Defence analyst Pierre Sprey on the F-35 (2012) - the fifth estate

the f-35 was born of an exceptionally dumb kind of piece of airforce PR spin the the mission of the airplane was to be half of what the airforce called the high/low mix it was supposed to be one super expensive supposedly super capable fighter the f-22 and then a cheaper fighter of which you were supposed to be able to buy a lot that would do everything else that beyond earlier that was the f-35 that whole high-low mix idea was an Air Force PR concoction to make up an excuse this was actually from the 70s can you believe this it shows how long dumb ideas persist it was in the 70s the Air Force the apple of its eye was the f-15 to engine great big fighter for its day close to 50,000 pounds super big radar all the bells and whistles that the Air Force could think of which was exactly what they wanted big expensive airplane Colonel Boyd and I internal virtually had worked on it had gotten disgusted with it because it had gotten too loaded up with junk and so we went off and as kind of bureaucratic guerrillas and underground started the f-16 which was by comparison which was going to be less than half the size half the cost and much hotter was going to just wax the f-15 by virtue of being smaller and hotter and designed specifically for that mission and not designed to carry a bunch of junk a bunch of complex electronic stuff that had no relevance to combat we've called the f-35 a turkey absolutely it is a turkey it's inherently a terrible airplane because it's an airplane built for a dumb idea as soon as you go to design a multi-mission airplane you're sunk as soon as you try to make the airplane to close support air to air deep interdiction bombing and to carry a whole long laundry list of technologies as long as my arm you're sunk you'll never get a good airplane out of that you'll get a kludge you know that will fail you know time and time again and even worse it's a three service airplane which means now you have three bureaucracies squabbling over the specifications you have the Air Force the Marines and the Navy and each of them want something totally different and then you have the pretense that somehow you can fold all this into one airplane airframe and make it work for three different services what's happened is you've compromised the airplane horribly for three different missions and you've compromised it even worse for three different services you know so just as an example the Marines have this you know mindless passion now recently for vertical takeoff airplanes ever since they got the British Harrier well that makes the airplane very fat because you have to have a lift fan in the center of the airplane to blow air vertically to make it take off vertically or land vertically so now you have a great big fat center section now you have too much drag it turned out they put on tiny wings which helps it to take off vertically but means you can't maneuver in combat you know you need wings to create lift to turn no wing no turn and so the airplane is astonishingly unmovable you know because it has to carry a hundred and eight pounds of airplane per square foot of wing so in air-to-air combat in dog fighting dog fighting is hopeless you can guarantee that a 1950s designed mig-21 or French Mirage would just hopelessly whip the f-35 so if the f-35 is not a fine combat plane what about as support for troops air support that's the most laughable of all because to support troops you have to be able to get in close to maneuver to find really difficult to find can flage targets you have to be able to turn that quite slow speed you have to carry a large gun say like the a-10 and you have to be able to stay in the vicinity of the troops for four to six hours you have to be able to loiter in order to really give them all day cover when they need it and this is hopelessly impossible with the f-35 why the f-35 uses far too much gas its lucky if it can hang around for an hour or an hour and a half at most the maneuverability is laughable you know you couldn't possibly get down in the weeds as the pilots say with this airplane and turn in time to see a tank remember a tank is not visible from me maybe from a quarter mile or less this airplane at the speeds at which it has to go because of the tiny wings remember it can't maneuver so it can't fly slow and nor should it in combat because it's so vulnerable so what is it good at it's not good at anything what Obama it's a terrible bomber there's a terrible bomber and by the way because of stealth it's designed really to carry the weapons internally right you can't hang weapons under the wing and still be invisible to radar so the whole thing that's another thing by the way that makes it fatter and and more drag and more fuel consumption and less maneuverable so you can put two big bombs inside this thing you know which is a ridiculous payload for most conventional war so well talk to me then about the stealth I mean how stealth capable is the f-35 the first thing to know about stealth is that it's a scam you know it simply doesn't work you know radars they were built in 1942 could detect every stealth airplane in the world today the Battle of Britain radars not because there was anything great about them but because they happen to have very long wavelength so every Battle of Britain radar which see the f-35 and the f-22 and the b2 now I'm not talking here as an antiquarian because unfortunately the Russians picked up on this and have been building exactly those radars ever since World War two they never stopped building low frequency long wavelength radars and they've modernized them to an extraordinary extent they built some really amazing mobile versions of them now that are both hard to find when they're camouflaged and can be erected in 40 minutes and see every stealth airplane in the world and they sell them to anybody who's got cash so you're telling me it's a bad airplane it can't do dogfights it can't protect troops on the ground it's a lousy bomber and despite everything that the manufacturer is saying it's it's not stealth built what is it exactly correct so what is the point of this plane the point is to spend money that is the mission of the airplane is for the US Congress to send money to Lockheed that's the real mission of the airplane and I guarantee you by the time all the failings of the f-35 have come to light if Canada is still buying it they'll be paying 200 million dollars plus 200 million dollars plus because among other things of course the quantity the promised quantity will never happen you know nations will drop out lots of people won't have the money to pay for it both abroad and the u.s. is going to cut back keep on cutting back the by as the buy cuts back the cost will go up and up I'm predicting that in the US will probably never buy more than 500 airplanes that means the cost of the f-35 in the US will shoot up beyond 300 million maybe 350 million if there had been a real competition in 2010 before Canada made its decision how do you think the f-35 would have held up if it was a straight-up competition with with reasonably well-defined mission goals and so on I suspect one of the European fighters would have won not that they're very good you know just they're not as bad as the f-35 the Gripen or the Eurofighter or whatever as they have won in other countries where they have had competitions I think it would be hands-down that they the f-35 would lose on a whole bunch of grounds on cost grounds on reliability grounds on performance grounds on all of it and but the hooker would be that the people who are doing the evaluation or doing the competition have to understand about stealth and the fact that it's a very shaky business that it's a scam one of the reasons that the Department of Defense has given for why it has sole-source this was because it was the only fifth generation available plane available first of all fifth generation is another silly you know mindless cliche it doesn't mean anything of course they use stealth as the excuse for sole-source know without evaluating at all the question of does stealth work you know what are people likely to do who are facing stealth airplanes what did the Yugoslavs do how did the Yugoslav shoot down the f-117 they were well aware that they were being invaded by stealthy airplanes and they figured out how to shoot it down that's what everybody's going to do who thinks they might be bombed by a stealthy airplane so any real evaluation would have to start there if you do that you realize that the stealth is a very thin read and certainly not an excuse for a sole source

Channel: The Fifth Estate

Views: 117,418

Keywords: Pierre Sprey, F-35, the fifth estate, A-10, Warthog, CBC News, CBC

Id: N1Z_DuF87Sc

Length: 10min 39sec (639 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 27 2016