09/19/16 – Dan Grazier – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing Dan Grazier from POGO, the Project on Government Oversight.
He's a Marine Corps veteran, and he's written extensively for the Marine Corps Gazette, Fires Bulletin, and the Small Wars Journal.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Hey, I'm doing very well, Scott.
How about yourself?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
And hell of a piece here.
You ready for this, everybody?
The F-35 may never be ready for combat.
Well, Dan, everybody knows that, and I mean everybody, could list off probably 35 things wrong with the F-35, but you're telling me that if we just continue throwing billions of dollars at this thing that we can't fix?
What's wrong with it?
Yeah, amazingly enough, that definitely seems to be the case.
This latest piece that we did, and that assertion has definitely gotten a lot of people's attention, the title of that piece about how the F-35 may never be ready for combat, that came directly out of the Pentagon's top weapons tester, Dr. Michael Gilmour, the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation.
He released a report right after the Air Force declared their variant of the F-35 to be initially operationally capable.
And the thrust of the report, and it was rather detailed, but the main point of the report was that if the program, if the whole project continues down its current trajectory, that it may never, ever be fully ready for combat.
And that has to do not so much with the technical part, the technical side of it, although there are certainly plenty of problems with that.
It has more to do with the management of the program at this point.
The program has worked so hard in recent years to ramp up production, to get as many planes built as possible, as quickly as possible, that they've neglected a lot of the steps necessary for development.
Well, and you know, the theory goes, and I've even had critics on this show say, well, you know, I mean, eventually it'll be a perfectly good plane, but do we really want to spend another trillion dollars to make it that good?
But it sort of sounds like, you know, actually even that won't help.
Well, it's true.
And this is something that we've known for a long time.
You go back a long way for a lot of these programs, and just history shows again and again that just because you spend a whole lot of money on something doesn't mean that you're going to get something that's effective.
And one of our biggest critiques of the F-35 all along has been that this was – the plane itself was a flawed concept from the very beginning.
The desire to create a multi-role plane that's supposed to be able to do – perform all these different missions has been tried before and has failed before.
And because the characteristics for each of these missions, for like a close-in fighter plane, a long-range interdiction plane, a close air support plane, a deep strike bomber, the characteristics needed to make an aircraft good at each one of those don't fit with the other missions.
And so when you have to make all the design tradeoffs to make the plane function in each one of these areas, you decrease its performance for any one of them.
So it's often been said that the F-35 is the jack-of-all-trades and master of none.
And no amount of money will ever fix that basic flawed concept behind the plane.
Right.
So, yeah, it's really two entirely different subjects of discussion, right, where on one hand the engine catches fire, the ejection seat will kill you, you can't fly it in the rain, whatever.
There's a million little things like that.
But then there's this whole other larger point, which is it's not fast enough to be an interceptor.
It's not maneuverable enough to be a dogfighter.
It can't carry enough bombs to be an effective bomber.
I read one thing that said the vertical version, the jump jet for the Marine Corps and the Navy, that it'll burn a hole straight through the deck of the aircraft carrier.
Yeah, they've definitely had some problems with that.
Yeah, they've had to upgrade the non-slip thermal coating on the flight decks of the big amphib aircraft carriers.
Because it's a very hot engine, and that's another one of the problems with it.
Because it is a single-engine plane, it produces a lot of heat and a lot of noise, which when they describe the F-35 as being stealthy, it's very easy for a passive infrared detector, a heat seeker, to detect that big massive plume of hot engine exhaust gas coming out of the back of the plane from a very long distance.
And, again, the plane is very noisy.
So that's another part of stealth.
You can hear it from a long way away.
So, again, that's other issues.
But the basic part of it is, from the very beginning, it was a flawed concept.
And even beyond just the multi-role part of it, it has really three things against it from the conceptual standpoint.
So I just discussed the multi-role limitations of it.
But then it's also a multi-service platform.
So you have to have a – so the different services have different requirements for a plane.
So they have to make all these different compromises so the plane fits the requirements for each one of the services.
So that compounds that problem.
And then you make it even worse because it's a multinational plane.
So you have to fit in all those design concepts as well.
So that's a lot of compromises in the design for this plane, which means that it's very expensive and it's very complicated.
And it's going to be next to impossible to get all of these things working together.
The integration part of the plane has been one of the biggest issues that we've been following lately.
Yeah.
Well, the integration, you're talking in terms of the computers being able to speak with each other from the different planes and ships and that kind of thing?
Right.
So, well, there's that part.
That's something even separate.
You're talking about the systems just inside one plane.
Trying to get all these different systems from the radars and the electronic warfare suites and getting in the helmet system and to get all those things integrated inside just the one plane is very difficult.
And that's something that Dr. Gilmour talked about in his latest report.
He talked about the data fusion issue where, let's say, the pilot has his radar on and then he has an electronic warfare suite on, and both of these systems are detecting the same target.
Let's say it's a plane in the air, so it's both detecting an enemy plane in the air.
Well, because these two systems are working very well together, it displays two different targets in the pilot's display.
So for the pilot to understand what's really out there, he has to shut one of them off in order to prevent the pilot from seeing double, essentially.
And that's just a problem with inside one plane.
Now you compound that fact when you try to do this whole information sharing between four planes, let's say, in a flight, where each one of these planes is displaying two different displays for the same target, and then you try to fuse all that together for one common battlefield picture for all the pilots, and then they're seeing all kinds of false targets.
Amazing.
And then, yeah, I had read one not too long ago, I guess, about how there was, I think it was, was it the newest, most expensive aircraft carrier that was basically designed to be compatible with the F-35, and yet it's not.
And the entire communications and electronic system of the aircraft carrier, you know, it's like trying to, well, I was going to say mixing Microsoft and Apple, but it's worse than that.
The computers just can't even talk to each other at all.
That's what we've been seeing.
I haven't done a whole lot of work on the aircraft by itself is a big enough project for any one of us to follow.
But that kind of proves the point where we're trying to do so much with this one plane that it almost becomes an impossible scenario for us, where we're trying to integrate all these different systems.
And one of the biggest guiding principles of our work at the Project and Government Oversight, going right back to our very beginnings, was these things always sound very good, but in reality, they don't work all that well.
But what has worked again and again throughout history are simple systems that are designed to do something very well, and they end up coming in under budget.
They're a whole lot cheaper.
They're a lot simpler to use on the battlefield, which is very important.
And we can buy them in numbers large enough to be operationally useful for us.
But when we start doing these really, really complicated, very expensive systems, then all of a sudden we get numbers cut on them.
A good example of that is the B-2.
We were supposed to – I forget the exact number off the top of my head, but we were supposed to buy a whole lot more than the 24 that we ultimately bought.
So they become very precious commodities.
When budget realities assert themselves and we end up having to slash the numbers that we can purchase, then we're stuck with these very few, precious, expensive systems that all of a sudden we – they're so expensive to buy that we don't even want to use them anymore.
And if they're not – if we can't use them, then why did we waste the money in the first place to purchase them?
Yeah.
Well, now talk to me about the Alice system when you're talking about the computers.
I know there's different computer systems in the plane, but I was reading one last week where they were saying it's Alice, A-L-I-S, this system.
It would be easy to hack that – I don't know, Block 2, Block 3, this and that software, but that basically an enemy MiG could just hack right into one of these planes, maybe crash it right into the ground or shoot it off into the stratosphere or what?
So, yes, you're talking about the Autonomic Logistics Information System.
And I would say it's actually even easier than that.
A smart enemy is going to take a look at this computer system that the plane has to plug into in order to download data.
And this computer system basically has to allow the plane to be fired up and used.
That's kind of the purpose behind it.
And so this computer system, which we've heard over and over and over again from the Joint Program Office, that the system can be – there is an override function on the Alice system, but this computer system on the ground that handles maintenance and information sharing can essentially brick the plane.
So we've created this failure point that a smart enemy can take advantage of.
You don't even have to try to defeat the airplane in the air.
If you can keep it on the ground, you don't even need to keep it on the ground all that long.
If someone is launching a surprise attack and we need to scramble aircraft, then all you have to do is if they hack that system and they can brick the plane, if they can create a signal inside that system that temporarily shuts down the aircraft at the moment that we need it to take off, then you've just defeated the entire system.
And those are the kind of things that really kind of bother us about these really complicated systems where, yeah, they sound really good that they can do all these different things, but there's all these – every time you add one of these little features to it, you create one more thing that can be broken or hacked.
Right.
Yeah, sort of like what do you mean you made one thermal exhaust port that leads straight to the reactor that controls the station?
Exactly.
Exactly.
Close enough for government work.
That's a pretty good analogy.
Yeah.
Well, and I remember – I'm sorry, I forget who to give credit to, but one of these great critics was on the show and explained about how World War II-era long-wave radar defeats the F-35 stealth no problem.
Yeah, it's true.
So it's not even stealthy at all in the first place.
Never could be.
Yeah, there's a number of things that go into stealth.
There's the radar cross-section, and yes, there are a lot of systems out there right now.
There's – oh, and I'm forgetting the name of the one system, but it's a diffused array radar system essentially where – because one of the ways that stealth works is you try to position the aircraft surfaces in such a way that it produces the smallest cross-section to the radar system that you're trying to defeat.
Well, so they've created radar systems where the transmitter of the radar is in one place, but then there's a lot of receivers that are positioned in a whole bunch of different places, and you can't detect where those little receivers are.
And so you don't know exactly which direction to point the aircraft in order to minimize your radar cross-section.
So there's all kinds of different ways to defeat this.
But the other – another big thing is the emissions from the plane that can be detected.
So for a stealth plane to have any hope of not being detected for its emissions, it has to shut everything off.
Well, they talk about the – when that big dogfighting report came out last year, the critics were very quick to – or the advocates for the F-35 were very quick to say, oh, well, this doesn't matter because it's not supposed to be a dogfighter because it's going to be able to kill all the enemies beyond visual range.
Well, the only way you can do that is you have to have a powerful radar inside the plane to be able to guide these missiles because they're radar-guided missiles out to the – out to the enemy plane.
When you do that, you're putting out a big emission, a big radar signal that can be detected by passive radar detection systems, which can then be used to target the aircraft from a very long distance.
So the only way for it to have even a theoretical chance of being stealthy is you have to shut all of that stuff off.
Well, then all of a sudden, then you can't – you can't shoot an enemy plane from beyond visual range.
Well, and I just read a thing too that said – I'm sorry if this was in your report.
I've been reading so much about the F-35 lately.
Well, there's one where that said that they have to open the bomb bay doors at least every 10 minutes so the damn thing will overheat and explode.
So – and then once you open the bomb bay doors, which can only hold a couple of bombs anyway, hardly worth it.
But once you do that, then you might as well be turning your transponder on.
That is true.
That was not in our report about the overheating issues.
We've definitely been looking into that, but we haven't written too much about that one yet.
But, yes, if – whenever they open up the – any of the hatches on the plane, then, yep, there you go.
You've just broken that stealthy skin, and I'm doing the finger quotes thing.
They've just broken that stealthy skin, and the radar signature opens up.
And, well, one of the really – this is – it's amusing in a very sad sense, but something that we saw – a new issue that we saw inside this latest report from Dr. Gilmore was when the F-35 opens the little door covering the cannon because the F-35 Alpha, the Air Force's variant, is the only one that has an internal cannon.
When they open that little door and that little flap opens up, it creates drag on the plane, so it actually pulls the nose of the plane off to one side, which decreases the gun's accuracy.
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Yeah, well, no surprise there.
At least – I mean, and this is assuming that they got the thing to work at all, right?
Well, they have fired it in the air.
That was – they made a big show of that after receiving a whole lot of criticism about not having a gun that works.
So they have done an aerial test of the cannon firing in a couple – that was a couple months ago now.
But it was just flying straight, and it was a test fire of the gun.
It has no operational capability with that gun yet because the software needed to point it and aim it in the right direction.
It actually hit a target.
It has not been developed yet.
Well, and this is a couple of years ago.
Maybe they finally updated this, but I read a thing that said that the camera that they were using for targeting with the gun was actually from the 1990s era, and it was completely worthless and could in no way be used for targeting with the gun.
They were going to have to completely scrap the camera and start all over again on that.
Well, I know – I don't know a whole lot about that issue specifically, but I do know that the program was really started back in 1996, which was the same year that I graduated high school.
And I just had my 20-year reunion a couple weeks ago.
So it kind of tells you how long this program has been going.
And the – but a lot of this technology was based on designs that come from the mid-'90s.
So – and not that old technology is necessarily bad, but as – because these things develop over such a long time period, then you're trying to integrate hardware and software from different eras together, which is a very difficult proposition.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, I mean, exactly.
We might be way better off if we had just F-16s and F-15s, and maybe even if they still had the F-14s for the Navy.
And, yeah, those are all designed and built in the 70s, but you can keep updating them with better radars and this kind of thing.
And they're surely a hell of a lot cheaper.
Well, you would hope so.
And that is definitely one of our preferred methods of acquiring weapons is, rather than having a revolutionary program where we create something brand new from the ground up, we have – we would prefer to have the Pentagon have a bias for evolutionary design.
And some of these older designs have been updated over the years, and – but one thing we have seen is the price on them has crept up because they keep adding a whole bunch of extra features to it.
For example, if you look at the latest version of the F-16, they've strapped on so many different systems onto it that it's – it has sort of the same outside shape of the F-16.
You can kind of see the shadow of it, of the original design in it, but they've definitely decreased the performance of the F-16, particularly from the original concept of the F-16, which was probably the best fighter plane ever built.
So – but you're right.
We love building brand new systems from the ground up.
And you're saying the more they add to the F-16, the worse they make it.
Right.
Well, for example, when you – the Block 60 F-16, they added on these big massive conformal fuel tanks to the outside of it.
So that adds a lot of drag and it adds a lot of weight to the plane.
So it decreases its – it decreases its performance in the air.
It decreases its maneuverability.
So, yeah, and that's – you know, and that's something else that we have to be very careful about when we start designing these things.
And this is why that discipline with the original concept has to really come in.
You know, you want – you generally want very austere systems because those are the ones that are – they're usually a whole lot more robust.
They maintain kind of a design purity to them.
So they can be very functional on the ground or in the air in combat when we really need them to be.
So one of the biggest problems that we have with these really complex systems is that they take so much time and attention to operate and to maintain that it forces our – it forces the military to kind of turn inwards on itself to focus on its own processes, on making sure the spare parts are coming up fast enough and, you know, just working on all these different systems that we have internally.
And so – but everything that we have that does that, that makes us turn inwards, that's less energy and less focus that we have to devote to the enemy, which is what a military is supposed to do.
You don't want to worry so much about what you're doing internally.
You want to worry more about what you're going to do to the enemy.
But every time we add one of these really complex systems to our – to the whole military system, that's just one more distraction, internal distraction that we have that decreases our focus outward toward the enemy.
Well, I think you hit the silver lining there, right?
I mean, I'd rather have these people sitting around in a ridiculous trillion-dollar circle jerk doing nothing and failing to kill the people that they're trying to kill when they've got no business waging any of these wars anyway.
I mean, do you want to have an effective dogfighter actually dogfighting the Chinese over the Pacific Ocean?
I don't.
I'd rather see all the F-35s brick and crash and have peace.
Well, it's – there – I guess one of the good things as far as that goes is the, you know, like the B-2, you know, these things are so expensive that, you know, it might make the military a little more choosy about where they use them.
Yeah, I would hope so.
And, you know, here's something that is a mystery to me.
I mean, I guess – I don't know.
It's pretty self-evident what happened.
I just can't believe that this is the way it happened.
But there was a faction fight in the Pentagon, and the Secretary of Defense, the former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, chose his side, and he gave a couple of big speeches and gave some big orders and shut down the F-22 program and said that this thing is a giant waste of money and we're going to focus on the F-35 instead because – the way I understood it, he was saying because the F-35 is more suited to ground attack and, frankly, we're busy fighting peasants in sandals in third world countries right now.
We're not up against advanced MiG fighters and this kind of thing.
And so we need ground attack capability.
But I'm confused, honestly, because I read that the F-22 actually did have ground attack capability anyway.
But my point really being is that, wow, so a Secretary of Defense can close down one of these completely ridiculous boondoggle programs.
Maybe he can't close down two, but maybe he could.
Is it possible that in a Clinton or Trump administration that the Secretary of Defense actually could say that, you know what, the 35 is a joke and we're wasting way too much money and we need to go back to 15s and 16s and that kind of thing?
Or is it there's just no way at this point to shut this program down?
It would be very difficult to shut the program down, very difficult.
And the managers of the program both in the Pentagon and at Lockheed Martin and all the other contractors that are working on this have worked very hard to make sure that it's very difficult to kill the F-35.
It's built in 46 different states and 300-plus, as far as we can tell, congressional districts.
So that's a lot of political sport on Capitol Hill for this system.
So it is very difficult to kill, but potentially, yes, a future Secretary of Defense who has enough moral courage to stand up and say, look, we are, it's just sunken costs.
We're not, we won't ever be able to recoup our investment in this and we need to move in a different direction.
Potentially that could happen.
I will not be holding my breath for it, though.
Well, it seems like maybe the allies, if that's ever going to happen, it might be because our NATO allies and the Israelis and the rest of them are going to, you know, they're going to have these same problems and come to really resent paying this exorbitant price for this turkey of a plane, right?
You know, that could be.
I mean, we've definitely seen some rumblings of that out of Canada.
So far I haven't seen a lot of follow-through on it, but I know some of our allies are very, some of our allies are upset with the way this has gone.
And I just recently heard, I had a conversation with a journalist from there in Denmark, is one of the coalition partners for the F-35, and they are spending every bit of their procurement budget for the next 10 years buying F-35s, every bit of it.
And they're only getting, you know, maybe two dozen planes when it's all said and done.
So I can imagine a lot of people being very upset in Denmark that, look, we're essentially staking our whole future for 10 years on this one system.
Yeah.
Well, it seems like the Israelis, too.
This would go perfect with their theory that no matter what Obama does for them, he's a horrible, evil, Muslim anti-Semite.
And look at his program of sabotage, trying to saddle the poor Israelis with these ridiculous F-35s.
Well, you know, but the flip side of that coin is, you know, the Chinese did hack the system a couple of years ago, about 10 years ago now, and got all the designs and information about the F-35.
And then all of a sudden their latest plane looks a whole lot like ours.
So, you know, maybe there is a – well, I mean, we saw this with the Soviets, too, where they copied a lot of our design characteristics over the years, some of them that weren't all that good, like the swing wing designs.
That was a big design fad that we had for a number of years.
And we ruined two generations of planes, but the Soviets ruined three generations of planes with that design.
So, I don't know, maybe we played a big trick on the Chinese with regards to that.
Ha ha, fools you into making a piece of garbage.
But really we have a whole secret deployment of F-15s that still work, huh?
Maybe, maybe.
Yeah, you know, I read a thing one time on a website where there's – a military website where they were debating the F-35.
And there was a guy – I'm not saying I believe this necessarily, but it was funny for irony's sake anyway.
And I think he was not being ironic.
He was making a serious case that all the critics of the F-35 basically are suckers and are serving the purposes of Lockheed Martin Marietta.
They're the ones who are against the F-35 more than anyone else.
They're the ones who want to kill the project and start over on a brand new one, because that's where they make all their big profits, is in the startup costs and all the upfront costs of a brand new project.
Whereas years down the line when they're cranking them out off the assembly line, their margins get much, much thinner.
So they're deliberately making these turkeys so that you and I will complain that, damn, we have a fighter that you can't fly in the rain, so that then they'll say, ah, I guess we need a whole new one.
Let's invent the F-45 now and start all over and blow another trillion dollars.
Bob, the evidence does certainly point in that direction.
The defense contractors and the prime contractor and all their subcontractors definitely do make a lot of money on the development part of these programs, which again is one of the reasons why they like designing these new planes from the ground up, rather than just evolving the designs that we already have, because that's where they make their money.
Well, you know, it's funny, the economics of this whole thing.
I mean, it seems like even in America that somewhere there would be somebody responsible for saying that this is not working.
And at the end of the day, I mean, you talk about the ground attack capabilities and this kind of thing, where this plane is supposed to replace the A-10 in doing ground attack, suppressing enemy fire, in protecting American ground forces, a job that it's never going to be able to do.
And this kind of thing.
It seems like somewhere somebody would say enough of this.
But instead, you know, it's almost like a TV show or something, where you couldn't make this up, really.
It wouldn't be believable that just the economics of the military-industrial-congressional complex keeps a lemon like this on the boards for this long, when we've known for how long that this project is going nowhere.
More than a decade, anyway.
It's been this clear that this is a waste.
And yet it just keeps going.
Yes, indeed.
Yeah, you know, the program hit the Nunn-McCurdy threshold six years ago.
Oh, what's that?
That's where program costs, when program costs have increased to a certain amount, like 15% over the original estimate, it's supposed to get a really hard review, like, hey, what's going on with this program?
And then at 25%, then the program is supposed to be canceled.
And the idea behind that basically being, look, if we have a program that has a 25% cost overrun, then there's something seriously wrong with this whole program.
The whole program seriously thought we should cancel it.
And the F-35 hit that a little more than six years ago now.
But at the time, the Secretary of Defense signed off on it and said, no, this program is critical because they built an override in the whole process.
This program is critical for national security, and it needs to continue.
So then it was re-baselined, and now we're still working on developing this program.
Man.
And now I know this happened after your article hit, but I guess it must have been the moment you hit publish or something, where they came out and said that, oh, yeah, we're having to ground all of the Air Force F-35s right now because it turns out that the fuel is not compatible with the insulation in the fuel tank.
It's the coolant lines in the fuel tanks.
Well, and they're using fuel for coolant.
Yeah.
So we're going to be looking into that one a little more.
That one did come out a little later.
That definitely wasn't included in this.
I'm curious about the timing of that, because apparently this problem was identified over the summer, but we only just found out about it now.
And so I'm kind of wondering why we didn't find out about this before the IOC declaration was made on August 2nd.
Yeah.
Well, money somewhere, right?
Yep.
Somebody made a call, and it was about a margin.
Indeed.
All right.
Listen, I've got to tell you, man, the work that you guys are doing there, and particularly on this subject, this is a really great article.
Hey, thank you very much.
I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Yep.
Great interview, too.
All right.
Have a good one.
Appreciate it.
All right.
Hey, thanks, Guy.
Take care.
All right.
Okay, everybody, that is Dan Grazier, and he's got this great piece with Mandy Smithberger at POGO.
It's called The F-35 May Never Be Ready for Combat.
That's at pogo.org.
And that's The Scott Horton Show.
Check out the archives at scotthorton.org, and help support at scotthorton.org, slash donate.
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