Canada wants to buy 65 F-35 fighter jets. The government says the purchase price is $9 billion, including some spare parts and weapons but not including a long-term maintenance contract.
Today, Winslow Wheeler, the director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center For Defense Information in Washington, D.C., releases written testimony he was asked to give to the House of Commons Standing Committee on National Defence. Wheeler says he tries to answer three questions in his testimony:
1. What will Canada’s F-35As cost?
2. What will Canada obtain for that expense?
3. Is there a good reason to wait?
The short answers to those three questions: 1. Unable to know. 2. Unable to know 3. Yes.
Some quotes from the piece:
I can guarantee to you, however, that the unit cost Canada will pay for a complete, operational F-35A will be well in excess of $70 million – even taking into account whatever exclusion of American costs to develop the aircraft your government may be able to negotiate.
If and when Canada signs an actual purchase contract for F-35As in 2014, as I understand is currently planned, the real question is what multiple of CAD$70 million will Canada have to pay? I do not believe it unreasonable to expect a multiplication factor of two.
Finally, what will be your costs to operate this aircraft? In January 2010, the U.S. Navy estimated the cost of operating F-35C’s to be 62 percent higher than operating its current F-18A-Ds and AV-8Bs. New operating costs for the F-35 are now being discussed inside the Pentagon; the cost is, of course, going up. Even the lesser A model will be a very large increase in operating costs over your CF-18s. It would not be unreasonable to expect the flying hour costs to double.
One of the tricky bits for the designer is to deliver on promises to make this a “stealth” fighter, which means it will be hard or impossible for enemy radars to pick up the F-35. Wheeler has something to say about the stealth promises:
The above assumes the stealth characteristic performs as designed, but that is usually not the case. My work at the U.S. Government Accountability Office on stealth systems made it clear to me that not a single U.S. stealth aircraft had lived up to its original detectability promises, and the F-35 looks to be no exception.
And, in Wheeler’s view, the stealth technology comes with sharp performance trade-offs:
The F-35’s stealth features build into the aircraft weight and drag so severe that a hugely powerful engine gives the F-35 less rapid acceleration than American F-18Cs or F-16Cs, according to the data I have seen. The combination of the F-35’s considerable weight and its small-ish wings means it has a “wing loading” (and as a result maneuverability) roughly equivalent to an American F-105 fighter-bomber of the Vietnam era. The F-105 “Lead Sled” was notorious for its inability to defend itself over North Vietnam during the Indochina War.
