The F-35 No Holds Barred topic

[GTX]

Again - at $4m/working hour, the program should be making progress.

It is making progress.

Yes, there are a few odd rumors floating around about missile death-rays and such, but I would hope that they are briefed only on a need-to-know basis, and whether that extends to Mr GTX, I rather doubt.

Trying to distract people again with pointless posts Bill?

 

[GTX]

Agreed, many of the players remain committed to F-35. Not news, and not altogether surprising given (1) the normal reluctance of large institutions to change or abandon major plans, absent some powerful external force; (2) the known degree of support and pressure provided by USG; and (3) the continued promise that all will be well and that the US taxpayer will pick up the tab. And the reluctance of AFs that have been working with the USAF for generations to consider teaming with relative unknowns is a physical force of black-hole levels.

No mention of course that the end users may actually like what they are getting?

With respect to the comment "...reluctance of AFs that have been working with the USAF for generations to consider teaming with relative unknowns..." would you care to provide some examples of these "relative unknowns"?

 

[Rlewis]

Again - at $4m/working hour, the program should be making progress.

Agreed, many of the players remain committed to F-35. Not news, and not altogether surprising given (1) the normal reluctance of large institutions to change or abandon major plans, absent some powerful external force; (2) the known degree of support and pressure provided by USG; and (3) the continued promise that all will be well and that the US taxpayer will pick up the tab. And the reluctance of AFs that have been working with the USAF for generations to consider teaming with relative unknowns is a physical force of black-hole levels.

As for the secret miraculous advantages of F-35: Yes, there are a few odd rumors floating around about missile death-rays and such, but I would hope that they are briefed only on a need-to-know basis, and whether that extends to Mr GTX, I rather doubt.

The rumors are on a need to know basis?

 

[bobbymike]

Agreed, many of the players remain committed to F-35. Not news, and not altogether surprising given (1) the normal reluctance of large institutions to change or abandon major plans, absent some powerful external force; (2) the known degree of support and pressure provided by USG; and (3) the continued promise that all will be well and that the US taxpayer will pick up the tab. And the reluctance of AFs that have been working with the USAF for generations to consider teaming with relative unknowns is a physical force of black-hole levels.

No mention of course that the end users may actually like what they are getting?

With respect to the comment "...reluctance of AFs that have been working with the USAF for generations to consider teaming with relative unknowns..." would you care to provide some examples of these "relative unknowns"?

GTX just remember;

1) Anything good - lies and/or corporate government military industrial complex propaganda
2) Anything negative - the word of God and signals the programs ultimate demise

 

[LowObservable]

BM - I don't think GTX needed that reminder.


Sferrin - Since I provided an answer to your question a few pages ago (with the exception of "replacing" the Harrier, which should actually be done with free A-10s and a Sikorsky Raider-type platform) I am not going to repeat myself.

 

[Triton]

That seems to be something that is normal and healthy in a functioning democracy. Moreover, a lack of trust may be well justified. Today, the elected and appointed - civilian and military Pentagon leaders - along with industry officials, are complaining loudly about their ageing fleets and the threat that declining budgets pose to recapitalization and modernization.

However, the fact is that defense budgets have been at historically high inflation-adjusted levels, even accounting for war funding, for a decade or more. The reason that fleets are aging is that many if not most major all-new defense acquisitions in the last 15-20 years have failed, either because they were canceled outright, for technical and economic reasons, or because they produced systems so costly that they could not be acquired in numbers necessary to renew the force.

Why should anyone trust the people and institutions that brought us the B-2, the F-22, the DDG-1000, the Comanche, Future Combat System, and FIA, and now - years late, tens of billions over the original budget, and with a projected operating cost that its own managers deem unaffordable - assure us that JSF will be all right on the night? Why should they be trusted when the Pentagon and its contractors have a history as long as your arm of broken promises and missed targets?

And please do not come back with how the Pentagon should have gone ahead with 132 B-2s or 440 F-22s or whatever, because the people you say we should trust made those termination and cut-off decisions as well.

Exactly. For example, the United States Navy had originally intended to purchase 32 Zumwalt-class (DDG-1000) destroyers. According to a memo written by John Young, the US DoD's top acquisition official, on January 26, 2009, the price per ship was 81 percent over the Navy's original estimate used in proposing the program. How are cost estimates when proposing defense programs so far off actual costs?

Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zumwalt-class_destroyer

 

[sferrin]

BM - I don't think GTX needed that reminder.


Sferrin - Since I provided an answer to your question a few pages ago (with the exception of "replacing" the Harrier, which should actually be done with free A-10s and a Sikorsky Raider-type platform) I am not going to repeat myself.

In other words, you can't come up with one without changing the requirements. Thanks.

 

[LowObservable]

OK. So here's a question:


In what conceivable scenario does the threat demand supersonic speed and stealth, but doesn't require AEW, EA or AAR?

 

[sferrin]

OK. So here's a question:


In what conceivable scenario does the threat demand supersonic speed and stealth, but doesn't require AEW, EA or AAR?

One doesn't always have the luxury of waiting for the USAF or CVNs to show up with all the goodies. *cough* Libya *cough* In those instances you could easily have networked F-35Bs up performing AEW, EA, and CAP to buy you time. It will also raise the bar for what requires a CVN (which will only become more valuable as CVN numbers decline). The flexibility of having the F-35B on 8 Wasps and 3+ Americas is hard to overstate. Could you have maybe saved a few bucks buy having a common F-35A/C and a 2nd-cousin, non-stealth F-35B? Possibly. Do you have a time-machine to go back and make that change? Me either. So what is gained by constantly complaining about what might have been? (And we all know how frequently the "greener grass" turns out to be just as brown once you get over there.)

 

[Abraham Gubler]

Thank you for publicly bragging about your access to classified information!

What's your problem? Your posts on the F-35 here can be broken into three sorts. One in which you make points about the project and fair enough. Another sort like this one in which you throw around insults thick and thin, which you later label jokes. And the final third complaining about it when others make fun of your insults or in some cases throw them back.


I understand that nihilist duplicity is basically the most popular thing in the non-productive chattering classes of advanced western democracies but can't you see how ridiculous your behaviour is? I don't think anyone who posts in this thread has a major problem with your insult/jokes. We all have thick skins. But please stop complaining about it when it gets thrown back in your face.

 

[sublight_]

Paul, if I put up a discussion forum at f35-battle-to-the-death.com, will you close this thread?

 

[GTX]

Paul, if I put up a discussion forum at f35-battle-to-the-death.com, will you close this thread?

That is ridiculous. the point of this thread is that it allows these arguments to be contained to one area without the risk of 'contaminating' other threads as used to occur all too regularly. If you don't want to read any of this, simply don't visit the thread.

 

[GTX]

OK. So here's a question:


In what conceivable scenario does the threat demand supersonic speed and stealth, but doesn't require AEW, EA or AAR?

Question for you Bill: Are you now saying that those uniformed & non-uniformed (though presumably expert in their Fields) individuals who developed the JSF specification and Requirements documents (and associated) didn't know what they were doing?

 

[bobbymike]

Paul, if I put up a discussion forum at f35-battle-to-the-death.com, will you close this thread?

That is ridiculous. the point of this thread is that it allows these arguments to be contained to one area without the risk of 'contaminating' other threads as used to occur all too regularly. If you don't want to read any of this, simply don't visit the thread.

100% agree with GTX (pretend that was in 96 font ;D)

 

[LowObservable]

Sferrin - The RAF/RN determined that they needed to accommodate 24-30 F-35Bs on the boat in order to sustain CAP and still perform offensive operations, never mind the challenge of trying to do AEW with short-legged jets with a fixed AESA (as opposed to a 360-deg. AEW radar, so you need at least two aircraft at a time). That's what sized the QEs. How do you plan to do AEW and CAP with fewer jets?

Later Edit - the UK took 38 Harriers to the Falklands. F-35B endurance (which determines the sortie rate required for 24-hour coverage) will be little or no better, and an LHA/LHD maxes out at 20-22 jets, even without helicopters - which is highly non-optimal.

GTX - DINGDINGDING we have a winnah!

The original planners had been told, and believed, that the acquisition and operating costs of JSF would range from comparable to the least costly legacy aircraft to lower than those types, in many cases by large margins. Ergo, they literally did not know what they were doing. They were working with inaccurate data. That's why the Dutch are getting 37, not 85 aircraft, and so on.

 

[Rlewis]

Paul, if I put up a discussion forum at f35-battle-to-the-death.com, will you close this thread?

I see the courtesy of a private message to the person you mean to address pales in comparison to this obnoxious large font post.

 

[AeroFranz]

You don't need to go as far as accusing the personnel responsible for formulating requirements of incompetence to envision that those were probably wrong. The requirements were formulated a LONG time ago, and I think at the time of their definition it would probably have taken equally vast amounts of luck and skill to nail the situation that the F-35 would face 20-some years hence (IOC), or worse yet somewhere towards the end of its life (40-50 years later). That being said, we can all easily come up with examples of platforms that never once performed in the scenario they were designed for, even when the required 'crystal ball gazing' was not as arduous. So yeah, even smart people with good information can and indeed have come to erroneous decisions.

What troubles me is that JSF is eating such a huge slice of the budget pie that there is nothing left for a more balanced 'hi-lo' mix of enough 'first-day' fighters (F-35), and another equally or more numerous platform that could do 80% of the missions at a lower cost. The Navy will have SHs for some more time and the AF will have Vipers and Eagles for somewhat less, but after that it's all F-35s. The Navy seems to be more open to a balanced force in light of the UCLASS debate.

In most engineering systems, the optimum tends to lie away from extrema. Are we sure that the right mix of platforms is 100% of a smaller number of the most expensive ones?

I agree with the argument that there isn't much that you can do about it now anyway. There is no alternative. And you are not guaranteed that the alternative would be designed with better requirements in mind, since money is finite and the curse of jointness seems like the only way of getting a program approved. Everyone is going to put their stink on it (hence Stealth, Supersonic, VTOL) regardless of how difficult and penalizing it is to design to those conflicting requirements.
Example of another catastrophe in the making: JFTL (or whatever they call it this week). the Army is going to want VTOL and large payload, while the AF will want speed and stealth. Either are reasonably doable. Both are nearly impossible.

So why complain about the state of things, if there is nothing you can do about it?

I believe that you can look forward to fewer mistakes in the future if you heed the lessons of the past. People are less likely to remember or care for that matter unless they are held accountable for their work (this goes for the government and for the contractor). By the way, I'm all for conversely rewarding contractors who deliver beyond what they promised.
I do not have access to the real numbers the government and LM have, but there are incontrovertible facts, such as slippage to the right, procurement cost far above the figures quoted at program inception (which is how it was sold), and performance relaxations. So yeah, i believe that even though the F-35 is here to stay, the taxpayer has the right to keep the government and the contractor honest when it's their money being spent.

 

[Dragon029]

Don't forget that if the need arises, the USAF does always have the F-22 fleet, and although it's still decades away from IOC, whatever comes out of NGAD.

Also, I'd expect a USAF UCAS program to follow in the footsteps of UCLASS, once the Navy proves its worth (presumably); possibly even just being a de-navalised version of the UCLASS product.

There is also a slight chance that LRS-B will (later in life) gain air-to-air capabilities sufficient to even be offensive in nature (with a nice large airframe, you can be sure there'll be plenty of opportunity to outfit it with impressive EW systems and maybe DEW). Obviously they'll be golden geese in comparison to the F-35s and F-22s, but still...

 

[LowObservable]

AF - Exactly - we have to learn from history. And there were people at the time (not me) who were duly skeptical about the wisdom of a joint program, but the promised numbers looked so brilliant that nobody could resist them.

 

[GTX]

In what conceivable scenario does the threat demand supersonic speed and stealth, but doesn't require AEW, EA or AAR?

What is driving this specific request? Where has someone suggested that such a scenario exists in relation to the F-35?

 

[GTX]

GTX - DINGDINGDING we have a winnah!

The original planners had been told, and believed, that the acquisition and operating costs of JSF would range from comparable to the least costly legacy aircraft to lower than those types, in many cases by large margins. Ergo, they literally did not know what they were doing. They were working with inaccurate data. That's why the Dutch are getting 37, not 85 aircraft, and so on.

You missed my point (I think) - I was not talking about costs or related. I am talking about the envisaged CONOPS/threat scenario etc that then drove the technical specification for the JSF. It was in response to your question mentioning "supersonic speed and stealth".

To put it more clearly: Are you saying that those uniformed & non-uniformed (though presumably expert in their Fields) individuals who developed the JSF specification and Requirements documents (related to the technical specification/physical performance requirements of the resulting platform(s)) didn't know what they were doing? In other words, are you saying that you believe the technical specification for the JSF program and thus the resulting F-35 winner is wrong?

 

[LowObservable]

Well, yes, if you remove all costs from the equation you may get a very different answer.

Unfortunately, this is not a case of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet deciding what to order for dinner. Unless you believe that defense budgets should be unlimited and that taxpayers should just cough up whatever the experts deem necessary (an argument that is way outside the scope of this discussion and in which I will not engage) then we are talking about a closed zero-sum system.

Consequently, the costs that are inherent in a requirement determine whether it can be met (that's what went wrong with the F-22, B-2 and DDG-1000), and to separate cost from the technical/operational requirement is meaningless. If you do so, you might as well argue that the people writing the requirement should have demanded Mach 3 cruise or a standard 100 MW laser - hey, with enough money and a few more decades of work, you could make it happen!

One prominent advocate of the F-35B did actually tell me "I don't care how much it costs". You can't argue with that kind of thinking, because it is not rational.

PS - Still waiting for that 50 per cent number on avionics costs. Can't find anything better than "one-third of EMD" myself, which is not necessarily equivalent to one-third of LCC.

 

[kcran567]

Again - at $4m/working hour, the program should be making progress.

As for the secret miraculous advantages of F-35: Yes, there are a few odd rumors floating around about missile death-rays and such, but I would hope that they are briefed only on a need-to-know basis, and whether that extends to Mr GTX, I rather doubt.

If the F-35 is indeed carrying some sort of budget busting mystery tech (which I admit would bring me a sigh of relief) its still a very shady way to sell what should have been a far more affordable fighter. ALSO, any speculation where it would carry such a weapon? the F-35 a does have a raised surface where the cannon goes. Is it covering a secret laser? B) could it be part of the EOTS window? ;D

 

[Triton]

The original planners had been told, and believed, that the acquisition and operating costs of JSF would range from comparable to the least costly legacy aircraft to lower than those types, in many cases by large margins. Ergo, they literally did not know what they were doing. They were working with inaccurate data. That's why the Dutch are getting 37, not 85 aircraft, and so on.

Did the JSF also experience feature creep (scope creep) during development that were not included in the original requirement? Or is most of the cost increase in the JSF program attributable to the challenges of using the same airframe in all three variants and the original goal of 80% parts commonality? Is any of the cost growth related to sensors, avionics, and/or software?

 

[Sundog]

Did the JSF also experience feature creep (scope creep) during development that were not included in the original requirement? Or is most of the cost increase in the JSF program attributable to the challenges of using the same airframe in all three variants and the original goal of 80% parts commonality? Is any of the cost growth related to sensors, avionics, and/or software?

I think a lot of it stems from poor TRL (Technology Readiness Levels) by the parties involved. Although, this is usually glazed over as , "Overly optimistic." So, instead of building a fighter based on near term achievable technology for production, it becomes a huge R&D endeavor, which drives up program costs. At least I think that is one of the drivers and I don't see the Pentagon or the contractors learning that lesson based on what I've seen so far of NGAD.

 

[Sundog]

ALSO, any speculation where it would carry such a weapon? the F-35 a does have a raised surface where the cannon goes. Is it covering a secret laser? B) could it be part of the EOTS window? ;D

They've already stated it would be placed in the volume currently occupied by the lift fan in the B variant. It would use the lift fan drive shaft to drive the LASER's generator.

 

[GTX]

PS - Still waiting for that 50 per cent number on avionics costs. Can't find anything better than "one-third of EMD" myself, which is not necessarily equivalent to one-third of LCC.

And I have lost count of the number of things I am still waiting on you to answer or provide...so I guess you can just stew a little while longer. Don't worry though, I can provide it the instant I feel like doing so. It is simply sitting in a Rand report...

 

[GTX]

to separate cost from the technical/operational requirement is meaningless.

I was not arguing that.


Perhaps if I put the question a different way: if you don't believe the JSF Technical/Operational Spec to be correct than what should it have been? Just keep it to simply bullet points if you like.

 

[overscan (PaulMM)]

to separate cost from the technical/operational requirement is meaningless.

I was not arguing that.


Perhaps if I put the question a different way: if you don't believe the JSF Technical/Operational Spec to be correct than what should it have been? Just keep it to simply bullet points if you like.

When the F-15 was being designed, the Air Force wanted it to have new dogfight missiles, a new gun, HMS, an electro-optical sensor, advanced EW suite and a radar near equivalant to the AWG-9. They cut out or reduced all of that under budgetary pressure and still ended with with a fighter that did it mission perfectly well for more than thirty years and still hasn't lost a fight.


How much better could it have done with all the extra gubbins listed above? Would its enemies be more dead?


Can we therefore say in hindsight that, if it had been built to the original requirements, it would have probably have been


1) Much more costly so many fewer were built
2) less reliable due to all that cutting edge technology


The Air Force, until restrained by cost, always wants everything. The manufacturer often promises to deliver everything for an unachievable price. Increasingly that seems to lead to everyone getting nothing.


As Voltaire said:


Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien

(The best is the enemy of the good)

 

[LowObservable]

GTX - Had I been making the decisions with accurate estimates and the strategic picture that was visible in 1994-95...

The Navy is in good shape for a while with its SH roadmap, Block 2 being on the books. AF is flush with new aircraft.

We had just come through some bad problems with B-2 and still had maintainability issues and A-12 had been chopped. F-22 was early days.

Trying to go full-stealth across TacAir was therefore high-risk. Time to do some serious no-commitment prototyping with mini-Me F-22 from LM, AVX from Boeing and tailless from MacAir.

Meanwhile, Fort Worth has F-16U/Falcon 21 and UAE wants to pay for it. Easy decision. So is the Phantom Works' stealth F-15, which will be declassified some day.

STOVL? DARPA has a good program going. Let's see if these high-risk approaches are better than LPLC, and whether (and how) we can make sense of supersonic STOVL.

 

[bobbymike]

GTX - Had I been making the decisions with accurate estimates and the strategic picture that was visible in 1994-95...

The Navy is in good shape for a while with its SH roadmap, Block 2 being on the books. AF is flush with new aircraft.

We had just come through some bad problems with B-2 and still had maintainability issues and A-12 had been chopped. F-22 was early days.

Trying to go full-stealth across TacAir was therefore high-risk. Time to do some serious no-commitment prototyping with mini-Me F-22 from LM, AVX from Boeing and tailless from MacAir.

Meanwhile, Fort Worth has F-16U/Falcon 21 and UAE wants to pay for it. Easy decision. So is the Phantom Works' stealth F-15, which will be declassified some day.

STOVL? DARPA has a good program going. Let's see if these high-risk approaches are better than LPLC, and whether (and how) we can make sense of supersonic STOVL.

What I would have been more comfortable with, not because I have reservations about the F-35 in its intended role (as Thomas Sowell said there are no solutions only trade offs) was if the US still planned to build at least 400 F-22s cause a real air to air door kicker in F-15C numbers is needed IMHO.

 

[LowObservable]

True, BobbyMike - and under the Plan B there might have been money to buy them. But the F-22 run was truncated in favor of... errrmmm.... other TacAir costs...

We also took into consideration the capabilities of the newest manned combat aircraft program, the stealth F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The F-35 is 10 to 15 years newer than the F-22, carries a much larger suite of weapons, and is superior in a number of areas – most importantly, air-to-ground missions such as destroying sophisticated enemy air defenses. It is a versatile aircraft, less than half the total cost of the F-22, and can be produced in quantity with all the advantages produced by economies of scale – some 500 will be bought over the next five years, more than 2,400 over the life of the program.

http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=1369

By the way, I left the AF-117X out of my Plan B above. Had that worked out, the AF would now be filling out its F-22 force and have a substantial number of in-weather stealth attackers and Falcon 21s with extensive stealth treatments.

And another omission - since I didn't nail down my requirements for every pre-2030 fighter in 1995, it would have made sense to continue investing in Advent-type engine technology; and when I did start looking at a next-gen fighter I would have had a much clearer idea of what UCAS could bring to the party.

 

[Rlewis]

to separate cost from the technical/operational requirement is meaningless.

I was not arguing that.


Perhaps if I put the question a different way: if you don't believe the JSF Technical/Operational Spec to be correct than what should it have been? Just keep it to simply bullet points if you like.

When the F-15 was being designed, the Air Force wanted it to have new dogfight missiles, a new gun, HMS, an electro-optical sensor, advanced EW suite and a radar near equivalant to the AWG-9. They cut out or reduced all of that under budgetary pressure and still ended with with a fighter that did it mission perfectly well for more than thirty years and still hasn't lost a fight.


How much better could it have done with all the extra gubbins listed above? Would its enemies be more dead?


Can we therefore say in hindsight that, if it had been built to the original requirements, it would have probably have been


1) Much more costly so many fewer were built
2) less reliable due to all that cutting edge technology


The Air Force, until restrained by cost, always wants everything. The manufacturer often promises to deliver everything for an unachievable price. Increasingly that seems to lead to everyone getting nothing.


As Voltaire said:


Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien

(The best is the enemy of the good)

Trust me reducing and relaxing the requirements has never been a problem with this program!

http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/pentagon-agrees-to-f-35a-combat-radius-reduction-369287/

Agree with Low Observable on the Block too super hornet as well

 

[bobbymike]

True, BobbyMike - and under the Plan B there might have been money to buy them. But the F-22 run was truncated in favor of... errrmmm.... other TacAir costs...

We also took into consideration the capabilities of the newest manned combat aircraft program, the stealth F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The F-35 is 10 to 15 years newer than the F-22, carries a much larger suite of weapons, and is superior in a number of areas – most importantly, air-to-ground missions such as destroying sophisticated enemy air defenses. It is a versatile aircraft, less than half the total cost of the F-22, and can be produced in quantity with all the advantages produced by economies of scale – some 500 will be bought over the next five years, more than 2,400 over the life of the program.

http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=1369

By the way, I left the AF-117X out of my Plan B above. Had that worked out, the AF would now be filling out its F-22 force and have a substantial number of in-weather stealth attackers and Falcon 21s with extensive stealth treatments.

And another omission - since I didn't nail down my requirements for every pre-2030 fighter in 1995, it would have made sense to continue investing in Advent-type engine technology; and when I did start looking at a next-gen fighter I would have had a much clearer idea of what UCAS could bring to the party.

Mind you I would have built all 132 B-2's screw the 'peace dividend'

 

[GTX]

Bill,

Come on now, you are still avoiding answering my question which was not about the alternate aircraft options (e.g. Super Hornet) or budget implications/tradeoffs or benefits of hindsight or simply not doing the JSF at all. It was focussed on what aspects of the actual JSF Technical/Operational Spec you believed to be correct/incorrect in the first place (e.g. do you believe it shouldn't have been "low observable" or shouldn't have been supersonic). This takes for a given, the fact that the JSF was going to happen. You can argue for adjustments to the spec that drove the resulting aircraft platforms. Of course, your silence on this might be inferred as your agreeing that the original spec was correct

Meanwhile, I will address one aspect of what you have written...

GTX - Had I been making the decisions with accurate estimates and the strategic picture that was visible in 1994-95...


The Navy is in good shape for a while with its SH roadmap, Block 2 being on the books.

You mean this SH?

But there is no denying that the Super Hornet does not do as much as its promoters said it would when the programme was launched; and it has, and will, actually cost more to develop than the taxpayers were led to believe. As these facts have become apparent, the Navy and Boeing have intensified a propaganda campaign. Unfortunately, the campaign is likely to damage their credibility in the long term, because it focuses on a few basic statements which don't mean anything like as much as the casual reader is meant to think.

For example: "The airplane meets all its key performance parameters." This is true. In 1998 -- as it became clear that the Super Hornet was slower, and less agile at transonic speeds than the C/D -- the Navy issued an "administrative clarification" which declared that speed, acceleration and sustained turn rate were not, and had never been, Key Performance Parameters (KPP) for the Super Hornet. Apparently, some misguided people thought that those were important attributes for a fighter.

"The Super Hornet has superb low-speed air combat handling." This may be true. The Navy has not explained why low-speed agility is crucially important, and transonic manoeuvrability and acceleration are not.
"The Super Hornet meets its interdiction range requirement." This is true -- but the requirement in the Super Hornet specification, laid down in 1992, is 720km, versus the 960 km-plus which was claimed in every unclassified briefing that I heard before 1996.

"The range is 40% more than the C/D". True again, but under oath before Congress, this statement is qualified by "when both are configured for the close air support role".

-Bill Sweetman, Just How Super is the F/A-18E/F?, Interavia Business & Technology, April 1, 2000-

“The airplane meets all its key performance parameters.” This is true. In 1998 — as it became clear that the Super Hornet was slower, and less agile at transonic speeds than the C/D — the Navy issued an “administrative clarification” which declared that speed, acceleration and sustained turn rate were not, and had never been, Key Performance Parameters (KPP) for the Super Hornet. Apparently, some misguided people thought that those were important attributes for a fighter.

-Bill Sweetman, Watch Your Six Maverick, Interavia Business & Technology, February 1, 2000-

Senator Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, has just introduced a bill that calls for the F/A-18E/F to be cancelled.

Feingold's move is prompted by the Pentagon's refusal to answer questions concerning the fighter's air combat performance. In particular, Feingold had asked the Pentagon in November to certify that the E/F's manoeuvering performance was equal or superior to the most likely threat aircraft (principally, the Su-27 and MiG29) and also to the F/A-18C/D.

In reply, the Pentagon has conceded that the MiG-29 and Su-27 can out-accelerate and out-turn all variants of the F/A-18 in most operating regimes, and that the E/F in turn cannot stay up with the older C/D through much of the envelope. However, the Pentagon did not respond to other key questions concerning the results of the second phase of operational testing (OTliB), carried out last year. Feingold's cancellation bill represents a move to keep the pressure on the Pentagon, either to eliminate the programme or to be forthright about the fighter's performance.

The Super Hornet was not designed to expand the combat envelope, and its supporters argue that in its primary mission, the difference between the C/D and E/F barely matters. However, the fighter's less-than-stellar performance is likely to reopen questions about the decisions that launched the F/A-18E/F in 1991, and will affect the potential for further production and export sales.

-Bill Sweetman, Super Hornet gathers speed, but critics keep pressure on, Interavia Business & Technology, March 1, 1999-

B)

 

[GTX]

When the F-15 was being designed, the Air Force wanted it to have new dogfight missiles, a new gun, HMS, an electro-optical sensor, advanced EW suite and a radar near equivalant to the AWG-9. They cut out or reduced all of that under budgetary pressure and still ended with with a fighter that did it mission perfectly well for more than thirty years and still hasn't lost a fight.

Good thing internet forums/blogs hadn't been around then else the F-15 and McDonnell Douglas would have been getting hell... ;D

But what you have posted is a good point Paul. The last bit of your comment, specifically "still ended with with a fighter that did it mission perfectly well for more than thirty years and still hasn't lost a fight." is something people should perhaps keep in mind when posting some of the vitriol when cases such as the customers deciding to live with reduced range requirements rather than spend more money occur.

 

[LowObservable]

What was that line from War Games? The only way to win is not to play.


There was no good spec for a three-service, stealthy, STOVL/CV/CTOL, sub-F-16-cost, common-OML, 2012-IOC fighter in 1995, because it couldn't be done, so I am not going to try to invent one.


Of those requirements, STOVL was the one that, if abandoned, would have moved the goalposts closer (think Super-Rafale) because at least you could have started with two F414s and fewer dimensional constraints, but I doubt that the cost target was feasible. It would have been more costly than the Super Hornet.


Thanks for quoting all that accurate, objective and ground-breaking reportage on the F/A-18. If you haven't noticed, a lot of things can change in 14 years; and when the world changes, one's perceptions and views may change too, and that is a healthy thing. Unchangeable views are the stock-in-trade of zealots, fanatics, Marxists and the plain stupid.


Re your comment to Paul about the customers deciding to live with reduced range requirements rather than spend more money: Did they really have a choice, given how much that deficiency would cost to fix, how long it would take, and how deep of a hole the program was already in?


Of course not. Their choices were to relax the KPP or terminate for cause - unless you can explain exactly how the range could have been recovered without a new engine or OML changes.

 

[GTX]

Unchangeable views are the stock-in-trade of zealots, fanatics, Marxists and the plain stupid.

Looking forward to the day your view of the F-35 changes then . I already changed mine - used to want the F-22 but not anymore. ;D

 

[AeroFranz]

"In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one tactical aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy 3½ days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day."

 

[sferrin]

Thanks for quoting all that accurate, objective and ground-breaking reportage on the F/A-18. If you haven't noticed, a lot of things can change in 14 years;

Hmmm. So what you're saying is that maybe you ought to let the F-35 get through development before declaring it a loser?