Angry Planet - America’s Joint Strike Fighter flies into a world of trouble

Episode Date: July 28, 2015

The United States plans to replace all of its fighter jets with the F-35 in the next decade or so, at a cost estimated to be at least $1 trillion. But the plane’s development hasn’t been smooth. So, is the Pentagon’s plan the smart way to go?Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' news. Several Inspector General reports, DOD Inspector General, and Government Accountability Office reports come out every year that say, hey guys, the F-35 is getting really expensive.

It's getting so expensive that we don't know how much it's going to end up costing the American taxpayers. We think it's going to be over a trillion dollars. This week on War College, War is Boring Writers, Joseph Krebithec, and Matthew Galt, take us on a tour of the F-35, the Pentagon's grandiose and expensive military fighter-ject project. You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of a world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here's your host, Jason Fields. I'm Jason Fields with Reuters, and I'm here talking with Matt Gaul and also Joe Trivethic.

We're talking today about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which is going to cost approximately a trillion dollars by the time we're all done and has been plagued with problems since the beginning. Matt, Joe, you want to just sort of fill us in what the program is and some of the problems it's run into? Yeah, Matt, you want to give the basic overview here? All right, so the F-35 is a joint-strike fighter being developed by Lockheed Martin. It's also called the Lightning 2 to another one of its fancy names. And it's probably, in my mind, one of the worst weapon systems that an American company has ever designed. And it is just plagued by problems, both mechanical and software. And the more we learn about it, the more we learn that the people that are flying the jet and testing out the jet hate the jet.

Would you say that's accurate, Joe? I'd say that's pretty accurate. I mean, I don't think you get any of them to really go on the public record for the media's consumption on that. you know, but it is, you know, it is a jet that is designed to be the future of American air power for the foreseeable future. It's going to be, it's called the Joint Strike Fighter because the Air Force, the Navy, and the Marine Corps will all be purchasing some number of aircraft, and they will be putting them into service to replace a variety of different planes that they all use. And it's estimated to cost over a trillion dollars by the end of its total life cycle. making it about the most expensive single weapons program in Defense Department history ever. So are these planes exactly the same?

I mean, did the Army, I'm sorry, the Navy, Air Force, Marines, do they need the exact same plane? Do they build to the same specifications? The planes, there are three different variants. The Air Force is F-35A. The Marine Corps is F-35B. and the Navy's F-35C, and they all share a number of basic components and a basic shape. The Air Force's version, of course, is designed to take off and land from bases on land. The Marine Corps variant has a special unique engine setup that allows it to take off and land vertically.

This was a requirement that the Marines had. uses a immensely complicated, gigantic fan that sits right behind the pilot to provide that lift. The rear nozzle of the engine also tilts down 90 degrees to blast itself up off the runway or off an amphibious assault ship. And that vertical take-off and lift variant is the F-35B, right? Right. And that engine is causing problems, that engine variant, correct? Yeah, that engine basically dictated the overall shape of the A, B, and the C, and the C model has a slightly larger wing and reinforced landing gear to allow it to be thrown off of Navy aircraft carriers and be able to land safely back aboard them. But the F-35B's engine is designed in such a way that it needs a certain amount of space and has to be positioned in a certain way.

And all three variants to allow for a certain amount of commonality in parts and in maintenance and the rest of it, basically were built to those dimensions, whether they have that engine or not. It all, they all, basically, the design revolves around the parameters of that engine, even though two out of the three purchasers will not use it. At least in the, in the U.S. military, there are also a dozen or so. other American allies who are either already purchasing this aircraft or are interested in possibly purchasing it down the line, both in Europe, the Middle East, and in Asia. Yeah, that's another interesting kind of wrinkle in this story, I think, is that America's not

just selling a janky jet to Americans, it's all of our allies as well. So this thing is going to be everywhere. And it's supposed to start rolling out next year. Is that right, Joe? Or is it this year? Oh, it's supposed to be the Marines. claims that their variant will be, quote-unquote, operationally capable by the end of the year. But the gun doesn't fire yet. Is that correct? Yes. And in a recent article put out by the National Defense Industry Association, they found a guy over at the American Enterprise Institute,

who, and I quote, let me read this. I brought this up, because this is just too good to, who cares about the gun? That's Thomas Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute, who then went on to say, I think this is going to end up being employed much less as a strike platform, and more basically as an arms scout that's stealthy and very operationally flexible. So, wait, so if it doesn't have a gun, what does it have? Oh, it does have a gun. It just has a gun that, well, you can't use the gun because, you know, and this goes back to the software issue that we really haven't gotten into.

This is one of the most advanced airplanes ever built. and a lot of, you know, fighter jets, current generation fighter jets have a sort of a panel of glass that the pilot will look at and projecting onto that panel of glass this heads-up display. They'll get to see all of the sort of flight information, you know, information about their currently selected weapon systems, etc. You know, it shows the targeting PIPPER, so to speak, you know, it allows them to aim and lock on and do all these, these fancy things. The F-35 dispenses with this heads-up display and puts the entire heads-up display information on a helmet. And it's a massive helmet, and it's a massively expensive helmet. Lockheed's current estimates, each helmet will cost $600,000 by itself. That's just the helmet. That's just each helmet. And the helmets basically sound like their virtual reality sets. I mean,

that's kind of... It's basically, since the pilot doesn't, since the plane has been designed so poorly, and the pilot does not have good all-around situational awareness. I mean, the engine behind the F-35B, and therefore that giant sort of space that has to be allotted to the engine means that the pilot really can't physically look behind themselves, which means they have to rely on a complicated set of cameras to look for them in all 360 degrees. Yeah, the way this helmet is basically supposed to work, and Joe, you can correct me if I'm wrong, is that it's just like you said, kind of like a virtual reality set, Jason,

where it's almost like someone wearing an Oculus Rift, if people know what that is, where you look to your left, and you're not actually looking through the camera, you're looking through the, not actually looking through the helmet, but looking through a virtual display of what the cameras outside of your F-35 are seeing.

So you should be able to look down and look through the bottom of the plane and look behind you, look through the back of the plane. Is that correct, Joe? Right, you know, it's supposed to provide a complete 360-degree situational awareness in all directions when it works. That sounds really cool, but the problem is the software's not done yet, as is the software for the gun also not done yet. So the camera... Well, so the software, right, it becomes extremely

complicated because, you know, people say, well, how much software does it take to run a gun? It's like, well, no actual software is taken to run the gun. The pilot can fire the gun, but the computer needs to take all the information from the fire control computer, and feed it into the helmet in such a way that the pilot actually sees in real time with no delay where he's aiming and how to correct for that, which means that you could be firing cannon shells now, but you don't really know where they're going necessarily. You can't really put them on target. You can't aim them.

And this is a big issue. And it's become a big problem in the program that basically the F-35A is the only variant to even have a gun as standard. The Marine Corps and the Navy planes will both have an external gun pot that won't even necessarily be fitted in all cases. Now, when we say a gun, actually, maybe we should actually make this just in case people don't know. When you talk about a gun, we're talking about a big machine gun, right? It's a Gatling gun. It's a four-barreled 25-millimeter Gatling cannon. And it fires, you know, I believe three or four thousand rounds a minute at its maximum speed. Of course, the Air Force variant carries about 180 shells in total

in its ammunition magazine giving the pilot about one three-round burst on that thing, and then he's done. What? Hold on. Which variant is that? That's the only gun with a fixed gun. The Air Force's F-35A, the gun has an ammunition reserve of 180 shells in total. And that basically, when you fire every three or four thousand rounds, minute that gives you about three seconds of firing time.

And just for comparison's sake, what are the guns on the F-16 and the F-15, Joe, if you happen to know off the top of your head? I can get that. Because, I mean, this is, fighter jets these days generally have relatively small ammunition capacities, but this is small even by those standards. and that's something that really should be pointed out that generally the guns on modern-day fighter jets are not really seen as super important, but the F-16 even has a 20-millimeter Gatlin cannon with over 500 rounds, and I think that's about standard. I mean, the A-10 ground attack plane that the F-35 is also supposed to replace, has a massive, massive 30-millimeter cannon. I mean, you know, people always love to point out that the gun itself is as big as a VW

beetle, and it has an ammunition capacity of over 1,300 rounds. So the F-35 can carry less than 200 shells, and an A-10 carries five times that amount. What about its capacity, the F-35's capacity for bombs and that kind of thing? Two bombs. Currently two bombs internally. It's because of the stealth design, it has to carry all of its weapons internally inside small weapons base that can be completely sealed up with sort of flush ceiling doors. That way the plane retains its stealth characteristics when it's not launching its missiles or dropping its bombs. That also means then that you have very limited space to work with. And right now the center weapons bay can carry two long-range air-to-air missiles and two bombs at the same time.

So four total weapons. And then can carry another, I believe, two or four short-range air-to-air missiles in bays mounted on the side. And, of course, people have already pointed out that this is not a whole lot of bombs for a plane that is supposed to be providing strike and close-air support capabilities. there is a plan to build external pylons that can be mounted on the wings if you would need them. And then you could rig up more bombs and such on them. But of course, once you've done that, you've completely negated the aircraft's stealth characteristics

because bombs are not stealthy, and those pylons are not stealthy. And so you rig all that stuff together, and your stealthy jet is not really very stealthy anymore. So in my mind, kind of what's happened here is the military, the Lockheed specifically, actually, has tried to come up with a jet fighter that does all the things, right? It's stealthy, it can drop bombs, it can supposedly get into dog fights, it's supposed to be everything to all branches and replace all of the current jets and planes. Yet, because of the, because when you design something that way that is supposed to be everything to everybody,

it's actually not really good at anything. It kind of does everything subpar. Is that accurate? Yeah, I mean, you know, it's a... There is an argument to be made for a jack-of-all-trades but master-of-none kind of airplane. We've seen these airplanes in,

you know, in the last 50 years. The F-4 Phantom is a good example of a tri-service, a so-called tri-service joint fighter. that took on a variety of roles and maybe wasn't really suited to any of them. But it was a plane that soldiered on and did well in the environment that it was built for. The F-35, by and large, from what we continue to be seeing, is that these are not teething troubles we're hearing about.

These are not issues in development. It's not, oh, you know, every plane has a certain amount of trouble. You know, you build prototypes. You have to figure out the problems, the flaws, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. the F-35 is a badly designed airplane. It's just a badly designed airplane. It is flawed down to its very core. And these are not things that are going to be worked out in teething.

You know, the software will eventually work. You will eventually be able to fire the gun. It won't change the fact that the gun remains extremely limited in the cases in which it's fitted at all. It will eventually be able to, drop bombs, it doesn't change the fact that those will be a very limited number of GPS guided bombs that it can carry internally, or if you decide to basically get rid of those highly touted stealth characteristics, then maybe you can carry more bombs. You know, these are design

flaws. The helmet may work. That actually might not work. The helmet is giving people serious problems. And when the helmet doesn't work, then the pilot has to go to the fact that they can't see. They just can't see. The plane is so badly designed that there's no backup plan. The pilot cannot see. In fact, War is Boring just recently obtained a report. Okay. So this report is the, is five pages of a test pilot's feelings about the F-35. And what they did, is they did a simulated the American military conducted a simulated

dog fight between an F-35 and an F-16 and I believe an F-14. Is that right, Joe? No, an F-16 D, a two-seat training F-16. And then one of the things they found, because the helmets don't work, is that the

viewing angles are so poor in the F-35 that it becomes impossible to win a dog fight at close quarters. And then, Joe, there were other problems as well? Well, the thing about the helmet is, is what really sort of bears mentioning is that the helmet is that the helmet is huge because it has to be huge. And in this test, the pilot found that given the constraints of the cockpit, he was basically pressed up against the cockpit windshield whenever he would turn his head. And then he would have to basically use his eyes to move and track the target rather than looking through the helmet visor, meaning that he wouldn't have to.

actually be able to see the stuff projected on the front of the visor anyways. One of the conclusions in the report was literally try and make the cockpit bigger somehow, you know, because there's just not enough room in the cockpit for the pilot wearing the helmet. Combined with the fact that it's a helmet that has to be linked to the computer, so he's got a cord that jacks into the helmet, and he's straining against that cord every time he has to move his head. And while they said it wasn't painful, they said it did severely limit movement, and you'd have to really strain your neck sometimes because you were plugged into the plane. So, okay, how do you think we got here? How could you, if you were an engineer, or I'm going to guess several thousand engineers, right?

I mean, do you have any thoughts as to how we ended up in a situation where there needs to be a helmet, but they're, you know, in order to fly the thing, but they didn't really think through the helmet first. By committee. By committee. That's how we got here. This is absolutely, this is what happens when you design weapon systems by committee, and you've got a lot of money on the table, I think. And this is when, and then when three services show up each with their own requirements, and they say, we need you to crowbar this into our. plane, and if you're making one plane, there was a lot of crowbar. So, I mean, we've seen, we've seen this kind of behavior before with, say, the Bradley fighting vehicle, where a long time ago, somebody designed a pretty good armored personnel

carrier, and then some people at the military looked at it, and they said, okay, well, why don't we tack on a gun here, a turret there needs to be able to do X, Y, and Z, and then you end up with this monster that doesn't really do live up to the spirit of its original intended use, which was just to be an armor personnel carrier. So they needed a, is this a fourth generation? I'm sorry, is this a fifth generation? Yeah, right? Yes, this is what we refer to as a fifth generation,

and the generation since the Second World War of the sort of general levels of capability. The Pentagon decided to get the fifth generation fighter jet going. Lockheed won, and just like Joe said, They, people started coming, different military branches started coming in and say, well, we needed to be stealth. We need to be able to fly so fast. We need to have this amount of armor on it. It needs to be adaptable. Marine said, I need a vertical take-off and lift.

And then you just end up with this Frankenstein monster of a bunch of different battlefield needs that don't necessarily all fit together well. Yeah, I mean, the kind of fighter jet that the Air Force wants combined with the kind of plane that the Marines want to replace their Harrier jump jets. I mean, these are completely different concepts of airplane. You know, that's not even, you know, just from an engineering perspective, if somebody were to look at those planes. Those planes fulfill dramatically different roles and dramatically different ideas of how you go about using AirPow. Like, at its most basic. So, but was one of the concepts, one of the ideas behind having a single joint strike fighter, that somehow the government was going to save money by sharing parts or something like that.

So that was, like I said, this is the first time they tried to do that. You know, this is hardly the first time the U.S. government has tried this idea. You know, they succeeded with the F4. The F4 is a prime example of succeeding with a plane that gets the job done. What people don't remember is that, you know, we love to remember the F-14 from Top Gun, but we don't remember that that plane came about because the Air Force and the Navy had tried to team up on another plane, the F-11, and the Navy quite smartly in my mind decided relatively early on in that debacle, they wanted nothing to do with what the F-11 was turning into. You know, generally regarded as probably one of the, maybe not the worst airplanes ever designed, but generally one of the most protracted development cycles. and a plane that just really was not very good at much of anything.

You know, it designed from the Air Force perspective being able to fly very fast at very low levels to sneak past Russian air defenses to drop nuclear bombs. I mean, yes, initially this kind of idea and concept will, yeah, save you money on paper. The problem with the F-35 is that it's been going on so long that we're well past the point that it would save money. And it's kind of frightening because several Inspector General reports, DOD Inspector General,

and Government Accountability Office reports come out every year that say, hey, guys, the F-35 is getting really expensive. It's getting so expensive that we don't know how much it's going to end up costing the American taxpayers. We think it's going to be over a trillion dollars. We're not sure. Please stop, watch out, you know, rein in the costs somehow. Well, how many planes are they planning on building or buying? The United States is planning on building over 1,000 planes,

and then there's a significant number of planes planned for foreign customers, some of which will be produced in part. A number of countries in Europe are contributing. Basically, they're building various portions of the airplane, and the Italians have secured a major concession that they are going to be the, they run a so-called final checkout and assembly facility at an Air Force base in Italy that will be the facility that will put the European F-35s together

and will also be the sole source of repair for the F-35 in Europe. Basically, when a European F-35 needs repairs, which from the sounds of it at the moment is going to be quite often, the Italians are going to basically, you're going to send them to Italy and Finna McCannia, the massive Italian defense conglomerate, is going to be in charge of that. And Finna McCannia and the Italian government have been fighting tooth and nail to secure that place in the F-35 program and basically assure, at least in their mind, that they're going to basically be raking in the money as time goes on as being the sole provider of those services. And Joe touches on here something I think is another really interesting. part of this story.

Every state and all the countries that are involved in purchasing the F-35 manufactures a little piece of it. How many states is it? Over 40. It's most of the states. I would have to go look at a list that I apologize. I don't have a...

But it's over 40. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely over. Almost every state in the country has a little piece of this plane that they're manufacturing and then it all gets shipped out to Fort Worth in Texas where it's all put together. or into Italy, where it's all put together for the European market. So what you have is a complete lack from legislators in this country sounding the alarm on this thing because there's people in a lot of their districts

whose jobs rely on working at a plant that manufactures a piece of the F-35. So it makes it really hard for anyone to stand up against it because it is creating jobs all over the country. you know, they can't be denied. There's a lot of money. There's a whole lot of money in it. Yeah. I guess there's a trillion dollars. Yeah.

At least. So let me ask, what other problems have people run into while trying to actually fly the plane? The engine sometimes catches on fire. Joe would know. Yeah, the plane, last summer, about a year ago now, actually, an F-35A, one of the Air Force's F-35A's spontaneously combusted on the runway trying to take off. The incident report was recently released, and that accident report had some pretty shocking statistics. Firstly, it was declared a Class A mishap, and the Air Force Reserves Class A mishap, that term means that somebody had to die.

somebody had to be permanently disabled or the plane had to be completely totaled or it had to cause more than $2 million in property damage when the accident occurred. The F-35, the rear two-thirds of the airplane were completely fried. They don't even know how much it's going to cost yet, but they assume that plane is totaled. It's going to basically be at least $50 million in damage that just... just gone. And this is because of a relatively simple failure when it comes down to it. They described it, you know,

hyper-technically as what they called an uncontrolled blade release. And what that means is that one of the turbine blades, one of the fan blades inside the jet turbine broke off and came loose and went careening through the fuel

system and through the fuselage. And fuel then filled the cavity where the engine was still running and was already burning fuel and caused this massive internal fire in the entire central cavity of the plane you know basically the pilot was on touch the pilot managed to jump out he was thankfully still on the ground

god knows what would have happened had this happened in mid-flight which easily could have happened i mean it's not a was not a failure that was linked to to any particular environmental condition the engine just failed and then led to a catastrophic failure of everything else. They have said that they've known that this was a possibility, right? Like they said that in the accident report, that this sometimes just... They said combining the accident report and what happened in the accident report

with the most recent director of operational test and evaluations report on the F-35, which itself was pretty damning. You could see the concerns about engine fires and concerns about the way the engine was situated inside this giant sort of central cavity and the way the fuel system was positioned around and the hydraulic system was positioned around it, they had been worried about catastrophic failures for almost a decade. You know, they said since fiscal year 2006, they had been voicing, you know, engineers have been voicing concerns about catastrophic failures leading, you know, basically after some

sort of engine failure leading to complete destruction of the airplane, or at least, least a catastrophe, what they called a catastrophic failure of associated systems. I mean, these are all hyper-technical terms meant to sort of downplay the seriousness of it, but they were talking about basically that if something happened in the engine, the central compartment would burst into flames,

and there would be nothing you could do about. Well, so let's just, I mean, a couple of things to sort of wrap up. I mean, first of all, what does the company say about these planes? Don't worry, be happy. One of the most interesting things that we saw recently actually from Lockheed because it's been getting, it's being produced in Italy right now

the Italian media has been going after them a lot saying that these planes are scary and terrible, a lot of the same things that we're saying. Lockheed released a statement on their website debunking F-35 myths, quote unquote, but it's really interesting, they really talk around them. They don't, like, one of them is that the F-35 will just catch on fire sometimes when it's going at high speeds. The way they debunked that was by saying, oh, it doesn't catch fire sometimes at high speeds. And then they just kind of move on. They talked about the software system problems and the lines of code. They say, they acknowledged that there were problems with

the code and said, you know what, the military's happy with it. They understand that we're going have all the code written for them by 2017. Yeah, we're fixing it. We're fixing it. Everything's going to be okay, guys. We're fixing the plan. The helmet one was the best one, because they brought up complaints about the helmet, and basically that the helmet doesn't work. And their response to that was, but pilots really like it. Yes, that was... Didn't answer about whether it worked or not, but said, from the reports we're getting, the pilots really like it. I'm like, well, liking it when it works is not the same as it working. Right. Well, so, okay, so does this put

I mean, this is supposed to be, we're going to phase out the jets that we have in service, right? And this is supposed to replace us. Okay. So where does that leave us? I mean, as far as a nation, are we out? When a certain type of plane has a problem, you ground the fleet. This is one of the things that's starting to be brought up now is that when you have a crash and you don't know why a plane crashed, you ground the fleet to figure out whether that's something that's going to happen across the fleet,

whether there's some problem with the wing or some problem with the engine or what have you, because you don't want people flying when you don't really know what's going on. And this happens. That happens across the life cycle of planes as they get older and things you may not have thought about happen. That's normal. The F-35 already has a lot of problems, and a lot of problems keep cropping up. And if one of these problems cropped up and it was, you know, 75,000, percent of our combat fighter jets, well, then you've just grounded 75 percent of your combat fighter jets.

You know, one failure has just led to, you know, those planes can't fly. Those, you know, if we're fighting a war, well, those planes can't fly until you figure out what's going on because you don't want pilots basically blowing up in midair. And, you know, that's reasonable. And then you roll out whatever you have in the Boneyard and hope you've got enough F-16 still laying around that you can get up in the air. If anything. I mean, that would be, you would hope that that might be an option. That might not be an option. We're blowing up F-16s.

We're taking the first generation of F-16s that have gone to the Boneyard, the oldest ones in the Boneyard, and we're turning them into target drones and shooting them down. You mentioned... So there might not be any left. One of the things I kind of think about, as we've been covering the F-35, is sometimes I feel like we're seeing the last great jet. before an era that's completely like before the skies are completely taken over by drones um

you want to bring up the what the navy says about that yeah no absolutely because the navy has already said that this will that the f35 will be the last manned um jet that the last manned aircraft that they put in the sky everything else after this will be drones from the navy um and i just I feel like we're watching the last like the death knell of the great fighter pilots Like, this is the end of top gun. And I feel like the catastrophic failure of this weapon system will usher in an era of drone dominance. And the sky will double down on unmanned aerial vehicles after this.

I could be completely wrong, but I just, that's where I feel things. Well, the Navy, the Navy at least believes this. The Navy has just appointed someone to basically be, you know, head of, you know, drone planning. I forget the exact title of this new position. but they've created a policy office that will oversee unmanned warfare, basically. You know, and they are determined to, they have a new way of saving money, getting rid of pilots. You know, that saves a whole lot of money. Training pilots cost a ton of money.

And they're concerned that, you know, this will do them in. I know there's people that would argue against that, and I think it's, I think we're looking at end of an era here. It's going to be an existential question for sure going on, because, I mean, especially if the F-35 continues to be this bad. People really will make, you know, they will ask these questions. They will be like, is this really worth it? Well, I'll tell you what. I think this sounds like a good place to stop, but also a good place to start the next conversation, talk about drones as they are now and where are they going to be. So thanks very much, both of you for joining me.

And we'll talk next week. After we spoke, Lockheed, who was making the F-35, had this to say in defense of their plane. So this is the official response from Lockheed Martin that is published on their official F-35 website, www.f35.com. Joint program office response to Wars Boring Blog. The media report on the F-35 and F-16 flight does not tell the entire story. The F-35 involved was AF2, which is an F-35 designated for flight sciences testing or flying qualities of the aircraft. It is not equipped with a number of items that make today's production of F-35's fifth-generation fighters. Aircraft, AF2, did not have the mission system software to use the sensors that allow the F-30 to see its enemies long before it knows the F-35 is in the area.

Second, the AF2 does not have the special stealth coding. that operational F-35s have that make them virtually invisible to radar. And third, it is not equipped with the weapon or software that allows the F-35 pilot to turn, aim a weapon with the helmet, and fire at an enemy without having to point the airplane at its target. The tests cited in the article were done earlier this year to test the flying qualities of the F-35 using visual combat maneuvers to stress the system. and the F-16 involved was used as a visual reference to maneuver against. While the dog-fighting scenario was successful in showing the ability of the F-35 to maneuver to the edge of its limits without exceeding them,

and handle in a positive and predictable manner, the interpretation of the scenario's results could be misleading. The F-35's technology is designed to engage, shoot, and kill its enemies from long distances, not necessarily in visual dog-fighting situations. There have been numerous occasions where a four-ship of F-35s has engaged a four-ship of F-16s in simulated combat scenarios, and the F-35s won each of those encounters because of its sensors, weapons, and stealth technology. Now, as Joe has gone out to point out in print, Lockheed is kind of talking out of both sides of their mouth here. In the spring 2003 edition of the Air Force's Air and Space Power Journal, John Kent, a senior communication specialist with Lockheed Martin, wrote that the goals for the F-35 are lofty, end quote, and that the plane would be a, quote, single pilot, survival, first day of war combat fighter with precision, all-weather strike capability that uses a wide variety of air-to-air surface and air-to-air weapons, and that defends itself in a dog fight.

So expectations have changed. As of 2003, the F-35 was supposed to be a dogfighter, but both Lockheed and the Air Force knew that this kind of wasn't going to fly, and by 2012, they were adjusting expectations. In 2014, Air Force General Mike Hostage, who was then Chief of Air Combat Command, told breaking defense that, quote, an F-35 pilot who engages in a dog fight has probably made a mistake. However, later in the same interview, he made it a point to say that an F-35 pilot who was caught off-guard would still be able to move as well, maneuver as well as an F-16, which is contradictory to what he was saying earlier. What the Air Force and what Lockheed wants this fighter to be, all things to all pilots, is at odds with what we're hearing from actual pilots. If you'll remember again in that statement that I just read, the dogfighting scenario was successful in showing the ability of the F-35 to maneuver to the edge of its limits,

which stands in stark contrast to the actual pilots report, where they wrote lateral direction control was often unpredictable, and the rudder inputs often feel sluggish, gradual, or delayed. Now, this was just a test, but it doesn't look. look good. Next time on Reuters War College. There are huge rates of PTSD

in the drone community and other things because, I mean, these guys are just staring at people all day long and then every so often they have to blow them up.