This refers to “Scrap the MMRCA, buy US F-35s” (October 19) by Ajai Shukla. The author has suggested scrapping the ongoing procurement of 126 medium multi-role combat aircraft (MMRCA) by the Indian Air Force (IAF) and instead, buying Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II fighters, also known as the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). It is, however, important to know about JSF’s capabilities and its current status of development.
Apart from being designed in a network-centric combat environment, the F-35 loses out on everything else.
The JSF has the following shortcomings:
- It can’t fire weapons supersonically — the weapon bay doors fall off if one tries doing this.
- It has only one engine. No matter how good the engine efficiency may be, you’ll lose the aircraft as a result — it will be interesting to look at the loss rate of F-15s and F-16s, which use the same power plant.
- The JSF is not an air superiority fighter, it’s a bomber. But due to the limited size of its bomb bay, it can only carry a small number of weapons.
- The JSF does not have the same level of sensor fusion as the Eurofighter and requires more pilot intervention to fly it. This increases the cognitive load of the pilot.
- The JSF lacks manoeuvrability since its stealth shaping impinges on aerodynamics.
- Once it has done its job on day one of the war, the JSF has to act as any other aircraft and carry its weapons on pylons — this increases the radar cross section (RCS) and decreases its mission survival rate.
- There is no national sovereignty over any of the software on the aircraft, including independent loading of EW Mission Dependent Data. This is even the case with the UK, which is the only level-one international partner in the programme and has invested nearly $2billion as the development cost.
- The cost of the JSF is at least $100 million per aircraft and is likely to increase. There is no clear-cut, well-defined statement of JSF’s tactical capabilities or platform performance as on date.
- There is no possibility of local manufacture or joint production for this platform.
All over the world including Turkey, Denmark, Norway and Japan, similar ploys have been adopted by the vendors to create confusion and delay the process of selection. It is quite common for the vendors to state that they can deliver assets by a certain date, which delays the ongoing aircraft selection programme. Having chosen the JSF route, the delivery date of the first aircraft is likely to keep moving steadily to the right, one year at a time, so that the users do not realise that they are falling into the trap.
P R Rajgopal, New Delhi
