Shooting down lies from the sky

Step by step Australia's largest military purchase the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is unravelling. For a decade its performance failures, delays and cost over runs have been concealed by lies and half truths much of which have come out of the US but which have also been duplicated by our defence chiefs.

With the assistance of the Airpower Australia group, headed by Peter Goon and Carlo Kopp, I have been explaining the true situation with the JSF for over 10 years – first in The Australian newspaper and now in Business Spectator. Around 2002, I started writing about the false statements that came from Australian defence chiefs about the JSF delays and cost overruns. Then I realised that despite the huge escalation in costs the aircraft would be hideously costly to run and would be no match for the equivalent Russian or Chinese aircraft.

Just as our pilots were murdered when they flew the outdated Buffalo fighters in the second world war, so they will simply be shot down flying a hopelessly inferior JSF.

I gain no satisfaction from being right because our long-term air defence is now in mortal danger, but I am amazed that a mere business columnist could have access to more accurate information than our defence chiefs. Thanks again to Airpower.

Very few other journalists have followed either Airpower or me, but that is changing and I expect a big volley of "exclusives” in coming months as the JSF project unravels and the truth comes out.

My task now will be to get the Australian cabinet to move beyond discovering the horror of JSF failure to protect our air defence and to try and save some of the enterprises that do work for the JSF – Australia was kept on board the JSF program by a volley of supply contracts in politically sensitive seats. We are helped by the fact that both parties share responsibility for the JSF disaster. John Howard made the initial mistakes.

The global journalistic catch-up to this disaster started in the US but the dramatic speech in the Australian Parliament this week by Dennis Jensen, the WA Liberal member of the Joint Standing Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee, showed we are also waking up.

Jensen demanded that Tom Burbage, the head of the JSF program with Lockheed Martin, come to our parliament and explain why he gave "false and misleading information” to the Australian parliament.

Jensen said: "If we do not insist on full transparency, our fighting men and women will be the ones to pay the price, not those in Russell offices (Australian Defence Headquarters) or the boardrooms of Lockheed Martin.”

In the US, David Axe writes in Wired: "America's latest stealth fighter just got heavier, slower and more sluggish. For the second time in a year, the Pentagon has eased the performance requirements of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). The reduced specs – including a slower acceleration and turning rate – lower the bar for the troubled trillion-dollar JSF program allowing it to proceed toward full-rate production despite ongoing problems with the plane's complex design... the JSF is meant to be a jack of all trades, equally capable of dropping bombs and fighting other aircraft – the latter requiring extreme nimbleness in the air.

"For the pilots who will eventually take the F-35 into combat, the JSF's reduced performance means they might not be able to outfly and outfight the latest Russian- and Chinese-made fighters. Even before the downgrades, some analysts questioned the F-35′s ability to defeat newer Sukhoi and Shenyang jets.

"Despite the JSF's lower specs, Lockheed bizarrely claims its new plane is now more manoeuvrable than every other fighter in the world except the company's own F-22.”

So Americans are learning the truth that both Airpower and myself have been writing for a long time. As Americans discover the truth so the lies and half-truths will have to stop. The danger is that as these lies come to the surface the whole program will be scrapped when it should be merged with the F22, which has been mothballed for political reasons.

My first commentary on the JSF in Business Spectator (Reviewing the indefensible, December 31, 2007) explains how the Coalition made the initial mistakes.

According to a Business Spectator search of ‘Gottliebsen and JSF' in the five years that followed that first commentary, I have written almost 40 JSF commentaries taking our readers through the sad saga – I wanted to be wrong but unfortunately I was right.