{"id":21455,"date":"2015-07-07T15:00:36","date_gmt":"2015-07-07T05:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=21455"},"modified":"2015-07-13T12:40:11","modified_gmt":"2015-07-13T02:40:11","slug":"f-35-versus-f-16-who-wins-who-cares","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/f-35-versus-f-16-who-wins-who-cares\/","title":{"rendered":"F-35 versus F-16: who wins? Who cares?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"LM\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Last week there was a real flurry in the press and the blogosphere about the performance of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Or, more accurately, about the lack of manoeuvre performance in a trial against an F-16\u2014a design that dates back to the 1970s. War is Boring<\/em> has been running hard on the issue, with writer David Axe\u2014a frequent critic of the F-35\u2014leading the charge<\/a>. The story was picked up by the mainstream press, including an \u2018exclusive\u2019 in The Australian<\/em> today<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The story is based on a leaked test pilot’s report<\/a> (PDF) of an air-to-air exercise in January this year. (Note: the report is marked Export Controlled Information FOUO<\/em>. For Strategist<\/em> readers inside government, this is one to access at home.) The crux of the story is that the F-35 was beaten because it couldn’t outturn the F-16, and suffered from ‘energy disadvantage for every engagement’. To those who have been strident F-35 critics for years, such as Aviation Week’s Bill Sweetman<\/a>, this was the news they’d been expecting<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When I first saw the story, I was a bit surprised\u2014but only a bit. Based on figures I’ve seen, my expectation would’ve been that the F-35 and F-16 would be roughly comparable in close-in dogfighting performance, with one or the other having a marginal advantage depending on exactly how the fight was set up, and the configuration of the aircraft\u2014particularly how much stuff was slung under the F-16. And that’s consistent with other, far less reported on, comparative assessments between the two<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That might seem strange at first. Why, after all, would the latest and most sophisticated combat aircraft around not be able to completely outclass a competitor that pre-dated it by decades? (To be precise, the Block 40 F-16 in the trial is a late 80s design.) The answer, in part, is that it isn’t the fight the F-35 was designed for. An F-35 pilot who finds him- or herself in a tight turning contest within visual range has got something terribly wrong. In fact, in today’s world of helmet mounted off-boresight targeting, any pilot who finds themselves in such a fight is probably going to be walking home. And as for air-to-air gunfighting, as practiced in the January trial, oh please\u2014the 1960s called and wants its top guns back.<\/p>\n

Instead, the F-35 is designed to be lethal at well beyond visual range through a combination of stealth, sensors, superior information processing and electronic warfare capability. There are reasons to wonder how effective the F-35’s bag of tricks will be into the future, especially as counter-stealth systems evolve, and I’d like to see it carry more and longer-ranged weapons, but the trial back in January tells us precisely nothing about the effectiveness of the F-35 in the regime it was designed for.<\/p>\n

And if that was all that could be criticised about the recent fuss, it wouldn’t be so bad. But it seems that there was a strong element of confirmation bias at work as well. If you already thought the F-35 was a dog (not entirely a bad thing to be in a dogfight, but I digress), then this report confirmed it. But a careful reading suggests that the flight controls of the F-35 involved were software limited to a point where it was effectively handicapped out of the fight. That’s why the recommendations made at the end of the report read like this:<\/p>\n