I recently stumbled across an intriguing site on the Internet,“War Is Boring”, which featured a necessarily long article—necessarily long because it was titled “Everything Wrong With the F-35”, the F-35 being America’s newest and (of course) most expensive fighter jet. The F-35 is in fact the most expensive weapons project in history, and one that is, perhaps unsurprisingly, already $163 billion over budget and seven years behind schedule.
“War Is Boring” scribes Mandy Smithberger and Dan Grazier fill us in on the almost infinite number of glitches and screw-ups that resulted in the fact that in mock combat the F-35 is consistently bested by “archival” fighters like the F-16, thirty years the F-35’s senior. Beyond all the SNAFU’s is the simple fact that the F-35, like the F-22 fighter and the B-2 bomber, are too high-strung to allow their pilots the necessary flying time to develop high levels of competence.
“As Boyd’s1 and every other careful analysis of historical combat outcomes have shown, pilot skill always dominates fighter technical differences in achieving aerial victories. In every first rate air force, turning out superior fighter pilots has always required at least 40 sorties per month of realistic, intense air combat training to hone fight-winning skills.
“Here lies the single largest — and clearly incurable — cause of the F-35’s lack of combat effectiveness. Because of the plane’s unprecedented complexity and the corresponding reliability and maintenance burdens, it simply cannot fly often enough to train pilots that are clearly better than any possible adversary.
“The F-35 has nearly 30 million lines of constantly changing aircraft and support system computer code, a maintenance-intensive stealth skin, a problem-ridden helmet system,2 excessive engine failure rate, significant maintenance burdens, constantly emerging structural defects, and continuing reliability problems throughout the all-electric control and integrated power generation systems.
“All of these factors will combine to turn the F-35 into what is known as a “hangar queen.” The plane will have limited operational availability for flight training because maintenance crews will find it difficult to keep up with the inevitable mechanical failures.”
Once in production, the F-35 will have companions in the hanger—the F-22, which cost $422 million each, with operating costs of $60,000 an hour, which helped limit pilots to no more than nine hours of flight time a month, and the fabled B-2, with maintenance costs of about $3.4 million a month per plane.
Smithberger and Grazier claim that the F-35 will be vulnerable to fighters produced by Russia and China. I have to wonder if that is true, since Russia spends about $70 billion a year on the military, which the U.S. spends in the neighborhood of $620 billion. China spends more, but both countries are struggling economically. A head to head collision between the U.S. and either country seems unlikely, unless you listen to Hillary Clinton.3
The F-35 does have at least one champion, Bernie Sanders, because the program spends a lot of money in Vermont. According to Bernie, he has to vote for the F-35, because if he didn’t the money would go to South Carolina instead. Which is the real reason why military programs like the B-2, the F-22, and the F-35 achieve such fantastic, self-defeating complexity—because anything that keeps the money flowing is good.
- Colonel John Boyd, legendary figure in the history of U.S. fighter aircraft. ↩︎
- F-35 pilots wear individually configured helmets that cost over $600,000 each. ↩︎
- Hillary has consistently pushed for the U.S. to establish a “no-fly zone” in Syria, which could result in direct encounters between U.S. and Russian combat planes. ↩︎
