The F-35 program executive officer and Pentagon procurement chief have come out in strong defence of the Joint Strike Fighter saying they don't expect any airplane that is currently in development to be seriously competitive with the 5th Generation fighter.
The comments, from executive officer Lieutenant General Christopher Bogdan and Pentagon official Frank Kendall come after much criticism in recent months of the joint strike fighter, the most notable claiming that in a test dogfight with an F-16 fighter, the F-35 was outperformed.
“Nothing compares to it. I’d put this airplane up against any airplane in the world today, tomorrow and for the next 20 or 30 years and we will come out ahead,” LTGEN Bogdan said.
According to Lockheed Martin executives the key performance parameters set for the JSF do not call for the aircraft to be superior to the F-16 and F/A-18C/D in air-to-air combat, but they demand comparable performance in terms of sustained and instantaneous g and acceleration. The executives and pilots have stated that when including sensor fusion, stealth and other attributes, the F-35 will be superior in air combat, by margins of 400-600%, to so-called “fourth-generation” fighters such as the F-16.
“People all need to look at what F-35 really is,” said an aviator who spoke with Aviation Week.
“A stealth A-7 bomb truck, capable of first-night suppression of enemy air defences, with limited self-escort. It is, as software-configured right now, not a light air-combat-maneuvering-capable platform. This is what we saw with the early F/A-18E/F blocks: millions of lines of code, and in need of constant update. But, in this case, it’s becoming increasingly easier to rewrite the code laws to allow for those changes.”
At a ceremony this week to mark the rollout of the first Norwegian Air force F-35A, Bogdan and Kendall answered questions about the expected combat capability of the F-35 against the Russian 5th generation Sukhoi T-50 (PAK FA) fighter.
The JSF “is a very good dogfighting aircraft. It can pull 9g and turn almost equal to our modern fighters. But that’s not what it was uniquely designed to do. When two aircraft meet at the ‘merge’ in a visual engagement, this aircraft will have so many ‘smarts’ before you get there. And it will probably know about the other aircraft long before [the adversary] knows about it. The dogfight will end quickly, if it happens at all.”
Kendall desribed the classic dogfighting concept of manouevering to "get on each other's tail" as "pretty much obsolete".
But as another pilot told Aviation Week, “My belief is that the tactics against the F-35 will be something which we are not used to saying: If you see one – get close.”