When it comes to saving prized weapon systems from the budget ax, the Marine Corps has excelled like no other branch of the military.
The Marines beat back Dick Cheney and other Pentagon bosses who tried to kill the V-22 Osprey. They have, so far, managed to keep the troubled Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle alive despite exorbitant cost overruns over nearly two decades and widespread criticism about its relevance to modern warfare.
Marines also have weathered episodic challenges to the notion that they need their own air force — a question that tends to bubble up during Pentagon budget crunches. With the defense budget now under pressure, it is no surprise that the Marine Corps is having to once again put up a PR front to defend one of its treasured aviation programs, the F-35B, which is the short-takeoff vertical landing variant of the Joint Strike Fighter, known as STOVL.
For older marines, it is like déjà vu all over again. The aircraft that the F-35B is replacing, the Harrier, also came under attack in the early 1980s as it was viewed as a threat to conventional carrier aviation. Harrier proponents prevailed and marines believe the past two decades proved there is a place on the battlefield for STOVL tactical aviation. Harrier enthusiasts are salivating at the arrival of the F-35B, which is stealthier and far more technologically advanced than its predecessor.
But the F-35B, like the JSF program as a whole, is coming of age at a time of trillion-dollar deficits and growing discontent about the nation’s mounting debt. After a decade of double-digit increases in defense spending, the tide is turning and weapons such as the $120 million per-copy F-35B are under the microscope. Defense pundits specifically have questioned the utility of the STOVL F-35B, and some aviation experts have warned that the Corps should consider alternatives.
F-35B champions were particularly miffed at comments made last month by an anonymous defense official to
Brookings Institution fellow
Noah Shachtman, who wrote in a Wall Street Journal editorial that the Defense Department should consider scrapping the marine version of JSF because it is saddling a program that is already way over budget with unnecessary cost and complexity. “The marines have talked themselves into believing they really need this capability,” the senior defense official told Shachtman. “But it’s one we’ve never counted on in any fight.”
Supporters of the F-35B also were peeved by prime contractor Lockheed Martin CEO Robert Stevens’ factually accurate comments about F-35B flight tests being behind schedule because of its high component failure rates. Stevens recently told Wall Street analysts that test delays were caused by higher-than-expected failure rates for various aircraft components and subsystems. “The components that are failing are more of the things that would appear either smaller or more ordinary like thermal cooling fans, door actuators, selected valves or switches or components of the power system,” Stevens said. He noted that Lockheed is working with vendors to determine the causes of the part failures.
Marines who have been waiting years for the F-35B are unhappy with the flak that the aircraft has drawn, said Marine Lt. Col. Michael Dehner, an F/A-18 Hornet pilot and currently a JSF test plans coordinator who oversees F-35B flight tests at Patuxent River, Md.
The F-35B is scheduled to replace the Harrier beginning in 2012, although Harriers will be around until at least 2021. Marines hope to buy more than 400, and the U.K. Royal Navy is expected to order additional aircraft. The physics of vertical takeoff and landing make it considerably more complex than the Air Force and the Navy versions of the F-35. Regardless, marines are pushing back on the idea that STOVL aircraft are unaffordable luxuries.
“Everybody is free to give an opinion,” Dehner said in an interview. But marines are not going to give up the dream of an all-STOVL fleet, because it is essential to how they do business, he said.
Most military aircraft programs in the past have gone through similar growing pains as the F-35, but there is far less tolerance today given the budget climate and the backlash against big-ticket Pentagon programs that are chronically behind schedule and over budget. The budget environment is “absolutely” one reason why the program is under fire, Dehner said.
The F-35 top official, Navy Vice Adm. David Venlet, is now concentrating on budget concerns, following a major restructuring of the JSF program earlier this year, Dehner said. “He’s invited a lot of very senior people from all the services to evaluate the program,” he said. The message from Venlet: “Let’s look at our plans and resources over the next four years. Let’s look at resources and plans and make sure they match,” Dehner said. The entire F-35 program is being reorganized following a significant cost overrun (known as a Nunn-McCurdy breach). The restructuring is expected to be completed in November.
On the F-35B, Dehner downplayed the test setbacks, although he conceded that component breakdowns are a “real problem.” Of the current fleet of 15 F-35s, five are STOVL, and four are flying. As each aircraft comes off the production line, marines want to ensure that Lockheed fixed previously identified glitches such as part failures, Dehner said. “The aircraft has been flying consistently over the past several weeks,” he said. “It is too early to say if we’ve turned the corner or this has been just a good couple of weeks.”
Because it is early in the program — 220 hours into a 5,000-hour test schedule — components can be redesigned relatively painlessly, he insisted. Component malfunctions are fairly normal for a new aircraft, he said. “As good as our modeling and 21st century production is, you don’t really get how all the pieces interact with each other, the heat, the electronic interference and everything that’s internal to an aircraft until you fly it.”
In a test aircraft, however, a part failure is magnified because the plane is customized with special sensors that are used to monitor vertical takeoffs and landings. Each time a part fails, even if it is a minor issue, it takes a long time to correct in a test aircraft, said Marine Corps spokesman Capt. Craig Thomas.
Dehner said the significance of F-35B tests being behind schedule is being overplayed. The program as of the end of July is 22 flights short, which equates to being about two weeks to a month behind on a four-year test program. “In a year we’ll be cranking out 60 flights a month,” Dehner said. There are three marine test pilots currently at Pax River. At press time, 91 of 125 scheduled F-35B test flights had been completed.
To cushion the blow caused by part failures, the Marine Corps assigned another shift of maintainers to the flight line. Having more help available to change parts cuts down on the delays, he said.
Despite the additional help, it is still a “day-to-day grind” coping with parts that fail. When an actuator goes bad after a short number of hours, it may take a few days to get a replacement. That fuels frustration, Dehner said. Marine maintainers joke about the high “infant mortality” rate for these new parts, he said. To their amazement, what they hear back from suppliers is that many parts were wrongly designed because the vendors weren’t given enough information about the conditions in which these components would be functioning, Dehner said. “Most of the time they didn’t understand the environment they’d be operating in.”
The redesign of the aircraft’s drive shaft is a case in point. In flight tests it was discovered that as the aircraft heated up or cooled down, the drive shaft would expand and contract faster than the aircraft. During extreme temperatures, a buffer in the shaft would create friction, Dehner said. A new drive shaft will be delivered in 2012 and will be retrofit to the 13 aircraft the Marine Corps will own at that point, he said. The glitch will not stop flight tests, he noted.
Assuming these bugs are all fixed, the larger concern for the Marine Corps will be securing a broad base of support for the F-35B.
The whole point of STOVL is to have aerial combat support close to the infantry and to be able to land and take off on short runways, Dehner said. The closeness between the air and the ground team is part of the Marine Corps’ DNA. “We are the air-ground team,” Dehner said. “We train together, we fight together.”
From a war-fighting standpoint, STOVL gives commanders more options, he said. “I can start out on a big-deck carrier. I can move to a smaller amphibious ship. I can work with my coalition partners, and I can get it ashore on a less than 3,000-foot runway. I can be in many spots. It’s hard for the bad guys to figure out where we’re going to be.” While STOVL jets can operate from 29 different ships, the Navy’s conventional take off (CTOL) fighters are restricted to 11 ship variants. On the ground, conventional fighter jets require runways at least 6,000 to 10,000 feet long.
“It’s not like the Marine Corps would go out of business without STOVL, but it would change how we do business if you’re restricted to CTOL,” Dehner said.
The Marine Corps and the Navy have integrated their tac-air organizations, but on the F-35B, the Navy is not being as supportive as it could be, marines grumble. The Navy shuns the notion of integrating Harriers or F-35Bs into carrier wings. And there is always the internal rivalries between those who fly hovering jets and conventional carrier pilots. “There’s a bias within the Navy side,” Dehner said. “You have less people educated on [STOVL] on the Navy side. In general they don’t understand what the F-35B is going to bring,” he said. “The STOVL JSF is more capable than anything we have today in Navy-Marine Corps tac-air team.”
Within the Navy, the Marine Corps is being criticized not just for its zealous attitude about STOVL, but also because the Corps is refusing to consider alternatives. In an article published in the July 2010 issue of
Armed Forces Journal International, Navy F/A-18 pilot Lt. Cmdr. Perry Solomon said that marines are accepting an “untenable amount of risk” by going all-in with F-35B. “The Marine Corps must, at least privately, explore options to the wholesale procurement of the F-35B or prepare to weather the turbulence. … The Corps needs the F-35B, but it cannot afford — doctrinally or fiscally — to have only the F-35B,” said Solomon, who is now the department head of the Strike Fighter Squadron 213 at Naval Air Station Oceana, Va.
Countering Marine arguments about the superiority of STOVL, Solomon asserted that CTOL aircraft of the same construction and dimensions as a STOVL aircraft can fly farther and deliver more ordnance. “The extra space and weight required by the STOVL-specific propulsion and mechanical controls equate to a reduction in the lifting capability of the aircraft,” he wrote in the AFJI article. “The F-35B and F-35C (the aircraft carrier variant) have similar dimensions and the same engine; however, the F-35B has 75 percent the combat radius of the F-35C and carries less than half as much ordnance for short takeoff.”
Although the cancellation of the entire F-35 program is unlikely, he said, the “customers of the STOVL variant remain those with the most to lose.”
Marine Corps leaders, he added, are “making an existential gamble on an untested and unproven weapons system.