The F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) said that it has improved the Lockheed Martin [LMT] fighter’s gun and data sharing with 4th generation fighters.
General Dynamics [GD] builds the GAU-22/A 25 mm Gatling gun for the F-35.
“After working with the Air Force and our industry partners we can report that the gun, and interoperability with 4th generation fighters, have been improved and they are effective,” the F-35 JPO said in a Nov. 1 email in response to questions. “We continue to work with industry, the services, and our international partners for further improvements and to maximize effectiveness and lethality at the tactical/operational level.”
The U.S. Air Force said in an email on Nov. 1 that it did not have further comment beyond what the JPO provided.
Lockheed Martin said that its F-35 team “updated the gun to improve its accuracy in more than 95 percent of fielded aircraft” and pointed to a DoD posting from September 2021 on data sharing among F-35s and older aircraft.
The questions to the F-35 JPO, Lockheed Martin, and the Air Force on F-35 gun accuracy and the fighter’s interoperability stemmed from the Project on Government Oversight’s (POGO) posting this week of a redacted report from February last year by the DoD director of operational test and evaluation, Nickolas Guertin, on comparison testing conducted in 2018-19 between the F-35A and the A-10C close air support (CAS) aircraft. That testing was the result of a comparison testing provision in Section 134 of the fiscal 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, backed by A-10 proponents, such as former Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.). In September last year, President Joe Biden nominated Guertin as the next Navy acquisition chief, but the Senate has yet to approve him.
The F-35A/A-10C comparison testing began in April 2018, and then took a hiatus of several months, as A-10s deployed to support combat operations. The remaining one-third of testing finished in March 2019.
A lawyer for POGO received the redacted comparison testing report in September in response to the organization’s pledge to seek court action to get results from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by POGO.
The Air Force used Edwards AFB, Calif., and Nellis AFB, Nev., to launch 69 A-10 and F-35 sorties and conducted the F-35A/A-10C trials over Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, Calif. and Yuma Proving Ground, Ariz., in permissive and contested, but not “high-threat” environments having concentrations of simulated surface-to-air missiles. The 69 sorties logged 117 and a half flight hours, the report said.
While the report’s Section 3–Comparative Testing–said that “the typical loadout of the A-10C enabled more attacks than the typical loadout of the F-35A, particularly in the contested environment,” the section also said that “increased numbers of more capable, modern threat systems or the addition of an air threat would likely result in the need to dedicate additional aircraft to threat suppression and destruction and counter-air roles, either pre-emptively or concurrent with CAS.”
“Trials in such an environment could yield important lessons, but the F-35A has a clear capability advantage over the A-10C in higher threat environments–an environment where the A-10 was not designed to operate,” the report said.
It appears that the Air Force’s planned retirement of 42 A-10s in fiscal 2024 is another step for the service in retiring by fiscal 2028 its only dedicated CAS aircraft, one that the service contends has become too costly to maintain and less relevant in possible conflicts with advanced technology adversaries. The Air Force fielded the A-10 in 1975.
Section Four of the redacted, F-35A/A-10C comparison testing report contains eight, blacked out bullet points under recommendations for the JPO and the Air Force to improve F-35A performance in the close air support, forward air controller (airborne), and combat search and rescue missions.
The JPO, the Air Force, and Lockheed Martin “should fix the F-35A gun, improve digital communications, video data link capability and interoperability with 4th generation aircraft and develop training programs to further improve F-35A effectiveness in these missions,” according to the report’s Executive Summary. “Additional recommendations are detailed in Section Four of this report.”
Close air support is an afterthought for the service, as it moves ahead on manned-unmanned teaming, the Northrop Grumman [NOC] B-21 Raider, the F-35, artificial intelligence-enabled Collaborative Combat Aircraft, and long-range standoff missiles, such as the Lockheed Martin Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range, to counter adversaries and handle future conflicts. Service leaders and legislators, including Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), have said that close air support is an uncommon mission for Air Force tactical fighters and that other aircraft, such as the F-16 and even the B-52, can provide CAS.
“I would point out that, as we speak, there are young Ukrainians in trenches fighting Russians on the ground and Israeli tanks rolling through Gaza on the ground,” Dan Grazier, a senior defense policy fellow at POGO and a retired U.S. Marine Corps captain, said on Nov. 1. Grazier filed the POGO FOIA to get the F-35A/A-10C comparison testing report.
“In 2023, even with AI and drones, in a bigger picture, warfare hasn’t really changed all that much since human beings started writing about it,,” he said. “It’s our young people fighting their young people in close proximity on the ground. What difference have drones made in Ukraine? Have they backed the Russians up even an inch? They make a lot of noise and are pretty flashy when they blow up a target deep in Russia, but have they changed anything/accomplished anything? I don’t think so.”
At a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee’s (HASC) tactical air and land forces subcommittee in April last year, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) asked whether the Air Force planned to release an unclassified version of the F-35A/A-10C comparison testing report and, if not, whether the Air Force planned to brief Congress on the results in a classified session (Defense Daily, May 2, 2022). The Air Force was then non-committal in its answer on providing an unclassified version of the report.
Four three years ago, Gallego had asked about the same issue. In a May 2, 2019 hearing of the HASC tactical air and land forces panel, Gallego inquired about initial results from the comparison testing.