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...