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F-35B/C Lightning II (Joint Strike Fighter)
- Thread starter jai5w4
- Start date
More good news about the B.
http://www.air-attack.com/news/article/4285/11-17-2010-Fatigue-cracks-found-on-F-35B-bulkhead-.html
http://www.air-attack.com/news/article/4285/11-17-2010-Fatigue-cracks-found-on-F-35B-bulkhead-.html
While we're at it, Beesley defending it's dogfighting capabilities...
Reconjoe
Active Member
Perfect timing as the white house is preparing to recommend killing the B all together....
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/blog...79a7Post:8e2f6473-f31c-4d55-abf1-beb011a073c8
Oh well....we wouldn't be Marines if we didn't have a backup plan
Semper Gumbi
Perfect timing as the white house is preparing to recommend killing the B all together....
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/blog...79a7Post:8e2f6473-f31c-4d55-abf1-beb011a073c8
Oh well....we wouldn't be Marines if we didn't have a backup plan
Semper Gumbi
The larger question is whether, in a tight defense budget world, the USMC needs very high $$, stealthy, fixed-wing a/c to support Grunts on the ground? Long-range strike missions have historically been roles of the AF & USN carrier-based aviation (i.e., in contested airspace, not post-Saddam Iraq or Afghanistan).
Reconjoe
Active Member
Simply put, Marines fulfill the expeditionary quick reaction force/911 role, deployed and ready for immediate response to anything the President wants to act on. When you need a self contained "Army in a box" AKA MEU on short notice, the F35B makes more sense then giving up time for cross coordination and the arrival of additional assets. If you ask any Marine grunt he'll give you a well versed angry response as to why he wants a leatherneck overhead, and after all thats exactly why we have Marine Air...to support that 03 in the mud.
As I have no frame of reference? What does this mean? Is it normal? Catastrophic?
Also, if the F35B gets cancelled (which is seeming more and more like a coin toss depending on how Congress feels about it) does the new plan call for Marines to get C models, to get rhinos, or to just have Marine tacair don our best clothing and LPUs as the string quartet plays late into the night?
Any way you cut it, the combat power of the Marine Corps of the future is really sucking hind tit if this plan goes through as fragged, and I'm not only talking about air power. I get the feeling that this right here is why General Amos is.
I completely agree, but am not sure we can afford the (stealthy) F-35B at $150MM+ per copy when you could deploy F-18s on the CV w/ the Navy
It's that line of inquiry that, along with a slashed 35B, will get the Marine Corps out of FW attack altogether. Back in 2000 during the Great Harrier Red Stripe, a MEU floated without Harriers much to the horror of the MAGTF kool-aid guzzlers. Amazingly the MEU sailed and enjoyed a successful deployment - and probably enjoyed the smoothest running deck of any MEU in recent history. The doctrine writers were rightfully scared that the MEU wouldn't even miss having the big guns along because that would validate the argument that Harriers didn't belong in the ACE to begin with.
The bitch of it is, if you argue FW out of the MEU ACE there's not much argument left to keep any FW attack capability in the Corps at all. Arguably Joint Doctrine should be sufficiently evolved that should the MEU need FW AI or CAS, there's a purple asset suitably trained and operationally capable (AF long range assets or CV) available to support. You could go a step further and argue that if the MEU needs that "caliber" of support, the engagement is large enough that there are probably suitable assets already positioned nearby.
Don't get me wrong, I love the legacy of Marine Corps FW attack and STOVL ops/capability. But if circumstances/resources don't allow for the continuation of that legacy there will have to be a paradigm shift. Strip STOVL out of the MEU and backfill with AHs to max capacity - my money says the MEU will not notice any loss of capability.
**For anyone unfamiliar, I'm a previous Harrier guy and a previous FAC. You may disagree with my assessment but my thoughts/arguments are not without basis.
Even if they do kill the F-35B, I don't see why that would lead to the end of Marine jets. Marines have been doing FW attack for a long time before the Harrier came along, and even now the Harrier is only one part of it. I don't see why they wouldn't just buy super hornets and/or F-35C's and keep working with the Navy.
Because the Marine Corps is a niche service posturing itself to provide a highly differentiated type of combat capability. Strong differentiation combined with indisputable capability equates to longevity and greater chances of survival.
Resource constraints lead to consolidation, not redundancy, in assets. Marine Hornets for the last decade+ have been mere placeholders for STOVL JSF squadrons. The Harrier's role has been to continue to validate STOVL capabilities. The Corps has gone all-in in its "expeditionary" identity and capability - based on the Corps' definition there's nothing expeditionary about Hornets or 35C's on a CV. The addition of the 35B and the Osprey to the ACE were a bid to greatly expand the depth of expeditionary capability (and in so doing further solidify the Corps' identity in the spectrum of combat forces). If the 35B makes the cut that vision may come to fruition, if not the Corps may have to make do with CAG integration to enable deep expeditionary ops.
But then, I could be wrong (it's happened before). Maybe even if the 35B does get cut the Corps will fight tooth and nail to retain some flavor of fixed wing to keep the skills alive until next-gen STOVL is affordable. Don't kid yourself though, even if they do settle for conventional FW in the interim they'll keep working toward all STOVL in the future.
Harrier Dude
Living the dream
I was on that MEU as the Asst Air Officer.
Not so much. It was a standard "pre-9/11" float. We got to the Gulf to do 3 exercises and OSW. Couldn't do OSW because we had no FW. Couldn't do hardly any FW CAS during the exercises because we had no FW. Part of my job was to rustle up FW air for the exercises. The air force at AJ flat out told me to go pound sand. So did (embarrassingly enough) VMFA(AW)-121 at AJ. Nobody thought it was a good idea for the Kuwaitis to do anything more than sim-CAS (and I still believe that), so that left me with the USN.
To their credit, they did all that they could do. The fine folks at CAG-9 on the Stennis busted their butts to give us every spare sortie that they could muster. That wasn't much, but it wasn't for a lack of effort on their part. It was all a personality driven drug deal setup that got us any CAS at all. That's not a very good template for future success. And for the record, it was just as many USN dudes as it was VMFA-314 that did it.
Oh, and the deck was every bit as assed up as it ever was. Taking the Harriers off did not make Combat Cargo any smarter or the Phrog bubbas any better at planning the deck.
Best deck flow ever: USS Bataan in 2003.
I'm not sure I buy this. I don't think that anybody wants to avoid the HMM ACE anymore than I do, but the Corps wants a packaged deal under the MEU CO. They're not going to bend on that one unless FW air is pried from their cold dead fingers. It's about ownership and the ability to task/provide assets autonomously.
Again, I tend to disagree. We had FW aviation for decades before the mighty jump jet came along. We did just fine. We just traded the fixed basing costs to a cost of supporting V/STOL. We could always go back. The idea of just embedding a squadron (or a few) of FW on a CV "in case we need it" is a fallacy. Once those squadrons go to the CV, the CAG owns them. Whether we ever get to use them again is up to the CAG and MEU CO to wrestle with together. Maybe it'll work (like it did for me that float). Maybe not. It'll be largely personality dependent unless a large paradigm shift is made to give the USMC a larger role in the tasking of it's assets.
"Any loss of capability"? Totally disagree. You lose any deep strike capability, A/A capability, and the ability to shape the battlefield beyond about 100NM. Is that too much of a loss? I don't know. But it's definitley a loss.
Yeah, yeah, yeah......you've turned over to the Dark Side. You lost your "basis" when you started ironing your flight suit and wearing a scarf. <-----insert little smiley thing here
I don't think OSW was the mission they had in mind when they built the MEU. Had you needed FW because you were responding to a pop-up contingency, like the MEU was designed for, it would have been tasked and you would have gotten it.
You mean the Harrier carrier? I am really, truly sorry that I wasn't a part of that. Legendary chapter of AV8 service.
Which is precisely why I doubt that the Corps is going to happily get on board with Super Hornets or 35Cs if the Bs get chopped. Does nothing immediate for the MEU CO.
Of course we can go back, the question is will they (hence the thread)? They have a very specific vision for the architecture and functionality of their hardware and conventional FW does nothing to get them further toward it.
Well while you guys were off fighting the war from the Bataan in '03 we went into Liberia from the Iwo. It was a textbook 911 mission for the MEU. Had Harriers not been embarked they would have only lost their very deepest armed recce, and we could only do that recce because they fragged an AF KC-135 to come fuel us. RW had everything else covered. Oops, I meant just recce, we weren't allowed to carry any ordnance. Our only kill was a grass hut that got burned down by an accidentally initiated flare program.
Don't knock the scarf. Just last week I was in the shitter and ran out of TP, the scarf came in really handy.
No shit the deck ran smoothly. We could all save money by not getting car insurance. Things would run real smoothly until we had an accident.
You don't miss those "big guns" until fit hits the shan.