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Modern Wars – The F-35 Aircraft – Tom Burbage
225 Plays1 year ago
Ep 041 – Nonfiction. The F-35 aircraft, which changed modern warfare, was one of the most expensive and controversial military programs in history. Tom Burbage joins me to discuss his new book, "F-35: The Inside Story of the Lightning II."
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Transcript
Can Russia build a plane like the F-35?
00:00:00
Speaker
Now, does Russia already have the technology to build their own F-35? That's a really interesting question. And I had a guy that spoke with me in Denmark. We both spoke at the ceremony for the arrival of the F-35.
00:00:15
Speaker
And he's a test pilot that had done a lot of testing and he and I both agree that you can take high fidelity pictures from almost anywhere now from space from and you can and these airplanes sit on the ramp so you can get a you can get a pretty accurate.
00:00:33
Speaker
depiction of the geometry of the airplane. And this goes back to one of the comments I made in the very beginning. It's got two wings and two tails. Therefore, it's an airplane. And if that airplane looks like this airplane, they're both airplanes. Well, in the case of the F-35, you've got to peel back the airplane and look at what's inside it and look at how it operates and look at how the software has been developed.
00:00:56
Speaker
and look at how the engine operates. There's a whole lot of highly technical things. Many of them are confident or classified.
Introduction to AJ Woodham and Tom Burbage
00:01:15
Speaker
Hi, everyone. This is AJ Woodham's host of the War Books Podcast, where I interview today's best authors writing about war-related topics. Today, I am really excited to have on the show with me Tom Burbage for his new book, F-35, The Inside Story of the Lightning Two, co-written with Betsy Clark, Adrian Pittman, and David Poyer.
00:01:41
Speaker
Tom was the executive vice president and general manager of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. In that position, he led the concept demonstration phase in Lockheed Martin's competitive selection as the prime contractor in October 2001. He then led the first decade of the program design, development, test, and production.
00:02:03
Speaker
Prior to his assignment on the F-35, he led the F-22 Raptor development program and was the president of Lockheed Martin aeronautical systems company. Before joining Lockheed, Tom was a Naval aviator completing the US Navy test pilot school and accumulating more than 3000 flight hours in 38 different types of military aircraft, which is really cool. Tom, how are you doing today?
00:02:27
Speaker
Doing great, AJ. Thanks a lot for having me
F-35: A Modern Marvel in Aviation
00:02:30
Speaker
on the show. It's always fun to talk about the experience of this book. Yeah, absolutely. And this is actually, this is going to be a really fun show because this is the first time that I've had a show that's just about one aircraft.
00:02:46
Speaker
A lot of times we'll talk about periods in history or the history of certain wars and stuff like that, but today's show is just dedicated to one machine, which is the F-35. So this is going to be very cool for me. One of the first things that I like to ask people when they come on this show is if, in your own words, if you could just tell me what is your book about?
What makes the F-35 unique?
00:03:14
Speaker
You mentioned the one airplane theory here, but really when you get to it, the F-35 is a number of different airplanes. It's all similar to the pilot when he sits in the cockpit. He doesn't really know which one he's in. If he's blindfolded when he gets in the airplane, but they're designed to operate in different operating environments and they're replacing about 14 airplanes across the allied air forces. So I look at it as kind of a bigger than just an airplane. In fact, it's one of the
00:03:39
Speaker
Challenges that we've had with the program is it's got two wings and it's got two tails and it's got an engine and it's just an airplane Well, it's not just an airplane. It's a whole lot more than that but um, the book started out as a more of an academic case study By the other authors and I was on their list of people to interview and when they came to interview me I had been retired about a year From Lockheed Martin. I said, you know, I think there's a more interesting book in this probably a wider audience if we told the human journey
00:04:09
Speaker
VF
From Academic Study to Human Story
00:04:10
Speaker
35 and they agreed and we redid the table of contents and redid the interview list and the book is based on a little over 100 interviews a lot of the test pilots a lot of the international folks all the program management key people and it's really their story that the intent was to tell the story through them it's not my book or Betsy's book or Adrian's book we had the luxury of having a really good ghost writer David Poyer help us and
00:04:39
Speaker
He was especially helpful in making sure we didn't get too deep into the technical things that a general audience would have difficulty following. So we're trying to tell the story with enough detail that people can relate to it. But really, it's the human. It was quite a human endeavor to get this program from out of the starting blocks to where it is today. Yeah. Well, before we talk about some of the capabilities of the F-35
00:05:06
Speaker
Can you talk first about your role in this story? I know we've mentioned a few other people who wrote the book and worked on the program. What was your role in the F-35 program?
The F-35's Revolutionary Technology
00:05:21
Speaker
I was coming off of being the president of one of the aeronautics companies in Marietta, Georgia. And just prior to that, I'd had the role of the F-22 general manager. And so I had a lot of current experience and contacts in the Pentagon. I worked with the same basic set of decision makers, including the congressional types on the Hill too, because those programs basically have to be shepherded through the system.
00:05:45
Speaker
whether it's the Department of Defense or the Congressional budget cycle. So I had a current experience in doing that. At the time, the competitive phase of the, at the time, was the Joint Strike Fighter, and then it became F-35 later on, was going through what has been termed a fly-off, but it really wasn't a fly-off. It was a flight demonstration program to
00:06:07
Speaker
to verify that the technical information you were putting in your proposal could actually be verified by flight test data. So Boeing and Lockheed were competing for that and we both had flying prototypes and we were gathering the data to finish up the proposals that would then be evaluated to see who won the contract. And we were just about to fly the first flight on the first airplane when I was asked to go to the Joint Strike Fighter Program.
00:06:36
Speaker
My first reaction was, I'm not sure that's a step up for me because I'd already had a big program and I'd already been a president. There was some discussion about how if this program would ever go to its full potential, it would in fact change the aerospace industry. It would change the number of prime contractors. It had potential big impact.
Stealth and Interoperability: The F-35's Edge
00:06:58
Speaker
So I said, okay, I'll do that and I joined the program on the first the week of the first flight of the first x plane Which was one of the demonstrators And we went through the rest of the proposal phase the rest of that little mini flight test program won the contract in October 2001 and then I went through this big ramp up of bringing on partner countries and
00:07:23
Speaker
which was part of the underlying thematic of the program. Government-to-government relations were bringing on industry partners. We're growing the program from about 180 people when we started to thousands of people after the first year. So we had a big human resource challenge. And then I was on the program until I retired in 2013. So I had about 12 years.
00:07:45
Speaker
That doesn't happen on big programs. Normally you're there for two or three years that you rotate into something else, both on the government side and the contractor side. So I had longevity or tenure or whatever you want to call it on the program that gave me an unusual insight into that whole period, that whole decade of actually building the program.
00:08:06
Speaker
So for those 12 years, did this feel like, do you have any special personal attachment to the F-35? Did this feel like more than a job to you? What's kind of your relationship with the plane itself?
00:08:23
Speaker
It's not my baby, but you sort of feel like it's your family. It's part of your family. So I spent the bulk of my professional career, industrial career on either F-22 or F-35. So the whole fifth gen fighter world, I feel like I've been very privileged to be part of that.
00:08:42
Speaker
I think a lot of the technology that we broke ground in on F-35 was really revolutionary and we'll continue to show that as the airplane plays out and being able to work with really talented people. And I would say very strong leadership. A program like this doesn't normally survive because of the complexity of it, because of the number of stakeholders, because of the different factors, the length of time that it takes.
00:09:12
Speaker
has to go through many different budget cycles and political cycles. Then when you multiply that times nine, there were nine nations in the partnership. Each of them has the Department of Defense. Each of them has a parliament similar to our Congress and the program has to be shepherded through that process too. So the complexity factor was unprecedented from both a political standpoint and a technical standpoint. That challenge was
00:09:36
Speaker
was very dramatic and I think the reason the program was as successful as it was, despite the fact that we had a few bumps in the road, is that we had exceptionally strong people that were in leadership positions on the program. Well, right at the beginning here, let's talk about this aircraft and the capabilities that it has. I actually thought the book did
Evolution of Aircraft Technology
00:10:00
Speaker
a really great job at
00:10:02
Speaker
the very beginning of putting the reader in the place of somebody who is operating an F-35 or like in the vicinity of an F-35, talking about its capabilities. What makes this aircraft so special?
00:10:19
Speaker
It's a whole lot more than an aircraft. As you look at the evolution of technology, it really is in multiple dimensions. One is the ability to hold strategic targets at risk and be able to destroy them if required, which requires you to have a level of stealth or penetrability into heavily defended air defenses that today's generation of airplanes just don't have.
00:10:48
Speaker
big evolution is the connectedness of the battle space, whether it's the Aegis ships or whether it's aircraft carriers or whether it's airplanes, they fly and fight together as a joined up interoperable interdependent network. So the F-35 was designed from the beginning to be a very critical node on that network.
00:11:07
Speaker
What we found out as the airplane has been used more by the smart people that are using it now is that it makes everybody else in the battlespace network better because of its ability to gather and disseminate and distribute information that it's capable of getting that others aren't capable of.
00:11:24
Speaker
doing. So it's brought a whole connected piece to it. But I think perhaps the greatest value is that all three services and our closest allies, which are the eight nations that were envisioned to be part of the program, can now fly and fight together as if they were one composite squadron. In the past, that hasn't been the case. Even within our own Air Force, we had multiple versions of F-16s and multiple versions of F-15s, and our allies
00:11:51
Speaker
often would put different equipment in their airplanes. And so they've got to be quite complicated to have an integrated composite, whether it's war fighting or peacekeeping, because we spent the last 20 years doing that. And we haven't done it as an individual nation. We've done it as an allied group.
00:12:09
Speaker
So the core group of stakeholders was the Nine Nation Partnership that began it. Since that time today, that number is now 19. So quite a few more countries have come in. They'll buy the airplane through the foreign military sales process. They're not considered partners in the development. But the airplane has been recognized now, I think, for the tremendous capability that it brings.
00:12:37
Speaker
The allies that fly and fight with us are now going to be really able to fly and fight with us.
00:12:43
Speaker
Yeah, and one of the, just thinking about how aircraft technology in the last 50 years has advanced, one of the things in your book that you write is that during World War II, it took weeks of research planning rehearsal and hundreds of bomber aircraft and escorting fighters to destroy one high value enemy target, such as a ball bearing factory.
00:13:08
Speaker
But the F-35 could destroy an entire plant complex on its own in minutes and never have been spotted.
The Joint Strike Fighter Initiative
00:13:14
Speaker
And then you actually go on to say, also the F-35 could have targeted Hitler and his bunker with concrete-penetrating bombs. And of course, we can look back at historical events and wonder, oh, what if we had certain technology? But it does paint a picture of how far we've come since World War II with some of the capabilities. Right.
00:13:38
Speaker
Talk a little bit about some of those, I don't wanna call them destructive capabilities, but when an F-35 fires on a target, what's happening? And like what kinds of targets can it fire on? And what are those types of firing capabilities that it has?
00:14:00
Speaker
Well, the airplane, as you know, when it's in its very stealthy mode, carries those weapons internally. So you're constrained by the size of your bomb bay. There's two bomb bays in the airplane. And one of the things about its stealth capability, too, is that it tricks other aircraft and radar into thinking that it's not there, right? That's also a capability it's got.
00:14:23
Speaker
The airplane flies in a group of either four or eight normally. It's called the Wolfpack. It's not like the two-ship evolution of an F-22 that flies in a different part of the sky and things like that. This is designed to come in in a distributed group. And you can transmit or not transmit, depending on what your airplane wants to do, because you have the ability to exchange information between airplanes in the flight.
00:14:53
Speaker
In the past, when you mentioned some of the World War II challenges we had, and even as recently as Vietnam or Iraq, or we were fighting with fourth gen airplanes, you had to have multiple types of airplanes to successfully conduct a raid or an attack. You had to have some that were specialized in jamming enemy radars. You had to have some that would actually deliver the weapons, and you had to have some that were there to rescue
00:15:17
Speaker
You can't have all those airplanes in a real heavily defended air defense situation. You have to have all that capability in the jet. So integrating all that into what really is a fairly small package with a single engine was one of the big challenges we had. We used to kid our chief designer, a guy named Paul Park, that he needed a U-Haulic to pull all the parts that he couldn't fit in the airplane around behind the airplane. Because it really is a challenge. If you think about weight and balance on an airplane,
00:15:46
Speaker
heavy stuff obviously has to go in the back. If you have a single engine and you have bomb bays underneath that engine, there's not too many places you can route things. You can't route through the engine. And if you go through the weapons bay, you now have constrained the space of your ability to carry things.
00:16:03
Speaker
Quite a challenge, and obviously there's trade-offs involved as you get further and further into the details of the design. If the threat has been defeated and the enemy air defenses are beaten down, so to speak, then the airplane has to be able to carry a lot more weapons externally. There's three external stations under each wing. They carry missiles and bigger bombs and bigger payloads. So it's designed to be flexible like that.
00:16:30
Speaker
You know, it has all the systems in it that are needed to complete the mission, and it has the ability to strike deep and quick, you know, with its internal carriage weapons, and then it has the ability to be a truck, you know, a truck when it gets to the situation where you can carry more stuff on the outside of the airplane. So it's a flexible airplane. But the real value of it, again, is connecting everybody into the same network and being able to get information that other airplanes just can't get today.
00:17:00
Speaker
Well, let's talk about the genesis of this program then. And we don't have to go too far back. In your book, we go all the way back to World War I and the history of aircraft, which is really fascinating.
Advanced Computing in the F-35
00:17:14
Speaker
But let's just talk about the genesis of the F-35 program. And frankly, maybe it will take us back several steps, because as you noted at the beginning of this conversation, when we talk about the F-35, we're talking about the lead up of many other aircrafts as well.
00:17:29
Speaker
How did the F-35, how did this get born? The post Vietnam wind down, which of course occurred before the step up of Iraq and 9-11 and those things, resulted in a review of the budget process, particularly as it came to expensive development programs. And it turned out at the time, all three US services were developing their own new airplane.
00:17:57
Speaker
So the Air Force had one called a multi-role fighter. The Marine Corps had one called Advanced Short Takeout Vertical Landing, a Stovall. And the Navy had one called AX. And all three were in the, the one that was furthest along was the Heria replacement for the Marine Corps. And the Secretary of Defense at the time, looking at the amount of budget that that was going to require said, I think we're at the point now where we can develop technology that will allow us to build a more common airplane
00:18:28
Speaker
And our allies are at the same age point that we are with our aging air forces. Maybe they would like to join in. And so they basically terminated those three individual programs and rolled them into another requirements development process, which at the time was called JAST. It was called the Joint Advanced Strike Technologies, JAST. And that was a search to try to determine as best you can predict the future.
00:18:56
Speaker
What were the capabilities and technologies we would need 20 years down the road? And can we, in fact, develop them? Lots of things were changing at the time. Computer processing power was going through Moore's Law evolution over every 18 months. You doubled your processing capability. And the requirements to penetrate heavily defended strategic targets, we were starting to understand that better.
00:19:21
Speaker
We had some early stealth experience with the F-117 and then the B-2, but we still weren't able to capture full fighter maneuverability. Those airplanes were black and they tend to fly at night because the trade-off was less maneuverability, more stealth. And these are like the very traditional kind of, when we think of stealth fighters, we think of like the, it looks like a triangle with jagged edges, correct? Yeah.
00:19:50
Speaker
Yeah, and that's a whole interesting story, too. There's a little bit about that in the book about the evolution of the F-117, which I was working for Lockheed at the time, and that was still not revealed to anybody.
Software Integration and Pilot Experience
00:20:03
Speaker
I didn't work on the F-117, but looking backwards, to calculate those various complex angles on the airplane would take a great computer about a week to work those angles out. Well, now you've got that much power in your phone or your iWatch.
00:20:20
Speaker
So the whole computer process was evolving at the same time. That airplane was designed by electrical engineers to be hard to find with radar. And then they gave it to the aerodynamic engineers and said, okay, now make it fly. And that was kind of the trade-off on the two. But then we got to the F-22. We were able to recapture full fighter capability, thrust vectoring. You know, it's really still the King Kong air superiority airplane that's out there.
00:20:47
Speaker
But it was 10 years ahead of the F-35. So there was a 10-year gap between the design freeze on the Raptor and the design freeze on the F-35. And that 10 years was right where computer power was exploding. You know, technology was growing in leaps and bounds. And so there was a need to review what exactly do we want to do in this new airplane called Joint Strike Fighter.
00:21:13
Speaker
They knew they wanted it to concentrate on life cycle costs, which drives you to a single engine. They knew they wanted it to be a smaller multi-role fighter, not another competitor to the F-22. So those things sort of drove the F-35 design and development. The actual development of the technology was occurring across many individual laboratories that were owned by the sensor developer, like Northrop would develop the radar, they'd have a lab in Baltimore.
00:21:42
Speaker
And eventually, you bring those pieces into the integration lab, which was in Fort Worth, and you try to integrate them as a system. And then the third step is you actually put them in an airplane. We had a Boeing 737 flying lab. Put them in the airplane and go out and fly in a big airplane in the aerodynamic environment to make sure that all the software is truly integrated. So we went from F-42 to somewhere around 2 million lines of software code in the airplane. F-35 to somewhere around 9 million.
00:22:12
Speaker
So it was a forex increase in software in the airplane.
Desire to Fly: An Ex-Pilot's Perspective
00:22:16
Speaker
And as anybody who's worked with software knows, that's a challenge when you get to the level of integration. If you were flying in F-35 today, like I'm looking at you, AJ, across my computer screen, you basically are looking at a big screen TV and you're watching the movie. You're not trying to figure out who the actors are, you're watching the movie.
00:22:36
Speaker
What that level of software has been able to do is integrated all the sensors. So you don't even know what sensor is providing your data. You're just watching the movie. This might be a silly question, but I wonder this about people who work on NASA ships and they've never been able to fly to the moon. You are a pilot. You are a Navy pilot. Have you ever flown an F-35?
00:23:03
Speaker
No, if I had a bucket list of things I'd like to do, I'd like to fly the F-22 and the F-35. But they're both single-piloted airplanes. There are no two-seaters. So it's like the Navy told Tom Cruise when he was filming Top Gun. He said, I want to fly the F-18. They said, well, give us 18 months and we'll train you to be a naval coordinator and you can fly it. So I never got to do that. I did get to chase it in a two-seat airplane. I got to chase the F-22 and the F-35, which was really, really dramatic because I could see
00:23:32
Speaker
We couldn't go as slow as they could, and we couldn't go as fast as they could. It was quite a step up. I would love to fly both of them. The F-35, if we're talking about after Vietnam, thinking about the next 20 years of warfare and where do our aircraft need to be, I imagine that this plane was developed with maybe a conflict with the Soviet Union in mind.
Designing for Future Conflicts
00:24:00
Speaker
Is that correct?
00:24:02
Speaker
I think the F-22 was really concentrating on that. The world was still thinking in terms of dogfighting as air to air combat as kind of the ultimate fighter theater. We had multi-role attack aircraft, but they usually were not fighters. They were special to deliver weapons. And then the F-18 became the strike fighter, both words in its vocabulary.
00:24:32
Speaker
So the need for an airplane that could do both was really being driven by, I think, for size by cost of maintaining multiple training operations and cost of maintaining different kinds of squadrons across all three of the services. So I think the thought was a multi-role airplane that could in fact be used by all three services with the modifications required to fit their operating environment, but commonality across everything else
00:25:01
Speaker
would in fact shrink the total investment in defense air power. It would reduce training costs.
Leadership Hesitation and Commitment
00:25:11
Speaker
Pilots today can jump from the A to the B to the C with no real special training. You basically reduce the infrastructure costs of trying to maintain the commonality across the systems that are in the airplane, drives down your logistics costs of supply chain costs.
00:25:27
Speaker
There were a lot of effort went into trying to drive down the cost of ownership, not just the effectiveness in the combat scenario. All those things were important in the design and the theory of why we're doing the airplane. So let's move up to 2001 then when you take control of this program.
00:25:50
Speaker
When somebody came to you and I don't know if it happened like this, but it was like, Tom, we want you to be in charge of the F 35 program. Were you like, I don't think so. Or did you, did you jump immediately? Like, what did you think when, when the idea of leading this program was, was pushed across your desk?
00:26:08
Speaker
I was the president of the company in Marietta, Georgia, a Lockheed or not a company. And we were in the middle of transitioning the defense industry in general. So I was only in that position about a year and a half. And we had three different airplane companies inside Lockheed Martin at the time. And we were merging those into a single company with the headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas. I was in Marietta, Georgia. When that happens and the president's position is now in Fort Worth, Texas, the guys who are in the other president positions generally go
00:26:37
Speaker
looking for something else to do. I had only worked for Lockheed. It's the only company I'd ever worked for, Lockheed Martin. And I wasn't looking for something else to do, but I wasn't sure I was going to land in a position that I would want to continue on. So I was asked if I would go to F-35. They were having some particularly challenging issues with it.
00:27:02
Speaker
in the middle of a lot of budget battles and a lot of Pentagon discussions on what direction would the program go and so that my background made me pretty much the person to inside Lockheed Martin to go try and work those issues. You were the guy.
Post-9/11 Acceleration and Challenges
00:27:18
Speaker
Well, yeah, only because I had the scars. But then the chairman of Lockheed Martin came to see me and he said, look,
00:27:27
Speaker
We don't know how far this is going to go. These programs sometimes don't materialize in the end game like they're envisioned in the beginning. But it's extremely important. We had been the last big winner with the F-22. And to be honest with you, a lot of people thought they would never give the next program to the same guy that was doing the previous one. Although the earlier F-22 program was truncated way shorter than it was envisioned to go, 188 airplanes instead of 700 or something. So I said, well, yeah.
00:27:57
Speaker
I'd love to go do it. And I don't know, maybe for a year or two years, I don't know how long I'd be doing it until they figured out who was going to win and move on. Well, we won and then we're in the middle of trying to keep the program sold and build it rapidly and get the international partners. And I had, I had enough, um, you know, experience in all those areas to basically think this would be a pretty challenging assignment. And if it really does do everything they say it's going to do, it's going to have a very meaningful impact on the future of the defense industry.
00:28:27
Speaker
and particularly the future of Lockheed Martin. So from that point on, I never thought about it or looked back. I just figured I'm going to stay here until somebody tells me they don't want me to do this anymore. Then I retired in 2013. There was an interesting point that sometimes gets lost and that's that this contract was awarded on October 26th of 2001, which was about six weeks after 9-11. I was just about to bring that up. Yeah, normally you would have a few months to say, Oh my God, what are we just, you know, the dog just caught the car.
00:28:56
Speaker
What do we do now? How do we get organized? How do we start our staffing up? But the contract was signed that day. Now, you and your team, a month after 9-11, did this energize people? Were people much more committed to the program now? How did 9-11 impact how everybody saw this program? Well, we knew that the F-35 wasn't going to have any near-term effect on the
00:29:26
Speaker
terrorist war. But at the same time, the US really needed to build its alliances. And this was one vehicle around which those alliances would come together, even though it was for maybe a different project in the longer term, it would be important in building allied unity in the fight against terror. At least that's my interpretation of what was going on. And I think it did accelerate the international interest in the program.
00:29:56
Speaker
So we, uh, you know, I mean, it's, it's, it's hard to say that there was a direct effect of nine 11, but I can tell you that the biggest risk on the program, when we won the contract was our ability to staff it at the levels that were required at the speed that was required.
Technical Hurdles in Development
00:30:11
Speaker
And that was listed as a number one risk by the Pentagon on the program that we probably couldn't get started on time. Well, we didn't have any trouble staffing up. A lot of people came to want to work on F 35. And they came from, you know, the Boeing's and the Northridge and the other parts of the world.
00:30:26
Speaker
Because this was going to be the big game in town, I think. So we were bringing on, averaging probably 100 people a week. And that's a very difficult challenge to do because you want people to come in and be productive right away since we're already under contract. And we had to figure out how we're going to bring all those people on board and keep a sense of unity and progress going forward while we're still trying to train the new people. And we had some older, well-experienced engineers that were kind of the
00:30:56
Speaker
the brain trust core. And then we had a 50% of our new hires had to be new college hires just to keep the engineering dollar rate down to the point where the program was affordable. And we had an interesting concept that I mentioned in a book called reverse mentoring, where the young folks that came in were very fluent in the latest computer modeling and how do you do aircraft design through computer databases, whereas the older guys weren't even sure where the on off button was.
00:31:24
Speaker
but they had all the experience of designing really complex airplanes. So the two, it was interesting to watch the two. There was a mentoring and a reverse mentoring going on, and it really pulled everybody together because everybody had value to bring to the proposition. Well, let's talk about, speaking of risks and problems, let's talk about some of the problems. What were some of the initial challenges that you had with this program?
00:31:51
Speaker
If we go back to the X airplanes, their intention was to demonstrate that the shape of the airplane, the design of the airplane we were building, would perform aerodynamically as we were predicting in our proposal. But they didn't have any stealth features. They didn't have internal weapons base. They really were X airplanes. They were demonstrators. It's called a concept demonstration phase.
00:32:20
Speaker
So we had a lot of work to do to go from, okay, we got the winning preferred concept. Now we need to actually fill that concept out and design the weapon space, design the electrical. We didn't want to have any hydraulics in the airplane for life cycle cost reasons. So we had, it's all electric airplane. So there were a lot of things that we had to do in the detailed design and the
00:32:44
Speaker
theory was in the beginning was we'll do the simplest one first. We'll walk before we run. That'd be the A model, the Air Force version. And if I took the Air Force version and the Marine version, I'd put them on top of each other. The shadow on the ground is about the same. It's from a structure standpoint. So we'll do the B second, and then we'll do the Navy's airplane third. The Navy really didn't want their airplanes a little bit later on anyway. And the Navy airplane in our view would be the most significant change structurally because it needed to have a bigger wing
00:33:13
Speaker
to slow the airplane down for landing aboard ship. And it needed to have stressed landing gear to take the stresses of catapults and arresting gear. So that was your A, B, C. Then we started building, and the way you do that is you have conceptual design, then you go into detailed design, and then you get to the point where you can actually build something. And we were building the first A airplane, and we're projecting using computer tools what the weight of the B would be and what the weight of the C would be.
00:33:42
Speaker
Now, the reason that's important is neither the A or the C are really that weight sensitive. I mean, they take off on basically runways or use catapults, but the B version has got to have a short takeoff and vertical landing capability. So weight is very sensitive to that airplane. Well, all of a sudden we were started projecting weights without the detailed design. The weight of the B model was started going up for reasons that we didn't quite understand, but later did understand.
00:34:09
Speaker
And it became obvious that on our current path, we weren't going to be able to meet the requirements of the B model at the weights that were being projected. So we went through this process of trying to figure out, okay, what are we going to do now?
Navigating Program Challenges
00:34:23
Speaker
We got one airplane that's almost ready to fly. So we call that a production prototype. It was still a very valuable asset. It was an A version. You could go out and you could do a lot of the initial flight testing. But we needed to reverse the order and bring the B model forward and really concentrate on getting that design right.
00:34:39
Speaker
So it would meet its requirements. And then we went from A to B to C to a new sequence, which was B to A to C. And that change added about 18 months of engineering to get weight out of the airplane. We actually got about 3,500 pounds. If you think about this, a lot of weight for, it's like a Mack truck, getting a Mack truck out of that airplane. Some weight came back in, which we knew it would, because you always kind of undercut. Then you find out where you've undercut and add the minimum back in.
00:35:09
Speaker
But if you talk to the test pilots or any pilot today, they'll tell you that all three airplanes are significantly better having gone through that weight optimization program. I think of engineers, we always used to kid the engineers, you have to break their pencils eventually to get them to stop making changes. But in this case, I think every engineer's dream is to have one last pass through the design to optimize it. So the airplanes are optimized, but it nearly killed the program and basically put an 18 month delay
00:35:38
Speaker
in the program, we had one airplane that we flew and that's it for while we were doing that change. So I imagine that if, I'm not quite sure how the overlap between the military and Lockheed works, but I don't know, you probably have to approach some people in the military and be like, look, we got a big problem here. What do they say when you tell them we've got another 18 months to add to this?
00:36:03
Speaker
Well, actually the teams are made up of fully integrated programs run by a joint program office and is headed up by a program executive officer who's a flag general officer. That's in Crystal City. And then we have the contractor team that's working in multiple sites.
Budgetary Scrutiny and Validation
00:36:21
Speaker
And all of the reviews, the monthly reviews were all being done as a group. So the government was 100% in the middle of all of it. It wasn't like they're in the middle of it. Nobody can blame it.
00:36:33
Speaker
They knew it was happening, but it was interesting because we were all predicting the weights of the B and we were within 5% of each other. The government independently predicted it when all of a sudden we realized that there's something causing this to look like neither one of us have actually got the right estimate on it. But luckily the Department of Defense agreed that we needed to reverse the change the order and we continued on.
00:37:00
Speaker
The B model was put on probation until we got it sorted out, which is nobody knew what that, that's not an acquisition term, be put on probation. But I guess it meant if we didn't, we didn't successfully get the weight out and get it to where it was meeting its performance requirements, that the B would be canceled. And we felt that that would be really, really bad for the program because the Marine Corps was such a strong advocate. And, you know, in the UK was buying that version of the airplane, the Italians were buying that version of the airplane.
00:37:30
Speaker
it would have really been disruptive. And I don't know whether the program could have survived if they had decided to cancel the beam. That's an unknown. But today, all three airplanes are flying, and they're all better for having gone through that process. So the entire phase of development took us from 2001. How long did it take for the plane to actually go into action, if you want to call it that? Well, it goes through a process that's called
00:37:58
Speaker
IOC, initial operating capability. And when it goes through that milestone, it can be used in an operational sense. It may not have all the final software in the airplane for some of the detailed stuff. But then when it completely finishes operational test, it gets into FOC, which is final operational capability. But IOC is the big milestone that people are looking for. And it was about 2014.
00:38:26
Speaker
I think 14 or 15 before the, I think the Marine Corps was first and then shortly after that came the Air Force and shortly after that came the Marine Corps. The one ally that took delivery of the airplanes earliest was actually Norway, which was influenced by the melting of the Arctic. This was way before the Russia-Ukraine scenario. But the other one was one of the strategic partners, not one of the, one of the initial group of partner countries was Israel.
00:38:56
Speaker
And Israel was the first to actually use it in a threat environment, I think. Well, we're going to talk about Israel and Russia towards the end, because I want to ask you about current events. But you've got this 12-, 13-year period, so weights, that was a big problem. Was that the biggest problem for the whole program? I would say there was three inflection points in the program.
00:39:25
Speaker
there was no plan B for that was technical. And then there were the two programmatic inflection points, the one I just described where the program had to reposition some of this production money into development to do this engineering work.
Innovative Manufacturing Solutions
00:39:38
Speaker
And then a few years later, that wrinkle sort of shows up in your budgeting process. And the
00:39:47
Speaker
Congress passed a 2009 budget. They passed a new rule that required the Department of Defense to project budgets based on independent assessments that were done by Congressional Budget Office or the GAO, instead of using the program estimates. And about 20 programs in Department of Defense busted a threshold that's referred to as a none McCurdy.
00:40:13
Speaker
And Senator Nunn was from Georgia, and Senator McCurdy was from, I think, Michigan or Minnesota, had passed a law that just said, if you're in an Department of Defense program and you exceed a cost threshold, whether it's the unit cost of the airplane or whether it's the total cost of the program, then you have to go through an extensive review. Secretary of Defense has to validate that your program's worth continuing, yada, yada. So that happened later on. And that was really the long-term effect of that delay that occurred to get the weight out.
00:40:43
Speaker
numbers, just our numbers. And when you re-plan the program and you add a whole bunch of more testing in and stuff like that, it just takes the number up. So those were the two programmatic points. Probably the biggest one, the technical point that we didn't have a good early solution for, but later did, was the fact that two of the three airplanes had to go to sea, right? So the B model for the Marine Corps and the C model for the Navy were going to operate in a much more
00:41:11
Speaker
difficult environment from historical stealthy airplanes. Stealthy airplanes can operate in any environment, but if they are damaged and need repair, they have to go into a humidity controlled, temperature controlled environment to get all the right combinations of materials together. You don't have that on a ship. You have saltwater, you have open bays, even the hangar bay where the maintenance is done is open to the elements. So we had to come up with a new way of doing that.
00:41:41
Speaker
We wanted it to be common across all three airplanes. Luckily, and I don't know whether it's luck or just timing from a technology standpoint, what was happening around the same time was the advancement of composite manufacturing. So where the skins of earlier stealth airplanes were all metal, mostly aluminum, some cases other things, now all of a sudden the skin of the airplane could be composite.
00:42:08
Speaker
And you can do things with composites, you know, how they're manufactured with cloth and the resins, and then you build up a structure that's much lighter but much tougher than metal. But you can also do some things in the composite that you would have had to do on top of metal surfaces. You could do it inside the composite. So it becomes much more durable, doesn't require, you know, special care and feeding when you go aboard ship and things like that.
00:42:37
Speaker
That breakthrough occurred around 2004. We'd already been on the contract for about three years. We had tried a couple of other ways of doing this. One was with appliqués, that they're like big decals that you put on the airplane, but it wasn't durable when you got on a flight deck because with the engines kicking up non-skid and grit and stuff, it just wasn't acceptable. We finally did that and we proved it by making a bunch of samples and going down to Daytona Beach.
00:43:05
Speaker
building a big structure in the surf and putting these composite parts in the surf for long periods of time, a couple years in some cases, and proving to the Navy that this was going to work. This wasn't going to be something that was going to be susceptible to damage from the environment of
Redesigning for Safety
00:43:24
Speaker
a ship. So those were the three major points
00:43:28
Speaker
that the program went through bumps in the road. And every program has them. And when you're bringing this many technologies on at the same time, there's going to be risks that you find out when you start integrating them that you didn't know when you were doing the conceptual design part of it. Well, what are some of the things that you can share that even the most well-read F-35 enthusiasts would be surprised to learn in this book? There's a couple of really interesting ones, I think,
00:43:57
Speaker
that people don't normally think about. One is the ejection system. Once we got into the F-35 era, the pilot population now expanded by a considerable amount, mostly on the low end. Ejection seats historically have been limited to about 150 pound to 230 pound nude weight because the rocket blast required to get somebody out of the airplane would handle that weight range.
00:44:26
Speaker
Now all of a sudden we're going down to 100 pounds and that's to accommodate females and lightweight Asian males that would be flying the airplane. Well, you don't want to have a rocket blast that's going to hurt the small person and you don't want to have one that's going to leave the big guy in the airplane. So you have to go to a graduated rocket type of capability. And the smaller person also had a second issue that we've discovered during the testing that their neck loads
Testing and Software Development
00:44:55
Speaker
particularly the strength of the muscles in the neck are not near as strong as, it's almost like an exponential thing instead of a linear thing, as the larger pilots are if they eject at high speed and get a high wind blast. You no longer have the face curtain that you pull over your face like we used to do. You know, now it's just, boom, you're gone. So Martin Baker was the ejection seat manufacturer. They are very, very good. And they did an extensive amount of testing to develop
00:45:24
Speaker
escape system that would do that. Further complicating that challenge was the B model. There's a lift fan that rotates in the horizontal plane right behind the cockpit that's connected to the main engine. And only when it's in the vertical landing mode does that connection take place. But if you're in the hover and the shaft should happen to shear, even though it's a very, very low probability that will ever happen, hopefully it will never happen. It's never happened yet. The airplane tumbles fast.
00:45:54
Speaker
and it's too fast for the human to react. So there's an auto eject where the airplane sensors can sense that tumbling and eject the pilot before the airplane
Unique Operational Features
00:46:04
Speaker
hits the ground. So that's when you're in a lot. And that's something most people don't know. Right, right. So the pilot escape process was really a complex one driven by that. The other one that I like to talk about is the catbird, which is a
00:46:20
Speaker
was a 737 being flown by Indonesian Airlines that we went and found, had low time on it. And it became the most heavily modified 737 in the world because we basically made it into an F-35. If you walk into the airplane about where first class is, there's a real F-35 cockpit pilot gets in in his flight suit. He's not flying the 737, he's flying the controls and sensors that are in the cockpit. But sitting behind him are, I think it's 12 engineering stations
00:46:49
Speaker
where you can look at the individual sensors and you can look at the integrated sensors that he's operated.
Proud Moments and Operational Success
00:46:55
Speaker
So in essence, and we modified the 737 from a geometric standpoint so that the relationship between the nose radar and the leading wing, the little wing that's on the air finders, pictures of it in the book, are exactly the same as the F-35. So in fact, it can fly, if you didn't know it was a 737, it can fly in a flight of F-35s and it's an F-35.
00:47:15
Speaker
That was really required because of the level of software fusion we were trying to get. And you have to get the sensors in the airborne environment to really be able to get that software where you want it to be. So that was another, I think, example that most people don't think about. Now, if you're on the ground in, I mean, obviously, maybe like a low-flying F-35 or one
00:47:39
Speaker
Can you tell from the ground that this is an F-35 flying besides the fact that it would be in like a group of eight? Is it that distinguishable
Strategic Alliances and Global Dynamics
00:47:48
Speaker
from other aircraft?
00:47:50
Speaker
I live, right now, I'm sitting in Florida, right? And I'm halfway between Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City Beach and Eglin Air Force Base in Destin. And the F-22s are a Tyndall F-35s, so it's a perfect place for me to be. I can sit on my porch and I hear a loud noise and it's coming from that direction, it's an F-22, it's that direction, it's an F-35. Can you distinguish the noises? I was at a barbecue once in the DC area and a guy was there, he was
00:48:19
Speaker
a Marine on Marine One, the president's helicopter. And we're all sitting around the campfire and he's like, everyone be quiet. He's like, he's listening. He's like, I hear it. I hear Marine One. And he pointed and there sure enough was Marine One had a very distinct sound to it. Can you distinguish the sounds? You can.
00:48:40
Speaker
I mean, you can't, if you listen long enough, but airplanes have one level of noise when they're in military power and a whole other one when they're in afterburners. So if you took an F-16 in afterburner and you took an F-35 in military power, there's no...
00:48:56
Speaker
The noise was a big challenge in the early days of the program because nobody really understood it, but it's a physics thing. The air comes in this end and it goes out this end and the noise is generated by the amount of speed that the air gathers as it goes through the engine. I can tell when an F-35 is flying over.
00:49:18
Speaker
They usually have fairly low altitude out there, but normal altitude, you know, where they would normally fly up in the 35, 38,000 foot level, you probably wouldn't be able to tell, but if they're low, you can tell. And part of that reason... And are they grouped together when they fly or do they actually fly pretty far apart? Technically, they fly pretty far apart, much further than we ever did in the past when I was flying. You were always pretty much in visual sight of the guys who were flying with and that's no longer required because they have
00:49:46
Speaker
data stream connections where you can see where everybody else is on your screen, which is a real tactical advantage for the airplane. But the thrust of the single F-35 engine is almost exactly the same as the two engines on an F-18.
00:50:05
Speaker
So it's a much bigger engine.
Comparison with Other Fighter Jets
00:50:09
Speaker
And the noise is somewhat directional based on the shape of the airplane, too. There's a lot of care goes into shaping the airplane from a stealth standpoint. And so the noise tends to be somewhat directional. When an airplane flies over, you'll hear a little more noise coming when he's past you than you do when he's coming towards you. But yeah, you can sort of tell if you listen to him enough. And then you can visually see whether you're right or not.
00:50:34
Speaker
Well, what would you say, um, from the, the entire program, the entire time you were there, what would you say your proudest moment was? Oh boy. You know, I'm a Navy guy by background. And so, um, I really wanted the airplane to be a super Navy airplane. In other words, handle handing qualities around a ship.
00:50:54
Speaker
the ability to land it precisely every time you come in and land stuff like that. And we started off a little bit rocky. We didn't really understand the impact of stealth on a tail hook.
00:51:06
Speaker
If you think about it, the tail hook has to be hidden, so it has to come up inside the airplane and doors have to close. If you're aboard ship, you may use it three times a day, so it's got to be repeatedly used. On the other two airplanes, the A model has a hook, but you'd only use it if you were an extremist and lost your brakes and were going to overrun or something. So you might use it once, and then you can repair it.
00:51:28
Speaker
But on a navy ship is not the same But but because of that it's got a relatively short hook if you look at a f-18, it's got a long hook You know and the reason for that is the proximity It's gonna get a little bit complicated about doing real quick the proximity of where the tail hook hits the flight deck and where the main landing gear roll over the wire That's much shorter on an f-35 than it is on an f-18 So the why the wheels roll over the wire the wire creates a harmonic the hook misses the wire
Influence on Geopolitical Alliances
00:51:57
Speaker
So our initial tests were not good and the Navy wasn't happy with it. We weren't happy with it either. Our final test, by the time we finished fixing everything, correcting everything and making it fly, it's now the most repeatable. They're wearing out the three-wire and they're wearing out a point knot in the flight because the airplane is so accurate on where it lands now.
00:52:20
Speaker
So I think, I think my proudest moment, which kind of went under the radar for most people was the fact that the airplane is really, really good around the ship. And that was always the Navy's fear. You get a stealthy airplane, I think on the ship, it'd be hard to take care of, you know, and probably wouldn't have real good flying qualities because of the compromises made for stuff. Well, that's not the case. The airplane really is a good, it's a great Navy airplane, I think. That's great. Well, let's transition a little bit and talk about some current events.
00:52:47
Speaker
First, let's talk about Russia. I'm curious just to know, so what's the story with the F-35 and the Russia-Ukraine conflict? As far as I know, we're not supplying F-35s. Some countries have committed to supplying F-16s to Ukraine. I guess first, why is Ukraine asking for F-16s and not F-35s? And then what's the larger role that the F-35 is playing with Russia-Ukraine?
00:53:18
Speaker
Let me talk about the strategic piece of it first. When the ice cap started melting, we already had Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, we're already partners on the program. Canada was the other one. And if you look at one of the things that I think this airplane is going to do, which I don't think any airplane's ever done before, it's been instrumental in realigning alliances.
00:53:43
Speaker
I think with the melting of the Arctic, there's going to be an Arctic Alliance that's formed eventually, whether it's formal or informal. And that's, that's Canada. You know, all the countries, all the countries that surround the Arctic. And since Russia invaded Ukraine, Finland, Switzerland, finding Canada, Canada is one of the original partners, but they hadn't committed it by the airplane. It got wrapped up in all their internal politics, but they have committed now.
00:54:09
Speaker
So pretty much every country that rims the Arctic now is going to be an F-35 operator.
F-35 and Defense Capabilities in Conflicts
00:54:16
Speaker
A lot of that was driven by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the fact that the countries just hadn't made a decision politically on what they wanted to buy and all of a sudden they're in the queue for F-35s. That's an issue because then the question comes, how long, when can you get them? Because we're pretty much building them at the capacity of the plant right now.
00:54:38
Speaker
But they're in there now. So there's, like I mentioned in the beginning, there's 19 countries that are now part of the project and pretty much the Balkans up there are lined up. As far as Ukraine goes, Ukraine operates a very small air force, mostly Russian airplanes right now with MiGs and
00:54:57
Speaker
and they're not a modern air force. They have a very sophisticated air defense system, as does Russia, which is why you're not seeing an air war in Russia, Ukraine, you're seeing a tank war. Neither one could survive the air defenses that each one has. But the real long-term, and this is me giving you my impression now, I'm not speaking for anybody. The real long-term strategy is to make, I think to make Ukraine a valid member of NATO.
00:55:26
Speaker
And the NATO standard Air Force airplane is the F-16. And these countries that are already flying, I just got back on the 1st of October from Copenhagen for the arrival of the first data ship, 35. Norwegians have several of them. I don't know what many they have exactly, but they have enough to have a good operating force of them. So as those countries transition to F-35, they're sun setting their F-16s and their F-16s are now available to bring
00:55:55
Speaker
Ukraine up to NATO, sort of a NATO common standard. Eventually, if that all happens and Ukraine becomes a strong member of NATO, they would probably be eligible for F-35s. But right now there's enough people in the F-35 program, I think, for a while that they're not really pushing it on others right now. Nobody's really pushing it. They all kind of want to have their air force upgraded because of the threat that's there.
00:56:22
Speaker
I think it's more of a position in Ukraine to eventually, in the next couple of years, become a full-fledged member of NATO. That hasn't been proved. They're not a member of NATO today, but that's where I would see it going.
00:56:35
Speaker
So the reasoning for wanting F-16s instead of F-35s would be to more align with what a normal NATO country would have. It's not for any kind of tactical reason, you would say. Correct. And I also think that there's a lot of diplomatic issues that you have to be done. Who's going to train pilots? Who's going to train maintainers? Where are you going to base the F-16s? Where are you going to base the airplanes? You can't have them all at one base with the war going on.
00:57:02
Speaker
So there's a lot of questions that are yet to be ironed out. Denmark and the Netherlands have both publicly announced they're going to donate, I think the number's 48 total F-16s, but they won't be ready. You have the second issue of making sure all those F-16s are the same. You don't want to manage an Air Force that's got multiple configurations of F-16s. So there's a lot, you have to be worked out, but that's where I would see it going.
Challenges in Replication
00:57:27
Speaker
Now, does Russia already have the technology to build their own F-35?
00:57:33
Speaker
That's a really interesting question. And I had a guy that spoke with me in Denmark. We both spoke at the ceremony for the arrival of the F-35. And he's a test pilot that had done a lot of testing. And he and I both agree that you can take high fidelity pictures from almost anywhere now, from space. And these airplanes sit on the ramp. So you can get a pretty accurate
00:58:00
Speaker
depiction of the geometry of the airplane. And this goes back to one of the comments I made in the very beginning. It's got two wings and two tails. Therefore, it's an airplane. And if that airplane looks like this airplane, they're both airplanes. Well, in the case of the F-35, you've got to peel back the airplane and look at what's inside it and look at how it operates and look at how the software has been developed and look at how the engine operates. There's a whole lot of highly technical
00:58:28
Speaker
things, many of them are confident or classified that make the F-35 and F-35 that go way beyond what the design looks like. Whether the Soviet Union or China or anybody has the ability to do what's under the skin is the big question mark. The second point is that the US has a very unique capability of being able to manufacture these really complex machines at relatively high production rates.
00:58:57
Speaker
So far that has not been the case in certainly in Russia. They may have 10 airplanes that they can actually fly where we're producing 150 a year. That's one every other day. Every other manufacturing day goes out the factory. So being able to manufacture and populate an air force with large numbers of airplanes is something that's somewhat unique to the United States right now.
F-22 vs. F-35: Combat Strengths
00:59:25
Speaker
What's the difference in planes? How many planes does Russia have compared to what the US military has? I don't know. I can't really answer the question accurately. I think if you look at generations, they've got plenty of airplanes that can
00:59:42
Speaker
fly and fight with the older generation, the F-18, F-16 group, which populates most of the air forces of the world right now. Whether they have the ability to produce the more capable quasi fifth gen airplanes or not kind of remains to be seen. Everything I've read says they don't have very many of those and they've been working on it for about 10 years now. So they just haven't been able to produce them in large quantities.
01:00:09
Speaker
I should have asked this at the very beginning, but is the F-35, would you say that's the best military aircraft in the sky today? That's another question I get all the time, which is kind of interesting because I was present by F-22 and F-35 background. And my answer to that is the F-22 was built as an air superiority fighter. If you're going to get into
01:00:33
Speaker
a visual fight, you want to be in an F-22, it's King Kong. It also has tremendous capability from a sensor standpoint, but it is a little bit older, 10 years gap. It's continued to upgrade as it's gone through time, but F-35 had the advantage of having a clean sheet to start with 10 years further along in the technology world. If you want to go in and attack a heavily defended strategic target and escape alive,
01:01:02
Speaker
F-35 can both do that mission. F-35 probably does a little bit better. If you want something that can be produced in broad scale and populate the allied air forces along with all three services, only the F-35 can do that. So they're both, and I guess that's a long way of saying it, it all gets down to your requirements, you know, and how well did you define the requirements of what you want the airplane to do. And then the one thing that every,
01:01:32
Speaker
every modern tactical airplane has to worry about is how do you deal with changing requirements going forward. We're 20 years into the F-35 now. What's different today than when we first envisioned the airplane 20 years ago?
Potential Role in Middle East Conflicts
01:01:45
Speaker
Would you say if given the choice between the F-22 and the F-35, do you think Russia would be like, we want the F-22 or you think they'd be like, no, we want the F-35?
01:01:59
Speaker
I don't really know how they would define their requirement. I think that a lot of it is shell of force and visual. I think F-22 may be preferred by some just because it's recognized as being a fighter. But the real battle is not in the phone booth with two airplanes and a knife fight in the phone booth as they used to say. It's really more now.
01:02:28
Speaker
If I see you and you don't see me, I have a tremendous advantage over what you do and where you go and how you end up. Both F-22 and F-35 have that embedded in them based on their stealth designs. But I think there's a certain macho image that comes along with being in the best air superiority fighter. And there's a certain capability that
01:02:57
Speaker
That can be exploited in the in the f-35 Well, let's let's transition to Israel which as of us recording this today so October 2023 You know a major conflict has broken out between Israel and Hamas. I think today a few hours ago I heard in the news that Israel either is just about to invade the Gaza Strip where they already have and
01:03:23
Speaker
So of course, we're seeing images of airstrikes in Gaza on the news. Israel has the F-35. When we see airstrikes in Gaza, are those coming from F-35s? I don't know. They haven't said. They also operate F-16s. I spent quite a bit of time in Israel during the days of the F-35, and I went down. There's a base in the very southern region, not far from where they're playing today.
01:03:51
Speaker
It's called base 25 in the Ramon Valley and I went in there and briefed all the Israeli pilots on the F-35 program and they were stationed there and there was an F-16 ready to go 24-7 there because it's so close to the southern border and you don't have time to react unless you have somebody on alert.
01:04:12
Speaker
There's a whole bunch of questions that I think everybody has about how this Hamas invasion happened with that many people coming over a border that's so highly surveilled. And I don't know the answer to that question, but it's almost like we've gone backwards. We've got sophisticated air defense systems. We've got leading front edge fifth generation fighters. And we got tractors knocking down fences
01:04:39
Speaker
people running over the border, you know, so this is, this is not going to be an air war. Hamas doesn't have any airplanes other than maybe some Iranian drones, but this is going to be, you know, things are going to be falling from the sky from the sense that it's going to be an air war, but it's not going to be an air combat war.
01:04:59
Speaker
What role do you think that, assuming that F-35s are being used, first, I guess, what would the advantage of using an F-35 over an F-16 be in this situation? But if F-35s are used, what do you think their primary role would be? I think in most...
01:05:21
Speaker
Well, I think I really don't know, but I think either one could be used to drop ordinance on targets. And I heard they had something like 1,000 targets, so they may need to operate the whole Air Force to do that. But there wouldn't be much difference because you're not asking them to go into a heavily defended target area. So you could use either airplane.
01:05:41
Speaker
I do think that the F-35 can provide a surveillance and electronic warfare information gathering capability that other airplanes can provide and provide that back to the Air Combat Center that's kind of managing the war. It has nothing to do with the kinetic side of dropping ordnance or anything else. It's just its ability to scoop up information and provide that to other sources.
01:06:10
Speaker
So it may have a role in both areas, but again, I'm speaking completely out of, out of, um, out of lack of knowledge of what's actually happening there. Sure. Well, I mean, yeah, it's real time with some friends there. And I, the first thing I did was I sent them a message, people that are, that are, um, worked with me on F 35 over there to see if they're all okay. And, and, uh, there's, it's a, it's a rough place right now. I mean, it's, they're okay. Cause they're a little further north, um, sort of up towards Haifa, but, uh, but now there's
01:06:40
Speaker
there's another group Hezbollah, I guess, is manning up the northern border. So they may be fighting on two fronts before too long. It's a pretty scary situation, not just for Israel, but for the whole world right now. Yeah, absolutely. And thinking about how more players in the Middle East could just keep getting sucked in to this conflict. And Iran too, kind of playing a role here. It is a very, very delicate situation.
The Future of the F-35
01:07:10
Speaker
Well, lastly here, Tom, and thank you so much for all your insightful and thoughtful answers to all my questions. It's really been a terrific interview. Lastly here, what do you think the future is for the F-35? Do you think the F-35 is just now entering its best years? What's on the horizon for this program?
01:07:35
Speaker
I think the real strategic benefit of the F-35 concept hasn't even begun to be realized yet. And I'll tell you a couple of examples. One is the Arctic. We talked about that a little bit. Now you have the countries that rim the Arctic can fly as an interoperable air force.
01:07:53
Speaker
The other hotspot is the Pacific, the South China Sea. And if you look over there, you have Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Australia, and any US super carriers that are deployed to the region. And if that region gets hotter with Taiwan, China type activities, there'll be a couple carriers there. That's a formidable air force that can fly and operate together as a unified force. So suddenly, you're going to be at the point, and I don't think the tactics have been fully developed yet,
01:08:24
Speaker
You can be at the point where it doesn't matter whose insignia is on your airplane, even what services insignia is on your airplane. When you go into the fight, you're a force multiplier. You have all of these capabilities and you are able to share strategic challenges, you know, where in the past you basically had a limited number of allies that could go into a heavily defended area. And then when the threat was beaten down, others could come and participate.
01:08:53
Speaker
Now you have kind of a unified force. At the end of this year, there was projected to be about 1,000 F-35s out there flying in about 10 or 11 countries. The ultimate is three or four times that. So one other really interesting example was the Queen Elizabeth. There's a good bit in the book about the UK, which is a really interesting piece of the story. But the Queen Elizabeth class carrier was built just for the F-35.
01:09:22
Speaker
You can almost think of it like the catbird, the 737, it's an F-35 that's on the sea. And it deployed its maiden cruise, went to Syria in 21, so almost two years ago now. And it had two squatters of US Marine Corps F-35Bs on it and one squadron of RAF F-35Bs. And the reason for that was the RAF hadn't had enough airplanes delivered yet to fully populate the ship. So the Marine Corps lent them two squatters. They went to, did their first,
01:09:50
Speaker
combat tour in Syria, and as they're coming back through the Mediterranean, the Italian F-35Bs flew out and landed on the ship. So on a single day in the Med, you had F-35Bs being operated by three sovereign nations on a capital ship that didn't belong to the US. I mean, that's a pretty good thumbnail sketch of the power of the airplane.
01:10:14
Speaker
Well, I got to say, I went from knowing nothing about this airplane to feeling like I could jump in a cockpit myself and just jet off. So thank you so much, Tom. I was just joking, by the way. I know it's a very complex aircraft and I've never flown a plane.
01:10:31
Speaker
Is it? Well, there's no way. If you've never flown an F-35, there's a 0% chance I'm ever getting that. Well, everybody, Tom Burbage, F-35, the inside story of the Lightning II, co-written with Betsy Clark, Adrian Pittman, and David Boyer. Go buy a copy. Go check it out from your library. What a fascinating story. And Tom, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you, AJ. It's been a great pleasure talking to you.