Re: F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Thread
The quest for what early aviators called “command of the air” is a defining feature of the military enterprise. Major military powers spend much more on combat aircraft than they do on warships or armored vehicles. And with good reason: if friendly forces can’t utilize the air space above enemy forces and nations for military advantage, then they probably can’t win the war on the ground or at sea.
However, modern technology offers many options for seeking air dominance, and choices have to be made. In the case of the U.S., which spends as much on cutting-edge military technology as the rest of the world combined, those choices can involve the commitment of hundreds of billions of dollars. So policymakers have to be clear about what they are getting for their money.
That brings me to an arcane controversy that is unfolding right now in military circles about the future needs of America’s air forces. The U.S. actually has several air forces — the really big one that we call the Air Force, which operates things like long-range bombers and land-based fighters; the Navy’s carrier-based air wings; and the various aircraft owned by the Marine Corps. We’ll leave the rotorcraft operated by the Army and other services out of this discussion since they aren’t much use in achieving air dominance.
The controversy concerns what sort of support a new fighter called the F-35 Lightning II will require in combat. More than any other plane, the F-35 will decide whether U.S. forces enjoy command of the air through mid-century, because it will be replacing most of the tactical aircraft operated by the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. Three different variants are being developed — a land-based version for the Air Force, a carrier-based version for the Navy, and a vertical-takeoff-and-landing version for the Marines that can be based pretty much anywhere.
All three variants are stealthy and hyper-digitized, representing the state of the art in agility, lethality, survivability and all those other things warfighters value. Because the three versions share common technologies and equipment, they generate efficiencies in the joint fleet that could not be achieved if each service operated a completely different plane (as they do today). Collectively, these advanced features have earned F-35 the designation of a “fifth-generation” fighter, meaning it is a cutting-edge, world-class tactical aircraft. The question is whether the F-35 is so good that it can be self-sufficient in combat, not requiring the support of electronic-warfare aircraft designed to jam enemy radars.
The Air Force and Marine Corps apparently think it is. They have no plans to buy new jamming aircraft as the F-35 is fielded. The Navy isn’t so sure; it plans to buy 138 EA-18G jamming aircraft, popularly known as Growlers, to support its carrier-based strike aircraft, and now it has told Congress it would like to have 22 more. Navy leaders haven’t spelled out precisely why they need the additional jamming aircraft, but it appears they plan to use their Growlers to support both existing strike aircraft and the F-35 when it becomes operational. That would be consistent with a longstanding Navy preference for using a mix of technologies and tactics in countering enemy defenses, rather than relying heavily on one feature such as stealth.
The particulars of this controversy are highly technical, and are obscured by government secrecy. Nonetheless, it is feasible to discuss in general terms why the Air Force and Marine Corps have decided they don’t need support from off-board jammers to operate their fifth-generation fighters against increasingly capable adversaries such as China. Here, as near as I can determine, are the five leading reasons they think their F-35s will be self-sufficient against the well-armed enemies of tomorrow.
Low-observable technology. The performance requirements for the F-35 specify that it be able to penetrate deep into defended air space, autonomously and alone. The most important feature of the plane enabling this capability is the integration of low-observable (stealth) technologies that make it virtually invisible to enemy sensors such as radar. Using the standard metric of square-meter reflectivity, the radar cross-section of a fourth-generation F/A-18 fighter in the forward aspect is two hundred times greater than that of the fifth-generation F-35. Radar cross-section is a complicated calculation that varies depending on the frequency of a radar and the aspect in which a plane is viewed, but with less reflectivity than a bird from most directions, the F-35 will make it impossible for defenders to complete all the steps in a “kill-chain” necessary for successful interception. Even if long-wavelength radars can occasionally sense the plane’s presence, the later steps in the sequence such as locking on target are beyond the capacity of current radars unless defenders are exceedingly lucky.
On-board electronic defenses. In those rare instances where luck is on the side of defenders, their chances of interception still are nearly nonexistent because of an F-35 system that seldom gets discussed in public: an electronic-warfare suite that has nearly ten times the power output of legacy jamming systems. Built by BAE Systems under extremely secretive conditions, the F-35′s electronic defenses integrate a multifunction, electronically-steered radar, other sensors distributed around the airframe, diverse countermeasures, and a core processor that can perform over a trillion operations per second. These various components enable the on-board system to detect, collect, locate and identify all hostile emitters, tailoring a response that negates defender capabilities without diminishing the F-35′s stealth. The system not only can determine precisely what the capabilities of an enemy emitter are, but what mode it is operating in and then automatically generate a solution that imposes minimal workload on the pilot.
Other on-board systems. Unlike in legacy fourth-generation aircraft, the F-35 electronics architecture was not conceived as a series of discrete, federated pieces. Every facet of the aircraft’s offensive and defensive operations is integrated to afford unprecedented situational awareness of the battle space without the assistance of off-board resources. When other friendly aircraft such as radar planes are in positions suitable for supplementing this information the F-35 has secure datalinks for passing information back and forth, but the plane has numerous tactical options even when operating autonomously due to the sophistication of on-board systems – such as the ability to non-kinetically attack enemy networks. Few of the F-35′s critics have any knowledge of these other on-board capabilities, and thus they don’t really grasp the implications of the fact that the plane is meeting all of its extensive performance requirements. F-35 is, hands down, the most versatile combat aircraft ever conceived.
Limits of fourth-gen jammers. The EA-18G Growler too is an impressive aircraft, but there are limits to what a fourth-generation airframe can accomplish in support of fifth-generation fighters. Because it does not have an integrated stealth design, it cannot accompany F-35s deep into contested airspace without running a major risk of interception. Operating in a standoff role beyond the reach of enemy defensive missiles and interceptors, it will have only limited capacity to support penetrating fifth-gen strike aircraft since its radiated power diminishes as a square of the distance from its point of origin (the U.S. lost a fighter in the Balkans because a jamming plane was out of position). Beyond that, Growler will be hosting a dated and deficient jamming system until it is replaced by Raytheon’s next-generation jammer in the future, and the Navy now says it will delay development of technology for the new system that can defeat longer-wavelength radars.
Dangers of fourth-gen support. There isn’t much doubt that parts of the joint force will need support from the Growler for decades to come, because legacy planes have sizable radar cross-sections that make them vulnerable. However, using non-stealthy jamming aircraft to support stealthy fifth-generation strike planes could prove counter-productive since the presence of the legacy planes might tip off adversaries as to the attack vectors of the strikers. For instance, Chinese radars typically would not be able to track carrier-based F-35 fighters operating around Taiwan due to their combination of low observables and on-board electronic-warfare capabilities, but if Growlers were loitering in the vicinity that could simplify the task of figuring out where the stealthy planes were operating. Once a military service transitions to relying on fifth-generation technology to maintain its fighting edge, it needs to carefully think through how to exploit that technology for maximum tactical effect; mixing fourth- and fifth-generation planes in the same strike package could easily backfire.
It is not easy to discuss these topics in a public setting because the capabilities of the F-35 and the war plans that it would help execute are largely secret. You can’t learn much about the electronic-warfare suite on the F-35, or the functional limitations of its Northrop Grumman radar, or the network-attack techniques built into its on-board software, unless you have a raft of security clearances. You also aren’t likely to get much insight into the warfighting scenarios that have shaped the plane’s performance requirements. So any public debate about the plane’s warfighting potential is going to be a one-sided affair, with critics doing most of the talking. But there’s a reason why the Air Force and Marine Corps don’t feel the need to buy new jamming aircraft, and as the Navy begins operating carrier-based F-35s, its views on what capabilities are needed for the future could change too.
