Page 54 - Renorming of Airpower: The F-35 Enters the Combat Fleet

The Renorming of Airpower: The F-35 Arrives into the Combat Force

Question: I believe that any new platform needs a decade to put its legs under it. But the basic point is
that we’re moving in a different direction from the beginning, rather than spinning our wheels with
historic patterns.

And your perspective is the need to get on with it, more or less?

Group Captain Townsend: “I think that’s absolutely right and inevitable. But at least, the foundation has been
set. The partners involved in the global platform understand each other’s business, from the outset, in a way
that we haven’t really seen ever before.

I think the closest equivalent you could come to would be the F-16 program that was widely sold across the
world, but every nation did F-16 differently.

There were different support solutions for every F-16 operating nation.

By and large, anyone operating F-35 is going to be doing it in broadly the same way with the same sort of
broad sustainment solution.

That’s part of the global program.

That’s what makes it an attractive option for everyone that’s involved.”

THE F-35 AND THE EVOLVING STRATEGIC ENVIRONMENT

The F-35 is a first generation information age air combat asset. It is a foundational capability to empower the
security and defense forces which need to operate flexibility and rapidly across an area of interest, for
combat or deterrence.

Lt. General Preziosa, the recently retired head of the Italian Air Force provided a clear link between how he
saw the F-35 as an information age combat asset and the changing global environment. In an interview
conducted in Rome at his office in 2013, but several points enhanced in follow up interviews in 2014 and
2015 he underscored the nature of global change which called for an information warfare combat asset.

He saw the period through World War II to end of the first decade of the 21st century as having more in
common than different. He saw this as a period, which saw significant disruption and then growth built around
building up continental focused growth and development. Global regions grew and financial systems largely
supported those regions in their growth and development.

Airpower has been largely linear in its development during this period, in which new planes have been
added, but they have essentially replicated what we asked planes in World War II to do. Bombers and
fighters have over time gotten better, but essentially they work in a linear strike and defense pattern in
shaping an approach towards longer-range operations.

With the information age, he sees a different type of development, globalization in which the focus is upon
inter-continental growth and development. In this phase, we have to meet the challenge of new growth and
development models, shape new financial systems and deal with new defense and security challenges.

“Partnerships are changing; continents are working to get closer and to work more effectively with one
another. But there is a governability shortfall in managing the new challenges, and in such areas of shortfall
the problems appear. There are continuing conflicts within and among continents but there are also new
patches of emerging challenges within the seams of the global system whereby terrorists, organized crime or
forces of instability grow and disrupt.”
Second Line of Defense

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