Interesting Comment column in today's Times.
Top Gun diplomacy helps US win friends
It would be comic if it were not so ruinously expensive. The F-35 fighter, a project two decades in the making at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, had so many flaws it might as well have been the ramshackle police truck in a Keystone Cops movie. Pilots complained of piercing ear pain in the cockpit, their built-in guns played up. Sometimes a flat tyre could set off a series of errors. Engineers found 873 software glitches, a dozen of them serious enough to impede a mission.
And yet here we are: the F-35, the American-built fighter for the next generation of war, has arrived and though only a few have actually seen action it is already changing geopolitics. The US Marine version of the plane was filmed this week making an elegant landing on Britain’s new aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, and next year the carrier and its planes, both British and American, are due to steam off to the tense South China Sea.
The US carrier Carl Vinson, recently retrofitted to take F-35s, looks likely to be heading in the same direction. Whatever happens in the US presidential election, the betting is that Beijing will be putting pressure on Taiwan to assess whether the West is willing to fight for it.
Despite all the hiccups in its development, the F-35 is a demonstration of military prowess. Its stealthiness — its ability to avoid radar — has forced both Russia and China to plough research into radar, new air-and-sea tactics and defences including an S500 missile. Russia was certainly rattled when Norwegian F-35s escorted two American B-2 “Spirit” stealth bombers over the northernmost parts of the Norwegian Sea. The mission was to test the ability of Nato allies to co-ordinate at high Arctic altitudes in what could soon become a new battleground.
There’s a danger that everyone comes to see the F-35 as a shortcut to security, that we’re all drinking from the rather muddy fountain of Hitler’s V2 Wunderwaffe. It is not a miracle machine and won’t be even when the technical flaws have been ironed out. But it ticks a lot of boxes: close air support, air-to-ground attacks, aerial dogfights, vertical take-off and a sucker-up of intelligence. The pilot has a 360-degree view; his helmet feeds him with, and usefully prioritises, incoming data. The plane is a nimble flying computer that can hide from the enemy. Because of its design, but also because of the way it has been marketed, it makes for extraordinary levels of real-time battlefield communication between allies. And it can be adapted to different theatres of war.
That’s why it has become such a political tool. The combination of breech-loading, longer-range rifles — meaning camouflaged attackers could lie down and shoot behind cover — gave Afrikaner farmers the edge over red-coated British soldiers in the Boer war. “I never saw a Boer all day till the battle was over, and it was our men who were the victims,” groaned a British general. That was the power of stealth, of accuracy and nimbleness and is what the fifth generation of fighters offers.
Little wonder, then, that the F-35 was the subject of a side deal when the US brokered a peace accord between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. The UAE has formally requested the fighter. Israel already has it, about 24 at present, possibly rising to as many as 75, and was the first to use it in an active strike. Earlier this year it wiped out an Iranian or Iranian ally’s ammunition convoy crossing Syria.
The US has pledged it won’t allow Israel to lose its military advantage over Arab states so, if it agrees to supply the UAE, it must find a way that prevents their F-35s from hitting those of Israel. That’s a gamble but in the short term at least it should draw the two countries closer in countering the pernicious influence of Iran.
Saudi Arabia may be the next to request the fighter. Again, this would not be a straightforward transaction. The first batch of the F-35 is being manufactured and sold at the same time as it is being developed, hence the high number of technical problems. They are serviced and maintained as part of the sales contract, with both the manufacturer and the purchaser learning more as they go along. Later deliveries will thus be more attractive than the retrofitted earlier ones.
What happens to the old fleet? Are they going to be used as an expensive training tool? Or will they be sold on in a grey arms market? If Saudi Arabia were to pass on its older F-35s to Pakistan, there would be trouble ahead. Britain’s decision to be in at the beginning on the F-35, alongside Australia, Canada, Israel and Italy, was nonetheless the right one. The coming integrated defence review aims to set our strategic priorities and may, in the light of tightening Covid-era budgets, conclude that Britain can get by with fewer than 70 fighters, rather than the original target of 138. At the moment we’re down for 48 by 2025 at a cost of £9 billion and 18 have arrived.
It’s a conceit, though, to believe we can choose our war or confine it to one theatre. The reality is that conflict has a way of finding us. The next few years will be defined by a hostile China. Putin’s Russia is inherently unstable. Small wars will merge or trigger bigger ones. Command of the air will be crucial; it’s not the time for us to retire as a military power.