You can’t turn a screw with a hammer or play a symphony with a snare drum. But you don’t need to, if you have the correct tools. Most jobs are easier if you have the correct tools, but many jobs are impossible if you have the wrong tools.
That’s true in warfare as well. Our military needs the right tools if it’s going to succeed.
Two recent incidents show the value of the tried and true F-15 fighter jet. Fox News reported on October 16 that after Turkish forces came very close to U.S. forces in the border region of Syria, “Air Force F-15 fighters and Army Apache attack helicopters arrived on the scene” and provided a show of force to protect our troops without a shot fired. Air Force Times reported on May 15, in response to threats from Iran, “Air Force F-15C Eagles also flew deterrence missions on Saturday” while more F-15Cs were “deployed to an undisclosed location in the Middle East on Wednesday.”
In other words, the versatile F-15 is now participating in ground support missions, while continuing its primary mission of maintaining air superiority throughout a battle space. That’s a weapon that can really do it all.
It’s fair to say the F-35, while it supposedly has many uses, actually isn’t the right tool for all jobs our military now needs to do. That’s ironic, because the F-35 was conceived in the 1990s as a tool that could do it all, and some want the F-35s that make up the Joint Fighter Program to displace a good number of reliable F-15s.
“The Joint Strike Fighter program called for a common design with three variants to share 80 percent of their parts. There would be the conventional F-35A, the Air Force’s plane. There would be the short takeoff and landing (STOVL) F-35B for the Marines. The Navy would get the carrier landing F-35C,” reports Eric Tegler of Popular Mechanics from a report posted on July 27, 2018. “At its dawn, the F-35 was projected to be four times more effective than older, legacy fighters in air-to-air combat, eight times more effective in air-to-ground combat, and three times better at reconnaissance and suppression of enemy air defenses.”
But the F-35 is not great at deterrence because the stealth technology is heavy and failing cannon made it useless for close-air support in the past. While the military kept doubling down on the F-35s and some pushed to exclude or end the F-15s, that would have put our troops in harm’s way as recently as this past week.
The Pentagon pressed Lockheed Martin to get the F-35 plane in the air, counting on the idea of “concurrency” to save money. That would mean testing existing plane while others were still being built. In any event, that just meant that faulty planes had to be pulled out of service and retrofitted, while newer jets also had to be fixed for the same, and other, problems. It meant a conveyer belt of failures that kept the F-35 out of service until 2018, more than 20 years after it was proposed.
Even when the plane does undertake a mission, it is not an especially challenging or important one. “The U.S. Air Force has finally flown its variant of the F-35 in combat, using two of the aircraft to take out an ISIS tunnel network and weapons cache in Iraq on April 30,” noted Defense News this spring. That’s akin to using your Lamborghini to drive trash to the town dump; it’s a mission that could and should have been done by a much less expensive jet.
A military official who worked on the F-35 gave Vanity Fair a scathing review in 2013. “They can’t drop a single live bomb on a target, can’t do any fighter engagements. There are limitations on Instrument Flight Rules — what’s required to take an airplane into bad weather and to fly at night,” the anonymous source said. “What the program is saying is that the J.S.F., your latest and greatest fighter, is restricted from flying in instrument meteorological conditions — something a $60,000 Cessna can do.”
Even with these limitations, the F-35 clearly is important, yet it should not be considered the only tool the Air Force needs to protect our troops and fly missions.
Waiting for the F-35 to do it all is, at this point, putting America at risk. So the Air Force needs an effective plan B. Luckily, it has the F-15 at the ready.
The National Interest reports, “The Pentagon proposes to buy 80 F-15Xs over the next five years, likely expanding to an eventual buy of 144 or more to ‘refresh’ the F-15C/D fleet — and potentially the F-15E fleet down the road.”
That makes sense. F-15s have been projecting American power for decades. They are currently being used to keep the Iranians in line, and protect American service members in Syria.
Americans need the F-15 in our tool box, especially since the F-35 is turning out to be a one dimensional, if expensive, tool.
