Reach for the Sky [embedded video .. 44 minutes .. John Howard signed Australia up, in a secret deal with Lockheed Martin .. 'my prediction is that it will be scrapped as an embarrassment before 500 airplanes are built'.]
It's been billed as the smartest jet fighter on the planet, designed to strike enemies in the air and on the ground without being detected by radar. But after a decade of intensive development, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) is over budget, a long way behind schedule and described by one expert as "big, fat and draggy".
The JSF project could cost Australian taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. Is this plane a super fighter or a massive waste of money?
Next on Four Corners reporter Andrew Fowler travels to the United States in search of answers. He goes to Lockheed Martin's top secret factory in Texas. He also secured the first television interview with the Pentagon's new head man on the project, whose candid assessment of the JSF would chill many in the Defence Department:
"Well let's make no mistake about it. This program still has risks, technical risks, it has cost issues, it has problems we'll have to fix in the future."
The question is how and why did Australia lock itself into a project that both experts and senior US politicians say is dangerously flawed? Four Corners asks three crucial questions. Why was the plane chosen without an open and competitive tender? Why did the then head of the RAAF give the plane and the project his stamp of approval when it was barely off the drawing board? And will the aircraft's capabilities have to be downgraded before it gets into service?
Reflecting on the decision not to open the purchase of a new fighter jet to competition, one insider told the program:
"Now we were proposing that we buy something being developed for the US Air Force if you like, on a whim."
Last year the Canadian Government was rocked by revelations that it had severely under-estimated the cost of the 65 Joint Strike Fighters it had contracted to buy. As a result Canada has been forced to halt the purchase and re-assess it through an open tender process. This has major implications for Australia. It suggests we could be under-estimating the JSF's true cost and it means if the Canadians pull out of the program the price of each plane will rise yet again.
"Reach for the Sky", reported by Andrew Fowler and presented by Kerry O'Brien, goes to air on Monday 18th February at 8.30pm on ABC1. It is replayed on Tuesday 19th February at 11.35pm. It can also be seen on ABC News 24 at 8.00pm Saturday, on ABC iview and at abc.net.au/4corners.
Are aircraft carriers about to become an endangered species in the United States?
By Agence France-Presse Sunday, March 24, 2013 19:15 EDT
[ hidden: A US Navy F-/A-18C Hornet takes off from the USS Kitty Hawk in northern Gulf waters on March 25, 2003. ]
Budget pressures at the Pentagon have renewed a debate about the value of the US Navy’s giant aircraft carriers, with critics arguing the warships are fast becoming costly relics in a new era of warfare.
With the Pentagon facing $500 billion in cuts over the next decade, a Navy officer has dared to question the most treasured vessels in his service’s fleet, saying the super carriers are increasingly vulnerable to new weapons and too expensive to operate.
“After 100 years, the carrier is rapidly approaching the end of its useful strategic life,” wrote Captain Henry Hendrix in a report published this month by the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think-tank with close ties to President Barack Obama’s administration.
Changes in naval warfare mean that carriers “may not be able to move close enough to targets to operate effectively or survive in an era of satellite imagery and long-range precision strike missiles,” Hendrix wrote.
Under US law, the military is required to maintain 11 aircraft carriers. Ten are currently in service after the retirement of the USS Enterprise, which is due to be replaced in 2017 with the USS Gerald Ford, the first of a new class of “big decks.”
The new carrier carries a prohibitive pricetag of $13.6 billion, double the cost of the last aircraft carrier. And that does not count the $4.7 billion spent on research and development for the new class of carriers.
It costs about $6.5 million a day to operate a single carrier strike group, which includes five other warships, an attack submarine, an air wing of 80 fighters and helicopters, and a crew of 6,700.
But Hendrix maintains the return on the investment is paltry.
Each F/A-18 fighter in the carrier fleet has dropped roughly 16 bombs in 10 years of war, which works out to about $7.5 million for each bomb when all the costs of the aircraft are taken into account.
That compares to the cost of firing a Tomahawk cruise missile, at about $2 million each. And five naval destroyers armed with Tomahawks cost only $10 billion to build and $1.8 million a day to operate, Hendrix said.
Apart from the mushrooming cost, carriers are facing mounting dangers from increasingly sophisticated ship-killing missiles, skeptics say.
US strategists are fixated on China’s DF-21D missile, which they fear could potentially knock out a carrier and deprive the American fleet of its dominance on the high seas.
Former Pentagon chief Robert Gates cited the anti-ship missiles and other hi-tech weapons in a speech in 2010 in which he questioned whether it was worth spending billions on more carriers.
“Do we really need 11 carrier strike groups for another 30 years when no other country has more than one?” Gates told retired naval officers.
Advanced missiles and stealthy submarines “could end the operational sanctuary our navy has enjoyed in the Western Pacific for the better part of six decades,” said Gates, who referred to carriers as potential “wasting assets.”
His remarks alarmed naval leaders, and the latest dissent has failed to dissuade most officers, who view the big decks as crucial and note that China is deploying its own carrier.
Pete Daly, a retired vice admiral who once commanded the USS Nimitz carrier strike group, defended the ships as a vital element of US military might.
To hit deeply buried targets, fighter jets flying off a carrier were more effective than Tomahawk missiles, and knocking out a super carrier is “very, very hard,” said Daly, now head of the US Naval Institute.
As for China’s missiles, “it was an additional threat to take into account,” Daly told AFP. But he added: “The US Navy is very aware of this and has plans to deal with it.”
The cost of the carriers had to be compared with the huge funding required to protect and supply air bases and troops on land, as illustrated by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said.
And the carriers could be ordered in without the political strain associated with a drawn-out ground war.
“The American people are very wary of commitments ashore, there’s no appetite to go in and have a ten-year presence in some place,” said Daly.
“Here you have a force that can go to a location, deal with a task ahead and then leave quickly or stay as long as it needs to. The political dynamic of that is completely different”.
Austerity measures in the US and Western and Central Europe, as well as in Australia, Canada and Japan, pushed global defence spending down by 0.5 per cent to £1.14 trillion in 2012, according to the report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
The fall was partly the result of budget cuts associated with the global financial crisis, especially in the West, but was "substantially offset" by increased spending in Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and Latin America.
"We are seeing what may be the beginning of a shift in the balance of world military spending from the rich western countries to emerging regions, as austerity policies and the drawdown in Afghanistan reduce spending in the former, while economic growth funds continuing increases elsewhere," said Dr Sam Perlo-Freeman, director of SIPRI's Military Expenditure and Arms Production Programme.
Also significant was that the US share of world military spending fell below 40 per cent for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Washington's expenditure dropped six per cent in real terms to $682 billion (£444 billion) in 2012.
The UK spent $60.8 billion (£39.6 billion) on defence last year – putting it fourth in the spending table after the US, China and Russia – a drop of 0.8 per cent on 2011. Britain cut military spending by 5.2 per cent between 2008 and 2012, reflecting a 6.9 per cent drop for Western and Central Europe as a whole over the same period.
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