F 16 Sales to Taiwan Likely

Dogfighting over the Taiwan Strait

For national-security dorks who like to read the Defense Department’s 36(b) arms sale notifications, watching the back-and-forth over weapons sales to Taiwan is pure entertainment. It’s partly a question of political spin, but it’s also an interesting look at how the Pentagon sizes up the military balance between China and Taiwan.

Back in January, the Defense Intelligence Agency issued a stark assessment of Taiwan’s air power: Without a serious upgrade, the report said, Taiwan’s air defenses would not be able to fight off an attack by China. The Pentagon report — which was sent to Congress in January, but only became public last month — noted the growing obsolescence of Taiwan’s fighter inventory, which includes F-5 Tigers, Mirage 2000-5s and some older F-16A/Bs. “Taiwan recognizes that it needs a sustainable replacement for obsolete and problematic airframes,” the unclassified version of the report said.

That came as welcome news to Taiwan, which has been lobbying to buy more advanced F-16s, the F-16C/D model, from the United States. (China, predictably, is opposed to the plan.)

But here’s the catch: The F-16 production line is eventually going to shut down as the United States and its allies switch to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Now members of Congress are now stepping up pressure on the administration to sell the aircraft, in part to keep a production line in Fort Worth, Texas, open.

And that proves the old adage: All politics is local, even when we’re talking about the Taiwan Strait. In a floor statement this week, Sen. Jon Cornyn of Texas appealed for the sale to go through. The reason? Constituent jobs.

“Taiwan needs these F-16 C/D aircraft now,” he said. “… If hard orders are not received for Taiwan’s F-16s this year, the U.S. production line will likely be forced to start shutting down. Once the line begins closing, personnel will be shifted to other programs, inventory orders will be cancelled, and machine tools will be decommissioned. When the F-16 line eventually goes ‘cold,’ it is not realistic to expect that it would be restarted.

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Canada needs to update its aging fleet of CF-18s, but when will Ottawa get around to it?

Think of a paper clip, suggests retired Lieutenant-Colonel Billy Allen. Just as you can only bend one so many times before it breaks, you can only push an aircraft beyond the speed of sound so many times before some crucial part gives out on you.

“You can take a handful of paper clips and they’re all going to break at about 16 bends,” said Lt. Col. Allen, an asscociate professor at the Royal Military College and an expert on Canada’s past aircraft acquisitions.

The air force’s frontline fleet of CF-18 fighter-bombers is on its 15th bend; just 80 remain flyable from the original 138 delivered during the 1980s, and yet Canada and Japan remain the only G7 countries not to have designated successors to their primary fighters of the 1970s/1980s generation. The Harper government, Industry Canada and the Department of National Defence have maintained a stealthy uncommunicativeness about the selection process, let alone the choice of aircraft. Meanwhile, a long tarry by Ottawa could mean the last, tired Hornet will not be able to fly off into the sunset around 2020 as planned.

“We’re hoping that [a decision is] getting close. Their current timeline to actually buy the airplane [leads to] 2016 deliveries, which would mean you’d have to place an order by 2014 and have a down payment in 2013,” said Tom Burbage, executive vice-president for F-35 Program Integration at Lockheed Martin, maker of the presumptive front-runner.

“The next formal decision point, in my understanding, is a Cabinet endorsement of the candidate replacement for the F-18. Hopefully it’ll be this year. It’s hard to predict the Canadian process.”

The hazard for the Harper government lies in announcing a defence program with a final cost likely to land in the range of $10-billion. Choosing a fighter to patrol Canada’s skies and fulfill its NATO obligations in the coming decades entails making probably the largest military acquisition in Canadian history.

Meanwhile, last week’s federal budget included a plan to trim $2.5-billion from the defence budget over the next five years. It is not known what effect the austerity plan will have on the fighter replacement program.

Last fall, air force officers told Canwest News Service that they worried any competition to proceed on the replacement for the CF-18 would be delayed by a federal election, or at least threats of a federal election. No government wants to announce a multi-billion project to buy new fighter jets when the public is focused on health care, unemployment and other concerns, they said.

Since Canada’s 2002 investment of US$160-million in the U.S.-British program, Lockheed Martin’s Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) or F-35 Lightning II, has been the leading candidate. The many-talented stealth warplane is being developed to serve as NATO’s air backbone for decades to come.

Canada’s JSF commitment was simply the ante; going all-in and buying the F-35 would give the Canadian air force its first stealth aircraft. It boasts a radar signature the size of a golf ball.

In some respects the F-35 can be regarded as a shrunken, exportable version of the dominating F-22 Raptor, the high-performance U.S. stealth fighter that costs at least US$140-million per unit — so expensive that President Barack Obama thought even the United States could not afford any more of them, and capped the purchase at 187 units.

“If you were to ask me, ‘Will the F-35 be the world’s best multi-mission aircraft?’ I have no doubt that that will be the case,” said Baker Spring, a research fellow in security policy at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation. However, Mr. Spring said, by being jack of all trades the F-35 may not be master of any.

Last November, Australia announced a A$16-billion ($14.9-billion) contract for 100 Joint Strike Fighters, implying a price tag that approaches $10-billion for a Canadian fleet of 65.

(A staffer in Defence Minister Peter MacKay’s office told the Post that Canada will procure 65 new fighters. That’s down from the 80 CF-18s now operating; 80 was also the number of replacements quoted when Canadian Forces created an office to work on the replacement in 2007.)

Should the Harper government decide to purchase the JSF, it could find itself in a similar position to Australia’s Labour administration, which has been dogged in Parliament and the press with criticism that the fighter program is late, over budget and will result in a slow, mediocre airplane. Some have questioned whether the F-35, with its modest maximum speed of Mach 1.6, would be capable of defending Australian airspace against advanced Russian or Chinese weaponry. The question is a pertinent one for a Harper government keen to be regarded as defenders of Canada’s sovereignty over the Arctic.

Last week, the Pentagon told Congress its estimates for the massive American order of 2,400 F-35s had climbed 50% higher than a 2002 estimate, triggering an automatic review under U.S. legislation.

“The JSF program has fallen short on performance over the past several years,” Ashton Carter, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, told the Senate Armed Services Committee. The average price per airplane is now expected to range from US$80-million to US$95-million in 2002 dollars.

As for talk of the program dragging behind schedule, Lockheed Martin’s Tom Burbage said the F-35 was at worst 13 months delayed, and the first aircraft will be delivered to customers on time.

Amid the controversy, aerospace industry sources said last year that a plan to sole source a Canadian purchase of the JSF — that is, award a contract to Lockheed Martin without formally entertaining competing proposals — is no longer on the table.

Still, a decision remains out of visual range.

Competitors to the JSF on the radar include Boeing, maker of the F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet, an advanced cousin to the CF-18, and the Eurofighter consortium, which builds the high-performance, European-made Typhoon. Both manufacturers are growing impatient for Ottawa to announce a competition between bidders, or even just to spell out its requirements for a new fighter. The Swedish Saab Gripen, already in service in a few small countries, is also reportedly under consideration.

The potential competitors want the Department of National Defence to pit the aircraft programs against each other for the contract, as was done during the late 1970s when Canada last chose a fighter.

In the absence of any published requirements from Ottawa spelling out what its new fighter must be able to do, potential contractors can only refer to the Canada First Defence Strategy, a set of military modernization goals announced by Stephen Harper in 2008.

“What Boeing is really communicating in Canada is they really ought to go to a competition for the next-generation fighter. Only in a competition will they get all the real facts and data and the real capabilities of the aircraft,” said Mike Gibbons, Super Hornet program manager for Boeing, in a recent interview.

There is evidence that the Eurofighter Typhoon seems to be in the running. The Post has learned that Canadian officials visited the United Kingdom during the past week to take a closer look at the program. Sources with knowledge of the fighter-selection process said an Industry Canada delegation spoke with BAE Systems, one of the four members of the European consortium that builds the aircraft, about potential benefits to the Canadian aerospace industry should National Defence choose the Typhoon.

Ottawa is not just being asked to choose between different airplanes, it must also endorse a major industrial effort to build and maintain them. Critics often regard fighter planes as flying pork barrels, with plenty of contracts for parts and maintenance to spread around in the purchasing country.

Unlike its rivals, the JSF program comes packaged with no “offsets,” or guarantees for the amount of industrial activity for customers. Instead, it offers subcontractors in those countries access to a common, competitive marketplace for parts and maintenance contracts. With perhaps 3,500 JSFs to be manufactured for various countries in the years to come, the sky is the limit in terms of potential benefits to Canada’s aerospace industry – but only if it signs on to buy F-35s.

“We really need to make a decision very quickly. The worst situation would be to not make a decision,” said Claude Lajeunesse, president of the Aerospace Industries Association of Canada, which has urged the Harper government to find a fighter replacement soon. “You’re talking billions of dollars.”

Whatever National Defence’s plan, continuing to fly the CF-18 much beyond 2020 is not an option, said the RMC’s Lt.-Col. Allen. Notwithstanding a $2.6-billion modernization program wrapping up this spring, the fleet is scheduled to be retired starting in 2017. By that time some of the airframes will be 35 years old. Dozens of CF-18s have already been cannibalized for parts.

“The ones that are flying have had their hip replacements,” Lt.-Col. Allen said.

The Canadian Forces’ 80 remaining CF-18s have served the country well since first being delivered in 1982. Said the retired colonel, “History has shown that Canada’s choice was very wise.”

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Yeah, suspected as much. Tragically for you both that is the basis for your arguments and opinions. You just tried to accuse a senior PAF officer of sayingdetrimental things about LCA without knowledge of the facts when both of you (probably after searching Google in a panic!) have no evidence to support your claims.

This is embaressing isit not? Especially when on this very thread a few posts ago I was asked for a link about my claims regarding IAF loding a protest to USAF and put up my evidence immediately…

I cannot exactly give you links regarding the PAF chiefs comments on LCA however the IAF chief talked about the JF 17 in the February 2009 issue of Defense Technology International.

I hope abhi will give you the links to the PAF chiefs comments on LCA.

And do you have a link to this?

Ask Abhimanyu he said it, I was just explaining to Insiq what Abhi said. 🙂