Fighter the pride of our future

Fighter the pride of the future

Figure the author made a few statements in here likely to incite vehement rebuttals from some quarters of the crowd around here so I’ve put it in its own thread to make it easier to ignore the crap when it flows 🙂 Enjoy

Greg Sheridan: Fighter the pride of our future
OPINION
Greg Sheridan, Foreign editor
July 22, 2006
THE dreadful fighting in southern Lebanon, in Israel’s war with Hezbollah, demonstrates the importance, and the limitations, of air power. In the end, to destroy Hezbollah, Israel had to send in ground forces. But to do that effectively it relied on its overwhelming air superiority to take out air defences, missile batteries and to prepare the ground. In fact, with the benefit of clear air superiority, it is almost impossible for a competent ground force to lose.

That is partly why the US is such a decisive ally. Even if it doesn’t send in ground forces, it can change any ground battle by the exercise of air power.

This column has often argued that Australia needs many more ground soldiers, partly because of the nature of the engagements we need to be involved in during the long war on terror, within our region and more distantly.

But we are also in the process of making thebiggest decision in our history about airpowerand, indeed, the biggest single defence purchase.

We are planning to spend, broadly speaking, $12 billion in 2002 dollars for a fleet of up to 100 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters.

I have to admit a fatal bias here. I’ve flown the JSF simulator and shot down three Soviet aircraft while notionally in the air. It’s the most fun you can have legally in peacetime, but I suspect the simulator operators somewhat biased the odds in my favour.

Notwithstanding the affection you always feel for a fighter you’ve flown successfully, the JSF will move Australia into a totally new generation of air-power capability.

Most of the negative publicity you’ve seen about the JSF is tosh. Some of the specifics may be true, but they lack context. The JSF will be a fine replacement for the magnificent F-111, which has served Australia superbly well, and will establish a renewed technological and capability edge for us in the region.

There are some distinctive features about Australia’s strategic culture that mean that certain types of controversy recur whenever we buy a big new weapons system. The F-111s were leading-edge technology when we bought them and they were plagued by development problems. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, the F-111s were utterly ridiculed and scorned by the know-alls in the media of the day. You didn’t need to know much about defence to know that the F-111 was a dud. I can recall radio figure Brian White offering to lead a rebellion in Australia’s northern islands so long as all the Australian government had to fight him with were F-111s. It is impossible to overstate the scorn they engendered.

The F-111s have since become acknowledged as having been a superb plane for Australia. They were a strike fighter. They were hardy, tough, reliable planes with an extraordinary range, which you need if you’re operating in Australia, or in the approaches to Australia. They gave Australia a potent strike capacity, which was not meant as a threat to any of our neighbours but nonetheless was a significant deterrent.

The JSFs will attract much less intense controversy than the F-111s did, but it will be the same type of controversy and for the same basic reasons.

One of the endearing and delightful things about Australia is the way our national conversation recurs, like a sweet symphony in which certain themes, certain melodies, are played again and again at orchestral intervals, so that there is a soothing rhythm to our national life.

The reasons we always have the same type of defence equipment controversies derive from our bigness and our smallness. Because we are so big and so far away from people who may harm us, trade lines we may need to protect or friends we may need to help, we need equipment that can work across vast distances.

This transcends the old debate over whether we just want to defend the Australian mainland or work farther out.

Even if only operating within Australia we need to be able to cover thousands and thousands of kilometres. It means we often need equipment with special characteristics: not only range as such but durability, survivability and the ability to operate in widely different climatic conditions.

So that’s what bigness requires of us. Then there are the requirements of smallness. Because we are a small population we do not have the option of a big military, although I think it should be bigger than it is. But as well as being small, we are rich and technologically advanced. So the strategy we naturally adopt is to maintain a clear technological edge over our much more populous neighbours.

We can do this not only because we are rich but because we are such close allies of the US. They will provide us with defence technology that they will not provide to anyone else in our region. Because President George W. Bush has changed the US national disclosure policy to grant much greater information access for Australia, the US will give us more intimate knowledge of the highly sensitive systems in the JSF than it has for any plane we’ve ever bought before.

The strategy of always seeking a technological edge on everyone else in the region means we have to be involved in leading-edge technology, which means we have to take certain calculated risks.

If you buy something off the shelf you don’t have the risks, but you also don’t have the edge. Sometimes the risk can be too great. Sometimes we try to overdesign what we can get from a manufacturer.

This is essentially what happened with the Collins Class submarines, although at the end the cost overrun was reasonable and the Collins became the most formidable non-nuclear sub in the water, the F-111 of the seas.

Cost overruns seem to imply great incompetence on the part of defence planners. But has anyone ever done a renovation of their house that doesn’t end up coming in 10 per cent over budget and three months late?

The notional cost of the JSF is very hard to calculate. The main real cost increases since the project was announced in 2002 have been caused by the increase in costs of titanium and the increased costs of skilled labour. Many of the misleading figures simply compare 2012 dollars with 2002 dollars (we’ll take delivery of our first JSFs in 2012).

Similarly, the first plane you buy is more expensive than the last, especially if you’re buying 100. Then the cost of just the plane alone is different from the average cost of the plane and all the accompanying systems, training equipment, simulators, support facilities and so on that you need over the lifetime of the program.

The average cost of the JSF is estimated at about $100 million. Thus a hundred aircraft is $10 billion. But the notional budget for the program is $12 billion, so that some leeway is built in.

The idea that any Russian-built plane in our region could challenge the JSF is nonsense. Modern fighter warfare is mostly done beyond the range of visual engagement. Some of the Russian planes have a notionally tighter turning ability in close quarters, but their weapons systems and stealth capacities are nothing compared with the JSF.

And our JSFs will be integrated with our Airborne Early Warning and Control command aircraft and our powerful radars. They will identify, track and destroy their enemies long before their enemies are even aware they are in the air.

The JSF answers our needs because it is both an air superiority fighter and a strike weapon. Because it is superbly flexible between those roles we can one day have 100 air-superiority fighters and the next day have 100 strike weapons. At the start of a conflict we can keep all the weapons inside the JSFand go very stealthily (largely invisible toradar).

Once we’ve knocked out air defences we can load up many more weapons on the planes’ external weapons ports, not worrying that radar may detect external bumps on theplanes.

Oppositions always focus on the shortcomings of new weapons systems. Labor has suggested we buy a squadron of F-22s and keep the F-111s in the air for many more years. Both suggestions are ridiculous. The F-22 is a superior air fighter but does not have the JSF’s strike capacity.

Defence Minister Brendan Nelson told me the US has told the Australian Defence Force it would not be prepared to sell the F-22 even to so close an ally as Australia.

It is just unrealistic to imagine we can keep the F-111s going forever, and the costs of running two types of plane are also excessive. The F-22 is vastly more expensive than the JSF anyway, not even factoring in all the extra costs you would incur by importing it.

“We can’t afford to be risk-averse,” Nelson says. Nelson gives every impression of relishing the defence portfolio, notwithstanding the tragedy of Jake Kovco and all the embarrassment that caused.

But we don’t finally commit to the JSF until 2008, after the next election. The sheer fun of introducing magnificent new technology like the JSF would be enough to keep me in the defence portfolio for years.

The Howard Government’s complete redesign of the ADF to match its strategic vision is proceeding deliberately, begun by Robert Hill, continued by Nelson. The JSF will be our pride and joy.