F-35 will quickly be outdated

There’s something I’m not buying about the F-35 “stealth” joint-strike fighter. Besides the government’s dishonest bloviating and the opposition’s peacenik whimpering, I mean. I just can’t understand a plane meant to dominate aerial combat for five decades in a world of blinding technological change.

I do understand the need for air power. And for “interoperability” with our American ally, the free world’s only remaining military hope even under Barack Obama. But I don’t believe the F-35, after inevitable teething problems and cost increases, will dominate the skies for two generations. The world just isn’t like that, and neither is this plane.

OK, we’re currently flying CF-18s we bought in 1980 over destroyers we bought in 1972. And today’s CF-18 is not the plane that began entering service in 1982; rather, the same reliable airframe has seen constant “avionics” and weapons upgrades. But the F-35 won’t work that way for two main reasons.

First, the big boast of the F-35 is its “stealth” invisibility to radar. And if all your eggs are in that basket and they knock a hole in it you have no eggs.

I grant that enemy radar can’t currently see the F-35. Not just Libyan radar that wasn’t connected to anything. This plane would doubtless give the Chinese fits if we had any in the air. But we don’t. And what makes you think they won’t be able to see it in 10 years, or 15? I’d certainly bet our radar will be tracking their “Mighty Dragon” J20 stealth fighter before it’s fully operational.

Second, manufacturing is faster and more adaptable today than in 1982. Compare today’s iPad with the one you had four years ago and tell me we won’t have far better stealth options, and airframes, four years from now.

OK, that was a trick example. The iPad didn’t even appear until April 2010 and we’re already on the 3rd generation. But that’s my point.

As for warplanes, the legendary “Sopwith Camel”, which Snoopy flies against the Red Baron, entered service on the Western Front in June 1917 and was obsolete by the November 1918 Armistice. If the F-35 comes into service in June 2017 and lasts even 25 years, it’s the equivalent of flying Sopwith Camels against ME-109s over London during the Blitz. Yet technology changes faster today than in 1917.

Or 1940. But consider how badly the Allies were caught with their armaments down at the start of World War II with the partial exception of the Spitfire, and how they managed to create a whole new generation of aircraft, tanks and antitank weapons in six years for Britain and Canada and just four for the United States under conditions of total war. Even Germany’s 1944 tanks made their 1940 Blitzkrieg Panzer II’s look like toys, and in the final collapsing year of the war they put jet fighters in the air that were museum pieces a decade later.

Now if trouble comes fast and hard there’s little time for this kind of rapid adaptation. But the F-35 won’t be ready either. I say if a bakery can turn an emailed JPG picture into cake icing, medical men talk soberly about 3D “printing” of artificial organs for transplant and your car plays tunes wirelessly off your phone, we can improve military hardware with computers and lasers at least as fast as our grandparents did with typewriters and wrenches.

As for interoperability, compare hooking computer components together 20 years ago (“driver not found”!) with seamlessly accessing email and your home security system with your iPhone. It really shouldn’t be hard to make military hardware cooperate in future. Heck, by 2022 your iPad will be interoperable with the F-35.

Or the pilotless drones we should actually be flying instead.

Original Article
Source: ottawa sun
Author: John Robson