Donald Trump’s Least Favorite Warplane Has Finally Been Deployed Overseas

Twenty-four years after it entered development, the US military's stealthy F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has deployed overseas for its first frontline missions.

On Jan. 18, 2017, 10 F-35Bs from Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 121 began landing at a Marine air base in Iwakuni, Japan after a nine-day, multi-leg journey from the squadron's previous base in Yuma, Arizona.

Once settled in, the newly-arrived squadron will be part of US Pacific Command's routine contingency planning for war with China or North Korea. If fighting breaks out in the region, the F-35s could go to war.

But that doesn't mean they'll win. The Joint Strike Fighter suffers serious, ongoing problems that cast doubt on its combat prowess. Especially in the Pacific region.

The Joint Strike Fighter suffers serious, ongoing problems that cast doubt on its combat prowess. Especially in the Pacific region.

Since initial development of the new plane began in 1993, the Lockheed Martin-made F-35 has weathered a three-year delay, cost overruns, technical malfunctions and harsh criticism from political leaders. Today a single F-35B—that's the Marines' vertically-launching "jump jet" version of the plane—set US taxpayers back as much as $250 million once you factor in development costs.

That's more than twice the price of a new Boeing F-15 Eagle or F/A-18E/F Super Hornet. It could cost $400 billion to buy all 2,400 F-35s the Pentagon wants.

On Dec. 22, Pres. Donald Trump tweeted about the Joint Strike Fighter's "tremendous cost and cost overruns" and threatened to dump the plane in favor of the Super Hornet.

Based on the tremendous cost and cost overruns of the Lockheed Martin F-35, I have asked Boeing to price-out a comparable F-18 Super Hornet!

Donald J. Trump December 22, 2016

To be fair, the F-35 has many supporters. In stark contrast to Trump, US Defense Secretary James Mattis, a retired Marine general, is a strong proponent of the Joint Strike Fighter—especially its potential to modernize not only the US military, but allied forces, too. "Many of our allies have got their air superiority on the F-35 program, and it bonds us tightly together with them," Mattis told a Senate committee on Jan. 12, 2017.

In any event, the F-35 has endured. But its ultimate fate still hasn't been decided. Early on, the Pentagon had hoped the single-engine, single-seat F-35 would replace nearly all other fighter jets in the inventories of the US Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and the air arms of friendly countries.

Image: JSF.mil

Now some politicians and military officials are already thinking about replacing the Joint Strike Fighter. That has increased the pressure on the Marine aviators in Japan to prove that their expensive new plane works—and should remain at the center of the Pentagon's plans to modernize American air power.

But the Pacific might not be the best possible place for the F-35 to demonstrate its worth. Flying from Iwakuni, the Marine Joint Strike Fighters could find themselves going up against the latest Chinese warships and stealth warplanes and deeply-entrenched North Korean forces.

It's not at all clear that the F-35s are up to all of those tasks. "As it stands now, the F-35 would need to run away from combat and have other planes come to its rescue," Dan Grazier and Mandy Smithberger, analysts with the Project on Government Oversight in Washington, D.C., quipped in a recent op-ed.

Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 121 was the very first operational F-35 squadron. The Marine Corps declared the unit combat-ready back in the summer of 2015. But critics pointed out that "combat-ready" didn't really mean much.

The F-35 is still technically in its $55-billion "system development and demonstration" phase. Many of the plane’s capabilities are not ready for daily use, including its gun, many of its other weapons, and the special helmet the pilot wears. The Joint Strike Fighter's software—the most complex ever on a warplane—is buggy and incomplete.

Just getting the F-35 ready for its intensive, final test flights could take until 2018, possibly 2019, according to David Duma, the Pentagon's acting director of test and evaluation. In its latest annual report, released the day after the Marine F-35s left Yuma, Duma's office criticized the Joint Strike Fighter's developers for simplifying testing in order to speed up the schedule—a move Duma's team described as "risky."

The Joint Strike Fighter program office defended the F-35, highlighting the plane's "significant progress in maturing."

The program office's protestations don't change the fact that the Marines have sent incomplete aircraft to the Pacific front lines. Worse, the F-35s arrived at a time of heightened tensions. In January 2017, the Chinese navy's first aircraft carrier Liaoning sailed with her escorts on the vessel's first frontline deployment, passing close to Japan and Taiwan in a bold show of strength.

Around the same time, Beijing's air force was forming its first squadron of Chinese-made J-20 stealth fighters. Meanwhile, North Korea prepared to test at least one new type of long-range ballistic missile that could, in theory, be armed with a nuclear warhead and possibly reach the United States.

Designed in the early 1990s when the Pentagon was still preparing to refight the Gulf War, the F-35 is optimized for dropping a small number of smart bombs on a moderately sophisticated enemy. It wasn't supposed to sink ships or fight other, high-tech planes in the air.

That philosophy drove the Joint Strike Fighter's design. To preserve its clean lines and thus its ability to avoid radar detection, the F-35 normally carries its munitions in an internal weapons bay. There's just one anti-ship missile in development that fits inside the F-35's bay—the Joint Strike Missile, co-produced by US missile-maker Raytheon and Norwegian defense firm Kongsberg Gruppen.

It wasn't supposed to sink ships or fight other, high-tech planes in the air.

Norway plans to buy the new missile, but the United States doesn't. And that means the Chinese navy has little to fear from the Marine Joint Strike Fighters currently setting up shop in Japan.

The F-35's weapons bay imposes other limitations on the plane's capabilities. The bay and the downward-blasting lift fan—which gives the Joint Strike Fighter a vertical-launch capability in its F-35B version—dictated the fighter's bulky overall shape. And that shape means lots of aerial drag, which in turn impedes the plane's ability to maneuver.

Image: JSF.mil

In July 2015, someone inside the Joint Strike Fighter program leaked a memo written by an F-35 test pilot describing his disastrous mock dogfight against an Air Force F-16, one of the older planes the F-35 is supposed to replace. "The F-35 was at a distinct energy disadvantage," the pilot lamented.

It's unclear how maneuverable China's J-20 stealth fighter is. But even if the Chinese jet lacks agility, it possesses at least one clear advantage over the F-35.

In its standard weapons loadout with missiles and bombs, the F-35 carries just two air-to-air missiles. A J-20 can carry at least four missiles, meaning the Chinese plane has more chances to shoot down the American. "I wake up in a cold sweat at the thought of the F-35 going in with only two air-dominance weapons," Maj. Richard Koch, a planner with the Air Force's Air Combat Command, told trade publication Aviation Week in 2008.

While a potentially lackluster dogfighter and impotent ship-killer, the F-35 might fare better against land-based threats in the Pacific region. If North and South Korea go to war over, say, Pyongyang's nuclear developments, the Marine F-35s in Japan could be among the first American reinforcements to reach the battlefield.

The Vermont Air National Guard, which is slated to receive F-35s in 2019, recently offered civilian pilot Adam Alpert a chance to fly the military's Joint Strike Fighter simulator—replicating a combat mission over North Korea. Tasked with hitting a heavily-defended nuclear facility, Alpert flew his F-35 right past North Korean planes and missile sites and lobbed a single GPS-guided bomb to destroy the target.

"If the simulator's stealth performance is representative, F-35 attacks on enemy air defenses will be devastatingly effective," Alpert wrote. "Engaging multiple ground and air targets during my flight, only once was I detected. The combination of electronic countermeasures, external airframe geometry, protective coatings and a bunch of secret things make the F-35 difficult to track."

It's not for no reason, perhaps, that South Korea is also buying F-35s to begin replacing some of its own, older fighters.

Still, a simulated F-35 is one thing. A real F-35 is quite another. Years away from final testing, the Joint Strike Fighter could be lacking critical capabilities if it finds itself fighting a Second Korean War in the near term. And the controversial warplane might never be ready to do battle with the Chinese air force and navy.

It's worth noting that the US Air Force is already working on concepts for a new fighter with better air-to-air capabilities than the F-35 possesses. "Today, advanced air and surface threats are spreading to other countries around the world," the Air Force noted in its Air Superiority 2030 Flight Plan study, released in May 2016.

By 2030, the F-35 could be the most numerous plane in the Air Force's inventory. But "the Air Force’s projected force structure in 2030 is not capable of fighting and winning against this array of potential adversary capabilities," according to the study.

The Air Force wants a new fighter or some new combination of modernized older planes to handle the air-to-air mission, presumably freeing F-35s to do what they're good at—bombing targets on the ground. But this could mean fewer F-35s, if one key lawmaker gets his way.

Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican and chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, proposed a new military force structure. McCain called for the Marines to buy more F-35Bs—and faster—in order to quickly replace existing Marine fighters that are among the oldest and least reliable in the US military.

But the Air Force—which anticipates buying more than 1,700 F-35s, by far the greatest share of Joint Strike Fighters—should work on "moving beyond the program as quickly as possible," McCain advised.

A new fighter might not come fast enough to save the current generation of F-35 pilots. If war breaks out between the United States and China or North Korea, the Marine squadron at Iwakuni—not to mention other Joint Strike Fighter units currently forming up—will go to war with the planes it has.

For better or worse.

Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day by signing up for our newsletter.

from Donald Trump’s Least Favorite Warplane Has Finally Been Deployed Overseas