from CDI

Two weeks ago, with help from combat aviation innovator and designer Pierre Sprey, I circulated a piece about the self-dismembering F-35 program.  More recently, I submitted a revised and updated version to Military.com, but even before the editors there had a chance to run the piece, the F-35 disemboweled itself some more.  While reports two weeks ago had the new estimate for cost overruns to be “as bad” as those the program’s uniquely qualified Joint Estimating Team (JET) found in 2008, newer reports state them to be perceptibly worse and that nothing has happened to fix the problems identified last year.  Also, new doubts about the program have emerged with another foreign partner (Denmark), and today we are told by an Inside the Navy article that  “the test article of the Marine Corps’ short-take-off, vertical-landing variant of the JSF — has once again been delayed until December due to poor weather, Kent (John Kent, Lockheed Martin spokesman) said.”  That would give a new meaning to the term “all weather fighter aircraft” – that is, a fighter that cannot fly in all, rather any, weather.

Cutting edge, indeed.

At least as interesting is the reaction to the – unsurprising – unraveling of the program by Pentagon management.  The JET report is described inside the Pentagon as “radio active” – and management as desperate to find a way out of the new numbers, which – by the way – the QDR’s experts on aviation have apparently decided to ignore.  Some are now suggesting inside the building that the JET analysis should be whittled down to something that top management finds more (politically) acceptable.

Pray tell: all this shows that the Pentagon has changed its stripes and is reforming exactly how?

“Tactical Air’s Gloomy Future” was first published by Military.com on Nov. 9, 2009. It is reproduced below.

“Tactical Air’s Gloomy Future”

by Winslow Wheeler

The Defense Authorization bill just signed into law by President Obama pretends a bright future for the Pentagon’s Joint Strike Fighter.  The program is fully funded, and Congress even added separate authority for the alternate GE engine, advice sure to be taken when the definitive DOD Appropriations bill is enacted later this year.  Meanwhile, in the real world, the F-35 program continues to fall apart.  The latest – but hardly last – shoe to drop is a new internal analysis (breathlessly refuted by Lockheed) that the cost growth stage for this airplane is just beginning.

Lockheed’s refutation of the Joint Estimating Team (JET) analysis of cost growth and delays in the F-35 program borders on the hilarious: new computer aided design, simulation, and desk studies (un-validated by empirical testing) make cost growth in truly modern defense technology a thing of the past, they assert.  Indeed, just like in DDG-1000, LCS, FCS, VH-71, etc., etc., etc…..

How pathetic.

Even sadder than Lockheed’s desperate grasp for reasons to do nothing to fix the self-dismembering F-35 program is the fact that the future of Western combat aviation relies on it.  The 2,456 models of it on order for the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps will ultimately replace almost all tactical aircraft now in our inventory, except for the F-22, for which production beyond 187 aircraft was cancelled this past summer.  Major allies, including Britain and much of the rest of Western Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, and Israel have all made commitments to buy the aircraft.  Sales to many others (there’s a long list) are postulated, and those who do not intend to buy the F-35 will probably copy it to the extent their treasuries, government bureaucracies, and technological development permit.

Unfortunately, the F-35 is unaffordable, and it is a technological kluge that will be less effective than airplanes it replaces. It will undo our air forces and our allies’, not help them.

Few agree now, but in time the finger pointing will start. That’s when someone will have to pick up the pieces to give our pilots a war winning aircraft.  The road between here and there will be neither smooth, pretty, nor short, but it is time to take the first step.

A financial disaster?  Impossible.  Visiting the F-35 plant in Fort Worth, Texas last August, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates assured us that the F-35 will be “less than half the price … of the F-22.”

Technically, Gates is right – for now.  At a breathtaking $65 billion for 187 aircraft, the F-22 consumes $350 million for each plane.  At $299 billion for 2,456, the F-35 would seem a bargain at $122 million each.

However, F-35 unit cost has barely begun to will climb.  In 2001, the Pentagon had planned to buy 2,866 aircraft for $226.5 billion – $79 million per airplane.  In 2007, that unit cost increased to $122 million, thanks to more cost and fewer airplanes being planned.

In the next few weeks, the program will have to admit to another increase.  Gates and Deputy Secretary William Lynn have re-convened a “Joint Estimating Team” (JET) to reassess F-35 cost and schedule.  Last year, while a part of the Bush administration, Gates basically ignored the Team’s recommendations, but the new JET is about to reconfirm them: the F-35 program will cost up to $15 billion more, and it will be delivered about two years late, and there are rumors the JET’s findings may even be worse.

Moreover, those address only the known problems.  With F-35 flight testing barely three percent complete, new problems – and big new costs – are sure to emerge.  Worse, only 17 percent of the aircraft’s characteristics will be validated by flight testing by the time the Pentagon has signed contracts for more than 500 aircraft.  Operational squadron pilots will have the thrill of discovering the remaining glitches, in training or in combat.  No one should be surprised if the final F-35 total program unit cost reaches $200 million per aircraft after all the fixes are paid for.

This kluge is not “affordable,” either.  The latest version of the F-16, heavily laden with complex electronics and other expensive modifications, costs about $60 million, twice its original price – in today’s dollars.  The A-10, which the F-35 will also replace, cost about $15 million in today’s dollars.  Thus, to replace the almost 4,000 F-16s and A-10s built with just over 1,700 F-35s, the Air Force will have to pay far more to buy less than half as many airplanes.

In an age when the Air Force budget looks to increase only marginally, if at all, while simultaneously planning to buy several other major aircraft (new aerial tankers, new transports, new heavy bombers, and new helicopters), the plan to distend the fighter-bomber budget is a pipe dream.

While most, but not all, in the Pentagon and Congress remain oblivious to the unaffordability of the F-35, some of its foreign buyers are becoming horrified.  Despite their governments’ investment of hundreds of millions, parliamentarians and analysts in Australia, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands are expressing real concerns. The F-35′s single largest international partner is the United Kingdom.  There, the Royal Navy and Air Force have just decided to reduce their F-35 buy from 138 aircraft to 50.  The reason: “We are waking up to the fact that all those planes are unaffordable.”

The problems with the F-35 are not limited to its cost.

As a fighter, the F-35 depends on a technological fantasy.  Having failed to develop in the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s an effective (and reliable) radar-based technology to shoot down enemy (not friendly) aircraft “beyond visual range,” the Air Force is trying yet again with the F-35, like the F-22 before it.  Both have the added development of “stealth” (less detectability against some radars at some angles), but that new “high tech” feature and the long range radar have imposed design penalties that compromised the aircraft with not just high cost but also weight, drag, complexity, and vulnerabilities.  The few times this technology has been tried in real air combat in the past decade, it has been successful less than half the time, and that has been against incompetent and/or primitively equipped pilots from Iraq and Serbia.

If the latest iteration of “beyond visual range” turns out to be yet another chimera, the F-35 will have to operate as a close-in dogfighter, but in that regime it is a dog.  If one accepts every aerodynamic promise DOD currently makes for it, the F-35 will be overweight and underpowered.  At 49,500 pounds in air-to-air take-off weight with an engine rated at 42,000 pounds of thrust, it will be a significant step backward in thrust-to-weight and acceleration for a new fighter. In fact, at that weight and with just 460 square feet of wing area for the Air Force and Marine Corps versions, the F-35′s small wings will be loaded with 108 pounds for every square foot, one third worse than the F-16A. (Wings that are large relative to weight are crucial for maneuvering and surviving in combat.) The F-35 is, in fact, considerably less maneuverable than the appallingly vulnerable F-105 “Lead Sled,” a fighter that proved helpless in dogfights against MiGs over North Vietnam. (A chilling note: most of the Air Force’s fleet of F-105s was lost in four years of bombing; one hundred pilots were lost in just six months.)

Nor is the F-35 a first class bomber for all that cost: in its stealthy mode it carries only a 4,000 pound payload, one third the 12,000 pounds carried by the “Lead Sled.”

As a “close air support” ground-attack aircraft to help US troops engaged in combat, the F-35 is too fast to identify the targets it is shooting at; too delicate and flammable to withstand ground fire, and too short-legged to loiter usefully over embattled US ground units for sustained periods.  It is a giant step backward from the current A-10.
It is time to start fixing this mess.  Needless to say, the complexities of Pentagon procurement regulations and especially the circle-the-wagons mentality of the Pentagon and Congress present serious hurdles to be overcome, most of them ethical.

First is the need is to accept the facts as they exist, rather than as Lockheed and self-interested bureaucrats in the Pentagon would prefer them to be.  That will mean accepting the JET recommendations as currently written – not watering them down to make them palatable, or ignoring them as they were in 2008 under Gates’ first term as SecDef.

Let’s watch closely and see if the original JET findings are watered down by Deputy Secretary Lynn or others who helped to father the Joint Strike Fighter in the Clinton Administration, or others, such as Acquisition Czar Ashton Cater, who will have to re-jigger the Air Force’s entire long range budget to accommodate more F-35 cost.  His having been forthright about underhanded Air Force behavior on the F-22, perhaps we can hope that Gates will insist on ethical behavior on the F-35.  We shall see.

Comparing the original JET findings with whatever comes out the other end should be easy.  The details of the study were reported by Jason Sherman at InsideDefense.com; other outsiders are familiar with just what is in the JET analysis, and quick reaction professionals like Colin Clark at DODBuzz will surely have a field day if top Pentagon management tries to fudge what’s in the JET study.  The glare of public understanding is always a good way to appeal to the patriotism of top Pentagon management.

In addition to listening to the facts, we will need to exercise the professed spirit of the new Weapon System Acquisition Act, signed into law by President Obama last May.  While the fine print of the new law is hopelessly riddled with loopholes to protect business as usual, the bill purports to control costs and inspire competition, especially the “fly-before-buy” competitive approach that has worked so marvelously well the few times it’s been tried.

This is the same vision that President Obama expressed to the VFW in Phoenix last August when he said he wanted to stop “the special interests and their exotic projects that are years behind schedule and billions over budget.”  Clearly, no one has told the President that the F-35 is a leading poster child for those evils.

Finally, the biggest step, would be to suspend further F-35 production until the test aircraft, all of them now funded, can complete a revised, much more thorough flight test schedule.  Once we know the F-35′s realistically demonstrated performance and problems, and the full extent of its costs, we can make an informed decision whether to put it into full production. To do that, the upside down F-35 acquisition plan — which buys 500 aircraft before the “definitive” test report (the one that only flight tests 17 percent of F-35 characteristics) is on Gates’ desk — needs to be radically recast into real fly-before-buy plan.  Just the kind of plan the new Acquisition Reform Act pretends to advocate.

In the almost certain event that the F-35 is found by uncompromised, realistic testing to be an unaffordable loser, there are viable alternatives.  If an active consensus develops to reverse the current aging and shrinking of the existing tactical aviation inventory (as opposed to today’s silent conspiracy encouraging those trends to worsen), a short term, affordable fix to restore combat adequacy is needed: Extend the life of existing F-16 and A-10 airframes for the Air Force and continue purchasing F-18E/F aircraft for the Navy and Marine Corps. For the part of the inventory that most urgently needs immediate expansion, the A-10 and the close support mission, hundreds of airframes now sitting in the “boneyard” can and should be refurbished – something that can be done at extraordinarily modest cost.

Just a life-extension program will not address long term needs.  Accordingly, competitive prototype fly off programs should be immediately initiated to develop and select new fighters to build a larger force that is far more combat-effective than existing the F-16s, F-18s, and A-10s.  Just such programs — that lead to an astonishing 10,000 plane Air Force within current budget levels — are described in detail in “Reversing the Decay in American Air Power,” a chapter in the anthology America’s Defense Meltdown: Pentagon Reform for President Obama and the New Congress (Stamford University Press).

You can almost literally hear the howls of protest right now. The F-35 is too big to fail.  Gates himself seems trapped by that logic; he said “My view is we cannot afford as a nation not to have this airplane.”  We take the opposite view. The F-35′s bloat — in cost, leaden weight, and mindless complexity — guarantees failure. It will shrink our air forces at increased cost, rot their ability to prevail in the air and support our ground forces, and will needlessly spill the blood of far too many of our pilots.

We have to take the first steps to better understand the extent of the F-35 disaster and to reverse the continuing decay in our air forces.

PrisonPlanet.com

Acclimatizing the public to the idea of sulfur particle spraying while it is already in progress

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Tuesday, August 18, 2009

A new article in TIME magazine suggests that geo-engineering the planet may be the only way forward to prevent the climate “collapsing”.

Bryan Walsh’s article, entitled Can Geoengineering Help Slow Global Warming? suggests that through the use of fossil fuels we are “already geoengineers” and that “we might as well get good at it.”

“If we geoengineered the earth into a mess with our uncontrolled appetite for fossil fuels, maybe we have to geoengineer our way out of it” Walsh writes, citing a new paper by the think tankCopenhagen Consensus on Climate.

In the paper, co-author Lee Lane cites all the usual suggestions of how the planet could be cooled including space mirrors, seawater-mist and man-made volcanoes.

The most prominent form of geoengineering suggested in the paper, however, comes in the form of spraying sulfur into the air.

“One way to turn down the thermostat would be to spread sulfur particles into the atmosphere, either through artillery or with airplanes, thickening the air enough so that it would bounce some sunlight back …it would need to be done continuously, to keep up with the intensifying greenhouse effect.” the article explains.

As we previously highlighted when this issue last hit the headlines, the process described here is already being conducted by government-affiliated universities, government agencies, and on a mass scale through chemtrail spraying.

The study of past and ongoing upper atmosphere aerosol programs confirms that the government has been active in this field for years.

The topic of geoengineering came to the fore back in April when Obama’s science czar John Holdren commented in an AP interview that he was pushing for radical terra forming programs to be explored.

Holdren’s suggestions for planetary geoengineering exactly mirrored those in publications penned by the elite internationalist group The Council On Foreign Relations, who also called for the implementation of a global Carbon Tax in 1999.

The Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy then back pedaled 360 degrees on his own comments when the wider media picked up on them and turned them into major headlines.

Holdren’s interest in radical geoengineering programs should be of great concern to the American people and the rest of the world given that he has also advocated extreme population control techniques including forced abortions and mass sterilization all under the oversight of a “Planetary Regime”.

Impossible, you say? That must be an exaggeration or a hoax. If you don’t believe it you can read it for yourself in Holdren’s own book Ecoscience, co-authored in 1977. Excerpts of the book can also be found in another of our previous articles on Holdren here.

Interestingly, Lee Lane, the author of the new geoengineering paper, is also a fellow at theAmerican Enterprise Institute, a common hangout for neoconservatives such as John Bolton, David Frum, Irving Kristol, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and John Yoo.

The AEI is renowned for casting doubt on the theory of human caused global warming, and is heavily funded by energy companies, but it is also best known as a forum to engender business opportunities.

These tentative announcements and recycling of ideas to terra form the planet constitute a first step toward introducing the idea to the wider public.

One of the accepted truisms of scientific study is the fact that if scientists are proposing an idea, then those scientists with access to the bottomless pit of black-budget secret government funding are already doing it.

It is highly likely that sulfur spraying and chemtrails are merely one manifestation of “geo-engineering” that is taking place without proper debate, notification or any form of legality, and with a callous disregard for the potential dangers to both our health and our environment.

by Crocker, Behind Blue Lines

Aircraft carriers have historically been vulnerable giants that could throw a punch but not take one. Even after SCB-125 modernization in the 1950s, WWII Essex class carriers had wooden flight decks with the first layer of armor at the hanger deck level.

While the generation of supercarriers beginning with the USS Forrestal incorporated many of the design lessons of earlier classes, aircraft carriers have continued to be floating bombs – packed with fuel, aircraft and ordinance that burn and explode merrilywhether by accident or battle casualty.

Even though successive designs have been increasingly robust and survivable – and decommissioned carriers are sometimes used in simulated battle damage tests – in terms of all-important striking power, they are at the very center of the protective battlegroup.

And in response to more survivable and capable carriers, potential adversaries have not been idle in devising weapons in response. With so much striking power concentrated in a single ship, it’s not even necessary to sink the carrier – a ‘mission kill‘ will suffice.

Naturally, the Chinese have been working overtime to acquire the ability either to destroy our carriers or make sure they don’t forward deploy. In an article entitled ‘Naval Supremecy Without Ships‘, the folks at Strategy Page describe a program to modify the Chinese DF-21 ballistic missile into an anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM). The newer generation of the DF-21 reportedly incorporates reverse engineered terminal guidance technology from the US Pershing II missile that provided 30 meter targeting accuracy.

The way this weapon works is pretty simple. First you have to detect, and track, an American carrier at sea. This can be done with space or ground based radar, or electronic monitoring equipment. One could also do it with submarines (which would stalk the carriers, at a distance, and use satellite comm to send location updates back to China). Once you know where the carrier is, and where it is heading, you put that data into the navigation system of one or more ASBMs and launch. Less than half an hour later, the warhead is plunging earthward, and using its targeting sensors to detect the carrier below. Unless the carrier turned around and hauled ass at full speed about the time the ASBM was launched, the warhead will detect the carrier and hit it, while travelling at several times faster than a rifle bullet. If that doesn’t sink the carrier, it certainly puts it out of action for months.

Because this is a ballistic missile with re-entry vehicles moving at Mach 5, defense would be very difficult. Presumably, the navy could modify its Aegis system with the Standard SM-3 missile providing shoot down capability. The danger, of course, is that the enemy would saturate the battle group’s defenses in a combined attack.

I trust that our navy is thinking this through. We seem to have most of our offensive eggs in one glass-jawed basket at a time when the Chinese are developing the technology to achieve naval supremacy in the Western Pacific.