“Air Boss” is a pseudonym. The author has decades of experience in aerospace strategic analysis, planning, and acquisition, as well as assessments of strategic and tactical capabilities.
Recent public comments by the former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, current Air Force leadership, and House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith illustrate what expert observers have predicted for two decades.
The F-35 program and its basic design concepts are failures.
Much less widely appreciated are some more somber realities. The strategic environment the F-35 was envisioned to defeat a quarter of a century ago no longer exists, making the jet largely irrelevant. Rather than win regional intervention air campaigns such as those over Iraq and Kosovo in the 1990s, or against insurgents, the U.S. military needs to deter and defeat technically smarter and highly adaptable peer competitors. Both China and Russia have heavily invested in military technology specifically designed to challenge and defeat U.S. air power. Much of this technology is new, much of it uniquely original and developed in China or Russia, or collaboratively, and many designs have borrowed U.S. ideas and technology. Many of these developments are also being offered for export to other adversaries, so as to strategically challenge the United States and buy influence. The specifics should alarm us.
China has deployed large numbers of advanced high-performance stealth fighters, long-range surface-to-air missile systems, and counterstealth radar systems. The Chengdu J-20 fighter was built to compete with the F-22, and with its latest engines, is expected to outperform the F-22 in a number of areas. New J-20B variants show stealth features and treatments very similar to the F-22. The formidable Chinese HQ-9 and imported Russian S-300P and S-400 surface-to-air missiles have been deployed in large numbers. These are supported by a new generation of Chinese low-band counterstealth radars and indigenous but capable airborne warning radar systems. Similarly, Russia has developed air defenses to frustrate and defeat U.S. air power. The new Su-57 is a supercruising and extremely agile stealth fighter jet built to challenge the F-22. And both China and Russia are deploying hypersonic missiles to defeat U.S. air defenses at long ranges. Russian and Chinese publications expound on how this lethal cocktail of threats was devised to beat the U.S. Air Force, and specifically kill the mediocre F-35. The current F-22 fleet is too small to deal with this strategic environment. Instead of building the 749 F-22s initially planned, only 187 have been built.
So, what are America’s options?
Current thinking centers on keeping the F-35 alive and supplementing that program with the technologically refreshed legacy F-15EX fighter jet. This is supposed to buy time until a next-generation air dominance fighter jet is developed alongside an F-16 replacement jet. But this is a compromise designed to appease F-35 supporters in Congress. And the F-35 is not fixable, burdened with so many design defects and deficiencies that fixing one problem creates others. The idea that an F-35 can stop highly agile supercruising Chinese and Russian stealth fighters penetrating at twice the speed and altitude of an F-35 is absurd. The F-15EX might be competitive against advanced Russian and Chinese “Flanker-class” fighters, but it cannot compete against the F-22 class highly agile supercruising stealth fighters now being deployed. Neither can the F-35 easily penetrate advanced air defenses.
Top line: America and its allies will be confronting a strategic fighter capability gap for a decade or more, precisely when China and Russia are challenging Western democratic interests on every front.
The cleanest exit strategy from the F-35 debacle is thus to build new F-22s instead of F-35s. When former Defense Secretary Bob Gates killed the F-22 production line against bipartisan objections across Congress, the option of a production restart was provisioned for by preserving production tooling. Rand’s 2011 study and earlier investigations were widely misunderstood, as they conflated production restart costs with the cost of manufacturing different numbers of F-22s, and assumed very limited production numbers. The 2017 production restart study mandated by Congress found no technological showstoppers but argued that building more F-22s would siphon funding away from the F-35 program. Put simply, the bottomless funding pit for the F-35 program has been the main obstacle to F-22 production.
If Air Force F-35 funding is redirected into building newer F-22s, all of the adverse funding conclusions from the 2011 and 2017 production restart studies collapse and genuine returns on investments can be realized. If the F-35 supply chain, advanced assembly line, and lean production techniques devised for the F-35 program are repurposed, unit prices would be further driven down. Importantly, congressional advocates of the F-35 program would get to keep lucrative production contracts in their districts. Exporting the F-22 to key allies would further improve economies of scale. Most important of all, the F-22s will deter China and Russia. That must be our priority. It’s time to abandon the F-35.
