Page 75 - Renorming of Airpower: The F-35 Enters the Combat Fleet

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

The PLA is modernizing its air and naval forces along a linear command directed “hub and spoke” (AWACS-is
their key tell). US Air/Sea Battle can build”honeycomb” technology base/con-ops, which is a winning formula
for Allies and US.

Against future hypersonic cruise missiles if F-35 did not exist it would have to be invented. Hypersonic cruise
missiles are the biggest emerging realistic threat against the fleet and “others.” (Dr. Mark Lewis former Chief
Scientist USAF). With nine minutes of incoming flight, seven minutes can be an eternity at speed of light. The F-
35 is a component of focusing energy weapon, “tron” warfare capability and kinetic weapon research
relevant to the task and is hence enhanced ship survivability in an operational theater.

The US and its Pacific allies can be their own relative reactive enemy if PLA gets hypersonic cruise missiles. An
F-35 lighting up threats 800 miles out and vectoring our killer hypersonic cruise missiles will be a deadly first
shot, the one that really counts

In short, the F-35 sensor engine is a key element to fighting “Tron War.” The F-35 seen as a fleet of
capability provides an entirely new approach to cognitive learning for the warfighter. Similar to Jean
Piaget’s approach to understanding the cognitive learning of the child, the fleet learns as it fights and reaches
different levels of competence and capabilities in dealing with the reactive enemy.

This point was driven home in a recent note made by Dean Ebert, a Naval Academy Grad, and former USMC
pilot. Dean was one of the key sources of an interview done at the Paris Air Show in 2007 by Doug Barrie
and Amy Butler when they were talking with General Trautman, then DCA of the USMC, about the future of
Electronic Warfare.

Behavioral aspects of cognition are finding their way into architectures, processing, fusion, and
distribution/collaboration of information nodes. Pulling your thread of increased processing power and open
architectures — not to mention C4ISR-D and the Z-axis — we are now able to interact with our environment in
a more “human” way.

By this I mean that we sense our environment, we understand it, we interact with it based on that
understanding, and then as the environment changes we change with it.

Throughout this process, we allow our systems/networks to learn not only what it has sensed and which dials to
turn to better interact, but to remember what they HAVE learned… then they can share that with other nodes
that may have interests.

You could think of a automated equalizer for a stereo that adapts automatically to a room based on user
defined preferences.

Cognitive computing/architectures will be necessary to combat the PLA threat… smaller, disposable “swarms”
of sensors, non-kinetic/kinetic attack options will be essential to defeating the numbers of threats while
minimizing the risk of our manned systems.

To this end, if JSF with it’s perception of the world, and ability to display/control information is able to direct
or at least perceive what the swarms of intelligent sensors are doing, you’ve got yourself a true multiplier.

Each node in the battlespace must be a collaborator… it must be able to share it’s understanding of the
environment as well as it’s sensed knowledge, it ALSO must be able to be interacted with… whether asked a
question, pass along information, or change its mode of operation/aim point.

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