Lockheed Martin [LMT] said on May 1 that it has developed a new weapons rack, called “Sidekick,” to increase the internal weapons carrying capacity of the aircraft carrier variant of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), the F-35C, which achieved Initial Operational Capability (IOC) in February.
“Lockheed Martin has gone out on its own and developed a new weapons rack to incorporate into our internal bays,” Tony “Brick” Wilson, a Lockheed Martin F-35 test pilot, told reporters at the company’s Global Vision Center in Arlington, Va., in advance of the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space exposition at National Harbor, Md., next week.
“Right now, the F-35 is capable with IOC of carrying two air-to-air missiles internally for a total of four,” Wilson said. “However, with ‘Sidekick,’ we can now up that to three internal missiles per bay for a total of six. What does this mean to the pilot? It means increased lethality with the increased load out, as well as increased survivability. An increased number of missiles internally means we can go into combat with four weapons but still maintain our stealth configuration.”
Lockheed Martin said that it is prepared to integrate Sidekick on the F-35C, should the Navy decide to go forward with the new weapons rack.
Wilson said that “in addition to this increased loadout carrying capability, the F-35 structure has been set up so we have the capability of carrying hypersonic weapons externally.”
“This is going to provide an important deep strike capability while maintaining our ISR capability,” he said. As the company keeps its eye on reducing costs, Lockheed Martin “is still on track to provide an $80 million F-35[A] by 2020,” Wilson said.
In November, 2014 aboard the USS Nimitz (CVN-68), Wilson, then a Navy commander, became the first pilot to perform an arrested landing of the F-35C.
The Navy plans future carrier air wings to be made of F-35Cs, Super Hornets, Growlers, Hawkeyes, and MH-60R/S helicopters by 2025.
Wilson said that “in addition to this increased loadout carrying capability, the F-35 structure has been set up so we have the capability of carrying hypersonic weapons externally.”
“This is going to provide an important deep strike capability while maintaining our ISR capability,” he said. As the company keeps its eye on reducing costs, Lockheed Martin “is still on track to provide an $80 million F-35A by 2020,” Wilson said.
Last September, Lockheed Martin and the Defense Department agreed on a new $11.5 billion contract for JSF that they said would bring the price of an F-35A below $90 million for the first time.
Last week, the Government Accountability Office issued a new report, “F-35 Aircraft Sustainment: DOD Needs to Address Substantial Supply Chain Challenges,” recommending improvements to the JSF supply chain and warning that without implementing new procedures, the program could prove unable to meet readiness requirements in an affordable manner.
From May 2018 to November 2018, the GAO found that F-35s were mission capable only 52 percent of the time, while the target rate is 75 percent. The JSF was fully mission capable only 27 percent of the time, compared to a target rate of 60 percent.
The Defense Department concurred with the GAO’s recommendations.
Lockheed Martin has made several recent efforts to reduce sustainability costs, to include moving suppliers to long term contracts (Defense Daily, April 17) and using process automation and new software solutions to improve capabilities such as the notorious unwieldy automated logistics information system, or ALIS (Defense Daily, March 4).