Originally Posted by aviation week and space technology
Feb 3, 2012
By David Fulghum, Bill Sweetman, Amy Butler
Washington, Washington, Washington
How much of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter’s spiraling cost in recent years can be traced to China’s cybertheft of technology and the subsequent need to reduce the fifth-generation aircraft’s vulnerability to detection and electronic attack?
That is a central question that budget planners are asking, and their queries appear to have validity. Moreover, senior Pentagon and industry officials say other classified weapon programs are suffering from the same problem. Before the intrusions were discovered nearly three years ago, Chinese hackers actually sat in on what were supposed to have been secure, online program-progress conferences, the officials say.
The full extent of the connection is still being assessed, but there is consensus that escalating costs, reduced annual purchases and production stretch-outs are a reflection to some degree of the need for redesign of critical equipment. Examples include specialized communications and antenna arrays for stealth aircraft, as well as significant rewriting of software to protect systems vulnerable to hacking.
It is only recently that U.S. officials have started talking openly about how data losses are driving up the cost of military programs and creating operational vulnerabilities, although claims of a large impact on the Lockheed Martin JSF are drawing mixed responses from senior leaders. All the same, no one is saying there has been no impact.
While claiming ignorance of details about effects on the stealth strike aircraft program, James Clapper, director of national intelligence, says that Internet technology has “led to egregious pilfering of intellectual capital and property. The F-35 was clearly a target,” he confirms. “Clearly the attacks . . . whether from individuals or nation-states are a serious challenge and we need to do something about it.”
The F-35 issue was ducked as well by David Shedd, deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, but not the impact of cybertheft on defense spending and operational security.
“I am not going to talk about the F-35, Shedd says. “I’d be sitting with the secretary having a counseling session. The answer is absolutely yes. The leaks have hurt our efforts in that it gives the adversary an advantage in having insights into what we’re doing. It should be clear that whether there are leaks on the technology side or that affect preemptive decision-making, they are very damaging to the intelligence community.”
Those closer to the program are less equivocal about the damage that cyberintrusions are causing the JSF program.
“You are on to something,” says a veteran combat pilot with insight into both the F-35 and the intelligence communities “There are both operational and schedule problems with the program related to the cyber data thefts. In addition, there are the costs of redressing weaknesses in the original system design and lots of software fixes.”
The subject also was addressed during Pentagon briefings about President Barack Obama’s budget for 2013.
“We are very attentive . . . to cybervulnerabilities in weapon systems, ours and those of others,” says Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter. “It’s part of the modern world. It’s a highly computerized airplane. Like all our other computer systems, we have to be attentive to it.”
In July 2011, then-Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn pointed out that a foreign intelligence agency had victimized a major defense contractor and extracted 24,000 files concerning a developmental system. That is important because a decision to redesign a compromised system depends on whether the lost information would help the intruder develop similar systems and generate methods of attack and defense. Some U.S. officials have pegged the costs at tens of billions of dollars.
There is some empirical evidence to support this concern. China has made a habit in recent years of regularly rolling out new aircraft designs, including the J-20 stealth prototype strike fighter and a series of new unmanned aircraft that look like U.S. designs such as the Global Hawk and Sensor Craft.
Nonetheless, the Pentagon’s ardor for the strike fighter has not dampened.
“We want the airplane,” Carter declares. “We want all three variants. At the same time, there is the issue of cost and the performance of the program in this difficult time when we are trying to reach full-rate production. That’s still a concern. We’ll ride up that curve to full-rate production when it’s economically and managerially prudent to do it.”
Despite the proclamation of support for the program, the Pentagon is expected to reduce by 179 aircraft the U.S. buy of F-35s through 2017 in the forthcoming fiscal 2013 defense spending request, according to a Reuters report. If approved by Congress, this would dash the hopes of Lockheed Martin to swiftly ramp up production and lower per-unit prices, a goal tied to the company’s campaign to sell the aircraft abroad. The Pentagon’s reasoning for slowing production is to reduce the impact of yet-unknown problems that could still arise from the flight-test program. In addition, the Block II software package is late. It was slated for release to the flight-testing fleet by the end of last year.
An early concern about a possible avenue for hacking into stealth aircraft, the F-35’s Multifunction Advanced Data Link (MADL), is no longer suspect. It was dropped as an add-on to the F-22 and B-2 that would allow stealth aircraft to communicate without being detected. Program insiders say MADL was scrubbed as a “pure money issue.” MADL was designed for high throughput, frequency-hopping and anti-jamming capabilities with phased-array antenna assemblies that send and receive tightly directed radio signals.
The F-35 program may have been vulnerable because of its lengthy development. Defense analysts note that the JSF’s information system was not designed with cyberespionage, now called advanced persistent threat, in mind. Lockheed Martin officials now admit that subcontractors (6-8 in 2009 alone, according to company officials) were hacked and “totally compromised.” In fact, the stealth fighter program probably has the biggest “attack surface” or points that can be attacked owing to the vast number of international subcontractors.
There also is the issue of unintended consequences. The 2009 hacking was apparently not aimed at the F-35 but rather at a classified program. However, those accidental results were spectacular. Not only could intruders extract data, but they became invisible witnesses to online meetings and technical discussions, say veteran U.S. aerospace industry analysts. After the break-in was discovered, the classified program was halted and not restarted until a completely new, costly and cumbersome security system was in place.
There is another view of what is affecting JSF and why. A former senior staffer for the U.S. Senate contends that the F-35 program’s problems reflect diminishing interest in manned aircraft whose performance is limited primarily by its aircrew.
“I think the biggest issue facing the JSF is that there has been a profound shift in the military’s perception of the value of manned aircraft compared to unmanned aircraft,” he says. “I’ve had long conversations with a Marine Corps forward air controller who has just returned from Afghanistan. He pointed out that an F/A-18 can be kept on call for 15 minutes, but an unmanned Reaper is there for eight hours. The day of the fighter pilot is over. There has been a seismic shift in the military’s value judgment of manned and unmanned aircraft.”
However, that is a disputed analysis.
The JSF and its mission of penetrating integrated air defense systems will not be threatened by unmanned aircraft despite cost issues, says a retired aerospace official who has been involved with the F-35 throughout its life.