Advanced prototyping, a last minute deal for the F-16

Today's quote is from the 1971 Senate hearings on Advanced Prototyping. Here is Air Force General K. R. Chapman:

"... we think three- to five-man teams on each project working closely with the contractor, strongly supported by our inhouse laboratories and systems division, would compare very favorably with 50- to 250-man program offices that are in our full scale production efforts.

“Some of the principles that we have looked at, which we think are useful here, are to reduce the requirement for special reporting by the use of the contractor formatted data; to waive or set aside several hundred procedural policy regulations, manuals and directives that normally govern our full development, procedure; also to, in other cases, selectively apply but not contractually invoke some of these existing directives. Reporting of the program managers would be kept as simple and direct as possible and in terms of the split test program we are talking about the services and the contractor jointly performing this with the contractor retaining the right through his designers to make changes during that program...

"We believe that our solicitation can be reduced to a Request for Proposal of about 25 pages compared to what we are doing today. We think the contractor response can be held to about 60 pages compared to what we have received today.”

General Chapman was one of the service representatives accompanying Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard. They came to the Senate on September 9, 1971 to plead for additional prototype funding in the FY1972 budget, which officially began on October 1, 1971. Further, Packard said "We believe this should be an authorization rather than a reprograming or tradeoff action."

In other words, increase the DoD top line with three weeks left to the start of budget execution. Rather unorthodox, one might suppose. The amount came to $63.7 million. I wonder if some of that money went directly to the YF-16 and YF-17 flyoff:

"In January 1972, proposals were sought for a fighter with excellent acceleration, turn rate and range in the 20,000-pound weight class… In February 1972, Lockheed, General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop and LingTemco-Vought (LTV, later Vought) submitted proposals… The Air Force selected General Dynamics and Northrop in April 1972 to design and build two prototypes each"

Notice how they took no time at all, requesting proposals from industry just four months after begging for the money and receiving four bids just a month after that; it only took another two months to select the winners. Both were truly winners, as General Dynamics would go on to build the F-16 after winning the Air Force competition and Northrop the F-18, which evolved out of the YF-17 that lost the competition. Both are mainstays.

I'll frame this as a questionable last minute budget deal, purposefully put out in front of the public, that had unquestionable good results. However favorable prototyping is, and it is favorable, the situation feels like short-termism that allowed the DoD not to internalize the reform it asked for. Packard himself resigned two months after the Sepember 1971 hearings.

That second quote was from “Quest to Build a Better Fighter” by Michael Sanibel.

F-35 and Risk Management

F-35A Assembly at Lockheed Ft. Worth

It has been no secret that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the air-superiority aircraft intended replace numerous legacy counterparts, has had its fair share of difficulties. Acquisition costs have ballooned to $400bn and another $1tn (yes, trillion) in operating and support costs are expected. The Air Force even had to repaint their refueling trucks from green to white because the former color absorbed too much heat and the resulting fuel temperature was inoperable with the F-35B short-take off, vertical landing (STOVL) variant. A fascinating article from David Axe sheds light on what we are really buying through one of the government’s largest and most important programs. An unnamed test pilot wrote a scathing unclassified briefing after a dogfight test with an F-16D.

"The stealth fighter proved too sluggish to reliably defeat the F-16, even with the F-16 lugging extra fuel tanks. ‘Even with the limited F-16 target configuration, the F-35A remained at a distinct energy disadvantage for every engagement,’ the pilot reported.

‘Insufficient pitch rate.’ ‘Energy deficit to the bandit would increase over time.’ ‘The flying qualities in the blended region (20–26 degrees AoA) were not intuitive or favorable.’

The F-35 jockey tried to target the F-16 with the stealth jet’s 25-millimeter cannon, but the smaller F-16 easily dodged. ‘Instead of catching the bandit off-guard by rapidly pull aft to achieve lead, the nose rate was slow, allowing him to easily time his jink prior to a gun solution,’ the JSF pilot complained.

And when the pilot of the F-16 turned the tables on the F-35, maneuvering to put the stealth plane in his own gunsight, the JSF jockey found he couldn’t maneuver out of the way, owing to a ‘lack of nose rate.’

The F-35 pilot came right out and said it — if you’re flying a JSF, there’s no point in trying to get into a sustained, close turning battle with another fighter. ‘There were not compelling reasons to fight in this region.’ God help you if the enemy surprises you and you have no choice but to turn.

[….]In the end, the F-35 — the only new fighter jet that America and most of its allies are developing — is demonstrably inferior in a dogfight with the F-16, which the U.S. Air Force first acquired in the late 1970s.”

This process of testing  your system against handicapped opponents or unrealistic situations is rife. The Ballistics Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) would put a infrared beacon or radar reflector on the target missile in order to make the test intercept easier.

As Axe explained in another article, the F-35’s design was compromised to fulfill the needs of the Marine Corps who insisted on the STOVL. In order to get the lift-fan mechanism to work, it was decided to dump 11 pounds of worth of valves and fuses making the plane 25% more likely to get destroyed by enemy fire. The Chinese, who likely hacked and stole engineering data from Lockheed, have quickly built an F-35 replica without the complexity stemming from the STOVL requirements.

Here is my take on the subject, which comes down to risk management. Even if there is a slight chance of total ruin, the precautionary principle applies. Climate change is an often used case of this logic. Even if the chances that humans are causing climate change are miniscule, the potential effects are so great that the burden of proof must be on those who wish to do nothing. Nissim Talebhas applied the precautionary principle to GMOs because an unintended blight could destroy the entire ecosystem.

The precautionary principle can be applied in defense acquisitions as well. The F-35 has monopoly in its sphere and we are led to believe that there is at least a reasonable chance that it will be completely outclassed by competitors. If air superiority turns out to be a decisive factor in the next war, I would argue that diversification is a sound choice. 

Interestingly enough, enacting the precautionary principle usually comes at a cost of "higher returns" (e.g. emissions regulations dampen economic growth), but the case here is that we are paying more for accepting this risk because of the nature of massive acquisition programs (more on this discussed later). 

The strengths of the F-16 were born in a reaction to the complexities of the F-15, and has proved itself simple, effective, and enduring. The F-35 is also intended to replace the A-10, whose strengths come from features that stand in stark contrast to the F-16. 

I don’t see an easy resolution to the F-35 problem. The primary impediment to change is how insular the program is from the public eye (aided and abetted by poor media coverage).