F-35 Update, by David Archibald.
Lockheed’s F-35 program has continued on untroubled by the fact that it is almost completely useless and keeps falling short of the performance required by legislated standards. …
Using real world data has the F-35 being shot out of the sky at a great rate as predicted by the the 2008 Rand Study Air Combat Past, Present and Future. Similarly, modelling of Australia’s F-35 fleet has the last one being shot down on day three of conflict with a near-peer competitor. …
The F-35 is effectively unarmed, carrying only two radar-guided missiles and two 2,000 lb bombs in its normal configuration. There is a perception that a target aircraft is doomed once a missile is fired at it. The reality is that most missiles miss. A radar-guided missile has a 70% chance of hitting a non-maneuvering target. That falls to 8% if the target aircraft attempts to avoid the missile. So in normal combat a loadout of two missiles would give you about a 15% chance of downing an enemy fighter. … The F-35 has a gun as a backup, but real fighter aircraft can out-turn it so an F-35 will never be in a position to fire its gun effectively. …
The F-35 is just about perfect from a weapons manufacturer’s perspective. The governments buying the F-35 have paid for its development but don’t own the IP associated with it. Lockheed does. … Buyers can’t do their own maintenance. The plane has to phone home to a Lockheed facility in Fort Worth, Texas after each flight. Supposedly the F-35 can go a month without doing that before it refuses to fly, but it could be much shorter in reality. F-35 users are not encouraged to stock spare parts and are required to rely upon just-in-time delivery by Lockheed. When a war breaks out Australia will find that problematic.
An article on the history of Israel’s Lavi fighter effort sheds a lot of light on why that country, after taking its allocation of F-35s, wants to buy more F-15s. Israel gets US$3.0 billion worth of military equipment annually from the US free of charge under the Camp David accords. It did not have any choice in taking the F-35, twelve of which have been delivered to date. From that article:
Despite this seeming success, however, the IDF has reportedly prioritized the purchase of 20-25 additional, non-stealthy F-15I fighters-bombers to overcome the payload and range limitations of the supposedly superior, stealthy F-35. …
The article goes on to describe what you have to do to get respect from US weapons manufacturers — you have to make a credible effort towards your own weapons system. For example the UK started a secret stealth fighter effort called Replica in the 1990s. It was cancelled in 2005. This is a still from a video of the aircraft being moved:
… Buying more Super Hornets is not the solution to Australia’s fighter capability gap. That plane is a light bomber development from the original F-18A fighter and will get shot down at the rate of 8:1 if it goes up against the Su-35, such as the ones that Indonesia is getting. Similarly, Saab’s Gripen E would shoot down 20 Super Hornets for each Gripen E lost. It would be better to send our existing fleet of Super Hornets out to sea, to deliver antiship cruise missiles, where they won’t get molested by real fighter aircraft.
The best solution for Australia is to sign up for Saab’s Gripen E and take the same deal that Brazil took for domestic manufacture. We used to make fighter aircraft and their engines here. We can do so again. We need to, in fact.
