Taki's Mag

F-35

The F-35 is the latest marvel brought to us by the military-industrial complex. It’s presently years behind deployment schedule. It is also the most expensive military procurement program in American history. The projected cost of an F-35 will go as high as $185 million if you believe the Wikipedia entry. The F-35 program, including production and operation, could cost taxpayers around a trillion dollars.

The F-35 is expected to do everything. It is supposed to be used in different roles by the Navy, Marines, and Air Force, something no jet aircraft has accomplished by fiat. We tried and failed at this “one plane to rule them all” concept before with Robert McNamara’s bizarro F-111, a plane so bad it was nicknamed the “Aardvark.”

Even the military admits the F-35 is riddled with horrendous design flaws, such as the wings potentially falling off. In an incredible display of military intelligence, the defense department put the project on probation a few months ago. The Marines say they don’t want the Marines “brand…weakened” if the F-35B program fails. I’m trying to imagine a real Marine like Chesty Puller worrying about “brand weakness.”

The role the F-35B fulfills is one of close air support: blowing up bad guys on the ground who are harassing the troops. The best close air support aircraft in the present inventory is the unloved A-10 Warthog, a jet which the Air Force has been trying to kill for decades because it is low-tech, slow, and has an unglamorous role supporting the ground pounders. The A-10 works well in part because it goes slow and because of its armor. It can get very close so it can see its target. The A-10 also has a Brobdingnagian cannon with which to smite the enemy. The plane was designed around the cannon and the 1,200 rounds of ammunition it carries. The F-35B has no cannon. Despite its alleged purpose as a close air support aircraft, the F-35B only has a cannon as an add-on accessory, and the add-on can only carry 200 rounds of significantly less potent ammunition. Bolt-on guns don’t work any better than bolt-on boobs; they tend to point in the wrong direction.

Ask any grunt on the ground if he’d rather call in close air support from a fragile F-16 traveling at close to the speed of sound, a helicopter (the Army’s close air support choice) or the Warthog. They’ll pick the A-10 if they can get it. Yet the Pentagon wants a bunch of F-35s; supersonic, high-flying, cannonless, radar-proof fighters with virtually no resistance to small arms fire.

The best close air support in the Vietnam War didn’t come from the supersonic blunderbusses the military-industrial complex was turning out at the time, it came from the WWII-era Douglas A-1 Skyraider, nicknamed the Spad. This was a 1940s design which ended up being the most useful aircraft in the Vietnam War, mostly because it wasn’t a fragile, supersonic wonder weapon. Like the A-10, it was heavily armored, slow-moving, and had lots of big guns with plenty of ammunition. If we need new close support aircraft for the Marines, it seems more sensible to me to build or refurbish a tough plane with lots of armor and guns on it. This has been proven in combat multiple times. We do not need a stealthy, supersonic, gunless monstrosity.

The F-35 wouldn’t be a great idea even if it was cheap and wonderful. Assuming everything else works, there isn’t much of a wing on the thing. Wings help airplanes turn. The issue with turning is a serious one. Our Air Force had a hard time in Vietnam against outdated Soviet fighters in part because we didn’t have any fighter planes which could turn. A lone genius named John Boyd eventually figured out what was going wrong and helped the Air Force develop our present generation of jet fighters, which are actually very good at turning and shooting down other jets. They say the F-35 is supposed to be good at turning, but the fact that it has the same wing loading as an F-105 makes me doubt this. They also said it would be cheap and delivered on time.

The F-35 program should be a national scandal. It is unarguably a very costly design which solves nonexistent problems. Worst of all, we’ve invested so much money in the damn fool thing, we don’t have any viable alternatives to replace our aging air fleet. Even the Soviet Union, a nation mad enough to use central planning to determine how many toilet-paper rolls to produce each year, used multiple design bureaus to come up with their fighter planes. Somehow, central planning’s disadvantages are lost on modern America.