Network integration of fighter aircraft is fast becoming the central effort of the fighter defense industrial base, a top Air Force official on the Joint Strike Fighter program said last week.
“Over the years, you will gradually see the industrial base evolve and change what its focus is,” Air Force Maj. Gen. C.R. Davis, the F-35 JSF program executive officer, told sister publication Defense Daily in an Aug. 20 interview. “It won’t be so platform-centric.”
“”All these companies are going to be building highly leveraged technology systems for the military, and we’ve got to figure out how to link those together,” he added.
Among the F-35’s distinguishing capabilities is its ability to interoperate with an unprecedented array of assets in the air, at sea and on the ground.
The inability to communicate with various platforms, allies and different military services has hampered coalition operations for many years, according to Davis. But the F-35 is specifically designed to resolve those issues. For example, information the F-35 receives from its sensors or an off-board source can be passed to troops immediately.
“We talk a lot about international operations, coalition operations,” said Davis. “What this (F-35 capabilities) basically means is that you have a netted airborne network that spans all those … countries.”
Three F-35 variants are derived from a common design and will replace at least 13 types of aircraft for 11 nations. While the United States is the primary customer and financier of the effort, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Canada, Turkey, Australia, Norway and Denmark have contributed $4.4 billion of the just over $40 billion in total development costs. Participation deals with Israel and Singapore are also pending (Defense Daily, Aug. 22).
With the F-35, “they’ll be connected in a way they’ve never been connected before,” Davis explained.
Asked about the overall health of the fighter industrial base in the United States, the general said he hopes U.S. fighter manufacturers will continue to embrace the network integrator role.
“The F-18 will be flying for another 30 years; the U.K. will be flying Typhoons for 30 years,” he said. “The question I want Boeing and Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman and BAE to spend some time thinking about is, ‘How do I make these platforms interoperable? How do I integrate? How do they share data?'”
Lockheed Martin [LMT] is the lead JSF contractor, with Northrop Grumman [NOC] and BAE Systems involved in a supporting role.
“While a lot of folks are worried about what Boeing’s last production line date [for the F-18] will be,” Davis said, “I’m more worried about bringing Boeing in … to make the F-35 and the F-18 work together.”
Asked about press reports that Boeing [BA] may have offered to build F-35 platforms, David dismissed the idea.
“I don’t think the industrial base is in that big of a problem, and I don’t think just moving an airframe production from one location to another helps anybody,” he said.
On the other hand, making the entire fleet of legacy and next-generation aircraft more interoperable will be the new focus.
“You get more data to a legacy aircraft, and that airplane becomes a lot more effective in the sky,” said Davis. “Everybody gets more effective if you can find a way to fully integrate with your fleets.”
Davis said all the services are going through high-level discussions on what types of data should be available to forces under various circumstances. While industry is making “huge advancements” in interoperable linkages, he said, the military has not made the commensurate adjustments to its data-sharing protocol.
“It’s a matter of what data do you want when, and in what format,” he said. “That’s probably the biggest challenge of all these discussions.”
Developing a common software radio solution has also been a challenge, according to the general. The Joint Tactical Radio System continues to experience developmental difficulties, according to a Government Accountability Office report released Aug. 15.
“The whole idea was to get everybody using a similar radio and a similar wave form, and that’s proved almost impossible,” Davis explained.
Other challenges include reconciling the need for information security and coalition data-sharing.
“The U.S. will have to come to grips with what data it shares with its coalition partners,” Davis said. “There is a lot of data that, for a lot of good reasons and a lot of not-so-good reasons we just mark, ‘this is U.S. only and I’m not going to share.'”
“We’ve built these things that can share a wide variety of data with a lot of folks,” he added. “So if we don’t find a way to do that as smoothly as possible…that will be a big challenge.”