In the mix

When the Commonwealth signed on to the F-35 program as a development partner in 2001, the RAAF was to have notionally received its first F-35A in 2012, stand up its first squadron at Eglin AFB in Florida in 2013, and bring that squadron home in 2014.

But there have since been two or three slips to the right of these milestones, each of about one year, while Australia’s actual final decision to order the aircraft has also slipped from an originally planned 2006.

While the report in August 21’s The Australian suggested the Rudd Government might delay the RAAF’s first F-35 deliveries for budgetary reasons seems possible unlikely. But while this would now not see the first squadron stood up until 2017 at the earliest, as suggested by the Williams Foundation paper on page XX, the Government’s wish to move $20 billion from the administration of the defence department in the next decade and re-invest it in capital equipment may mean there may be other reasons looming for the delay.

In the late 20-teens Navy will be inducting its second and third Hobart class AWDs, its second Canberra class LHD, finalising the design of its Anzac frigate replacement, and well down the track for a Collins class submarine replacement with as many as 12 new vessels. So whilst the aircraft themselves may be a little bit cheaper if manufactured later in the build run, overall defence funding looks to be tighter if the F-35 is delayed. Naturally this is not an attractive proposition to Air Force which is anxious to sign off on the F-35 as soon as possible in order to keep as much of the $15 billion set aside for the project as possible.

If 2017 is now the new delivery date for the first RAAF F-35A squadron, one can reasonably assume that it would take at least 12 to 18 months before that squadron could declare itself operational, and another couple of years before sufficient aircraft are in place to declare the capability operational. Industry insiders have observed that there is currently “no way” a large proportion of the RAAF’s current ‘classic’ Hornet fleet will make it to 2017, let alone 2019 or beyond, leaving the very real potential of another capability gap emerging in the 2015-2020 timeframe. These sources say that the Hornet’s structural problems go far beyond the Centre Barrel Replacement (CBR) issues which are being partially addressed under Phase 3.2 of the Air 5376 Hornet Upgrade program (HUG). But the originally planned number of aircraft to be modified was last year cut from between 42 and 55 F/A-18s to just 10 aircraft, perhaps reflecting the myriad of other structural issues the fleet are or soon will be experiencing such as those in the wings and undercarriage.

At the July rollout of the first F/A-18F Super Hornet in St Louis, this writer asked Chief of Air Force AIRMSHL Binskin whether there was a chance of additional Supers being acquired, and he couldn’t say “No!” fast enough before half-jokingly apologising to Bob Gower, Boeing’s vice president of F/A-18 and EA-18 Programs who was sitting next to him. As mentioned above, AIRMSHL Binskin obviously has an interest in preserving JSF money and is naturally anxious to silence any possible talk of fewer F-35s. He sees the JSF as the future of the RAAF, the introduction of a true fifth generation capability.

Industry sources claim that a 50:50 buy of F-35s and F/A-18E/Fs would still give a 100 aircraft, four to five squadron combat force, while spreading the expenditure over a longer period and potentially saving as much as $4 billion over the current Super Hornet and Air 6000 acquisition budgets. And this would be a real saving, not just a reshuffling of money from one project to another, money which could be re-directed to health, education, the environment or used to pay off debt.

The Williams Foundation called the first Super Hornet buy, despite being made by a ‘shoot from the hip’ government rolling in a huge surplus, as “prescient” in the wake of the F-111 retirement and the initial delays to the JSF. Perhaps now, with the classic Hornet fleet unlikely to make the distance and further delays coming for the JSF, Boeing is readying a further ‘prescient’ marketing push for another batch of Super Hornets. The trouble for Boeing is, the Rudd government does not ‘shoot from the hip’ in the Defence realm, and time is getting very short before the Second Pass assessment of Air 6000 is due.