Gen. Mike Hostage On The F-35; No Growlers Needed When War Starts
By COLIN CLARK on June 06, 2014 at 4:25 AM
Aerial refueling of F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters at Eglin AFB, Fla.
For years, the news about the most expensive conventional weapons system in US history, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, has been driven by its soaring costs, technical problems and schedule screw-ups. The government and Congress and the public rarely speak about what the F-35 will do, how effectively it could destroy an enemy’s air defenses, shoot down an enemy plane, or find and strike other high value targets.
I spoke with dozens of experts in the government, the defense industry and academia about likely scenarios for the F-35 and to flesh out some of its capabilities. This is the main piece we’re running this week about the F-35, based on my interview with Gen. Hostage and those other experts. The second piece deals with the cyber and electronic warfare capabilities of the F-35.
The issue of how effective the F-35 would be in a classic dogfight often arises. Gen. Hostage noted during our interview that the F-35 pilot who engages in a dogfight has either made a mistake or been very unlucky. Shooting down other planes using kinetics is only one role of the F-35. Perhaps air forces around the world are going to have to come up with a new honor other than ace to define those who fly the F-35. What should a pilot be awarded for outsmarting the best air defense systems in the world or injecting something like Stuxnet into the enemy’s command and control system? So much of what this aircraft will do has nothing to do with shooting down another pilot that we may need a new term.
The F-35′s cross section is much smaller than the F-22′s, but that does not mean, Hostage concedes, that the F-35 is necessarily superior to the F-22 when we go to war. In fact, Hostage says that it takes eight F-35s to do what two F-22s can handle.
“The F-35 is geared to go out and take down the surface targets,” says Hostage, leaning forward. “The F-35 doesn’t have the altitude, doesn’t have the speed [of the F-22], but it can beat the F-22 in stealth.” But stealth — the ability to elude or greatly complicate an enemy’s ability to find and destroy an aircraft using a combination of design, tactics and technology — is not a magic pill, Hostage reminds us.
“The F-35 was fundamentally designed to go do that sort of thing [take out advanced IADS]. The problem is, with the lack of F-22s, I’m going to have to use F-35s in the air superiority role in the early phases as well, which is another reason why I need all 1,763. I’m going to have some F-35s doing air superiority, some doing those early phases of persistent attack, opening the holes, and again, the F-35 is not compelling unless it’s there in numbers,” the general says. “Because it can’t turn and run away, it’s got to have support from other F-35s. So I’m going to need eight F-35s to go after a target that I might only need two Raptors to go after. But the F-35s can be equally or more effective against that site than the Raptor can because of the synergistic effects of the platform.”
The F-35, critics say, can be spotted by low frequency radar (as can almost any aircraft, no matter how stealthy) and isn’t as good at dogfighting as is the F-22. But Hostage says, as do other senior Air Force and Marine officers, that an F-35 pilot who engages in a dogfight has probably made a mistake or has already broken through those IADS lanes and is facing a second wave of enemy aircraft. The F-35, he says, has “at least” the maneuverability and thrust and weight of the F-16. The F-35 is to the F-22 as the F-16 is to the F-15. The latter aircraft are the kings of air to air combat. The F-35 and the F-16 are the mainstay of the air fleet, designed for both air-to-air and air-to-ground attacks.
In the end, what marks the F-35 as a dominant weapon is its combination of stealth, computing power, built-in targeting and databases, sensors that we hear can reach out more than 1,200 miles in some scenarios, with all of that fed to the pilot in his cockpit with automatically-generated target, weapons and route choices though his helmet.
“And instead of having to fuse three pieces of information and decide if that’s an adversary or not, the airplane is telling him, with an extremely high degree of confidence, what that adversary is and what they’re doing and what all your wingmen are doing,” Hostage explains. “It’s a stunning amount of information.”
Breaking Defense excerpt: General Hostage on F-35
