In May the British government decided to reverse its previous decision to abandon short-take-off combat aircraft and therefore to relegate the first of the country’s two 65,000-ton carriers to helicopter operations while the second was completed with catapults and arresting gear. That decision was made in light of the fact that the STOVL (short take off/vertical landing) version of the F-35 was proving too expensive. On the assumption that STOVL was dead, the government felt justified in eliminating the existing joint navy-air force Harrier fleet and laying up the three existing light carriers (one has been retained as a helicopter carrier). The Harriers operated by the joint force were sold off (to the U.S. Marine Corps) to make sure the decision could not easily be reversed. This was the result of an agonizing defense review forced on the government by the fiscal crisis, and Prime Minister David Cameron said that killing—albeit temporarily—the Royal Navy’s carrier strike capability was the hardest and most unpleasant decision he made.
Now the British will adopt the STOVL F-35 for which their new carriers had originally been designed. The decision was explained on two grounds. First, it would provide naval-air striking capacity much earlier. Second, analysis had shown that the savings gained in adopting the conventional take off and landing version of the F-35 would be quickly consumed by the cost of developing the necessary catapult and arresting gear. During the design of the British carrier, much was made of “future-proofing,” which meant that space and weight had been provided for catapults and arresting gear. However, once the initial decision had been made to go for the STOVL fighter, there was probably little attempt actually to design the necessary catapults and arresting gear. Conversely, when the STOVL version was dropped, design work had to begin on a fairly rapid basis.
The reality is that the Libyan experience dramatized the consequences of abandoning carrier aviation, even when, on paper, British land-based aircraft were within range of their targets. Libya demonstrated that what matters is loiter time in the target area. The farther an airplane has to fly to get there, the less time it is available to support those on the ground. More or less continuous air support requires airplanes very close by, or else unaffordable numbers at a greater distance. That is aside from pilot-fatigue issues.
Other Customers
The British decision is likely to have considerable consequences for other navies. When the British dropped out of the STOVL program, it was widely suspected that this variant would be particularly vulnerable to budget-cutters in the United States. The STOVL version is the most expensive of the three F-35 variants, and it has the fewest orders. Programs with international partners are, however, difficult to cancel because of the embarrassment involved.
It happens that several navies have small carriers that would have little future without the F-35 STOVL variant. No one else is building STOVL airplanes right now, and the existing versions of the Harrier are wearing out. The British alone had real alternatives. They might have pushed ahead and converted their new carriers to conventional operation, or they might have opted for a ski-jump solution like the one the Russians and almost certainly the Chinese and the Indians have adopted. Ski-jumps are inefficient, but they work for high-powered aircraft. They do require considerable length however, as the airplane has to build up speed to fly off the ski jump. It seems unlikely that the smaller carriers operated by, for example, Spain and Italy would be fully suited to ski-jump operation using conventional aircraft.
The U.S. Marines are of course particularly thankful, because the STOVL F-35 can directly replace the Harriers they currently operate from large-deck amphibious ships. The Marines see their attack aircraft as absolutely essential supporting artillery. Ironically, it can be argued that they, alone among potential users of the STOVL F-35, might do as well with an unmanned alternative.
The essence of the Marines’ artillery air mission is that the airplanes are, in effect, under the control of those they are supporting. They do not have alternative deep-strike or interceptor missions. They are always on call. For example, in Iraq in 1991 the Marines’ Harriers were deliberately kept out of the overall Air Tasking Order so that they could deliver strikes on a quick basis, and almost certainly that practice continues. A Marine pilot contributes considerable skill in delivering weapons under tricky conditions, but in most cases he is hitting coordinates chosen by those on the ground. In effect, his airplane is a reusable missile with multiple independently deliverable warheads. So is a UAV.
The F-35 is extremely, perhaps prohibitively, expensive because it compensates for limitations in its performance by offering the pilot remarkable advantages. For example, software merges the images from sensors under the airplane so that the pilot in effect sees through the airplane’s body when he looks down through his helmet visor. Other software provides the pilot with unusually complete situational awareness, partly by interpreting the mass of electronic signals the airplane intercepts. The operational software involved is extremely complex and apparently is the main incomplete item in the airplane’s development. Very little of this software would be needed if there were no pilot on board. Moreover, without the software and the sensors feeding it, the F-35 is fairly inexpensive. Its overall performance was limited to achieve exactly that.
Pilots Are Vital
The question, then, is really whether the pilot is essential. If he is not, then something like a stripped-down F-35 may be quite adequate. It may not even need an off-board pilot; many modern UAVs fly themselves from waypoint to waypoint, the operator handling several of them, and intervening (if at all) only when they get into trouble. If there are no pilots, there is no proficiency training, and no training pipeline of aircraft. The airplanes fly only when they are needed—the way missiles fly, except that they are recoverable.
Human pilots provide judgment and creativity. It is often pointed out, too, that a pilot can continue to function even when the link back to the base or the command has been cut. For example, no one would want to bet on an automaton in a delicate situation such as the approach of an unknown aircraft to a naval formation. People may fail, too, but they are responsible, and they can deal with novel situations.
Most users of the naval STOVL F-35 are looking for general-purpose aircraft, which may function as fighters or bombers. They might be needed for deep strikes against well-defined targets (that a missile could handle), but they may also be needed in ambiguous situations in which judgment is vital. The more distant the target, moreover, the better the chance that a link may fail at a crucial moment—and that a human in the cockpit may be able to think his way past that failure.
Moreover, to make unmanned strike the rule rather than the exception requires some corresponding mechanism to find the targets. The United States deploys clouds of UAVs plus other reconnaissance devices (such as satellites). The mass of information they collect can, at least in theory, provide sufficient support for unmanned strikes, even at a considerable distance. It is arguable that this mass of information might justify abandoning manned strike aircraft.
Other countries lack any comparable dense reconnaissance. Their pilots are an inescapable necessity: they must find the targets they will hit. The United States enjoys perhaps a unique advantage in that targets can be located remotely. It follows that our allies are unlikely to welcome any proposal to replace pilots with robots instructed to deliver bombs to particular addresses.
When our allies imagine replacing manned with unmanned aircraft, they necessarily envisage moving the pilot out of the airplane—but retaining him. In that case much depends on how reliable the link between operator and airplane is, and the threat of jamming (or perhaps cyber-warfare) must loom large. We also often imagine simply moving the pilot out of the airplane, but our massive reconnaissance capability gives us the alternative of moving the target-finding function out of the airplane altogether. That brings the airplane much closer to the status of a reusable missile. In this sense the truest current example of an armed UAV may not be the Predators and their ilk, which are used against al Qaeda and its friends, but Tactical Tomahawk, with its ability to change targets on command.
The Marines’ situation is strikingly different from that of our allies. The Marines are interested in direct support for troops engaged on the ground, in a situation that is probably impossible to disentangle from high overhead. The environment is changing, perhaps rapidly, so any kind of pre-briefing is unlikely to be very useful (there are of course exceptions). The pilot delivering ordnance is responding to orders from the ground, and if the link along which those orders come should fail, he is neutralized. Certainly the pilot’s skill can be crucial, as when bombs have to be delivered against masked targets. However, such cases are likely to be exceptions.
The Marines need something that can fly from large-deck amphibious ships and can reliably deliver considerable loads of ordnance in the face of serious opposition. That something has to be a STOVL aircraft, because the Marines’ ships lack catapults and arresting gear. It has to be somewhat stealthy, to get around new-generation surface-to-air missiles, and it needs high performance. The interesting question may be whether the Marines’ best bet would be an unmanned STOVL operating more like a reusable missile than a traditional airplane.