Germany Might Join the F-35 Program
Officials in Berlin ask for more information
on the Joint Strike Fighter as they try to replace their aging Tornado
multi-role jets.
BY JOSEPH TREVITHICKMAY 17, 2017
The German Air Force is reportedly looking
for additional information about Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter as
it moves ahead with plans to replace its aging Panavia Tornado multi-role
combat aircraft no later than 2035. The stealthy F-35 would be just one of
multiple options Germany might consider as it looks to modernize its military
in general.
In May 2017, Germany’s air arm, also
known as the Luftwaffe, asked the U.S. military for classified data on the
Joint Strike Fighter, according to a report by Reuters.
The letter highlighted the fact that German government and military officials
had not yet decided on any particular plan to buy new warplanes of any kind.
Instead, the country’s Federal Ministry of
Defense would "an in-depth evaluation of market available solutions,
including the F-35, later this year," according to the document, which
Reuters said it had reviewed. As such, “in order to understand [the] F-35's
cutting-edge technologies, the German Air Force is requesting a classified
brief of the F-35's capabilities in general and especially concerning sensor
suites, information management and operational capabilities.”
Defense contractor Lockheed Martin already
has a dozen international partners signed up to the Joint Strike Fighter
program, not including the primary customer, the United States. If Germany ever
decided to go ahead and purchase the F-35, they would find themselves in the
company of their NATO allies in Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Italy, the
Netherlands, Norway, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.
This would be an important consideration for
Germany, as it would ease logistical concerns and improve the ability for its
aircraft to operate with other members of the alliance. As part of the larger
F-35 project, Lockheed Martin is working with the Netherlands and Italy in
particular to build significant infrastructure within Europe to support the
jets.
In October 2015, Dutch authorities announced
that they would set up an engine test and maintenance facility , valued at between
$90 and $100 million, to service its own future Joint Strike Fighters, as well
as aircraft from Italy. Italy itself had previously arranged to operate the
only final assembly and checkout facility, or FACO, on the continent. The first
Italian F-35A rolled out of the plant in Cameri, Italy, in March 2015. The
facility will also finish putting together Italian F-35B and Dutch F-35A
aircraft, and could potentially do so for other future European partners.
This regional cooperation could become a political
consideration, as well. The Tornados that Germany wants to replace came out of
an Anglo-German-Italian partnership that began in the 1960s, which led to the
country having a significant financial stake in the project and reaping the
subsequent benefits of that industrial participation. Germany similarly joined
in the development and manufacture of the advanced Eurofighter Typhoon. The
country is still the registered location of the multi-national holding
companies, Panavia and Eurofighter, associated with both projects.
Not surprisingly, given that experience,
German authorities are considering a future fifth generation fighter jet from
Airbus. Germany is also part of this major European aviation consortium, which
itself has a stake in Eurofighter. In June 2016, Alberto Gutierrez, then head
of the multi-national company’s Eurofighter and combat aircraft programs, told
FlightGlobal the plan could include a combination of traditional aircraft and
drones, with the pilotless planes acting as the core of this manned-unmanned
team. In March 2017, Airbus Defence and Space chief executive Dirk Hoke
confirmed the still largely conceptual project, known as the Next Generation
Weapons System (NGWS), was still moving ahead, according to German business
daily Handelsblatt.
“We are currently putting together pre-design
studies to show what such an aircraft could look like,” Hoke said. He insisted
the future design would include “far-reaching new technical qualities.”
At that time, Airbus expected France and
Germany to be the two main drivers of the NGWS program. Unfortunately, that
could cause potential conflicts in how the project might proceed. German
officials want a new aircraft as early as 2025, when they want to start
retiring the first of their approximately 85 remaining Tornados. Despite their
own aging fleet of Mirage 2000s, French authorities have indicated they are
willing to wait until as late as 2040 to have a new fighter jet ready for
combat.
For Germany, this time frame may be
unacceptable. The Luftwaffe could probably do with replacing its Tornados, an
aircraft that went out of production in 1998, now. According to an official
report Der Spiegal obtained in 2014, only 66 of the aircraft were actually
flyable and the German air arm only had the resources to put 38 of them into
combat in or outside of the country. The numbers for the service’s Typhoons
weren’t much better, with only 42 of 109 being categorized as “deployable.” The
next year, Deutsche Welle obtained a new report that showed the situation had
gotten even worse.
This led to embarrassing incidents after six
Tornados began flying reconnaissance missions from Incirlik Air Base in Turkey
targeting ISIS terrorists, which started in January 2016. Later that month,
German newspaper Das Bild reported that an upgrade to the jets meant that the
cockpit lighting was too bright, making night flying impossible. The terrorists
had long before been making significant movements at night in an attempt to try
and avoid detection. Then in November 2016, two of planes touched down at the
main airport in Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region,
after an apparent in-flight emergency. After a subsequent inspection, German
officials deemed the aircraft airworthy enough to return to Turkey, despite the
fault in the fuel tank. As of February 2017, the detachment of Tornados had
flown 2,300 flight hours in total during 750 sorties over Iraq and Syria.
On top of the need to prepare for far-flung
missions like the fight against ISIS, the German military is generally looking
to improve its capabilities because of renewed threats closer to home. Since
Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014 and began taking an increasingly
revanchist stance toward NATO, officials in Berlin have found a need to reorient
their defense policies. For more than two decades, the Bundeswehr had been
slowly shrinking as the apparent threat of a major conflict in Europe appeared
to subside after the final collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Original post: thedrive.com
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