately the history presented by the big green markeeters is platitude.
Employ to where and how? One of the main reasons for the F-35B is ship ops like the Harrer. Yet, not having a grasp on the logistics and facilities needed aboard ship all while deceiving the public is not very convincing.
Then there is other deceptive behavior. Amos' history of bad advice and salesmanship is disturbing.
STOVL jet doctrine is over-rated and it looks like the F-35B will have less combat capability than the Harrer for the money spent. Sorry, for a projected $51B in USMC tac-air recap money, spent.
At least for the STOVL-jet loyalists, the Harrier will last out to 2030.
Because of poor progress with the F-35 program, the USMC will do their little 2015 circus act/deployment with a jet that has no gun (no working software block support and a questionable helmet cueing system), limited air to ground weapons, no ROVER capability and a host of other problems. The aircraft will be unsuitable to support Marines for close air support. This is the reason for any USMC combat aircraft to exist.
That makes this statement from the article, invalid:
The Marines will declare a combat-ready squadron when it’s equipped with between 10 and 16 jets and has trained pilots for missions such as close air support of troops.
The jet will look really funny with no working gunpod and an external LITENING or SNIPER pod to provide proper orbiting electro-optical target designation around a close air support event of interest. The external pod may also be the only way it could have a hope of having ROVER ability in such a situation.
Meanwhile this is video shows what small helicopters are able to do...at night...danger-close if needed. The current USMC Yankee and Zulu helicopters are a big bucketful of capability.
And the USMC has another outstanding air asset: the KC-130J Harvest Hawk. A go-to-deployment asset for any number of the majority of non-anti-access threat scenarios facing the USMC in this century.
The General continues with this untruth:
“The F-35 is the best hedge against the ever-evolving and unknown threats posed by potential adversaries,”
Unlikely.
If we fired all the marketing people in the USMC like Amos and Schmidle and killed the F-35B program, the USMC would have some realistic dollars available to equip and support their reason to exist.
2 comments:
Truly, I feel it would be a perfectly worthy and potent acquisition choice to jump on if the 'block IV' F-35B was going to be operational by around 2017-2018 and cost was around $125m max (as a total Procurement unit cost).
Unfortunately though, the F-35B will flat out be unsustainable as a cost-effective and reliable asset to fill the sufficient national strategy requirements, as currently still being expected and advertised.
Basically, F35 will be a bomb truck where other jets, helicopters or Marines/grunts will lase, they will do all the work and F35 will show up and drop a JDAM! Great and it only cost the the US taxpayer tens of billions!
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