Defence presses forward with their bad idea

Defence presses forward with their bad idea.

*UPDATE* - Defence rips off the taxpayer for another $1.5B

One thing you can count on with today's entrenched defence bureaucracy is that they will continue to do dumb things; in a very expensive and wasteful manner.

Minister for Defence Stephen Smith and Minister for Defence Materiel Jason Clare today announced that the Government had decided to acquire the Growler electronic warfare system for the Super Hornet, at a cost of around $1.5 billion.

Unfortunately, the facts of a tepid Growler "capability" don't allow for much of a future.

---UPDATE---

Industry sources hawking obsolete product say Growler is obsolete. Competition for available cash and all that. LOL. The bad decision by Defence to waste $1.5B on the Growler takes money away from the ultimate bad decision; the Joint Strike Failure.

Growler's roosting chickens have been home awhile

In Australia, when reporting defence issues, occasionally the local news people figure out the plot.

Today's Canberra Times points out what some of us have known for years. That is, that the idea from Defence senior leadership to field a jammer-capable Super Hornet is bad.

The "Growler" upgrade for 12 of Australia's 24 Super Hornets is a bad idea because the gear to be put on it is obsolete.

The U.S. Navy, has known this.

For at least 10 years.

$1.7B (if not more) will be thrown away on dud jamming gear.

Par for the course with Defence senior leadership's faulty air power thinking.

(Slides from U.S. Navy briefing via www.dtic.mil dated 2002-3)

Spend-thrift Defence faces new budget reality--badly

The Defence project to equip 12 of the 24 RAAF Block II Super Hornets with jamming gear that the U.S. Navy has stated is obsolete against emerging threats has blown out by almost 6-times or $1.4B dollars The Australian has learned.

Back in the Joel Fitzgibbon regime as Defence Minister, the project was supposed to cost $300M. Recently, a U.S. Government Defence proposal has stated this work would cost up to $1.7B.

This conversion which turns a two-seat F-18F Super Hornet into an electronic jamming F-18G would cost Defence and you the tax-payer $142M per jet. This is almost twice the cost of a new F-18F Super Hornet. A new F-18G costs the U.S. Government around $90-100M each.

Defence, uses the argument that the jamming capability of the F-18G was used successfully in last years fight against Libya. This is a crock. Libya's air defence capability was a joke and will be nothing close to the emerging threat picture in the Pacific Rim. Also, the F-18G is draggy, short-ranged and highly dependent on air-refueling resources.

While the F-18G may be fine to electronically jam older (or "legacy") air defence systems from the Soviet-era, the single-seat F-18E Super Hornet and the two-seat F-18F Super Hornet, in their Block II configuration, can already detect, pin-point and destroy this kind of threat. This includes the fact that the on-board jamming system and towed-decoy of the E and F Super Hornet provide outstanding self-defence capability against older threats.

Defence does not seem to be acting in a responsible manner with our tax dollars in the current budget environment.

A few days after the federal budget announcement, Defence spent $1.4B for 10 C-27J light airlift aircraft stating they were a Caribou replacement when they were not. The other reason Defence used justify this purchase was that the C-27J gets into more airfields than a C-130. True, but the C-130J's purchased by Defence were justified as "strategic air-lifters". And, while a variety of aircraft can get into more airfields than a C-130J, there was no formal tender for the C-27J against its world-wide competitor, the Airbus C-295.

Using the justification that they have to make ends meet under the new federal budget, Defence has cut funds used to get single enlisted soldiers fighting in Afghanistan home on leave. These troops in a combat theatre will have to pay for their own flights. The general that helped make this decision, can easily afford such flights.

No strategy, just bluster

Whatever.

He welcomed Australia's decisions to commit to the F-35 JSF program and to buy long-lead items for upgrading 12 RAAF Super Hornets to ''Growler'' electronic warfare systems.
"They are choices about hedging and risk management that are well taken," the general said.

Agreeing with thana-marketing isn't a sound strategy.

The F-35 and Growler have nothing to do with hedging and risk management of Pacific Rim threats because they are totally unsuited to the real needs of Australia.

More on the dud-jamming gear Defence wants to buy

As reported earlier, the plan by Australian Defence to put extra dedicated electronic jamming gear on 12 of its new Super Hornets is a bad idea.

Early in the last decade,  the U.S. Navy was trying to justify funding for a dedicated jamming version of the Super Hornet known as the "Growler". The U.S. Navy, in an effort to get the next generation jammer (NGJ) as the hardware of choice to put on the Super Hornet (Growler) had to state the obvious:  the existing years-old ALQ-99 jamming pods were for the bin. U.S. Navy said in plain language that the ALQ-99 pods were too legacy, couldn't keep up with the emerging threats and were becoming more expensive to maintain.

Guess what happened? When NGJ ran into funding problems, the U.S. Navy was forced to deploy their Growlers with a majority ALQ-99 pod configuration. They sure does look all nice painted up though boss.

Today, NGJ might be ready by 2020 according to a new report on airborne electronic attack (PDF) by the U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO). Label this a must-read. The report covers a wide range of current and future electronic attack (or jamming) solutions for the U.S. DOD. And to be fair, given the serious post Cold War deskilling of this electronic warfare brain-trust, DOD has done the best they can.

In a rush to save money at the end of the Cold War, DOD and Congress were short-sighted enough to think that all future threats would be broken-down countries with old and poorly maintained Soviet hardware. If anything else came along, well, future "affordable" stealth solutions would fix that for sure. And oh, only the U.S. had the ability to field anything advanced.

Things didn't work out that way.

Of interest in the recent GAO report is more pile-on of the state of affairs with the ALQ-99 pods on the Growler. They are over-kill, inefficient  and expensive to maintain for COIN warfare. And again, as already known, they will not be able to keep up with emerging threats.

Ever.

What is more? Even when the NGJ gets fielded; if it is fielded at the end of the decade, like the ALQ-99,  fitted with the Growler, what you have is still an escort-jammer and not a stand-off-jammer (SOJ). True, hardcore SOJ capability for the B-52 was shot down a few years ago. Like other needed programs, money was cut-off and sent to support  Operations: USELESS DIRT 1 and 2. In one of the more severe examples of U.S. DOD short-sighted strategy, electronic warfare against advanced threats was not on any key-decision-maker's top-ten list of needs. Years after the end of the Cold War.

The distinction between escort-jamming and stand-off jamming is important when you try and fly a pudgy Super-drag-Growler escort-jammer into the teeth of surface-to-air missile systems that can reach out and touch someone 250 miles away in, a very short amount of time. Any effective power output the Growler hopes to emit won't reach far enough, and, enemy defenses in the shape of upgraded S-300 and S-400 surface-to-air missile systems will have enough sensor and command-control resources to put the Growler at risk of being out-matched and killed.

ALQ-99s will be foolhardy against these threats.To be nice, NGJ on Growler will fare only a little better. If the "I" in integrated air defense systems (IADS) includes enemy aircraft, well, the U.S. Navy is bringing an obsolete carrier air wing to the fight. The USAF; 120 some combat-coded F-22s that may or may not reach depending where the war is at and the F-35; a non-solution.

So back to Australia and the over-optimism of some. Wasting money Defence does not have for a fantasy capability that has no hope of becoming useful is a very bad idea.

Australian Defence needs real engineers that know these things and less vendors knocking on the door trying to sell us obsolete gear. Also, something must be done to stop a Defence/DMO cabal that, when money can't be spent on delayed faulty-project-of-concern high-dollar programs it gets redirected toward impulse buys so-as to make sure annual budget spending evens out.

The Growler upgrade for Australia's existing Super Hornets is one more bad idea for the RAAF.

Defence on the verge of throwing away money on dud jamming aircraft 'upgrade'

This is another reason you can't trust the current senior defence leadership with your tax dollars: they don't know what they are doing. Again.

It was a bad idea then when deciding to wire 12 of Australia's F-18Fs for the ability to be set up as an ECM jet and it is a bad idea now.

Well over half a billion dollars could be wasted on this project.

And, why is it a waste?

Because the Growler is obsolete against modern threats. What is funny is how some mention it was used in a cream-puff of an air defense "system" like Libya last year.

Here is some additional thoughts by the U.S. Navy concerning the gear Defence wants to put into those 12 aircraft.

But what about the "next-generation jammer?"

What about it? The program may show up. However in these tight budget times and the U.S. Navy getting bled white by outrageously expensive defense projects, I wouldn't count on it.

If Defence goes through with this sham, it will be another monument to their incompetence.