rational defense

Few nations on earth have the luxury of applying a such a generous budget to such forward thinking and innovative projects as the American Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Indeed, one of the central factors of global American military dominance is technological superiority. Advanced weapon systems and technological innovation have been at the heart of U.S. military successes like Desert Storm in 1991 and the (initial) success of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Yet even the United States, which has recently been spending more than the rest of the world combined on defense, has its limitations. Even with massive increases in the defense budget since September 11, 2001, the cost — not to mention the wear and tear — of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined with failures in major acquisition programs in every branch of the military has driven the entire American defense budget into crisis. What’s more, defense spending is set to decline by the time the 2010 and 2011 defense budgets begin to take shape.

This means choices. There are indeed very real justifications for expensive, high-end weapon systems and technologies that offer American fighting forces a generational lead over adversaries. But cost-effective innovation and acceptance of the realities and budgetary limitations of even U.S. coffers will be absolutely essential to a cost-effective and flexible defense establishment in the coming years.

RD is hardly the first to make this point. Submissions to the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings have been lamenting the infeasibility of the U.S. Navy’s shipbuilding plan for years — just to name one example. There is now wide agreement that the defense budget process and (especially) the procurement process are badly broken.

But this is not just a matter of cutting costs due to budgetary reality. RD was founded in part on the dangers of institutional inertia in defense establishments. Innovation and intellectual agility are a challenge in any organization the size of the U.S. Department of Defense.

One of the most clear instances of this is the F-35 Lightning II, the product of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program. Even mentioning the F-35 in the blogosphere these days can bring down a storm of debate — often more of a post-by-post shouting match.

For RD, the problem begins with the genesis of the JSF program. Merged after the collapse of the Soviet Union from a number of U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps development programs, JSF sought to replace nearly all the strike fighters in the U.S. inventory with three variants of a single design.

There are two interrelated problems. The first is that the consolidation of such a broad spectrum of design requirements — from the austere, forward operations and short take-off and vertical landing requirements of the Marine Corps to the complex electronic warfare and delicate stealth requirements of the Air Force — would necessarily require compromises in almost every mission area and subsystem. This is the nature of the multi-mission platform. To be tailored for a variety of missions, that platform cannot be optimized for any one mission.

Consolidation is absolutely worthwhile, and reducing the variety of aircraft types in the inventory has very real benefits when it comes to manufacture, maintenance and training — benefits that can translate to lower life-cycle costs and the all-important bottom line of the budget. But just as specialization can go to far and lead to too many mission-specific platforms with too little wider utility, so too can consolidation go too far. When consolidation begins to build excessive cost and capability into each platform to the point where most of the expense and high-end capability will not be required for the bulk of its missions, the underlying rational of consolidation begins to crumble.

The counterpoint to the JSF is the A-10 Thunderbolt II ground attack aircraft, which is at least a generation older and flew three decades before the production F-35 testbed. Purpose-built from the ground up for close air support, it is slow (but with exceptional handling characteristics at low altitude and low speeds) and low-tech (but durable and capable of absorbing damage from low-level ‘trash fire’) — and has been unpopular with some U.S. Air Force brass almost since its inception.

Continually refining and improving weapon systems is an important part of maintaining an edge over adversaries. But there are cases, like the Browning .50 caliber heavy machine gun. In continuous service for nearly ninety years with the U.S. military, it continues to be issued to U.S. troops with only minor modifications to the original design, currently fielded as the M2 HB (for ‘Heavy Barrel’).

This is not to say that the very real subtleties of close air support (CAS) are akin to the basic requirement for a heavy machine gun. CAS in dense urban environments in Iraq has led to important refinements in the process, and live video feeds have become an important addition to the kill chain. But while the F-35 does undeniably promise some significant improved capabilities, it is essentially trying to improve upon the CAS version of the M2 HB.

In addition, the stealth characteristics and survivability in a high-threat environment of the F-35 come at a high cost when most U.S. CAS has been historically carried out in a relatively low or completely non-existent threat environment. What the mission often calls for is an aircraft that can loiter for long periods, carry a lot of ordnance and approach the target more slowly in order to have extra seconds to acquire a target in difficult or clustered terrain — be it an urban fight or a rural one where the potential for civilian collateral damage can be high.

The second problem is that two decades have elapsed since the predecessors to the JSF program were conceived. The adversary and the mission that the JSF’s underlying requirements were geared towards — World War III against the Soviet Union — has evaporated.

But more importantly, the years since its inception have seen the dawn of a new era in unmanned systems. The potential for applications to many aspects of the fight are only just now being explored.

Obviously, these systems may never completely replace human pilots. They certainly are not ready to do so today. But the distinction is that the F-22 Raptor is already in service, while the F-35 will in all likelihood still be ramping up production in a decade. While they are not the same aircraft, nor are they capable of all the same missions.

The problem is that one of the mission areas where unmanned systems are more aggressively employed is high-risk profiles. Robots have long played a role in explosive ordnance disposal. One of the areas in which unmanned aerial systems (UAS) may soon be playing an increasingly prominent role is in the early phases of an air campaign in a high threat environment, and particularly in the suppression of enemy air defenses. A computer may not be as adaptable as a human pilot, but in more dangerous mission profiles, the reduced flexibility may be deemed acceptable to avoid risking the life of the pilot, especially as unmanned capabilities improve. (And there are also cases in which software can react faster than humans and better compensate for battle damage, as DARPA demonstrated last year by blowing sixty percent of a wing off of a model airplane flying with damage tolerance software).

The point here is not to enter into a debate about the relative merits of manned versus unmanned flight, but rather to highlight the inexorable trajectory of increased usage of UAS, particularly in some of the high-threat environments that much of the F-35 design has been dedicated to working in.

In addition, new information management technologies are having to be developed in order for the sole pilot in an F-35 to cope with an unprecedented amount of information (and in all likelihood, the information management challenge is only going to continue to rise in the future). In other words, the F-35 is straining the mental and sensory bandwidth of its pilot essentially from day one. There is little room for growth in information management, or the ability to monitor and task potential combat UAS that will one day inexorably be flying and fighting alongside manned aircraft.

Taken as a whole, the F-35 is a multi-mission aircraft that has made too many compromises in too many mission areas and yet harbors aspirations of next-generation capability. The design attempts to be everything, and in the process stumbles badly. While there may be some place for it, the U.S. Air Force’s comprehensive acquisition of the F-35 is not striking a balance between high-end, technologically advanced weaponry and low-end capabilities like UAS.