Sunday May 6th, 2012 Joint Strike Fighter

Once in a while the sky crackles above Thunder Bay.  It is possibly a CF-18 Hornet, a fighter plane of the Royal Canadian Air Force. The Hornet was once state of the art, but the aging CF-18 is on the chopping block to be replaced by the F-35, also known as the Joint Strike Fighter, or JSF. I thought it would be interesting to see what I could learn through books and online databases regarding these planes.

In the 1970s the American Navy needed a lightweight fighter plane, so a competition was held and the F/A-18 prototype was the winner. Orr Kelly, author of Hornet: the Inside Story of the F/A-18 (1990) said that “The F/A-18 has turned out to be at least twice as reliable as other navy warplanes and to require less than half as many manhours of maintenance.” That was decades ago and military requirements and desires have changed, somewhat.

Now the F-35 is poised to replace many aging fighter planes across the world. In the U.S, the F-35 program is the Air Force’s only replacement regime for thousands of F-15 Eagles and F-16 Falcons. The Marines will have a variant of the F-35 to replace their Hornets and Harriers. Production of the Navy’s Super Hornet ends in 2013 and the F-35 looks to be the go-to replacement. (National Journal, March 19, 2010). Australia is upgrading their fleet too, to JSFs. (DISAM Journal, July 2010).

Production of F-35s has been beleaguered by problems in both the U.S. and Canada. According to the

United States Government Accountability Office in a Testimony before the Committee on Armed Services, “Significant challenges remain as the Department of Defence restructures its program.” (March 11, 2010). “The JSF is the Department of Defence’s most costly and ambitious aircraft acquisition...The current estimated investment is $323 billion to develop and procure 2,457 aircraft.” Manufacturing and engineering challenges have slowed production.  According to the GAO, by December 2009, “only 4 of 13 test aircraft had been delivered and total labor hours to build the aircraft had increased more than 50 percent above earlier estimates.” It has been a similar situation in Canada. Yet despite setbacks, the JSF program is being implemented virtually worldwide.

What makes the F-35 such an improvement over so many other jets in multiple armed forces? According to an article in the New Scientist (November 3, 2001), “The JSF will be a stealthy jet designed to slip past defences and attack ground targets. A short take-off variant, intended for the US Marines, will land vertically, like a Harrier. All versions will supposedly incorporate new stealth technologies that will make them difficult for enemy radars and infrared sensors to detect. They may also use "directed energy" weapons to attack enemy electronic systems.”  At that time, the only rival for the JSF was thought to be unmanned aircraft, which would be smaller, cheaper and safer because there is no pilot in the plane itself.

Such drones, however, aren’t as dramatic as the Top Gun movie image of heroic dogfights in the clouds. Indeed, P.W. Singer in his book Wired for War (2009) noted that there was a cultural resistance in the military when it came to unmanned aircraft. “The early Predator pilots in the air force, for instance, were paid less than regular pilots, didn’t get any credit in their career advancement for their flight hours, and were otherwise generally shunned...the air force still holds on dearly to its identity as a force of fighter aces dog fighting against enemy fighter planes, despite the fact that it hasn’t happened for years.”

Global militaries may require such necessary upgrades, but what’s the actual cost?


Chris Waite