Foreign air forces using the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter are being compelled to fund $150 million software laboratories, based in the U.S. and almost 50% staffed by U.S. personnel, that generate data crucial to the fighter’s ability to identify new radio-frequency threats.
As noted in the article (as well as years before), the U.S. DOD alone and the F-35 JPO and Lockheed Martin do not decide what is safe to export. A special U.S. government board does. (PDF file, page 9, item 2, sub-para b, sub-para 3.)
Bill Sweetman had covered much of this in an old article, "My JSF is stealthier than yours, or is it?" In that article, it was reported that two U.S. DOD contracts had be issued of around $700M-plus which helped develop different foreign configurations of the F-35. While there may only be 3 variants of the aircraft, there are certainly several different configurations.
Threat software profile management determines how "stealthy" each F-35 configuration will be in its combat mission behaviour. Mission planning, as well as how a whole air campaign is fought, are affected by these assumptions. In the F-35 cockpit displays, when a surface or airborne threat is detected, coloured circles of the threat's sensor potential (not just the active emitter kind) expand and compress depending on the F-35's aspect and distance. How low-observable is the F-35? The pilots and mission planners only know based on that particular customer's software configuration.
And, those software threat profiles can only go so far as the limits of the F-35 design.
How stealthy is a Turkish F-35 compared to a USAF F-35 when everything is taken into account with the software configurations? That includes how close Turkey is to Israel, of which the U.S. hands over $3B per year in foreign aid credits. Why to date, is it, no other Middle East countries appear to be able to have the F-35? Try writing up a software configuration for those customers that has to get by the U.S. government board which determines export friendliness.
An export-friendly F-35 agreement between the U.S. and the customer won't be valid if someone else besides the U.S. has full control of software builds.
The other part of U.S. export-friendly agreements are protecting industry secrets. Every JSF partner or FMS customer has some kind of defense industry. While the F-35 may be jointly built by a worldwide supply chain, it appears the software isn't or, when it is, it has minimal affect on U.S. export-friendly laws.
The other part of U.S. export-friendly agreements relate to a customer's defense-industry relationships to communist China as one example.
One other part of U.S. export-friendly agreements are the geographic areas of the customer. For example, Turkish and Pakistan's F-16s have certain limits built into the software of the combat and maintenance systems. The other part of geography: where is it most likely that a customer's aircraft will be shot down and the risks to compromise of the aircraft? Well, not only shot down, but pilot defection with an F-35 and risks associated with regime change: Iran in the late 1970's as an example.
Other limits of the base F-35 also come into play. When looking at this 1995 RAND report that has some pretty bad assumptions, we can see that it is a big part of the influence for developing the Joint Strike Fighter's Joint Operational Requirements Document (JORD) which was hashed out in the 1990's and signed off on at the beginning of the last decade.
The F-35 is not a high-end stealth combat aircraft able to take on emerging threats. It's original need is not for deep strike. It is for battlefield interdiction. It will probably do very well against SA-3, SA-6 and SA-8, obsolete, battlefield surface-to-air missiles. It may do well against early, export configuration, post-Cold War MiG-29s. When Germany reunified, the ex-East German, Soviet export variant MiG-29s that were used for DACT training were all the rage in the 1990s for NATO. They were considered the standard for a NATO/U.S. fighter pilot to claim street-cred: "I went to the MiG-29 course and 'fought it'. None of you other slobs have." All this around the time that the Joint Strike Fighter JORD was crafted.
The F-35 JORD was based on a post-Cold War world where threats would be less. Yet, the F-16 would have to be replaced and we needed something called a "joint strike fighter" to well, conduct coalition air campaigns...it was claimed...better. Operation:ALLIED FORCE in 1999 could be one of those campaigns that justified everything mentioned in the JSF JORD.
As one independent defense analyst with years of experience stated, you could see that F-16s in Desert Storm needed more survivabilty against battlefield interdiction threats.
For example, a customer of mine from the 1980s, who was assigned to the 527th Aggressor Squadron was later shot down by an SA-8 while flying his F-16 in Desert Storm. He ended up as a POW, took some severe beatings and made it home.
Would the JSF-JORD improve on the loss-exchange ratio in Desert Storm (which was already excellent)? In the future, would the JSF-JORD improve upon, reducing the number of damaged and lost stealth strike aircraft used in Operation: ALLIED FORCE in 1999? All aircraft losses in that campaign were acceptable. And that operation is deep strike which the JSF-JORD didn't properly address. How about interdiction missions? What could possibly do that?
Is it worth spending over $110B alone thus far for no credible combat aircraft, (up to U.S. Defense Budget year 2015) on the F-35 when for much less, we have better options for interdiction and deep strike...that don't involve flight pay?
The need for the F-35 design is gone because its requirement is obsolete. No software build is going to address that because of the aircraft's design limitations. Taking those already severe limitations and adding a weak, U.S. export-friendly software build?
With that, 14 years after the award of the JSF contract, no definitive public policy has been published to make it clear what capability is safely exportable. Including, how to manage threat libraries which make up only one (very important) piece of the F-35 combat capability. The public policy is important because: it is the public paying for this waste.
All those hopes and dreams depend on all the other F-35 design defects in a very trouble defense program being sorted. Which they are not.
Mistake jets.
Free sales-force tip: it is probably not a good idea for one of Lockheed Martin's paid lap-dogs (they are known as U.S. congressmen) to call a very important customer (and ally), "stupid". That will never help close a deal that is already so far down the crapper, it will take a swan dive to save it.
That is not being export-friendly.
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