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Source: Australian Financial Review It is time Australians got some honest answers on the Joint Strike Fighter, writes Dennis Jensen.
The decision on whether to commit to the purchase of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) as Australia’s new air combat capability will need to be made in the near future.
To date, many critical questions on the proposed purchase have been asked, based on hard evidence. JSF advocates have simply dismissed these questions, resorting to deriding their critics, questionable data or evasive arguments like “we could tell you about these incredible capabilities – but, unfortunately, they are secret”.
A new paper which analyses problems in the JSF stealth design now casts more doubt on the claims made by the JSF camp.
As someone who has worked with secret data in the past, I can attest that the data is secret either because release of such data would expose the source, or otherwise it relates to details of capabilities, signatures, frequencies of equipment etc, disclosure of which would compromise key capability.
Despite what Defence and others may suggest, the basics of capabilities and technologies are in the public domain, and the JSF has no “secret” capabilities, the fundamentals of which are not known in the public domain. The resort to “secrecy” is similar to Samuel Johnson’s quote that “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”. Be careful when you hear an exhortation that the capability is fantastic, but secret.
I have been, professionally, very sceptical about various claims made about the JSF program, for some years. I was the person who publicly revealed a RAND Corporation report which was scathing of the JSF capability. “Can’t turn, can’t climb, can’t run” was the assessment. This scathing assessment resulted in an extremely capable analyst, Dr. John Stillion, being fired. Shooting the messenger!
A one hour personal briefing by Tom Burbage, executive vice president at Lockheed Martin in charge of the JSF program, did nothing to dispel my concerns. In fact, the discussion evolved to the point that it appeared to me that they believed that the fundamentals of air combat were no longer important, that the JSF would have perfect knowledge of its environment, and would be able to remain completely invisible, even while transmitting radio, radar and network. Such fantasies do not exist in the real world.
The JSF is being sold on the basis of three fundamentals: price, stealth and networking. With price, Defence has argued on A$65 - A$80 million per aircraft. Nearly two years ago, Air Vice Marshall John Harvey admitted to me that they were working on $US131 million average unit procurement cost. At a Defence subcommittee hearing on the 10th of July 2008, DMO head Dr Stephen Gumley claimed he would be most surprised if the JSF cost Australia more than A$75 million a copy in 2008 dollars at an exchange rate of 0.92. However, in a follow on hearing on the 29th of August the same year, when pressed Dr Gumley admitted to the JSF price being more like A$135 million, with not even a scintilla of surprise. If you look back to what I and others were saying years ago about the price of the JSF, you will find that the critics’ estimates were far more reliable than the “spin” emanating from Defence! Norway, the first such customer to request 'binding information', received formal pricing recently - between $US165 million and $US230 million per jet. A far cry from Defence’s numerous claims, even to Parliament, that the JSF would be far less than $100 million each!
A recent paper on the radar cross section (RCS, or radar signature) of the JSF by Dr Carlo Kopp has demonstrated what others and I have been saying for years – the JSF is not very stealthy. Kopp’s work is seminal, and is much the same as would be expected of researchers within Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO). Kopp calculated JSF stealth performance in the very same way as stealth designers in the US do. The physics are well understood and software available to university researchers allows anybody with the understanding to perform the same kind of stealth performance modelling US industry pioneered during the 1970’s. Having authored a peer-reviewed publication on radar propagation and RCS, I can attest that Kopp’s work is solid. I do not put my capabilities in this area at his level, but I am able to assess the quality of his work.
His work demonstrated that the JSF is extremely vulnerable to most radar frequencies from most aspects. The JSF is only stealthy from the front, and is much more detectable from the sides and rear. This throws into disarray the second plank of JSF capability.
The third “sales” capability of the JSF relates to networking. The problem is, networking is nothing fundamentally new or revolutionary. Networking also requires transmission of data, and any transmissions can be detected and tracked, compromising the stealthiness of the transmitting platform.
In short, the JSF is an expensive aircraft, with very limited aerodynamic performance compared to legacy fighters, let alone other advanced fighters. The stealthiness of the aircraft has been shown, with hard numbers, to be poor compared to real stealth aircraft, and its much vaunted networking capability further degrades this.
Advocates of the JSF have argued that it is revolutionary and therefore its many limitations do not matter. Yet there is nothing truly revolutionary about this aircraft, other than the unprecedented barrage of public relations effort produced in its marketing. Should Australia bet its future sovereignty on an aircraft which is deficient in every key respect? I think not.
Dr Dennis Jensen is the Federal member for Tangney, WA, and a former Defence scientist.
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