Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
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The Joint Strike Fighter: F FIghteR RePLAceMent 36 APRIL/MAY 2014 www.vanguardcanada.com T alking in detail about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter re- quires verbal dexterity. Many of the aircraft's features are classified, so inadvertently revealing a number or the full capabilities of a sensor carry a heavy price. "Leavenworth [prison] is such a terrible place to be," Stephen O'Bryan says with a rueful smile as he pauses yet again at the de- scription of a sensor system. The vice president of F-35 Program Integration and Business Development for Lockheed Martin Aeronautics is treading care- fully for good reason. He needs to continue selling the virtues of the aircraft to Canadians, especially Cabinet members who now hold the fate of Canada's CF-18 fighter replacement program in their hands following the delivery of an options analysis report by the National Fighter Procurement Secretariat in April. But he wants them to understand the generational leap in technology he believes the F-35 represents without revealing the full extent of its capability. A former U.S. Navy fighter pilot with years of ex- perience in F-18s, O'Bryan knows the limitations of so-called fourth generation fighter jets. Where sur- vival was once about the skill of a pilot, it will now be about the strength of the data. "We used to say speed is life; it's now, information is life," he says. Rather than a technician in the cockpit, O'Bryan envisions a tactician making rapid decisions based on the automatic fusion of data from thousands of sensors. "Fourth generation flying was hard. The best fighter pilots I knew where the ones who [could process what they heard over their radios] and meld it with what they were looking at in their displays. That made it more art than science. "With the F-35, the pilot is a user of information. The idea is to give you near-perfect information from a variety of sources, including your wingmen, and fuse it into one picture. [And] ev- erybody has the same accurate picture." He equates the introduction of the F-35 to the arrival of the aircraft carrier and its impact on the notion of close engagement in naval warfare. The fighter jet's array of sensors, database and processor allow it to operate from distance to degrade and then attack an opponent's capa- bility. To demonstrate why the F-35 is a self-sufficient game- changer, able to operate without the support of electronic attack, air- borne warning and control, or joint surveillance and target attack aircraft, he points to the AESA (active electronically scanned array) radar. For starters, the F-35's APG 81 radar is no longer just a radar. "It's a multi-functional ar- ray" that automatically fuses information from "thousands of radars" in the aircraft, O'Bryan explains. And rather than the familiar sweep- ing cone, the F-35's beam is more like a laser, able to focus on a specific target or on multiple targets (the exact number is classified) with ten times the power of an EA 6B Prowler, he says. Furthermore, a formation of four F-35s can alternate transmission of the jamming signal among themselves, again automatically. And with stealth capability, one or all four of the air- craft can operate from inside the target's firing range. "You start with 10 times more power, and if you are much closer and you are alternating sig- nals between four airplanes with a stealth data link between them, you can do that jamming in a coherent, cooperative manner. The signal, the technique, everything is done for [the pilot]." Equally important, where fourth generation radar are able to detect the arrival of a threat with plus or minus 30 degrees accu- racy, the F-35 can pinpoint the threat to within plus or minus one degree, an advantage that is narrowed further with the assistance of a formation of four aircraft sharing that threat trajectory, he says. Driven by data by Chris thatcher