De defensa

Plusieurs sites font grand cas d’une longue analyse de l’analyste James Hasik, auteur d’une proposition longuement explicitée à propos du JSF, et rapidement résumée: “Kill It”.

• Stephen Trimble, sur son blog fameux DEW Line (Flight International), le 3 mars 2010, sous le titre romantique de “Imaginez un monde sans le JSF”…

«Analyst James Hasik, author of Arms and Innovation, yesterday posted a remarkable blog red-teaming a future without the Lockheed Martin F-35. You need to set aside several minutes to read through the logic, but it's well worth it.

»Perhaps Hasik's harshest comment:

»The JSF is just not militarily vital. Several years ago, I asked the head of strategy at a European aircraft manufacturer why his company had no obvious plans for a fighter beyond the current model. “All our customers,” he said, “have enough fighters for chasing Cessnas for the next fifty years.”…

»Rather, Hasik envisions a future without the F-35 program…» – ce monde, avec tous les concurrents qu’il fait pour le remplacer.

• DefenseTech.org, le 3 mars 2010, commente également.

«… James Hasik makes the case for killing the F-35. As we’ve learned is the cause of most human errors, Gates made his decision to go all-in on the F-35 on the basis of incomplete information, Hasik writes. Now, the F-35 is not justly hugely over budget but development is over a year behind schedule and slowing.

»Hasik figures the U.S. has at least a ten year window before any potential foe could build a fighter fleet that poses a real challenge. Money freed up from the F-35 should go to building a fighter that can best anything the Chinese are likely to build over the next few decades.

»As Trimble says, it’s worth a read.»

• Quant à Hasik, (le 2 mars 2010 sur son site Jameshasik.com), il présente effectivement un long argumentaire sur le cas. Avec ce passage où il évoque toutes les mesures déjà prises contre le JSF, pour en arriver à l’“option nucléaire”…

«Let’s take this a stage further. Would it be possible not just to shoot a general or a program manager, but rather, the whole program? The challenges appear overwhelmingly huge. In the United States, the leadership of the USAF and the USMC see no clear alternative to simply continuing to pour whatever money they must into the program. (The Navy is an exception, and I’ll get to that below.) But the US has a further problem: the airplane is not just joint, it’s international. Like the International Space Station, the JSF is still stumbling along in part because it’s too international to deorbit.

»Those partner countries that have signed up for the program do have alternatives, and that points to the list of parties with a commercial or political interest in termination. Even Lockheed Martin, though, should think long and hard about how its competitors might work this issue. Boeing could stand the most to gain, and has a particular interest in killing the F-35C, the tailhook version which competes for the Navy’s funding with the F/A-18E/F—an airplane for which the Navy has shown increased affection of late. Close behind though would stand Saab, Dassault, and EADS (as the one shareholder in Eurofighter GmbH with little interest in the JSF program). These three European companies have an interest in killing the F-35A, the conventional land-based version, as Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Italy, Canada, Turkey, and Australia would all open up as marketing targets (Belgium and even Portugal might eventually make that list as well). Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, and Alenia are perhaps of split opinions, in that all are major subcontractors to Lockheed Martin for the F-35, but that each has interests in the X-47B or Eurofighter programs, which would stand to gain from the F-35’s loss. In short, most of the combat aircraft industry would arguably like to kill this thing, and the rest is at best dispassionate.

»So, whether as an ambition or a red-teaming exercise, just how would one go about trying to kill the JSF?...»

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