October 5, 2023 | International, Naval
Japan, South Korea and the US should mirror AUKUS for destroyers
But before breaking a celebratory bottle of champagne across the bow, obstacles must be addressed.
March 20, 2019 | International, Aerospace
Lockheed Martin is Waging War on Boeing’s F-15EX
BY MARCUS WEISGERBER
The F-35 makers sees the Pentagon's plans to buy new F-15s for the first time in 19 years as a threat.
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has reportedly been racking up kills against older warplanes during U.S. military drills in Nevada — even the F-15, whose record in real combat is a flawless 104 to zero. Now the two jets are heading into a fierce dogfight, one that doesn't involve missiles or guns.
The battle between Lockheed Martin's F-35 and Boeing's F-15EX is being fought by lobbyists in and around Congress, which is beginning to review the Pentagon's fiscal 2020 budget request. Tens of billions of dollars are up for grabs over the coming decade.
This week, Pentagon officials proposed buying new F-15s for the first time since 2001, even though top Air Force officials have said as recently as two weeks ago that they didn't necessarily want the the planes. For nearly two decades, Air Force officials have argued against buying so-called fourth-generation planes, preferring for stealthier fifth-generation planes with newer technology.
The proposed F-15 purchase is rather small: eight jets in 2020 and a total of 80 through 2024. By comparison, the Pentagon wants to buy 78 F-35s in 2020, with 48 going to the Air Force.
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But Pentagon budget documents also signal that the Air Force could buy hundreds of F-15s over the next decade. A tranche of 144 planes would “initially refresh” squadrons that fly Cold War-era F-15C Eagles designed for air-to-air combat. And the plane has the “potential to refresh the remainder of the F-15C/D fleet and the F-15E fleet.” In all, that's more than 400 planes.
That was enough to draw a full-court press from Lockheed. One day after that announcement, company officials began circulating a three-page white paper detailing the “F-35's decisive edge” over unnamed fourth-generation warplanes. Defense One reviewed the white paper.
Lockheed's arguments boil down to bang-for-the-buck: The F-35 will cost about the same or less than the F-15 soon (the long-criticized price has in fact been coming down), its operating costs will be less than the F-15's within six years, and it can fly a more diverse set of missions.
Boeing's argument: The F-35 was never intended to replace the air-to-air F-15C — but the F-15EXcould do so while expanding those squadrons' capabilities. Pilots would not need to extensive training to fly the jet, which could carry heavy loads of weapons, plus Eagle bases would not need major infrastructure upgrades. And the new F-15EX is multirole, similar to the F-15E Strike Eagle, meaning that it could strike targets in the air, on the ground or at sea.
Boeing has been pitching new F-15s to the Air Force on and off for more than a decade, most recently offering a similar version of the plane it builds for Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The latest effort started to pick up steam last summer.
The idea was embraced within parts of the Air Force, but not by top Air Force leaders. Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson acknowledged on Feb. 28 that the planes were not in the service's initial budget plans.
But analysis by the Joint Staff and Pentagon Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation Office “on the kinds of capabilities that we require in the aviation realm” led officials to recommend buying the F-15EX, a senior defense official said.
Elaine McCusker, the Pentagon deputy comptroller, said Tuesday that former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis made the decision to include the F-15EX in the Defense Department's budget request.
“The F-35 remains a critical program for the joint force as we look to the future and the kinds of capabilities we require,” Lt. Gen. Anthony Ierardi, director of force structure, resources and assessment on the Joint Staff, said Tuesday. “The F-15EX provides additional capacity and readiness, especially in the near years to mid years, as we look at the threats and the kinds of combat potential that we needed to bring to bear.”
Whether Congress agrees with that rationale is yet to be seen. In February, five Republican senators — all with ties to Lockheed F-35 manufacturing work or F-35 bases — sent a letter to President Trump in opposition of the F-15EX.
“We are extremely concerned that, over the last few years, the DoD has underfunded the F-35 Program and relied on Congress to fund increases in production, sustainment, and modernization,” they group led by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, wrote. “In order to meet the overmatch and lethality goals laid out in the National Security Strategy, the DoD needs to make these investments in the F-35 to affordably deliver and operate this fifth-generation fighter fleet. The F-35 is the most affordable, lethal, and survivable air dominance fighter, and now is the time to double down on the program.”
The 2020 budget request includes $11.2 billion to buy 78 F-35s — 48, which would be Air Force jets. That money would also go toward improving jets already built. Lawmakers have routinely added F-35s to the Pentagon's request. For instance, last year they added 16 planes to the 77 requested by the Defense Department.
The 2020 budget request includes $1.1 billion for the eight F-15EX jets. Some of that money would go toward standing up the production line.
About a month after Bloomberg first reported in December that eight F-15EX jets would be in the budget request, Marillyn Hewson, Lockheed's CEO, said Pentagon leaders told her that F-15 buys would not be at the expense of the F-35.
“The combat proven F-35 is the National Defense Strategy in action and the program continues to see strong support throughout the Pentagon, the U.S. Services, Congress and the White House,” the company said in an emailed statement.
Pentagon officials have been insisted that any F-15EX buys would not eat into planned F-35 buys. In all, the Pentagon plans to buy a total 2,443 jets over the coming decades.
“If Congress changes that to all F-35s, they'll be all F-35s, we understand that,” Maj. Gen. David Krumm, director of strategic plans in the office of the deputy chief of staff for strategic plans and requirements at the Pentagon, said Thursday at the Mitchell Institute. “But based upon the resources we have and the ownership costs of the platforms, we think that this is the best way that we can present the nation's Air Force and the best way we can get to a capabilities and capacities that we have.
“If we have more resources, I think we need to have a conversation about what it is we go for,” he said. “But based upon the resources that we have, we think that this is the right way to go.”
https://www.defenseone.com/business/2019/03/lockheed-martin-waging-war-boeings-f-15ex/155598
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February 3, 2020 | International, Aerospace
The drive to advance missile defense is there, but there must be funding
By: Richard Matlock Over the past five years, missile threats have evolved far more rapidly than conventional wisdom had predicted. Best known is North Korea's accelerated development and testing of sophisticated, road-mobile ballistic missiles. But the U.S. National Defense Strategy requires renewed focus on greater powers. China has adopted an anti-access strategy consisting of new offensive missiles, operational tactics and fortifications in the South China Sea. Russia, too, has developed highly maneuverable hypersonic missiles specifically designed to defeat today's defenses. Grappling with these sobering realities demands change. The 2019 Missile Defense Review called for a comprehensive approach to countering regional missiles of all kinds and from whatever source, as well as the increasingly complex intercontinental ballistic missiles from rogue states. But programs and budgets have not yet aligned with the policy. The upcoming defense budget submission presents an important opportunity to address these new and complex challenges. The Missile Defense Agency's current top three goals are sustaining the existing force, increasing capacity and capability, and addressing more advanced threats. The first two are necessary but insufficient. The third goal must be elevated to adapt U.S. missile defense efforts to the geopolitical and technological realities of our time. For the last decade, less than 2 percent of MDA's annual funding has been dedicated to developing advanced technology, during which time our adversaries have begun outpacing us. As President Donald Trump said last January, we “cannot simply build more of the same, or make incremental improvements.” Adapting our missile defense architecture will require rebalance, discipline and difficult choices. Realigning resources to develop advanced technologies and operational concepts means investing less in single-purpose systems incapable against the broader threat. It also requires we accept and manage new kinds of risk. Indeed, meeting the advanced threat may, in the short term, require accepting some strategic risk with North Korea. The beginning of this rebalance requires more distributed, elevated and survivable sensors capable of tracking advanced threats. The most important component here is a proliferated, globally persistent space layer in low-Earth orbit consisting of both passive and active sensors. MDA may be the missile defense-centric organization best suited to developing and integrating this capability into the architecture, but there is considerable opportunity for partnering with others to move out smartly, as recently urged by Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Hyten. Partnerships with the Space Development Agency and the Air Force can be supplemented by collaborative efforts with commercial space companies. We need not do this all at once. Space assets could be fielded in phases, with numbers, capability (sensors, interceptors, lasers), missions, and orbits evolving over time. MDA demonstrated a similar paradigm with the Delta experiments, Miniature Sensor Technology Integration series and the Near Field Infrared Experiment in the past. Meanwhile, other sensors could alleviate the cost of building new, billion-dollar radar on islands in the Pacific Ocean — efforts which continue to suffer delay. Adding infrared tracking sensors to high-altitude drones, for instance, has already been demonstrated experimentally in the Indo-Pacific theater with modified Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles. These need not be dedicated assets. Sensor pod kits could be stored in theater to be deployed aboard Reapers or other platforms during heightened tensions. We must revisit boost-phase defenses and directed energy. In 2010, the Airborne Laser program demonstrated that lasers could destroy missiles in the boost phase, but deploying toxic chemical lasers aboard large commercial aircraft was fiscally and operationally untenable. Fortunately, considerable operational promise exists with recently developed solid-state lasers (the cost of which is around $2 of electricity per shot). We must move these systems out of the laboratory and build and test operational prototypes. Near-term actions to better manage risk against the rogue-state ballistic missile threat must not overtake the pursuit of these larger goals. Although the Pentagon is currently considering a 10-year, $12 billion program for a next-generation interceptor, nearer-term, cheaper options are available. Replacing each existing kill vehicle on the Ground-Based Interceptors with several smaller kill vehicles would multiply each interceptor's effectiveness dramatically. The U.S. has been developing this technology since 2006, including a “hover” flight test in 2009. Affordable solutions like this must be found. Missile defense cannot do it all. Denying, degrading and destroying enemy missile systems prior to launch must be part of the mix. But left-of-launch activities can be expensive and difficult, and reliance on a cyber magic wand carries risk, too. We need to broaden our approach to attack all parts of our adversary's kill chain. The National Defense Strategy urges that we contend with the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be — or as it previously was. To meet the threats of today and tomorrow, we must radically transform our U.S. missile defenses. It falls to the 2021 budget to do so. https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2020/01/31/the-drive-to-advance-missile-defense-is-there-but-there-must-be-funding/
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April 20, 2021 | International, Aerospace
Back in show business - Skies Mag
How the three major North American military aviation display teams are gearing up for what is hoped to be a far healthier 2021 schedule.