March 26, 2024 | International, Land
July 29, 2019 | International, Aerospace
Japan wants to be an official F-35 partner. The Pentagon plans to say no.
By: Aaron Mehta , Valerie Insinna , and Mike Yeo
WASHINGTON and MELBOURNE, Australia — Japan has formally expressed interest in joining the F-35 program as a full partner, but the Pentagon plans to shoot down that request, Defense News has learned.
Sources say Japan's request to join the partnership creates major political headaches for the Pentagon, with fears it would cause new tensions among the international production base for the joint strike fighter and open the door for other customer nations to demand a greater role in future capability development.
In a June 18 letter from Japan's Ministry of Defense to Pentagon acquisition head Ellen Lord, obtained by Defense News, Atsuo Suzuki, director general for the Bureau of Defense Buildup Planning, formally requests information on how Japan could move from being a customer of the F-35 to a full-fledged member of the industrial base consortium.
“I believe becoming a partner country in F-35 program is an option,” the letter reads. “I would like to have your thoughts on whether or not Japan has a possibility to be a partner country in the first place. Also, I would like you to provide the Ministry of Defense with detailed information about the responsibilities and rights of a partner country, as well as cost sharing and conditions such as the approval process and the required period.”
“We would like to make a final decision whether we could proceed to become a partner country by thoroughly examining the rights and obligations associated with becoming a partner country based on the terms and conditions you would provide,” the letter concludes.
Lord, the Pentagon acquisition head, is scheduled to meet with Japanese officials this week, and the question of membership is expected to come up. But Tokyo won't like the answer.
Although Lord's office will be responsible for carrying the final message to Japan, the F-35 Joint Program Office told Defense News that the partnership remains limited to the initial wave of F-35 investors.
“The F-35 cooperative Partnership closed on 15 July 2002,” stated Brandi Schiff, a spokesperson for the F-35 JPO.
The decision was documented in an April 2002 memo by the Pentagon's acquisition executive stating that, “except for those countries with which we are already engaged in Level III System Development and Demonstration partnership negotiation by 15 July 2002, we will not be able to accommodate any additional Level III partners due to our inability to offer equitable government-to-government benefits and U.S. industry's inability to offer equitable 'best value' workshare arrangements,” according to Schiff.
The F-35 partners in 2007 reiterated in a separate memo that only the partners who participated in the development phase of the F-35 program would be eligible to remain partners during the production, sustainment and modernization stages.
A source familiar with internal discussions says the Pentagon is concerned that letting Japan become a program partner would lead to other nations demanding similar access.
Japan's query is hitting the F-35 program at a time of change. Vice Adm. Mat Winter, the head of the JPO, retired this month after only two years on the job, and Turkey's pursuit of a Russian air defense system has resulted in them being booted from the F-35 consortium, with all work being done by its companies to end early next year.
So in many ways, Japan asking to be made a full partner now makes sense, said a former senior official in the F-35 program, who agreed to speak on background out of respect for current decision makers.
“You now lost a partner in Turkey, so there is a vacant parking space, so to speak. And other than the U.S. services, [Japan] will be the one nation with the most F-35s,” the former official said, noting two changes that have happened in just the last year.
“Ultimately, the Department of Defense, in coordination with the State Department, made up the rules," the former official said. "The Department of Defense can change the rules.”
Global impact
There are two tiers of participation in the F-35 program. The first-tier members are considered “partners” in the program, which comes with direct involvement in the joint program office. That includes having national representatives stationed in the JPO, weighing in on decisions about future capabilities, and deciding what future industrial participation looks like.
And that industrial participation is important — building parts of the jet that go into the global supply chain is expected to net the partner nations billions in revenue over the lifetime of the program. The partners are made up of the first nine nations to sign onto the program: Australia, Canada, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The second tier consists of “customers” for the jet, comprising nations that came later to the program. Those nations command less industrial participation, lack voting power on what future development of the jet looks like, and do not have officials assigned to the JPO. That tier is made up of Israel, South Korea, Belgium and Japan, but could expand in the future with Finland, Singapore and other nations.
In December 2018, Japan announced a plan to expand procurement of F-35s from 42 to 147 jets, making it the single largest F-35 operator outside of the United States, as well as one of only three foreign nations to operate the F-35B jump-jet model. But Tokyo appears interested in increasing its teaming with the program, in large part because it wishes to take part in guiding new capabilities development as the plane gets ready for its Block 4 upgrade.
“There are various merits in participating in continuous capability development and delivery deliberation process by partner countries. In addition, there is a further need to obtain flight safety information for accountability to the public,” the letter from the Japanese defense ministry reads. “I understand that partner countries are allowed to join [JSF Executive Steering Board], to be involved in capability improvement, to dispatch their personnel to JPO, to participate in parts production and to access further information.”
The emphasis on the need to obtain flight safety information is notable, after an F-35A crashed into the ocean in April, resulting in the loss of both the plane and its pilot. Japanese officials have since blamed the crash on spatial distortion for the pilot. However, customer nations receive the same safety information that partners do, albeit slightly delayed due to the need to clear information.
The letter also acknowledges that “partner countries share significant costs,” an indication that Japan would be willing to pony up more cash in order to join the inner circle of F-35 members.
From a pure program logistics perspective, Japan becoming a partner would not be a problem, and in fact program officials would likely find it easier to deal with the largest foreign buyer of the F-35 as a partner rather than customer overall. The politics, however, quickly get tricky.
Should Japan be allowed to join, the former official noted, “you've opened Pandora's box.”
The former official specifically said that South Korea, due to its complicated political relationship with Japan, and Israel, which was the first nation to be added as a customer after the partnership option was closed, would try to use Japan's joining the program as a way in, as well. The official also highlighted Belgium, for now the sole NATO ally buying the F-35 as a customer and not a partner, as a nation with a strong case for promotion should Japan be allowed in.
The best argument DoD could make would be that the sheer size of Japan's buy deserves special privileges, but that sets a bar that other nations could look to climb and effectively buy their way into a partnership.
“This is a very interesting political football that DoD has to wrestle with. This is a bigger political decision than a programmatic one,” the former official noted. “I personally think DoD doesn't want the headache if they say yes.”
No other countries have made formal requests to join the program, Schiff confirmed. Requests for comment from Lord's office, as well as the Japanese MoD, were not returned by press time.
Benefits for Japan
In terms of industrial participation, there are opportunities for Japanese firms to pick up work that has been removed from Turkey, said Richard Aboulafia, an analyst with the Teal Group.
Major Turkish defense firms have had a hand in building hundreds of parts for the jet. Turkey's expulsion from the program, which includes the United States blocking Turkey's planned procurement of 100 fighters, means that production will at least temporarily move to the United States, with a plan to farm it out to other partners in the future.
Turkey's aerostructures work could be picked up by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and to a lesser extent Kawasaki and Subaru, Aboulafia said. But he said he was “baffled” by the idea Japan would want more industrial participation at the same time they have publicly moved away from its domestic final assembly and check out (FACO) facility, which since 2013 has handled final production on Japan's domestic F-35s. The FACO facility, which is operated by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, will continue to carry out production work until FY22 to fulfill the F-35As contracted by Japan between FY15 and FY18.
Instead, Aboulafia sees Japan's interest as being driven by a desire for future developments, given the decision to increase the island nation's planned procurement of the jet.
“If they are going to base their fighter force on this plane for decades to come, they clearly want a say in how this plane is upgraded,” he said. “It's a sovereignty thing.”
And floating in the background is another potential complicating factor for the Pentagon: Japan's continued drive to develop an indigenous fighter.
Japan is developing a new fighter type to replace the indigenous Mitsubishi F-2 fighter currently in service, and wants the new design to enter service in the 2030s. It is also looking at development pathways for this project, with a fully indigenous design, collaboration with a foreign partner, or a spinoff from an existing fighter design being considered as possible options.
The country is already conducting research and development into a number of relevant areas for fighter design, including stealth technologies, fighter engines and active electronically scanned radars, and had previously built a technology demonstrator, the X-2 Shinshin, and carried out a series of test flights with this aircraft to validate these technologies.
Asked if the Japanese could be considering the fighter program in their decision to pursue membership in the F-35, Aboulafia bluntly responded, “How could they not?”
Schiff, the JPO spokesperson, said the F-35 remains a critical focal point of the U.S.-Japan alliance.
“Any opportunities to strengthen the alliance through interoperability and cooperation will be emphasized. As an FMS customer, Japan participates in F-35 user groups and other bi-lateral forums and engagements," she said.
On the same subject
-
-
May 21, 2020 | International, Naval
Shipbuilding suppliers need more than market forces to stay afloat
By: Bryan Clark and Timothy A. Walton The U.S. Navy's award this month of the contract for its new class of frigates starts the very necessary process of rebalancing the U.S. surface fleet, but the competition also highlighted the U.S. shipbuilding-industrial base's increasing fragility. If they lost, two of the four shipyards bidding on the frigate were at risk of either going out of business or joining the underemployed ranks of U.S. commercial shipbuilders. Due to specialization, only one or two yards construct each class of Navy combat ship with workforces, equipment, and infrastructure that would be expensive and difficult to adapt. A decision on any single ship class, as with the frigate, can shut down a shipyard and send its workers to the unemployment line. Specialization is also a problem when orders increase. The Navy's two submarine shipyards, General Dynamics Electric Boat and Huntington Ingalls Industries' Newport News division, shrank the time needed to build subs by 20 percent during the past decade while increasing production to two per year. The rising sophistication of Virginia-class submarines has now reversed this trend, however, and submarine builders' challenges are only increasing. They recently started a new contract to build up to 10 of the larger Block V Virginia submarines and are in negotiation with the Navy on a block-buy contract for the first two Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines. Supplier challenges abound U.S. shipbuilders may be fragile, but their suppliers are on life support. After decades of being whipsawed by changes to shipbuilding plans and budget uncertainty, a shrinking number of suppliers are able and willing to stay in business. The Navy's recent initiatives to improve supplier production capacity and resilience don't go far enough to address its rising dependence on sole-source suppliers, which now provide more than 75 percent of submarine parts. For example, when problems with Columbia missile tubes led the Navy to seek new suppliers, it replaced the existing, sole source — BWXT — with another — General Dynamics — that will assemble tubes at the same facilities that are constructing parts for the Virginia and Columbia submarines. Last year, the Trump administration used the Defense Production Act to establish new suppliers for military missile fuel. The Navy should build on this effort to identify sole-source items for which an additional supplier is appropriate. In selecting additional suppliers, the Navy should prioritize attributes other than cost. Sole-source items by definition are important enough to justify seeking out or creating a single supplier rather than adapting the ship's design to use an existing item. Therefore, the Navy should emphasize the provider's track record in conducting similar or other challenging engineering; its ability to adjust to what will likely be variable demand and changing specifications; and the likelihood of quality production that avoids rework. Planning for resiliency The Department of Defense could help address the shipbuilding-industrial base's fragility with its current study of the number and mix of ships needed in the future fleet. Although the primary goal of this analysis should be determining the most effective fleet possible within likely budget constraints, it must also ensure the industrial base can build and sustain the future Navy. Industrial base considerations are not new to Navy force structure planning. During the last decade, the Navy or Congress added amphibious ships, submarines, destroyers and auxiliary vessels to maintain hot production lines or keep a shipyard afloat until the next order. Each of the Navy's new combatant ships are expected to cost more than $1 billion to build, constraining the Navy's ability to spread ship construction to other qualified shipyards to fill production gaps or extend classes to keep a shipyard in operation. The Navy could better support shipbuilders by rebalancing its fleet architecture to increase the number of smaller vessels such as corvettes or tank landing ships, and reduce the number of larger destroyers and amphibious warships. Smaller, less-expensive ships could be built in larger numbers per year, providing more flexibility in shipbuilding plans to stabilize the workload for shipbuilders and providing more scalability to align shipbuilding expenditures with changing budgets. Smaller ships could also be built at a wider range of shipyards, including those that only build commercial vessels and noncombatant government ships like Coast Guard cutters and oceanographic research vessels. These “dual-use” shipbuilders suffer today from a lack of coordination between commercial and government shipbuilding, which creates a feast-or-famine cycle of orders. The Navy and nation depend on a healthy shipbuilding-industrial base. To foster the industrial base in the face of natural and man-made challenges, the Navy should change its fleet design and shipbuilding plans, while investing to establish and qualify new suppliers. Without deliberate action, the U.S. shipbuilding industry will become increasingly fragile, limiting the Navy's ability to build the ships it needs and respond when today's competitions turn to conflict. Bryan Clark is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, where Timothy A. Walton is a fellow. https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2020/05/20/shipbuilding-suppliers-need-more-than-market-forces-to-stay-afloat/
-
October 21, 2020 | International, Land
MPF: Light Tank Competitors BAE & GD Head For Soldier Tests
BAE and General Dynamics are vying to build 504 Mobile Protected Firepower vehicles to support light infantry units, especially in places the massive M1 Abrams cannot go. SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. WASHINGTON: After 24 years without a light tank in Army service, soldiers will climb aboard brand-new Mobile Protected Firepower prototypes this January. “It's not just PowerPoint” anymore, Maj. Gen. Bryan Cummings, the Army's Program Executive Officer for Ground Combat Systems (PEO-GCS), told me in an interview. “On Jan. 4th, we will have ... vehicles arriving at Fort Bragg.” Army experts have already started safety testing on prototype MPF vehicles, officials told me. Actual combat soldiers will start training on two platoons of prototypes in January – four MPFs from BAE, four from rival General Dynamics – with field tests scheduled to begin in April. A formal Limited User Test will start in August or September, with the Army choosing the winning design in 2022 and the first operational unit of MPF entering active service in 2025. A General Dynamics spokesperson told me they've already delivered five MPF prototypes to the Army, with two more in final checkouts and another five being built for delivery by the end of the year. BAE Systems is also building 12 prototypes, but they declined to say whether they'd delivered vehicles yet or not. While the Army can't comment on either contractor while the competition is ongoing, Cummings said, “both are on track to meet the major milestones” – despite the disruptions of COVID-19. After three months of training, the troops will start what's being called the Soldier Vehicle Assessment (SVA): four to five months of intensive field testing, including force-on-force wargames. It's all part of the Army's new emphasis on getting real soldiers' feedback on new weapons early and often. “The soldiers actually get to drive the vehicles around, shoot them, train with them,” BAE business developer James Miller told me. “Their feedback [is] likely to be the most critical factor ... in the decision the Army's going to make about who wins this contract.” The soldier assessment isn't just testing out the vehicles, however, Cummings told me: It's also a test of the Army. Specifically, how can light infantry brigades, which today have few vehicles or mechanics, sustain and operate a 20-plus-ton tank? The crucial distinction: MPF is not going to the Army's heavy brigades, which have lots of support troops and specialized equipment to take care of tracked armored vehicles. Instead, 14 MPFs per brigade will go to airborne and other light infantry units, which haven't had tracked armor since the M551 Sheridan was retired and its replacement cancelled in 1990s. Now, MPF won't be as fuel-hungry or maintenance-intensive as the massive M1 Abrams, America's mainstay main battle tank. Even with add-on armor kits for high-threat deployments, it'll be less than half as heavy as the M1. That's because MPF isn't meant to take on enemy tanks, at least not modern ones. Instead, it's designed to be light enough to deploy rapidly by air, simple enough to sustain at the end of a long and tenuous supply line, but potent enough to take on enemy light armored vehicles, bunkers, dug-in machineguns, and the like. That's a tricky balance to strike. In fact, the Army has never found a light tank it really liked despite decades of trying. Only six M22 Locusts actually fought in World War II, the M41 Walker Bulldog was too heavy for airborne units, the M551 Sheridan was plagued by technical problems throughout its service from Vietnam to Panama, the M8 Armored Gun System and the Future Combat System were both cancelled. So how do BAE and General Dynamics plan to square this circle? General Dynamics emphasized lethality in their interview with me. Their Lima tank plant builds the M1 Abrams, and while the MPF is smaller – though the company didn't divulge details, GD's version reportedly has a 105mm cannon, compared to the Abrams' 120mm – it will have the same fire controls and electronics as the latest model of its big brother. “If you sat in a Mobile Protected Firepower turret, you would think you were sitting in a [M1] SEPV3 turret,” a GD spokesperson told me. “It's all the same displays, architectures, power distribution, etc.” GD's design evolved from their Griffin demonstrators, prominently displayed for several years at AUSA annual meetings. It's got automotive components derived from the ASCOD/Ajax family widely used in Europe and an 800 horsepower engine. GD didn't tell me how much their vehicle weighed, but, depending on the armor package installed, the demonstrators ranged from 28 tons to 50 tons. Those figures would give horsepower/weight ratios ranging from 28 hp/ton, better than any model of the Abrams, to 16, which would make MPF much more sluggish. BAE, by contrast, emphasized their design's compactness and ease of maintenance – considerations as critical as firepower for a light infantry unit. BAE actually built the M8 AGS cancelled in the '90s drawdown, and while they've thoroughly overhauled that design for MPS with a new engine, new electronics, and underbody blast-proofing against roadside bombs, they've tried to preserve its airborne-friendly qualities. “The old M8 fit inside a C-130; in fact, it was air droppable,” Miller told me. “There's no requirement for that in the current MPF program, but we decided to stick with that as a design constraint: [Our MPF can] fit inside a C-130; we can do three on a C-17.” BAE's engine is less potent than GD's, with only 550 horsepower. With the base configuration coming in at under 30 tons, that equates to over 18 hp/ton, with heavier armor packages reducing performance from there. But the big selling point of the engine is ease of access, Miller argued. Engine maintenance on a tank requires a crane and partially disassembling the armor, but a mechanic can slide the BAE MPF's engine in and out of the chassis with a hand crank. If the MPF breaks down or gets stuck, it can be towed away by a truck, without requiring a special heavy recovery vehicle as an M1 does. “The infantry brigades are light. They don't have long logistics tails. They don't have a ton of mechanics and recovery vehicles,” Miller emphasized. “The vehicle has to be as mobile as them and fit inside their organization.” The Army estimates the life-cycle cost of MPF, from development to procurement to maintenance and retirement, at $16 billion. Whichever vehicle wins the Army contract will have an edge in sales worldwide – including, potentially, to the Marine Corps, which is retiring its M1s as too heavy for modern amphibious warfare. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/10/mpf-light-tank-competitors-bae-gd-head-for-soldier-tests/