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Major
General Charles R. Davis
Program Executive Officer
Joint Strike Fighter Program
200 12th Street South, Suite 600
Arlington, VA 22202-5402
Dear Major General Davis,
I am writing in response to your comments published in the 24th
February edition of Inside Defense.
Whether your comments to journalist Jason Sherman were made with
the intent to publish, or off the record “in confidence”, is
immaterial, as they are now public knowledge.
You have accused me, and my colleagues, of “having an agenda”, as if an
agenda were bad, but you
have misrepresented that agenda, whether wilfully or by failing to
study our work. Our agenda is simple: to
ensure that the Western alliance never again suffers the humiliation of
defeat in combat by opponents with superior air combat capabilities.
Your suggestion that Air Power Australia (APA) somehow has a primary
focus in criticizing your program is false, in fact, of the thirty
three (33) papers published in our APA
Analyses research journal since its launch in 2004, only five,
or 15
percent, are specifically focused upon the F-35 program. Moreover, APA
has argued widely and strongly for acquisition reform, and proper force
structure planning for Western Air Forces. APA has dealt with a wide
range of problem areas, including aerial refuelling, airbase hardening,
regional and national military strategy, the proliferation of advanced
Russian weapons technology, and matters
of governance, military culture and ethos. We have produced the most
complete and up-to-date technical analytical study of the fundamental,
pervasive and unprecedented changes taking place in the way
Russia and China build, deploy and intend to operate their fighters,
guided missiles and radars.
Make no mistake, the world is changing around us and many of these
changes are not for the better. Our ability, as the Western alliance,
to maintain global military superiority, will depend upon us having
genuinely superior capabilities. There is no room for the intellectual
sloth which has pervaded much of the Joint Strike Fighter Program since
its inception.
You have misrepresented the numerous works produced by APA on modern
air combat, claiming that APA has a “a very 1950s-type of mindset”.
Most of the work produced by APA deals specifically with Beyond Visual
Range missile combat in a networked environment, with modern digital
technology and stealth, none of which was even possible two decades
ago. Had you invested the time to study these works, you would know
that Lockheed-Martin’s briefing on JSF air combat simulations, detailed
recently in Janes Defence Weekly,
directly validated the two principal concerns raised by APA about the
air combat simulations your team performed on the JSF: the failure to
model the latest generation of adversary fighters, and the failure to
address the very frequent scenarios in which Beyond Visual Range
engagements devolve into close combat engagements. I will leave others
to elaborate on this matter in more detail.
You accused APA of a “rudimentary understanding of stealth”, a
remarkable claim given that APA employed the very same computational
electromagnetics modelling techniques used by every US contractor and
research establishment in the business. Had you taken the time to study
this work, you would not have falsely claimed that APA made no
allowances for radar absorbent materials in our analysis, as APA
actually made unusually generous allowances, favouring the F-35. In
fact the analysis produced by APA also included the impact of
refraction upon target aspect angles in long range missile engagement
geometries, a factor usually not considered in such analyses, also
favouring the F-35.
You failed to mention that the analysis produced by APA validated the
public claims made by Lockheed-Martin and the Air Force, that the F-35
has respectable -30 dBSM class front sector stealth performance. If the
simulations and analysis produced by APA are so poor, as you have
claimed, why do they validate Lockheed-Martin’s public claims? By
implication, do you therefore have similar doubts about the work
emanating from Lockheed-Martin and the Air Force? And if not, why not?
You failed to mention the
principal point made by APA, which is that inevitable evolutionary
advancements in
Russian radar power-aperture, signal and data processing, and missile
performance, have surpassed the stealth specification to which the F-35
is being built.
APA invested considerable effort in finding the optimal escape
manoeuvre for the F-35, to minimise its exposure to a Surface to Air
Missile battery, giving the aircraft every advantage we could. The
aircraft consistently died in combat, because its poor aft sector
stealth and low escape speed allowed the missile to run it down and
kill it every time. The key factors were improved radar power-aperture
and missile kinematic performance in the Russian Surface to Air Missile
batteries. When APA applied this very same model to the F-22, it
survived
every time, due to much better aft sector stealth and supercruise.
Your comments on classified access are curious, insofar as the Laws of
Physics and Rules of Probability have no respect for such bureaucratic
devices. Hiding information by such means merely makes it harder for an
analyst to divine the ground truth, not impossible.
Your program is a
techno-strategic failure, because its initial definition was predicated
on fundamentally wrong assumptions about the future threat environment
in which the aircraft would have to survive. At the root of that
failure was
intellectual laziness on the part of the architects of the Joint Strike
Fighter Program, who failed to account for future evolutionary and
revolutionary growth in opposing radar, missile, and aircraft
technology.
We are left with an aircraft that will never be able to do the job it
was intended to do and survive, in high intensity combat, even if it
can be made to eventually meet its key performance targets.
What was most disappointing about your comments, is that you chose
to attack APA for doing the difficult critical thinking and rigorous
analytical
work which your office should have done in the first place, and clearly
failed to do. The Joint Strike Fighter Program Office, under your
leadership as PEO and previously DPEO, became infatuated with marketing
the program over managing it. Given your professional and academic
background in engineering, science and test flying, you should have
known better. Others I am sure can and should elaborate on this matter
further.
I have had the privilege of knowing a great many serving and former
United States Air Force officers over the three decades I have been
involved with military aviation, and I take much pride in being able to
say that nearly all of them remain good friends and professional
colleagues. People
often ask why I keep a framed picture of Gen Curtis E LeMay in my
office. The answer is simple – the values of integrity, honour,
persistence and hard work, which Gen LeMay promoted so long and so
hard, are
worthwhile and necessary if anything good is to be achieved.
In conclusion, your comments to Inside
Defense are mostly
misrepresentations and errors of fact, and not what should be
expected from a General Officer in the world’s finest Air Force.
Sincerely,
Carlo Kopp, BE(Honours), MSc, PhD(Monash), SMAIAA, MIEEE, PEng
Head, Capability Analysis, Air Power Australia
Editor, Air Power Australia Analyses,
Editor, Air Power Australia NOTAM series,
Defence Analyst and Consulting Engineer
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