Manoj Ambat's Blog dealing with Defence, Foreign Affairs, Strategic Affairs and Politics

USAF F-22 Raptor ( Image credits- Wikimedia Commons / Author- USAF) Source- The National Interest Author- Dave Majumdar America’s F-35 clearly has its share of problems. Such challenges only compound the U.S. Air Force’s real dilemma: not having enough dedicated air superiority fighters as potential competitors like Russia and China beef up their own capabilities. The problem stems from the fact that the Air Force’s Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor fleet was terminated after only 187 aircraft were built–less than half of the 381 jets the service needed as a bare minimum. Speaking to reporters at the Air Force Association convention in National Harbor, Md., just outside the capital, Air Combat Command commander Gen. Hawk Carlisle said he would love to see the Raptor back in production. “I dream about it every night,” Carlisle said. Indeed, the Raptor has proven to be a formidable warplane with its unique combination of stealth, speed, maneuverability, altitude and senso

Image source- Wikimedia Commons / Author- Sergey Krivchikov Source- Russia & India Report Source- Rakesh Krishnan Simha America’s F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter may end up becoming cannon fodder for Russian Sukhois, suggests an August 2015 report by the US-based National Security Network (NSN). In ‘Thunder without Lightning: The High Costs and Limited Benefits of the F-35 Program’, the think tank’s policy analyst Bill French and researcher Daniel Edgren say the F-35 is likely to be “outmaneuvered” and “outgunned” by its “near peers” such as the Russian Su-27 series Flanker fighter jets. The report backs what a number of independent aviation experts have been saying all along – the F-35 is a truly useless aircraft that will be a sitting duck if it comes up against a serious air force. “The F-35’s performance characteristics compare unfavourably with already deployed foreign 4th Generation fighters such as the Russian designed MiG-29 Fulcrum and Su-27 Fla

USAF F-22 Raptor ( Source- Wikimedia Commons / Credits- USAF) Source- The National Interest Author- James Hasik The idea hasn’t gotten beyond the Duffel Blog and this column, but what if the USAF had long ago dropped the F-35A? As I noted last month, had the Pentagon foregone developing a wholly new fighter jet, the $100 billion it has spent to date on the F-35 project would have bought about 740 Eurofighter Typhoons. Euro-anything, of course, is hardly the USAF’s style, and the War Department hasn’t bought a French fighter since 1918. Doing so today is about as likely as Rob Farley getting a “Friend of the Air Force” award from General Welsh. So what else might the USAF have done? As a first-order vignette in this alternative history, let’s assume that former Defense Secretary Robert Gates wouldn’t have ended the F-22 program in 2009 at 187 aircraft. That said, the answer was never just a lot more F-22s. The first problem is procurement and operating costs. The US

Source- Wikimedia Commons / Credits-  United States Navy Source- The National Interest Author- Andrew Davies Last week there was a real flurry in the press and the blogosphere about the performance of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Or, more accurately, about the lack of maneuver performance in a trial against an F-16—a design that dates back to the 1970s. War is Boring has been running hard on the issue, with writer David Axe—a frequent critic of the F-35—leading the charge. The story was picked up by the mainstream press, including an ‘exclusive’ in The Australian today. The story is based on a leaked test pilot’s report (PDF) of an air-to-air exercise in January this year. (Note: the report is marked Export Controlled Information FOUO. For ASPI Strategist readers inside government, this is one to access at home.) The crux of the story is that the F-35 was beaten because it couldn’t outturn the F-16, and suffered from “energy disadvantage for every engagement.” To th

F-35 in wind tunnel tests ( Image credits- Wikimedia Commons) Source- The Diplomat Author- Franz-Stefan Gady The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter will not receive the software package required to operate the Pentagon’s top close-air support bomb until 2022, according to military.com. The article also stated that the JSF office already had discovered earlier that the precision-guided air-dropped Small Diameter Bomb II (SDB II) does not fit onto Joint Strike Fighter Marine Corps variant without modifications to the aircraft’s weapons bay. Yet the Department of Defense will wait until the F-35 B (the Marine Corps variant of the F-35) reaches initial operability before modifying the F-35’s armament bay, since the weapon will be useless without the right software package. The various systems of the plane require more than 10 billion individual lines of code, all of which are broken down by the developers into individual blocks numbered 1 to 4, then further subdivided into

J-20 combat Aircraft ( Image source- Wikimedia commons/ Credits- Alexandr Chechin) Source- The National Interest Author- Dave Majumdar China’s new stealth fighters might one day be able to match their American equivalents in battle, Pentagon and industry officials fear. Indeed, China is showing off its latest Shenyang J-31 stealth fighter at the Zhuhai air show in the Guangdong province. To meet the challenge, the Pentagon needs to continue to buy the F-35 and start developing a future fighter to counter the rising threat. “The J-31—along with the J-20 [the other Chinese stealth fighter]—is a tangible demonstration of the efforts made by China to counter the significant advantage the U.S. has with the [Lockheed Martin] F-22 and F-35,” said one senior U.S. military official with extensive experience with so-called fifth-generation fighters. “They recognize that fourth-gen airplanes [like the F-15, F-16, F/A-18, Russian Su-27 and so on] are quickly becoming obsolete. Th

F-35 ( Image credits- Wikimedia Commons/ Flickr) Sources- Russia & India report Author- Rakesh Krishna Simha Outgunned by the Su-30 family of aircraft and suffering critical design flaws, the American F-35 is staring down the barrel of obsolescence – and punching a gaping hole in western air defences. Built to be the deadliest hunter killer aircraft of all time, the F-35 has quite literally become the hunted. In every scenario that the F-35 has been wargamed against Su-30 Flankers, the Russian aircraft have emerged winners. America’s newest stealth aircraft – costing $191 million per unit – is riddled with such critical design flaws that it’s likely to get blown away in a shootout with the super-maneuverable Sukhois. Stubby wings (that reduce lift and maneuverability), a bulbous fuselage (that makes it less aerodynamic) low speed and a super hot engine (which a half decent radar can identify) are just a few of the major flaws that will expose its vulnerability

F-35 ( Image Courtesy- Wikimedia commons/Author- Andy Wolfe) According to  Want China Times , China’s nationalistic  Global Times  has reported that China’s currently military capabilities would be unable to combat the F-35.  Want China Times  cites the  Global Times  as saying that in a hypothetical aircraft carrier battle between the U.S. and China, China’s current carrier-based fighter, the J-15, would be unable to compete with American and allied F-35s. “In an attack on the Liaoning the F-35 could carry joint strike missiles developed in Norway, which have a range of 290 kilometers. The J-15, on the other hand, could carry two YJ8-3 anti-missiles with a range of only 180 km,” the report cited  Global Times  as saying. It continues: “In terms of radar technology, the U.S. has the clear upper hand with its AN/APG-81 AESA radar developed by Northrop Grumman, which has a thousand transceivers with the ability to simultaneously search for 23 moving targets, including 19 targets

F-35 ( Image Courtesy- Wikimedia commons/ United States Navy) The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter—the jet that the Pentagon is counting on to be the stealthy future of its tactical aircraft—is having all sorts of shortcomings. But the most serious may be that the JSF is not, in fact, stealthy in the eyes of a growing number of Russian and Chinese radars. Nor is it particularly good at jamming enemy radar. Which means the Defense Department is committing hundreds of billions of dollars to a fighter that will need the help of specialized jamming aircraft that protect non-stealthy—“radar-shiny,” as some insiders call them—aircraft today. These problems are not secret at all. The F-35 is susceptible to detection by radars operating in the VHF bands of the spectrum. The fighter’s jamming is mostly confined to the X-band, in the sector covered by its APG-81 radar. These are not criticisms of the program but the result of choices by the customer, the Pentagon. To suggest that the F-

F-35 Lightning (Image courtesy- Wikimedia commons and US Navy) Six Air Force F-35A Joint Strike Fighter aircraft are currently at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., to test the aircraft's stealth and sensor technologies against representations of Russian, Iranian and Chinese air-defenses.  "The surface threat is a tough problem because it is a system of systems and the emerging threats that we have right now can see you hundreds of miles away. If the missile is big enough it can shoot you from hundreds of miles away," said Thomas Lawhead, operations lead for JSF integration office. "If you have stealth as you go in all those ranges shrink down. Hopefully they shrink down enough to where you can get in and launch a weapon without being seen." He explained that the most advanced sensors have pivoted from European-based systems to ones in Asia developed by China. "If you look back to 2001 when the JSF threat started, the threats were mostly European c