This is taken from a Q & A session with Berke at a recent Airpower symposium regarding his 5th generation experience. Lt. Col. “Chip” Berke’s background is unique in that he has moved from more than 2,000 hours in the Hornet to the F-22 and then the F-35. He then became the first F-35 squadron commander in the USMC. He also had time as a ground air controller with both the Marines and the US Army as well.
Question: You have flown several legacy aircraft, and the F-22 as well as F-35. How does your CH-46 to V-22 analogy apply?
Berke: The F35 is here but you often hear: “Well, we’re going to replace the F18 with that, and the Harrier, we’re going to replace the F16 and the A10.”
For me, that has always been a red flag because of my experience in the Raptor where the Air Force originally acted like it was an F-15 replacement. It is not. Benefiting from being in a community that had already come to grips with the idea that the Eagle Raptor replacement was wrong, it is clear the F-35 is not replacing anything – it is a whole new way to operate. The USAF basically had to start over, sort of admit that they’d spun their wheels for a couple of years and tried to apply the Eagle template. They copied and pasted Eagle with the Raptor in the Weapons School publications. The ranges, the way they flew, the way they interacted with everybody else, looked very similar for a while. At some point, they just cut bait on that and realized it was the wrong way to do it, and they were forced to accelerate the evolution of the airplane once they came to grips with the fact that is was not a step change from the Eagle.
Now we are in a similar position with the F35, but because it sort of looks and sounds and smells like a fighter, there’s this compulsion to look at it like a fighter. One of the things I constantly try to say is that anybody that starts to try a comparison between the F35 and another platform – it’s a red flag. It’s an immediate warning sign that they are missing the much bigger picture about the platform. Once you start going through the metrics of the Eagle and the metrics of the F16 and the metrics of the Hornet, and compare them to the metrics of an F35, you’re dealing with someone who’s viewing this in sort of that traditional paradigm. That’s not easy to break. We know what we know. We understand what we understand, and when all of a sudden, everything you knew about fundamental military aviation is different, that doesn’t resonate. From someone who’s been on the inside of it, I know this sense of rupture and generational difference first hand. Once folks get the exposure to the F35 and say, “Whoa, holy cow, this is different.” I think you can get to the second set of questions, which is: “How does this transform everybody’s war fighting capability.”
For Berke, the F-35 represents a rupture in airpower, not a steady state evolution. It is not a replacement aircraft, and is no more a chronological replacement for the Hornet or the Super Hornet than is the Osprey a replacement for the CH-46. It is very different type of airplane and rooted in doing things very differently, and that difference is crucial to mission success dealing with 21st century strategic challenges. It is more about rupture than continuity and is a key part of the air combat revolution underway. Berke described the challenge he faced going from being a very successful pilot in 4th generation aircraft to confronting the disruptive change associated with fifth generation. He faced a situation where pilots with much, much, much less experience than he had were able to excel against him as he brought fourth generation mindsets to the F-22.
I showed up with guys about half my experience, who were just annihilating me in the airplane.
They just understood things way better than I did.
It was a very difficult transition for me.
So much of what you knew as a pilot didn’t apply.
It was very frustrating to make fourth generation decisions – my Hornet brain – inside an F-22.
A lot of those times, if not most of the times, those decisions proved to be wrong.
One might note, given the high cost of pilot training and the key role of the combat pilots in the air combat force that learning to fly yesterday’s airplanes creates a mind set that actually can undercut the capabilities to use 5th generation aircraft such as the F-35 effectively. It is not just about wasting time, effort and resources; it is about undercutting the speed with which the F-35 can have an impact upon the combat force. When he was able to grasp how to think differently as a combat pilot in the F-22, he recovered his ability to perform combat dominance.
You have so much more to offer the three-dimensional world than you did prior to really figuring it out.
When you realize that your contribution to air warfare is about that, and you’re doing it much better than you can in any other platform, you start to recognize your contribution on war fighting as a Fifth Gen aviator.
And what made the F-22 different suggests how the F-35 is different.
The F-22 is a very fast and maneuverable aircraft, but that is not where it excels.
It is an information dominant aircraft, a characteristic that the F-35 takes to another level.
“The F-22 is the fastest, the most powerful fighter ever built.
The least impressive thing about the Raptor is how fast it is, and it is really fast.
The least impressive thing about the Raptor is its speed and maneuverability.
It is its ability to master the battlespace is where it is most impressive.
Rather than focus on speed is life and more is better, the Raptor has started the rupture in air combat whereby information dominance in the battlespace is the key discriminator.
Berke believes that the replacement mentality really gets in the way of understanding the air combat revolution that fifth generation capabilities have introduced and that will accelerate with the F-35 global fleet.
What makes a sensor-collaborator-shooter platform relevant?
That is not the question we asked about a fighter 10 years ago, 25 years ago.
That was not the question we asked in 1975 when we wanted to buy the F-16.
That’s not the question that was asked 10 years ago with the Typhoon.
Information development, access sharing, and the ability to integrate security – that’s how you measure the F-35. That’s how you measure the fifth generation fleet.
How well does it do that?
You can build and design an airplane, and we have a designed and built airplane, to be able to answer those questions, to be relevant as a shooter, to be relevant as a collaborator. You have this information. I have this information. Let’s view that information together, provide each other a much more enhanced picture to make a more intelligent decision while, at the same time, funnel information to other users that can parse out the data that’s valuable and relevant to them. And it is the ability to operate throughout the combat spectrum that is essential as well, and is a core competence of the F-35.
Air warfare is about spectrum dominance.
It’s not just enough to say, “My radar is better than your radar,” or “My sensor is better than your sensor,” or “My capability in this spectrum is better than yours.” I have to be able to move back and forth between spectrums.
I need to figure out where within the spectrum the fight’s going to take place, and then layer on top of it as much depth. That’s what Sensor Fusion is by the way….
It isn’t just enough for that one airplane to get that information, it’s the data link and the multi-functioning capability that allthese different airplanes are fusing information together behind the scenes, and handing it to you, so you can now make decisions based on information that another airplane 10 miles or 100 miles away have given you, that you didn’t even realize because youdon’t even have to ask him for information because it’s just there.
And then Berke addressed the question of stealth and focused on its important contribution to the plane and its ability to operate and not providing a mystical capability. Stealth facilitates access.It doesn’t make you invisible; you don’t fly around with impunity. It just allows you to operate in an environment that you could be restricted from or excluded from without it. You take that with all the other capabilities of the platform, aggregate them together, and you now have a survivable platform that can operate in certain environments that no other platform can. And clearly, the F-35 is designed to work with core assets throughout the battlespace. With regard to other aircraft, the F-35 makes other aircraft more lethal and more survivable–and legacy airplanes provide ordinance and battlespace presence which complements the F-35 as well. “Don’t just think that the presence of a fifth gen platform is good to the legacy airplanes. It’s a two-way street, and it’s very functional for everybody.”
And he warned that if you do not make the jump into the F-35 world, you will have a core challenge of working with everyone else who has.
In the Q and A, one audience member asked about the A-10 discussion in the US and Berke had a straightforward response:
As a JTAC the key requirement is that the airplane show up. The A-10 pilots are amazing; the plane will not always able to show up in the environment in which we operate; the F-35 will.
That is the difference for a Marine on the ground.
