Going Bazaar Shopping in a Ferrari! Not Economical, Practical and Enjoyable! USAF in F-35 and F-16 Dilemma. China is the Rival. Is the Solution F-16 Again?

Former US Air Force Commander and current US Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Brown Jr. emphasized the US Air Force's predicament in fighter/bomber aircraft and pointed to the solution with the following observation he made in 2021. The issue that the most authoritative mouth drew attention to is still being discussed in the US today. 

According to Gen. Charles Brown Jr., the F-35 was a Ferrari, the F-22 was a Bugatti Chiron, and the US Air Force (USAF) was in urgent need of a Nissan 300ZX. Both the F-35 and the F-22 had higher technology than the USAF needed for the vast majority of its daily missions. Maintaining, maintaining, operating and upgrading these two aircraft was very difficult and costly. 

In fact, the USAF's urgent need for a replacement for the F-16 was to be affordable, capable of meeting minimum requirements, lightweight and long-range. It had to be faster to develop and upgrade than the F-35, and it did not need to be as technologically advanced as the F-35.

In fact, what was intended for the F-35 and beyond?

As the F-35A began to enter service, the F-16s and A-10s were to be retired one by one. 

The F-35A would take over all close air support, close and medium range air strikes and deep strike missions.

Air superiority missions would be carried out by the F-22 and, as long as it remained in service, by the F-15C, while long-range deep strike missions would be carried out by the F-15E Strike Eagle.

In other words, with the F-35A, the USAF's many cost-effective but effective operational missions requiring high sortie production performance would be carried out by the "industrious, hardworking and economical" F-35A, and the heaviest burden of air power would be borne by it.

However, what did the USAF expect from the F-35?

As Gen. As Gen. Charles Brown Jr. pointed out, what the USAF really needed was the Nissan 300ZX. This car would be both economical, sporty and a family car, requiring little maintenance and little expense, would bring relief to the USAF's budget, and would contribute greatly to the USAF's mission effectiveness.

But at the end of many years of testing and development, instead of the Nissan 300ZX, we ended up with an overpriced, high-performance Ferrari that could not perform, had too many breakdowns, was too expensive to maintain, and could not be taken out of the garage. 

The USAF could not say goodbye to the F-16 because the F-35 was different from what it was intended to be, so it revitalized the F-15 and ordered the F-15EX, which has an airframe life of 20,000 flight hours, while old friend and new enemy China was rapidly increasing its military capability. 

In fact, the USAF was clearly "caught offside" by the F-35 and is now trying to get out of it.

Does the USAF actually need a Long Range and Low Cost F-16?

It is as if the F-16XL dream is being reborn! But that's another story.

F-16XL

The F-16 was originally designed as a lightweight, low-cost and highly maneuverable multi-role fighter, optimized for dogfighting and low- and medium-altitude, short-range missions where the USAF's more expensive, dedicated air superiority fighter, the F-15, was not intended to be used. The F-16 was born as the F-15's "energetic and mischievous" little brother.

The F-16's lightweight design was what made it a perfectly maneuverable and versatile fighter platform for the time. But the lightweight platform was also the source of the F-16's greatest weakness. 

The F-16 was optimized for short-range dogfighting, not the long-range flights required to penetrate deep into enemy-held airspace. The maximum take-off weight of the F-16 is about 40,000 lbs, which is very small compared to the F-15 mentioned above (which was designed for long-range flights required for air superiority missions and has a maximum take-off weight of 68,000 lbs. 

The F-16's limited take-off weight is also well exceeded by modern aircraft such as the F-22 (over 80,000 lbs) and the F-35 (65,000 lbs).

The F-16's takeoff weight inherently limits the aircraft's internal fuel capacity to 7,000 lbs. In comparison, the F-15 has about 14,000 lbs of internal fuel, the USAF's newer F-22 air superiority fighter and the F-35 multi-role fighter have internal fuel capacities of 18,000 lbs.

The higher your internal fuel capacity, the more ammunition you can carry or range you can extend instead of carrying additional fuel with external fuel tanks.

The F-16's small fuel capacity exposes the aircraft's greatest weakness, which is its limited combat radius, which is the maximum distance an aircraft can fly and return without requiring air-to-air refueling. The F-16's combat radius is about 300-400 miles. The F-15, F-22 and F-35 each have a combat radius approaching 1,000 miles. Although this fuel capacity can be increased with external fuel tanks, carrying additional fuel reduces the ammunition load the aircraft can carry. As a result of this serious shortcoming, F-16 operational missions in the USAF are mostly dependent on aerial refueling.

F-35 Fails to Meet Conceptual Design Requirements, Upsets Plans.

During the development of the F-35 fifth-generation fighter, the Pentagon's search for new technological frontiers transformed it from a versatile and inexpensive concept into a futuristic, high-tech, high-cost, multi-role fighter.

In the Pacific, the most fundamental and critical air operational requirement of US Air, Sea-Air and Marine Corps-Air forces is an extended combat radius. China is the Target.

The US Air Force's imperative operational capability requirement is a greatly increased combat radius capable of striking Chinese forces from the air without refueling. The desired operational radius is preferably 1400 miles.

In addition, the deployment of U.S. airpower to attack China would require US airpower to conduct high sortie numbers of operational flights. This would be a very costly operational activity. It is not economically feasible to perform all of these sorties with the F-35. Moreover, most of these missions will not require the capability of the F-35's high-tech systems.

To reiterate, the most unique capability required of this new fighter is the ability to strike Chinese forces at a range of 1,400 miles and return without refueling from the air. This requires a long combat radius range capability. 

In addition, the envisioned new fighter/bomber should have the F-16's excellent dogfight maneuverability and weapons systems capability, while at the same time being short in design and manufacturing time, affordable, low in maintenance and sustainment costs, high in combat readiness, and capable of performing a large number of flight sorties extremely economically with a high activity rate. 

In the search for a solution, the Pentagon will also examine an upgraded F-16, which Lockheed Martin is offering to India as the F-21. Lockheed Martin has stated that it gives this aircraft a combat radius equal to that of the F-35. The F-21 would have the weapon system capability of the F-16 but would also be a very economical aircraft. 

Lockheed Martin's proposed F-21 (F-16 variant) for India.

The USAF is in search of a specialized, aerodynamic, unconventional fighter airframe that contributes to fuel efficiency. Unfortunately, the words "specialized" or "non-traditional", especially when used together, often, but not always, imply excessive costs and difficulties in integrating the new platform with existing power. The USAF will want a less-than-perfect design from the designer that eliminates these difficulties.

My personal opinion is that Lockheed Martin, the likely contractor, already has this design.

Conclusion:

The USAF needs an aircraft that is economical, long-range, capable of producing a high number of sorties, with technological systems that are adequate for a large number of routine operational fighter/bomber missions, but not at extreme levels of technology.