Can You Blame Them?

I was reading through some of the news aggregation sites the other day when I turned up a story about several countries (notably including Australia, Canada and Italy) that are backing out of the multi-national purchase program for the Joint Strike Fighter, otherwise known as the F-35 Lightning II. This is problematic for all of the usual reasons – the company’s profits will drop, possibly until they can’t make any money on the project; the volume savings the program was supposed to provide may not be possible if they don’t make as many airplanes; various U.S. allies may not have the best gear (or may buy it from companies in other countries), and so on – but in this particular case there’s also a certain amount of credibility involved. You see, one of the reasons that Australia has given for not wanting the aircraft is that they can’t fly within 25 miles of a thunderstorm…

You can find the Reuters/Yahoo News story about the situation here if you want to, but the basic idea is that if you fly the F-35 too close to an electrical storm there is a risk that the airplane’s fuel tank may catch fire and explode. This is not an attractive quality for a military asset, and it isn’t helping the reputation of a project that has already cost nearly $400 million without producing a single deployable airplane. But the fact that the general overseeing development of the F-35, on an interview for Australian television, admitted that production of the airplane was started before the design was ready is only making the whole thing look more like a gold-plated boondoggle and less like a critical defense asset. This, in turn, is causing some of the prospective buyers to consider purchasing other types of military aircraft – pretty much anything that won’t catch on fire and explode in the event of an electrical storm, in fact…

Now, we should probably consider that the American track record of producing and supporting cutting-edge military equipment has been somewhat hit or miss over the past two generations. On the one hand, we’ve produced world-beaters like the F-15 Eagle (which has never lost a dogfight in the over 30 years it has been operational), the F-16 Falcon (one of the most commonly-used warplanes in the world), the C-130 Hercules and F-4 Phantom II and a number of others that remain in use in dozens of countries. On the other hand, we’ve also produced flops like the A-12 (a strike airplane so ridiculous that it was cancelled after the program has spent over $2 billion without producing a single flyable airplane in the 12 years they were working on it) and the “Sgt. York” air defense gun (which was cancelled after it repeatedly failed to hit a large helium balloon). There’s no question that a good design would find fans (and buyers) all over the world; but these days the potential customers are requiring rather more convincing than they once did…

I’m not sure how this story is going to turn out. On the one hand, the F-35 represents not one but several completely new capabilities that would be of enormous utility, not just to the United States but also to a number of friendly nations that have agreed to buy it. On the other hand, there’s a limit to how much use a tactical fighter or strike aircraft is going to be if you can only use it in nice weather. The company says that now that they are aware of the problem it will be easy for them to correct, and the final design will be even better than they initially claimed. And all of that may be true – but until they can back up those claims it’s going to be really difficult to blame Australia and some of the other prospective buyers from acquiring the Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet instead…