No More New Fighter Aircraft Types?

On Mon, 12 Apr 2004 13:55:05 +0200, "Emmanuel Gustin"
wrote:

Considering that Sweden (population 8,8 million, GDP US$231
billion) could still afford to develop JAS39 Gripen, I think that
the demise of the fighter aircraft for financial reasons does not
yet need to be feared.

A good example. But, it also is an example of drawing conclusions when
comparing apples to oranges. Certainly Sweden has a history of
developing, producing and operating exceptional aircraft, but the
neutrality of Sweden means that the aircraft are by definition going
to be defensive in purpose and home-based in operation. We won't be
finding much force projection going on for the Swedish military.

The result is a fairly straightforward high agility, interceptor with
limited ground attack capability and a fairly traditional sensor
suite.

What is needed, clearly, is a revised approach to aircraft
development. The USA is now trying to fund two fighters, the
F"/A"-22 and the F-35, which are both highly ambitious and
complex. With hindsight, it should have developed a single
middle-class fighter (designed for carrier use; the USAF can
use a lightened version) instead of a high/low mix, and the
approach to design should have been more evolutionary.

While the stake in McNamara's heart never kill him? Must we also
administer a silver bullet and still wear garlic around our necks?
Your suggest sounds a lot like TFX--the horrendous "one size fits all"
development projection that got the US the F-111. An airplane the Navy
aborted in the third trimester and which the AF could not effectively
operate for twenty years after deployment. The under-powered A, the
vacuum tube unmaintainable D, the unsustainable E and finally the
almost capable F model....ahhh yes, I remember them well. Great
examples such as Mt. Home which housed 84 airplanes disguised as a
three squadron (18 UE per squadron) wing and still could barely
generate 0.5 sorties/aircraft/day figured on their "authorized
equippage of 54 airframes.

No thanks. Air dominance and ground attack seem to work best with
dedicated air frames in a hi/lo mix--the USAF has done quite nicely
with F-15/16 and the Navy seems to have concluded that the "good ol'
days" of F-14/A-6 operations were better on both sides of the mission
than the F/A-18 business.

But I suspect that no small part of the cost getting out of control
is due to so-called "management", techniques which are now
also eating their way into military culture. The litigious American
mind has long had an excessive reverence for the written word
(whether it is the Constitution or "Do not dry pets in this microwave
oven!") and appears to be easily seduced by the trappings of
bureaucracy. Granted, the multi-national Eurofighter bureaucracy
cannot be any better! There is a risk-averse tendency to break
down development in phases, phases in stages, and stages in
substages, ad infinitum, all surrounded by due process and a mass
of tests. In theory, these serve to eliminate risks and get the best
possible aircraft; in practice they stretch development time and
increase costs. The justification is that the complexity of modern
aircraft requires delegation of the work. In practice, according to
Conway's law, every dividing line in the organisation adds
complexity to the final system.

Gotta agree 100% here. Certainly the project management culture
increases costs while attempting to minimize risks. What you don't
address, however, is the over-lay of political decision interference.
While a free-market capitalist business model might be successful with
the phase/stage/substage sequence, when you throw in the political
posturing, competition for budget dollars, mis-information campaigns
and general pacifism of nearly 50% of the American electorate, you
really get a screwed up program.


Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (USAF-Ret)
"When Thunder Rolled"
Smithsonian Institution Press
ISBN #1-58834-103-8