(Luft) Lockheed Martin F-35 - Lightning II

[Quintus Fabius]

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Five months after it declared Initial Operational Capability of the F-35B fighter, and 14 years after award of the aircraft’s development contract, the Marine Corps is looking at how it will integrate the aircraft into its expeditionary units.

One of the first integration exercises, known as Steel Knight 2016, is taking place in Southern California, and has highlighted potential mismatches between Marine Corps plans for the F-35B and reality.

The Marine Corps is spending tens of billions of dollars to buy the F-35B Short Take-Off and Vertical Landing (STOVL) variant, which it says it needs to quickly deploy to beachheads to provide close air support to landing forces. Yet, the mechanics of getting it ashore are complex, and may make shore basing impossible.

“Quickly” is a relative concept, and the timelines necessary to prepare forward bases may be at odds with Marine amphibious warfare plans.

For example, one of four press releases issued to date about Exercise Steel Knight reveals for the first time that the Corps expects that building a 40,800 sq. ft. landing pad for the F-35B will take two months.

This means that, for anywhere from 17 days to two months, Marines ashore would be left dependent on ship-based aircraft for close air support – the very thing the F-35B is supposed to avoid.

But the forward bases where the F-35 will refuel and rearm will also require taxiways (150’ x 96’), a short runway for rolling take-offs – the F-35B does not take off vertically on combat missions – shelters for the aircraft, their fuel and their weapons, and food and accommodation for their flight and ground personnel – a Composite Aviation Squadron consists of 417 Marines.

If building a single landing pad on a Marine base cans take 17 days, one can only speculate how long it would take to build one on a hostile beachhead, where heavy equipment would not be as freely available as at Twentynine Palms, and under fire.

Building a landing pad is not a straightforward affair. A 41,000foot landing pad requires about 800 pieces of matting weighing about 60 short tons. Getting that load to the beach during a landing would take up capacity more urgently needed for combat equipment.

And once the matting has landed, one of the NCOs is quoted as saying that “one of the biggest challenges we face …. is getting the sand to compact as needed.” However, the Logistics Combat Element of Marine Expeditionary Units has two bulldozers and one excavator, but no steamroller, so sand is likely to remain significantly uncompacted.

Worth the cost?

The latest available price for the F-35B, according to the Senate Appropriations Committee (see table below), is $251 million per aircraft, and the Marines plan to buy 340 of them at a total cost of $85.3 billion.

This price, reported by the Senate Appropriations Committee in July 2014, excludes research and development costs, of which the Marine Corps is paying its share separately.

The complexity and cost of deploying F-35Bs ashore to provide close air support, the amount of manpower and assets required to protect the bases themselves, and the cost of buying the aircraft makes the cost of shore-based close air support prohibitive.

But the entire exercise becomes pointless if it takes three weeks for onshore landing pads to be built, as the battle will likely be over by then.

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Im Endeffekt ist damit die F-35B konzeptionell völlig gescheitert. Ganz allgemein krankt das ganze F-35 Programm an der B-Variante welche nun nachweislich nicht das kann, was sie eigentlich können sollte und das bei 251 Millionen pro Flugzeug und dies ohne umgelegte Entwicklungskosten .....