Chopping Block
The Army’s Commanche helicopter died yesterday. Could the Air Force’s F-22 Raptor and F-35 JSF be next? From StrategyPage:
If the air force decides it needs a lot of UCAVs in a hurry, Congress will probably not put up with buying expensive F-22s and F-35s (which only cost about $40 million each) as well. So the air force is looking into the possibility of cutting or canceling F-22 and F-35 production, and upgrading current aircraft (F-15s, F-16s and A-10s) to hold the fort until the UCAVs are available in quantity. The huge development costs for the F-22 and F-35 won’t be wasted. Those technologies can be applied to UCAVs, which can be built cheaper (at least 20 percent cheaper) because these aircraft don’t have to carry a pilot. That means F-22 class UCAVs could be built for under $100-150 million each. The F-22 UCAV would also be a more capable aircraft, being able to perform maneuvers a human pilot could not survive.
It’s hard to kill a program as big as either of these two new warplanes, and you can bet the F-22 ($250 million each) would be killed off before the cheap-in-comparison JSF (at a mere $40 million a copy).
Yep. I’d be surprised to see JSF go away. It’s cheap and “joint.”
Not to mention multinational.
If we pull out of JSF, the Brits are utterly screwed.
The JSF has purchase contracts from the Italians, the Brits, the Aussies, and about 11 other nations…. and the thing isn’t even into series production yet. Given the presence of hard cash on the barrelhead, it’ll indeed be a cold day in Hell when the JSF gets canceled. The Raptor is a different issue: there has been less effort to even get buy-in from the other services for the F-22 than there was to get foreign orders for the F-35. The second it gets seen as just another overpriced Air Force ego-toy, out it goes. Which is sad and bad: the F-14 and F-15 are both PAST their designed block-obsolescence; we still have no replacement for the Prowler and Raven electronic warfare planes, and the Navy badly needs a new heavy attack plane vice the A-6.
For more info on the JSF and F-22, go to http://www.strategypage.com and search.
Mr. Green and other military-tech fans who seem to believe in limited&constitutional government, most of the time:
How can the military whose judgement you seem to trust on so many issues that are really tough to verify…. how can they have even recently have been planning to buy over 5,000 ultra-expensive “human-powered” RECONNISANCE helicopters? 5000!
Dave,
I suggest you run a little Google search using the following words: Soviet Union ORBAT 1982.
Then you’ll know why the Army wanted nearly 1,000 Commanches.
And where’d you get the 5,000 figure? From the same imagination which conflates “human piloted” with “human powered”?
IN terms of roles, it will be easier to keep the F-22, partly because of institutional bias in favor of fighters. That, and the fact that there has been talk about adapting the airframe into a FB-22.
On the other hand, killing the JSF is a lot more politically difficult than the F-22, due in part to the amount ofinternational participations.
On the other, other hand, international participation is not enough to guarantee the health of a program – the MBT-70, for example.
BRD,
I hadn’t thought of the MBT-70 in ages. And now I can’t remember why we and the West Germans fell out on the project.
Stephen:
THAT was several things:
Cost (iirc, by the time MBT-70 was killed, it’d have cost $1M apiece, when M-60s cost a LOT less);
Technological immaturity (the “crew capsule,” hydrodynamic suspension, fire-on-the-move were all introduced into that one vehicle);
Divergent requirements (Germans ultimately wanted a less gee-whiz, more conventional tank, and developed the Leopard I, iirc [or was it L-II?], we had no guiding philosophy on what this thing was supposed to do).
We kept up the experimenting (XM-803, anyone?), before deciding to develop a doctrine (AirLand Battle) first, THEN designing the vehicle (w/ technologies that were also now more mature). The Germans were the ones who wanted out (can’t really blame them).
Internat’l programs don’t always have happy endings (note that the French pulled outta Eurofighter, and Franco-German PAH-2 is pretty much on life-support), but ones this big are pretty hard to kill. And the Brits, at least, have no place else to go. If they buy the planned CVF (or whatever acronym they’re gonna give it), it’s gotta have stuff on the flight deck, and unless they wanna go w/ Rafale or F/A-18s (neither of which may fit), they’re gonna need something like JSF.
Steven,
We and the Germans fell out for a coupla reasons – one is that it was in the hyper-gadget phase of military design – the MBT-70 sported a autoloading 152 mm gun that fired a guided missile with a 5.2 km range. Think Sheridan and Shilleliegh (sp?). And it was past a million a copy in the late 70′s.
IIRC, I also thought the British and maybe the Dutch had small shares in the program.
The other thing that I just noticed is the $250 M$/copy for the F-22. Keep in mind that there are more different ways to do cost accounting for projects than you can shake a stick at. I guarantee that in an apples-apples sense, the F-22 isn’t anywhere near 6 times as expensive as the F-35 on a per copy basis.
But you’re still right about the RAH-66 making all manner of sense when it was specced out. I, personally, am sorry to see it go, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles, I guess.
Here’s a good link on the MBT-70/XM-803.
Dave P,
The final batch of F-18E Super Hornets will be EA-18G’s – the Growler, and will replace the EA-6B’s. There’ll be a little under 100 of them made, built as dedicated EA aircraft, with hardware taken from the ICap III EA-6′s that just went operational.
Glad to see the Comanche go. If there is one thing the last two years has shown is both how vulnerable helicopters are, and how important they are. The Comanche was fragile and designed for an enemy that doesn’t exist any longer. What the Army needs are some Soviet style gunships like the Hind. Fast, heavily armed and heavilt armored.
Yeah, JSF is pretty close to impossible to kill right now, whether we want to or not. Though, for JSF at least, that’s mostly a good thing, because it’s a solid next-gen aircraft that we need. F-22 …. I’m not entirely sold on, it’s a good idea in general, I’m not sure the implementation is what it needs to be, especially cost and timetable wise.
As for UCAVs, big, big, big mistake. I think UCAVs have an enormous amount of potential, but you damned well do NOT switch up the batting order on the battlefield when you do not have really damned good proof that it’s the right thing to do. Plain and simple, UCAVs have not proved themselves superior, yet. More importantly, the UCAVs available today and in the near future have not proved themselves to be up to the task of being the backbone of air operations (of any kind).
The thing that distresses me about all this, and similar developments, is that it shows how misguided military procurement has become. There doesn’t seem to be an overarching plan or framework or even a concrete set of abilities matched with priorities. It seems like it’s just one mad “catch as catch can”. And we need to do better than that when it comes to national (and international) defense.
Robin,
There is a plan, that’s the whole “transformation” bugaboo. The problem is, is that during the ’90s cutbacks, procurment for a lot of systems got pushed back. The F-22 and RAH-66 are at least a decade behind where they’re supposed to be.
In happy ideal land, they’d already be deployed so when the next gen “transformation” stuff is in R&D we’ve go a current generation in place, and we don’t have to push legacy systems to the end of time.
But hey, if things were perfect we would need the crap in the first place.
BRD
There’s a bit of confusion over the procurement numbers game that isn’t being caught here.
The JSF has, is, and will be leveraging a lot of non-recurring engineering that has been tallied to the F22 bill. A lot. Not the tooling, but the technology development.
The development and tooling costs are built into the 250M price per platform for the F22. The quantity of the projected buy determines the cost per platform. At one point when the Air Force was considering a much larger number of planes, the individual cost per platform was much lower. It’s been a while, and I forget the actual figures. The reader is welcome to research and confirm, but be advised that the ATF initiative which became the F22 started long before there was an internet..
The basic rule of thumb for any new technology is the same. The more you build, the lower the per copy price when the non-recurring costs are amortized over a larger number of copies. A good example of the success of a program – read multiple add on contracts – dramatically lowering the overall cost per item was the F16. (GD did a great job also).
Cancel the F22 and a portion of the development cost (engineering, not tooling) by rights should be assigned to the JSF program, and the cost per platform goes up. We are talking many billions here. The 40M per JSF might still be advertised, but anyone understanding the technology leverage and synergy between the two planes knows damn well that the individual price tag for each JSF should skyrocket if the F22 is cancelled.
F/B-22? It is to laugh. It has internal stowage so as to maintain it’s girlish stealthy figure. This means it’s not going to carry much. And now that the AF has fallen in love with PGMs and stealth are they ever really going to want to go back to dropping herds of dumb munitions carried externally? PGMs are great if you know where/what your target is, but suppose that you know you have a threat in an area but don’t have a positive i.d. Do you wait until it shows it’s head, or do you sledge the area from flying dump trucks? P-47 Thunderbolts carried as much as the F/B-22 is likely to be able to but we’ll never have near as many Raptors as we did Jugs.
Just to expand on the tooling and engineering costs in procurement programs (I’m a manufacturing engineer at one of the main contractors for both planes, if you want to know my credentials,) the capital equipment costs (machines, or other heavy equipment,) of a program like the F-22 and JSF are rolled into the overhead cost of the program, whereas the durable tooling costs (fixtures and other re-usable tools,) are payed for and owned by the program.
For the JSF and F-22, the durable tooling costs are shared somewhat with common tooling, but for the most part, these things are already payed for, and cutting the F-22 will have no effect on these costs. The capital equipment costs are another matter. There are machines that at first were bought for the F-22 program. When they were bought, it was assumed that the F-22 program would have to pay for them, so the capital equipment expenses were rolled into the overhead for the F-22. When the JSF came along, most of the capital expenses were already payed for by the F-22, and thus it’s overhead cost wasn’t hit as hard during the development phase. I don’t think that there’s a whole lot of capital equipment expenses left to pay for though, so I don’t expect the JSF costs to increase significantly from this.
As for the engineering costs, the programs have been charged seperately from the start, and while I can’t speak for the other co.’s involved, the engineering costs have been billed and payed as they are incurred. While the JSF has been sharing some technological development with the F-22, those costs have already been charged and payed.
The F-22 is well into it’s flight tests, there is no more technological development, and what they’ve already done is payed for. The JSF is well into the technology development phase, and the validation phase has been started. All of these costs are already accounted for into the current JSF costs, so cancelling the F-22 shouldn’t have much, if any, of an effect on the JSF cost.
Sorry for the length, but long story short: if the F-22 is cancelled, there will be a slight JSf cost increase (if just because of a reduced schedule for the manufacturers, since most of the planes are being built in the same places,) but the capital equipment, tooling and engineering costs won’t be affected much.
JS,
The F/B 22 only makes sense with the Small Diameter Bomb/Minaturized Munitions Capability. The theory on those is that you get all the hard-target kill capability out of a 250lb munition as you can currently get out of a 2,000 JDAM, or something like that. If you can increase the number of aimpoints serviceable by a factor of 8, then the F/B-22 becomes a possibility. Otherwise, as you say, there’s just not enough internal stowage to justify it.
Trevor,
I agree that taking away the F22 will not effect the JSF much at this point. What I said was that this is not really the correct way to look at it. For credentials, I was involved in the avionics engineering efforts for both planes. I was also involved in some of the JSF proposal work (the ATF proposal was before my time) and one vital assumption in the bid was that the relevant ATF/F22 technology would be available for JSF.
Last related caveat – I am no longer involved with either program or even in defense related engineering and have no vested interest in arguing the benefits of the F22 or JSF.
Where we part company somewhat, or more likely are talking at cross purposes, is indirectly the way the actual cost per plane in the first buy is estimated and more directly how the published cost per plane figure is arrived at. The published cost per delivered item in the first contract in any procurement has the development costs including capitol equipment, tooling, engineering etc rolled into the cost of each copy. That’s how you estimate the cost to the customer and the reported 250M price tag for the F22 reflects this. You do not lay out 250M each time a plane is delivered. It does not cost that much to build each plane individually. The published price tag per plane is what it costs the customer to get that number of planes in the air and that 250M includes all the money spent on development and infrastucture etc. The fact that the money is spent up front does not mean it is not figured into the cost per plane. This is why the F22 cost per plane skyrocketed when the Air Force cut the number of planes.
My original point was not that the costs will roll into the JSF if the F22 is cancelled. The nre and development costs for the F22 are already paid out as you note and the program costs already incurred will not be passed to another program. The point I was making was in answer to some of the previous comments in the thread on the subject of military spending, waste, etc. The JSF price tag reflects a savings leveraged from the F22 program’s engineering, integration, and full scale deveopment phases. You cannot make the statement that the lower cost for the JSF versus the F22 indicates better procurement etc or even make cost comparisons between the planes at all without taking the leveraged F22 program development costs paid for out of a different bucket of money into account. The costs will never be captured by or assigned to the JSF if the F22 is cancelled. However, had there not been an F22 development program, the JSF 40M cost per plane would be a pipe dream.
There was a related controversy raised by some poorly informed folks many years ago that bears mention. When foreign military sales (FMS) for the F15 started, the planes being sold via FMS were cheaper than the current contract with the Air Force. There were some factors like avionics and EW in play, but not enough to account for the price difference. The difference in cost came from the fact that the current Air Force contract still reflected the development costs. The new contracts benefited from the fact that the infrastructure was already in place and the cost for the planes lower as a result. Follow on Air Force buys of F15s saw this same benefit. If more F22′s are purchased in the future under a separate contract, (assuming this happens while the infrastructure is still in place), they will not be approach 250M per plane.
A point to stress once again is that the 40M per plane cost for the JSF is estimated based on the proposed number of planes in the first buy. Cut that number and you get the same effect as you did with the F22 when the numbers were pared – dramatic increase in the cost per plane. Stretch the JSF program out and you get a similar increase in cost per plane effect just as you did with the F22.
The people in the thread with their finger on the real issue are the ones looking at mission, not costs. The initial proposal work on the JSF made many of the same assumptions about conflicts that the ATF/F22 assumed. The ATF initiative started much earlier with the tactical air/air mission against a USSR type of threat in mind. The JSF started up later, but was/is intended to perform the common strike fighter mission for NATO in the same conflict. Different planes, different missions, but same conflict.
BTW:
The F22 was/is intended to fill/replace the F15s mission. Cancel the F22 and you still have the problem of an aging F15 fleet. One could make the argument that the F15′s mission is no longer relevant and could be imperfectly filled by the F16 or JSF, but the JSF was not designed for nor it is intended to fill the F15 mission any more than the F16 was.
JPT, thanks for clearing all that up, and I agree 100%.
As a newbie/NG to this blog, my research on the history of the F22 and COMMANCHE is outdated by several years. However, I read on the Net that the USAF is considering developing a HT REGIONAL BOMBER based on the F22, or was it the F117! Plans are also reportedly in the works for the USAF to take out from retirement circa 20 B-1′s, and to seriously upgrade USAF “legacy” bombers and air superiority fighters like the B52, B-2, and F15-F16′s! The USDOD is also reportedly pressuring the US Navy to form two squadrons composed of improved F14 “Bombcats”. As for the US Army, I believe this service is planning to achieve its conceptual “sky soldiers”, now “space soldiers”, tenet by developing high-tech, low-atmospheric, multi-mission VTOL manned or unmanned UAV’s for the integrated battlefield/battlespace. Despite the advent of “smart” or “brilliant” high-yield weapons, the fact remains contemporary high-speed jet aircraft, however stealthy or armed, IS NOT YET ABLE TO SEARCH, TAKE, HOLD, AND DEFEND TERRITORY AS EFFECTIVELY OR EFFICIENTLY AS THE GROUND FORCES – against mixed-armed variable Islamic insurgents, the US Army and Marines current helicopter fleet is more than adequate for the ground forces mission, while so far America’s former Cold War enemies Russia and China have yet to field helicopters, or fixed-wing, ground attack tacair, overwhelmingly or tech-superior to the AH64 Apache, the A10 Warthog, the Marines’ SuperCobra, or the BlackHawk! I believe the Army wants a VTOL AV, a “flying tank” or “flying battleship/battlestation” or platform, capable of near-ground to lower mid-atmosphere combat or combat support operations in coordination with fast-moving, hard-hitting, deep-strike maneuver ground forces. Ideally, for LOCAL AREA DEFENSE-AREA CONTROL such an attack AV or platform may be SUBSONIC as well as STATIC/HOVER-CAPABLE – jet-style supersonic speeds, or the proposed hypervelocity vehicles, is good only for OFFENSIVE DEEP-STRIKE PURPOSES FAR BEHIND THE BATTLESPACE, , NOT FOR INTEGRATED REAR-AREA CLOSE-UNIT CONTROL OR DEFENSE! Time will tell what the Army and USDOD decide on for future “Battlefield:Space” warfighting!