Deep Intel on the F-35

all right joining us once again is our good friend Paco Benitez former F-15 Strike Eagle Weapons Systems officer and The Man Behind the merge newsletter which I highly recommend you subscribe to if you're not already Paco welcome back to the channel thanks Mitch so in our last conversation we were talking about the F-15 ex and during the course of that discussion naturally we're gonna interweave some programmatic dependencies with the F-35 and it sort of became obvious that we needed to do this episode as regular viewers of the channel know we use a lot of acronyms here so here's another one VPN which stands for virtual private Network and in this case the VPN I'm referring to is this episode's sponsor Atlas VPN top sniper security Specialists and it Engineers created Atlas VPN to make the internet accessible and secure for everyone right now you can join the more than 6 million users worldwide by taking advantage of the best VPN deal on the market 1.83 per month plus three months extra and all with a 30-day money-back guarantee let's say you're on a business trip or vacation and your location won't let you watch your favorite show on Netflix Atlas VPN allows you to tailor your access regionally regardless of where you actually are in the world LS VPN also lets you search the web without Google or other search engines tracking your activity it also blocks all the malicious links ads and trackers and notifies you when someone is trying to steal your data and Atlas VPN protects all your devices with a single subscription protect your privacy and get all the other benefits of Atlas VPN for the ridiculously low price of a dollar 83 per month plus three months extra and all this comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee so click the link in the episode description below and also pin to the top of the comments and hurry because this is a limited time offer when I think of the F-35 two things come come to mind first when I got down to navair my first job out of the Navy was working v22 program at navair as a civilian the Naval Air systems command down at Patuxent River so and this is 2002. there's a test pilot Museum down there and they have sort of a static display yard with all of these airplanes that have been used in test throughout the years and among the airplanes and this is 2002 is an F-35 and I thought that was kind of interesting because in terms of the f-35c we were still years away from initial operational capability in 2002. so that's the first sort of you know visualization that I think about when I think about the F-35 the second is the fact that when you think of these peos and that's program executive office is what that acronym stands for um and that's sort of a Acquisitions speak for all the various programs but you know program offices will have a peo over them but this specific platform is so big that it has its own peo so peo JSF and generally at least at navair you can keep me honest on the Air Force side of the house but a program manager is an 06. in the case of peojsf it is a three star so this is obviously and this shouldn't surprise anyone this is a very important program to DOD I think the last number I heard for the cost of the program is 1.2 trillion dollars which check me on this makes it the most expensive acquisition program in the history of DOD Acquisitions programs so what is the F-35 all about both programmatically and then we can get into the specific missions that it performs that is a great intro mooch uh yeah I have some experience with the F-35 program on the hill um and programmatically as well as operationally uh for the technology we'll talk about but yeah it's such a big program and it's a joint program it's probably the big takeaway to start with So the plan is to build 3 000 plus f-35s and operate them across 15 different nations uh and Counting as they join the program through 2070 that is the plan it is a massive plan 1.2 1.3 trillion dollars is the is kind of the total bill out to 2070 right now those numbers change a bit so uh expect them to come down and there's there's Fuzzy Math to kind of make it uh to work like that but the what you said about the three star most people realize this but it actually alternates so there'll be a Navy three star that's leading it as the peo as you described and then alternate so the next one will be the Air Force and it alternates back to the Navy so it goes back and forth between the Navy and the Air Force and then in that office they actually have partner Nation so partners and allies Partners means they paid into the program and they actually contribute to the requirements and and the stuff behind the scenes and then you have allies or people who just want to buy the Jets so the partners in this program we have the us obviously the UK Canada Italy Australia Norway Denmark and the Netherlands so you get a grasp of just how big this program is and in the shopping list the people who want to buy the jet that aren't Partners is Israel Japan South Korea Poland Belgium Singapore and most recently Germany it has about 1900 companies across the world in 10 countries that actually Supply the parts and the program is so big it actually is built in three locations there's a factory in the US which is in Fort Worth which is a massive one mile long production line there's a factory in Japan and there's a factory in Italy so this is a very very big program uh I don't think people really grasp of like how we got to where we're at and it's the biggest program it costs a lot of money there's a lot of things going on with it as you as you allude to with the three star in charge of it because it has so many moving elements it gets a lot of press good bad and ugly and some of it is is deserved and some of it's really not yeah so let's start from the beginning as you described previously on the channel the platform emerges from a specific set of requirements what came first in terms of the requirements oh so there's a lot of scar tissue uh no one actually woke up one day and the Pentagon and said you know what we need this F-35 program that's how it actually happened if you go back to 1993 there's a thing called a bottom-up review which was the post-cold War uh peace dividend so we're going to cut 100 billion dollars out of the defense budget and they basically put a Top Line make the cut so the bottom up was figure out what we're going to cut and so that had a ton of impacts uh the first one is that the Pentagon basically encouraged industry into this massive consolidation and so over the course of about 10 years there was 107 defense companies that all merged into become five primes so Boeing botan McDonald Douglas General Dynamics bought the F-16 line uh or sold at the Lockheed Lockheed merge of Martin Northrop took over grimmon and so all the names that you hear about in defense today this is where they all came from and the reason was is that they went from a huge demand signal of aircraft programs to no demand signal and the reason why that happened is because there was a ton of fighter programs that all got Consolidated canceled and realigned the two that survived the 1993-1994 review is the F-22 and the Super Hornet those went on to live slightly different lives in history one massively successful one was killed a little bit early there's another program called the multi-role fighter program this was the F-16 replacement and the F-18 the the baby Hornet replacement that was canceled there was another program called the AFX that was the plan to replace the Navy's A6 and the Air Force's F-111 f-15e and the F-117 that program is canceled there was another program called the calf the common affordable lightweight fighter this was a DARPA Navy program to basically design the replacement for the eight the av8b Harrier and this was actually a UK and U.S program and then they were going to make it adaptable for the air force that was canceled and so all that got rolled into a new program called jast The Joint Advanced strike strike technology project and what they did is we they took that calf program because it was the most mature which is hey the the harriers are going to run out of service life first let's build a program around that and then we can make it work for the Air Force and then we can make it work for the Navy so that was kind of the priority of what started driving the requirements it was a Marine Corps Aviation requirement first then make it work for the Air Force at scale then make it work at C for the Navy it was stealth the thing that they figured was going to solve all the other things that they weren't going to be able to do capabilities wise because of all the programs that were canceled Admiral winner whom you and I both know you know he has a very very when he was in charge of the program he had some very good talking points about this was like Hey back in the in the late 90s early 2000s when we locked down the requirements for the F-35 program as the United States and our partners we looked out to about 2025 and go what is the threat going to be what's the threat environment look like in 2025 and that's really the res the aircraft that we have today the requirements were written to fight and win in a 2025 environment with with the assumption that we predicted the future 100 correct uh which didn't happen but it also didn't account for what about the time from 2025 to 2070 then the rest of the service life of the plan like what are we going to do with it which gets into our follow-on modernization discussion which uh which is called block four we could talk about that towards the at the end but that's that's where it started was an ERA where stealth was perceived as like this is going to be the game changer we need we need to do it at scale across the force and this is how we're going to fight and win in 2025. so you mentioned uh Admiral winter Matt winter I've known him for a long time since we were lieutenants he started his life as an a6bn bombing your Navigator uh and then Rose through the ranks in the acquisition side of the house became what we call in the Navy an aviation engineering duty officer so basically the way that happens is you leave your squadron go to shore Duty get selected for test pilot school down at Pax River and after that you wind up at one of the test directorates one of the squadrons that does developmental tests uh or you wind up in a program office and so Matt Rose through the ranks and wound up being peojsf but at a glance the Casual viewer may be surprised that the guy in charge of the fifth generation one-seat fighter is actually a Navy nfo an a6bn so that kind of shows you that what you bring to the table in the Acquisitions world isn't really about having actually flown the airplane just a side note let's talk about some of the Lessons Learned along the way and and in so doing we'll explain how the cost grew and how the schedule slid yeah so for those who aren't aware there's three types of f-35s the a is a conventional takeoff and land aircraft the B is a what we call svitol so it's a short uh short takeoff vertically land and then C is the carrier version CV for Carrier so those are the three different types the goal of this program this is kind of the the vision was we want 70 Parts commonality across all three variants and we want to get them out the door at 50 million dollar price tag so 50 million dollar FlyAway cost and we talked before is the f-35b was the priority based on the harriers reaching their service life so to do that it was decided to use what they call concurrency and what this is is we're going to overlap research and development with aircraft production and so what you're going to do the bad thing about it is those first aircraft are going to be uh relatively useless early on as you're learning there's a labor learning curve they call it they're going to be very expensive but you can start years early and as you learn through building these aircraft you can start accelerating production and so the plan was to use concurrency to learn and then speed to scale so you can get to that savings uh those economies of scale so that was uh that's really how it started so it started at 3000 aircraft in 96 they cut it to 2800 aircraft in 97. the Navy went through a few restructures and by 2004 this is where the numbers you hear talk about today in the media so 2004 is is the official numbers that exist today which is 2456 aircraft uh interestingly the Marine Corps is actually buying more f-35s than the Navy so the Marine Corps was buying about 350 f-35bs and about 70 f-35cs and that's a one for one replacement for their harriers and for their FH the Navy's buying about 270 F-35 Cs and then the Air Force is buying 1763 that's the number and that side note that note that number from the Air Force is a one for one replacement for every A10 F16 and F-117 that was in service at the time so when people say uh about the F-35 replacing the A10 and it's a conspiracy and there's to save the A10 crowd you know at the end of the day like this is this is the plan in public record defensible every year in Congress since 2004 so it shouldn't be a surprise that the F-35 is supposed to replace the A10 and the Harrier for a ground attack mission um yeah so so that's kind of how it starts uh there's really up to 2010 and then after 2010 history of the F-35 program before 2010 there was a ton of issues um so much so that you've fired a bunch of people in industry and in the government they restructured the program they re-based lined everything and kind of started over so you really can't talk about the program collectively without recognizing like everyone recognized it was a complete failure until about 2010 2011. they've they cleaned house they restructured it they rewrote the books and then they kind of move forward and so the F-35 program from about 2011 forward to what we have today is much much different than it was back then so people don't realize this but in 2005 when they were still they were starting to basically make the production decisions the F-35 was 3 000 pounds overweight so it actually costs six and a half billion dollars to re keep redesigning the aircraft to cut weight out of the jet so it could make its actual max weight limits so it could go into production so that again those first Jets there's a lot of learning going on and this is the cost of concurrency so uh by 2009 the cost had started to spiral out of control and hit all of these Congressional mandates for reporting and that's what caused the 2010 Baseline so in 2010 the program was 13 billion dollars in seven years 13 billion dollars over budget in seven years behind schedule and this is why they fired everyone and started over so basically it existed for seven years doing it wrong and then it had to be completely write it because I also believe that the program manager in the early years was not a three star that was part of the making it right part am I correct in in saying that yeah I actually don't know how far back it goes but I do know that out of out of some of the mismanagement and oversight that it's a three star and and unlike most programs this this acquisition program reports directly to the office of the Secretary of Defense it does not report to any of the services right so the other thing I know about 2010 the the guy who became peojsf was navair and generally navair is the last job you'll have on active duty you're the commander of the Naval Air systems command three-star job well because they needed somebody to fix the Screwed Up JSF program they made him peojsf so that's a anal Dave vanlet uh who's a great guy and and he did right the ship uh but that just shows you how too big to fail the JSF program is is that a guy would be taken from what is basically a terminal job as the head of the systems command and then made into a program manager in essence let's just suggest at that point they made up for lost ground but as you said you know by the time we started that seven years behind and what was the how much over budget uh something like uh like six and a half seven billion dollars okay so uh that that accounts for a lot of the bad press um other things are what you learn along the way this is why we have acquisitions commands this is why we do tests if it was easy everybody would do it kind of a thing um so why don't we pivot from the programmatics and obviously we'll talk more as we talk about the capability but let's talk about the airplane itself okay well the first thing that you'll notice uh walking up to the jet uh if the canopy is open the first thing you'll notice is the canopy opens backwards from any other aircraft that you've seen before so the hinge is on the front of the aircraft not the back so it looks like a like a reverse it opens backwards the reason why it opens backwards goes back to the requirements the f-35b has that ducted fan just behind the cockpit so they had to put the hinge on the on the front of the aircraft by the nose instead of for the back that actually introduced a bunch of other issues throughout the program that again tons of engineering challenges that were overcome uh by some very smart people so when they moved the the hinge on the canopy a little tangent in here you can't just eject because the wind doesn't actually like help the canopy open in an ejection sequence the wind keeps the canopy closed in the injection sequence because it's mounted backwards so to get it certified through ejection after uh lot of testing and trial and error if you look really really closely at the F-35 canopy you'll see two things you'll see a dark canopy bow in the front of the pilot and then you'll see this very very faint line it's like a Halo just behind the Pilot's head when the when the canopy is closed and that is a explosive shape charge because it actually has to blow the canopy to then eject so that's uh that was all added after the airplane was designed to get it through the ejection certification so that's the first thing you notice uh if you climb up the ladder and you look in the cockpit you're going to notice it is a very clean minimalist design it has an 8 by 20 inch panoramic cockpit display it's like an iPad it's got a it's a touch panel but what's different about uh touch screens and fighter aircraft than your phone is that it does not use IR so and the reason is you're flying with gloves so if you put a glove and try to touch your phone in the winter you know it doesn't work so it actually uses a laser grid um in the in the bevel so when you push your finger you're not actually pushing the screen you're actually breaking the plane of the laser field and it's basically triangulating where your finger is so that's how the display works it uses a side stick so uh to control the aircraft on the right the right hand is a little side stick and it's the same as the F-16 F22 layout the other thing that's interesting it you'll you'll see is what you don't see it has no heads up display it is the first modern fighter ever built without a heads-up display which uh looks a little weird the first time you you look at it and the reason is they put all the heads up display info into making this helmet yeah let's talk about the helmet because uh this thing had a bunch of delays and tests uh there were what we call raster scan issues where it couldn't keep up as the pilot turned his head it would lag and sort of like if you've ever flown VR uh you know if if you don't have a kick-ass graphics card you'll have the same kind of issues that can actually make you a little bit air sick the other thing is the price tag the helmet I understand uh last number I heard cost five hundred thousand dollars and I'm thinking about how many visors we went through during a deployment you know because you'd be Manning up at night and you'd walk out of the catwalk and you'd hit a sparrow Fin and it would put a nice little scratch you know in your visor and you just go to the pr shop and go hey give me another visor and you could just you know I literally went through probably a dozen clear and daytime visors during the course of a deployment I'm thinking if you do that with this helmet um you're gonna have a Jag manual investigation going on so yeah talk to us about the helmet both what were some of the challenges in test and ultimately what does it what does it yield in terms of the capability that's that's fifth gen so you have a normal helmet that a fighter pilot wears which is just a the one that you're probably familiar with that helmet probably costs a thousand dollars then you have what most fighter pilots fly with right now except the F-35 which is a helmet mounted display called the J hammocks and there's a few versions those cost about 150 000. the the F-35 helmet does everything that that does and more and because of that it costs more so four to five hundred thousand dollars a piece uh interestingly mooch back to your story those those helmets are actually custom fitted to each person uh so if you have an issue with your helmet and you take it to uh to life support or flight equipment they can't just give you a new helmet you have to wait for them to fix that helmet because it is custom fitted to your head so there's a there's some interesting stories going across country where people have like you know oh my my headphones went out in my helmet like well we're gonna have to fly someone out to fix your helmet we can't give you another helmet because it won't it won't work so there's a there's some interesting uh design choices that went into that part of the price for the the hmd because it had additional requirements for not having a heads-up display in the jet so it had additional requirements put in the helmet so it's probably a it's probably a cost neutral they just moved where the technology went but it did introduce a bunch of issues so it has built-in night vision goggles into the visor so it's the same helmet day or night which is different than other fighter pilot helmets the other thing that the helmet does is this is where it feeds the sensor feed from your distributed aperture system is the Das and this is the six IR cameras that are embedded into the platform and it basically feeds into the helmet so when you look around you can actually see an IR and with an IR overlay as you're looking outside so this is where you can see through the jet everyone I know no one uses that they just you know Bank up and look down but but it's there you know it's there if you if you need it because that strikes me as one of the coolest features it's kind of like your space ghost uh it's it has some utility again these sensors were designed over a decade ago they're all being replaced by a new system right now to make them increase the Fidelity just like your digital camera from 10 or 15 years ago the it's kind of pixelated not very useful it's kind of the same thing so it does have some good environments it does have a short range IR picture for like limited range around you the new cameras I understand are way better so that'll be interesting to see how how that gets integrated into their their tactics but yeah I mean is the idea that you could like get a tally through the airplane or you do Target acquisition through the airplane what why would you want that that sort of capability I don't know how that requirement came to be uh I don't think it was a very important requirement to have but it's there the F-35 rear cockpit visibility like looking backwards is pretty terrible if you see how it's designed it kind of has a like a Russian fighter design where it has a kind of a bulkhead directly behind the pilot and it does that to manage its radar cross section so that's probably a contributing factor because the visibility isn't as good as say flying an F-16 so I don't know exactly know why where it came from though that almost strikes me as something where the the engineers kind of have this capability and they want to put it on something you know it's not a requirement coming from the the Air Force and and so it's kind of like when you go to an operational advisor group sometimes you look at your priorities and what you're getting and there's a disconnect sometimes yeah the jet also has a a voice command mode so you can basically like tell the jet what to do and it'll bring up the screens and do it I have not met a single person who's flown the F-35 that ever uses it they're like it's it's there but I don't know someone thought it was a good idea to put the jet but no one uses it it's like Firefox except you have to speak in Russian that's right that's right you've mentioned Styles we mentioned the helmet obviously part of stealth is the weapons bays are all internal what were some of the challenges associated with that so the weapons Bays aren't all the same the f-35b has a slightly smaller weapons Bay so it can't actually carry a 2 000 pound class weapon But the A and the C can there's 11 uh weapon stations on the jet okay uh most of those are external uh and you don't usually see them loaded up but the uh the IR missiles the only IR missiles the F-35 has are carried on the outside so unlike an F-22 when it's in its full stealth combat loaded configuration the F-35 has no IR missiles and if you're the if you're the Navy or Marine F-35 you also don't have a gun because it uses a gun pod not an actual internal gun but inside the the weapons Bay you can carry four aim 120 missiles uh or a 2 000 pound bomb on each side so I can carry two one two two thousand pound bombs uh it has uh six total pylons on the outboard on the wings so on the furthest outboard stations it's called station one and eleven that's where your IR missile your aim9x would go then you have a slightly inboard of that which is station two and ten those can carry uh about a thousand two thousand pound class weapon and then the ones inside that can carry a two thousand pound class weapon and they're actually plumbed to carry fuel tanks because the original F-35 requirement had fuel tanks that requirement was stripped out but the jet is plumbed for fuel tanks which is why the Israelis are uh designing and developing fuel tanks that's uh that's kind of how the it was designed uh it can carry a lot of weapons when it doesn't need to be stealth and then it needs to be a stealth it puts the weapons inside it can carry a little bit of weapons and let's talk about the Intel fusion part because this is what I'm hearing from the pointy end of the spear is you know strike group commanders and Alpha Whiskey and anybody who's had f-35cs particularly in a strike group are like you know hey mooch you're thinking of this like as a legacy guy in terms of Intel Fusion you know it's like you have these a-wax all over the place and the the God's eye view is just so much more granular than we ever had before which reminds me of something that Emma winter said when I was interviewing him a few years ago because I did the math right like you said roughly 2 000 airplanes across a 1.2 trillion dollar program so that kind of you know I'm a poli-sci major but when I do math I come up with numbers like so sir the unit FlyAway cost is actually 600 million dollars per airplane not the 50 million dollar Target that you're talking about and so what he said was mooch you're not buying an airplane you're buying a system of systems that's what the JSF is it's not an airplane it's a system of systems so that starts to sound like DOD marketing Acquisitions speak but maybe there's something to that so let's talk about the and this is something we nibbled at last time when we were talking about fifth gen with fourth gen and how would you work with exes in a tactical scenario but let's talk about what this brings to the fight we talk about let's talk about the sensors and let's talk about the fusion then we can talk about how the data's moved so uh it's a fighter it's got a radar um the culturally the the F-35 Community does not call the F-35 radar a radar it is a it is a cultural shift they call it an MFA a multi-functional array it can do a lot of things like a radar can do but it does some other things and so they don't even call it a radar so right now it's the apg-81 it's going to be a new radar apg85 that was uh went public finally a few months ago it uses a to get that data around the aircraft it has a electronic support measures esm a system called the the asq-239 it has antennas all over the jet for the system so it has three antennas on the Leading Edge of each wing for different bands and on the trailing edges it has on the trailing edge of the Wings and the trailing edges of the horizontal stabs that has more antennas so it can look all around it for that 360 degree picture and that's just the antennas and it has some some stuff that it does it's actually a different spectrums different waveforms it has a system called cni which is a communication navigate education interrogation what that is it's basically a software-defined avionics and it has a bunch of different signals that it's just taking in processing and analyzing and what it does is it's fusing that all together so once it does that it goes okay what do I do with the data so if you're an F-35 guy in your F-35 jet you are seeing everything that the jet is seeing and it displays it to you so that would be if you want to call that tier one data so that is that is my own jet measured and refined that's high confidence data that's the stuff that I would push out over a coalition Network like link 16. so I can share that information and again it displays it to you in your visor right that's where you're seeing this because no HUD are you heads down at all are you looking at the the MFD the as you describe it the iPad at all during during this uh you know this phase of flight most people spend a lot of time heads down because there's just so much data you're managing your system and the aircraft is inherently very easy to fly and so unlike you think like a fighter pilot keep your head in a swivel look outside actually it's the backwards for the F-35 it's it's I want my wingman 20 to 30 to 40 miles away from me and I want to be by myself and I'm going to be heads down managing all of this data that's coming in so I can make decisions on Geometry and tactical decisions and shooting and that kind of thing when I'm heads out of the cockpit all this symbology is in my visor and then when as soon as I look down does it just go away uh great question there's there's masking settings all helmet mounted displays have it so when I look down I can either turn it off or I could turn it where if I just look up a little bit it comes back and so it forces my habit pattern I can just look up get the info out of the helmet look back down so that's that's generally what generally what people do if you leave it on then you have this Parallax where you have data and you're trying to focus in Focus out and so it keeps your eyes focused on the near term inside and then kind of long-term outside with that capability how has that changed you know the the forward edge of of the the Battle Zone uh because I'm thinking again back in the day it was either an a-wax or an E2 our radar the AUG 9 looked 65 degrees either side of the nose maybe we had link four link 16 symbology on the tid fighter fighter to data link was pretty high speed back in the day but that wasn't like Intel fusion and my picture wasn't really shared necessarily with anybody else in any meaningful way certainly not with the aew assets not to mention the uh the folks in the strike group like the air Warfare Commander that was making the sort of macro decisions so how has this capability changed the way that goes yeah I'd say there's two parts of that first of all is the fusion so uh a single F-35 by itself is interesting um but really not compelling and when you start getting more and more f-35s together on their same internal Network it's called metal multi something data link that is their own internal data link and they use that for Sensor Fusion so I can do multi-ship Fusion of data so I can take a piece of data off of a center from the first F-35 take some other data off of the seventh or 8th F-35 and it fuses it all together on this internal Network and that's the that's the where the magic happens where I can put multiple f35s in the air and geometrically space and different things and looking at different things and they can collect Infuse data and then pass that solution to other people so when you hear about the hey the F-35 and the F22 can't can't communicate like well you're at that's that's correct sort of but it's the wrong phrasing of the problem that there is no scenario where an F-35 Fusion is going to take F22 sensor data and put it into its equation it's not designed to do it it doesn't need to do it you're talking about different manufacturers different requirements and it gets it's complicated enough to fuse four f-35s of data when you start adding in external sensors that is orders of magnitude more complex and I would argue not not really worth the the investment how do we employ this you know I could say China I could say um you know uh Russia what what is the F-35 gonna going to do that that a legacy platform couldn't do well I'd say first of all it goes back to the fusion because it can do Fusion it works best when the aircraft aren't close together and so there's there's some ranges and and geometry formations that you can set up that that do different things for your sensors uh that puts you in a position to do things at a a legacy aircraft that without this capability can't do so in a Strike Eagle for instance it kind of doesn't matter if I'm two miles away or ten miles away from my wingman um there's elements of mutual support there but for for an F-35 guy there's a huge difference between being two miles away and 10 miles away for how their sensors work so being further apart allows them to get uh higher confidence for some of the things they're doing again depending on how they're they're setting up their system so again there's they don't have to be pointing the same way they don't have to be necessarily close together they don't have to be you know called line abreast so they're even you know in a big line it's not about flying the aircraft it's about where do I how do I optimize the collection of information so I can make timely accurate decisions the F-35 is a passive asset at its best and can do targeting without ever broadcasting you know and so in terms of the enemy's raw gear in terms of alerting the integrated air defense in terms of the other things uh this is where the F-35 has a huge Advantage this is what stealth brings you and as you said they don't even call their sensor a radar so that's kind of the game changer uh part right there big time yeah that's that's exactly right so who's flying the F-35 are these all former f-15c folks or are they coming from all the various communities they actually come from all the communities everyone from A10 F16 Strike Eagle f-15c you name it uh it and we have obviously people now the programs more mature like lieutenants that go from Flight School into the F-35 so you see this uh this cultural uh kind of fusion going on in the squadrons uh and they've they've built their own culture now but it's taken a little bit of time but it's good to have that perspective if not all uh like when the F-22 stood up was very f-15c Centric and then they added some other people along the way but from the very start they realize like we need everyone involved early because this is basically going to replace all these airplanes anyways we want to fuse that those cultures together as fast as possible so if I'm an A-10 pilot is learning the F-35 easy is intuitive what are you hearing anecdotally about folks that are coming from what seemed to be wildly different communities and starting to fly the F-35 I think uh the A-10 conversion is probably the most difficult mostly because the A-10 doesn't really have but one sensor it has a targeting pod so now I have to manage a radar and so they've never even had to run a radar before or your MFA as we were talking about so that there's a learning curve on that and there's and there's an air-to-air role that they've never had to really learn and deal with and so there's a there's a pretty steep learning curve for the A10 I'd say the F-16 is probably the lowest and the easiest conversion just because it has a side stick and it's kind of set up kind of like in F16 is set up with the Hands-On throttle and stick and then your your F-15 C's and E's are probably like your middle of the road because they have to learn from flying a traditional Center stick to a side stick and some things like that you mentioned the initial numbers the initial unit Fly Away cost targets so let's get back to the programmatic side of it where are we now with this and how is this going to net out right now as we're recording this the 1 000th F-35 is actually being built in Fort Worth so that'll come off the line probably by the end of the year uh maybe early 2024 so think of that there's 1 000 f-35s in existence that's five times as many stealth Fighters as the entire F-22 program so this is this is real it's going to be real big and it is set up for success with some follow-on modernization it's called block four which is going to be required to kind of fly it out into the the 2050s 2060s maybe it's a 2070. so the program of record total number ultimately is what uh it's 2456 for the US and then all of the other allies brings it somewhere over three thousand so as you said there are countries who are not Partners who want to be partners so obviously the reputation the airplane is is desirable it is and at this point it actually becomes less of a factor about the capabilities of the aircraft and this goes back to the beginning one of the the the challenges that has been realized of this program is when you anoint a winner to to build the only fighter jet for the next 70 years in the U.S defense industrial base you have no defense industrial base at the end of that because there's no competition all those aeronautical Engineers are going to go get other jobs no one's going to go to school because there's no opportunities for that so you don't you're not really thriving that that community that so you're going to lose a generation of knowledge and a lot of the foreign partners are starting to realize that now too so there's you know Australia has a big Resurgence of Australian defense programs that are by Australia India has that Sweden and a few other countries they're trying to preserve their organic industrial base and if they choose to go with the F-35 it could be a balance between F-35 and something else like Japan is buying the F-35 and they're partnering with the UK on a sixth generation fighter so they're not going all in on buying just one air craft because they understand that the long-term benefits of their country are going to require that they have some kind of organic industrial base to do this themselves so you mentioned sixth generation fighter that'll be a topic for another conversation in a future episode but for me and see if this is true for you as well the ultimate test of whether an airplane is successful or not is you talk to a pilot who used to fly the Legacy airplane and you ask he or she would you want to go back to the old airplane so I was at hook this year uh last September and there were a number of f-35c folks walking around the exhibition floor and I made it a point to ask each and every one of them in general how they like the airplane you know again grounding issues notwithstanding ramp strike on on Vincent notwithstanding and that's sort of uh a separate issue that we'll talk about in a different episode as well once the mishap report is finalized in any case every one of them said I would not want to go back to fly in in this case the Super Hornet I'm very happy with the F-35 is that kind of what you hear on the Air Force side of the house yeah absolutely and a big part of that is not just because it's it's new it's the amount of investment that has gone into this program if you put this this kind of money into the call it the super hoarder program it could be just as amazing right but this is the way this program is structured it has billions and billions and billions of dollars in in technologies that keep getting funneled into the aircraft the oversight of the program has over a thousand people managing the program like the F-16 doesn't have that the Super Hornet program doesn't have that and so a big part of it is you go where the you know you escape where the Puck's going to be and that's and that's really the F-35 that's where all the money that's where all the resources are and really that's going to be the backbone of the feature fighter Force for you know the US and allies for the Next Generation yeah for all of that money and effort and Sweat Equity you you get a capability ultimately so Paco always great to have you on the channel thanks for the time once again I invite everyone who isn't already subscribed to the merged newsletter to do so I'll put the link in the episode description and we look forward to having you on the channel again very soon thanks Mitch see ya all right that's going to do it for this episode if you're not already subscribed click the button and ring the bell so you don't miss anything going forward and if you'd like to help support the Channel please consider using the super thanks the heart icon below or become a patron patreon.com Ward Carroll and in the meantime I look forward to talking to you again very soon [Music] thank you

Channel: Ward Carroll

Views: 241,511

Keywords: Ward Carroll, F-14 Tomcat, F-35, Top Gun, Top Gun Maverick, fighter pilots Department of Defense, Joint Strike Fighter, Strike Eagle, military jets, DCS, DCS World, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps, aircraft carriers, fighter pilots

Id: no07AGKg8Ys

Length: 44min 49sec (2689 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 17 2023