Half of Europe is very annoyed at Britain these days. Seems Britain has made an agreement with America not to breathe a word about any of the stealth technology the Americans show them while Britain is helping to develop the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). The other Europeans badly want to build a modern stealth aircraft. British Aerospace Engineering stands to lose a number of juicy contracts, including the Eurofighter, because of the Foreign Office’s decision. Click here for an article about the agreement.
It’s good to find our British allies so accomodating, but was this a smart thing for us Americans to ask? I can see some justification for not wanting continental Europeans to get their hands on stealth technology. France, in particular, has got itself a reputation for selling state-of-the-art weapons to just about anybody with ready cash. If they get stealth today, tomorrow it may turn up in the hands of the Iraqis, the Chinese, or some other potential U.S. enemy.
On the other hand, is it intended that Lockheed or Boeing will never market the JSF outside Britain and the U.S.? These days, you pretty well have to sell any sophisticated aircraft to several countries to recoup the huge R&D costs. If France, Germany or Sweden buy a shipment of JSFs, will they be able to reverse-engineer the technology if they want to build a stealth aircraft?
Furthermore, what repercussions will this policy have on the NATO alliance? I don’t see Heinrich Voter being all that eager to support things like NATO intervention in Yugoslavia if the Americans are going in with fifth-generation stealth aircraft while Heinrich’s son is flying a fourth-generation Tornado that shows up bright and clear on a SAM radar screen.
I guess this is a bit of a transient issue for a Great Debate, but we generally don’t discuss international policy in IMHO, so I’m throwing it out here: is it worthwhile to slap this gag order about stealth technology on the British aerospace industry?
From the US viewpoint, absolutely. From the British viewpoint, probably not, but it probably won’t kill existing European deals, which involve a tangled mess of subcontractors across the continent. Eurofighter is already well past the point where it would make any economic sense to pull the plug completely, and the joint European cargo airacraft has already been assigned to Airbus’ military division, in which the UK is heavily involved.
I seriously doubt that the US government will allow more thna two or three highly trusted customers access to JSF, at least for the first 20 years or so of its operational life, and it is fairly certain that France willnot be one of them. As I understand it, even surpus F-15’s are much more likely to be scrapped, rather than sold on to any countries that are not already approved to fly it. The USA would much rather sell foreign customers F-16’s and -18’s, for all eternity if possible, to help maintain the US edge.
Re: BAE, there are many in the UK who believe that the USA has been a willing accomplice in the systematic dismantling of the UK’s capability to design and build military aircraft on its own. The JSF deal, in their eyes, is just another example of this.
France and Germany are both more protective of their domestic aviation industries than the UK. Both countries, I think, would much rather have access to the details of LO (low observable) technology than be forced to buy a fighter with LO features, such as JSF, developed elsewhere.
As for the ultimate impact on NATO, the organization’s relevance has been in decline ever since the Berlin Wall fell. This is just another nail in the coffin, IMO.
Think of it this way: What the hell does the United States do if an unfriendly country gets it’s hands on stealth technology? The worst-case scenario would involve countries like China being able to bomb the U.S. at will… the best-case scenario would have the U.S. having a pre-existing countermeasure to current stealth technology.
Either way, it’s within the U.S.'s best interests to make sure that stealth remains as far out of an enemy’s hands for as long as possible.
If it does leak, by the time it might possibly show up against us, it’ll be obsolete. We’re not talking a generic new missile or bomb that anything in the air can use with a little software upgrading, we’re talking ground-up production methods. It would easily be 5-10 years before it could be implemented, even assuming any enemy would be willing to spend the money on it and integrate it into their own aircraft designs. This obviously rules out Iraq, who has zip money and no production capability. China, possibly, but it’s not their MO either. There are rumors that stealth aircraft are already obsolete against top of the line equipment, and USAF future production choices seem to support that viewpoint (the selection of the F-22 over the YF-23, for instance)
I don’t see much reason to be rabidly overprotective of it, but hey, it’s the military, it’s what they do European military even more so than the US.
Stealth technology relies on a specialized designed airframe to produce minimal radar bounceback and special absorbing materals to lessen radar bounceback even more. We’re not talking about faster processors or better hard drives, things that just need “fine-tuning” to make drastic improvements.
In order to detect a stealth plane, one can’t rely on traditional radar systems (little tower, emitting a “pulse”, waiting for the “echo”…). Granted, detection systems are getting better all the time, but a defense against stealth cannot be widely implemented, lest the defense itself become stolen.
In short, there’s no guarantee that a single, stealthy plane can’t drop a missile or two on a city, killing potentially hundreds. Personally, I’d like to keep those odds as minimized as possible.
Speaking to the original question, it’s not unprecedented for the US and the UK to keep certain technology to themselves - speaking, of course, about the Polaris sub-borne missile system, back in the 60s (a US invention, granted, but still).
I’m with the Anglophones on this issue - it would be fine if the Euros could demonstrate that the info won’t somehow slip into the hands of some “middleman” country (like South Africa or Israel etc.), but such a guarantee cannot be made; the discipline isn’t there. The Euros think they are so smart? Fine. Let them come up with their own stealth tech.
PS it’s a ridiculous assertion to say that if the Chinese had stealth they could “bomb the US at will”, there being a little thing called the “Pacific Ocean” in between us. Oh - aircraft carriers, you say? Well, last I looked the Chinese were working on one (1). Hardly “Battle-of-Britain” material.
(Though I do remember a conspiracy theory floated about - that the reason we bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was because inside was the wreckage of our stealth fighter, shot down just a week or so earlier.)
Mekhazzio and others: Don’t be too confident about the pace of technological improvement in the US aerospace industry and in the US military. It has slowed dramatically since the height of the Cold War, and there is no longer any basis I can see for optimism that deployed US technology would be able to beat any leaked earlier technology. Remember that the F-117 and B-2 are 1970’s designs, and they’re on the front line. Even those are vulnerable with a little bad luck - for instance, would you really have thought the Bosnian Serbs of all people could bag one? Spoofe, you’re way too late in your worries, sorry.
The extreme case would be the B-52, which will be in service until it’s 80 years old - yes, you read that right, some guys will be flying the same planes their grandfathers flew. The reasons for the slow, almost zero pace of improvement are varied, of course, and they include not only loss of a major identifiable threat, but increased complexity and cost as well as huge bureaucratic growth.
That said, I have no problem with the US approach in this instance. The French government has such an entrenched habit of independent, self-serving action in foreign affairs (even though DeGaulle has been dead for decades) that mistrust is well-founded by now. By contrast, there’s been no cause for questioning the US-UK “special relationship”. I of course do not doubt that US government AND industrial self-interest are the predominant factors in this decision, too.
RTA, perhaps you’re thinking of the PRC’s recent purchase of the scrapped Soviet carrier “Minsk” - that’s being turned into a museum. It represents about as much of a threat to anyone else as does the USS Intrepid. That has even less credibility than the Chinese PLA Air Force, whose front-line fighters are copies of the MiG-17 and MiG-19, both of which are 50 years old by now.
The JSF program is arguably corporate welfare, but the alternative would be to abandon the capability of developing new combat aircraft entirely, and it’s just too early in our planet’s history to do that.
Looking at the posts so far, I’m inclined to agree that the U.S.-British secrecy deal is worthwhile. Mekhazzio may be right that any leaked LO tech would be obsolete in concept before it could be built, but it would be good not to have to spend billions developing an aircraft better than the JSF if nobody can replicate the “obsolete” JSF for several decades.
Looking at Rocket88’s comments, I infer that America’s strategic planning is indeed becoming less dependent on NATO, which makes the decision to expand the alliance even harder to justify in my view. But that’s a different topic.
China ain’t the only country in the world that doesn’t like us. And there’s more than one way to get a plane in range of our borders. Just so you know.
The Serbs nailed the F-117 because it was flying during the day. Stealth technology doesn’t make something invisible (like in the movie Predator). You can still SEE the damn thing.
F-117’s and B-2’s are slated to fly at night, when it’s not raining.
(Oh, I thought I’d also mention another flaw in the F-117’s design… when it’s missile doors are open, the thing looks like a friggin’ flying building on radar screens…)
Are you sure Britain would lose out with the Eurofighter. Its invested a lot of time and money to be told to piss off. Besides the JSF is to be used by the RN and the Eurofighter (Typhoon?) is to be used by the RAF.
It doesn’t even make it invisible to radar, merely more difficult to see. It functionally just shortens the effective range of enemy radar, not completely remove it.
And, as I’ve mentioned, there are rumors that modern high-tech radar technology is nowhere near as affected by the reduced observability as older radar (what it was designed against) is. I doubt that played a part with the Nighthawk that got shot down, though. That could be just about anything. When you get right down to it, the F-117 is a pretty darn vulnerable aircraft. It’s not very fast (can’t be, to keep IR signature down), it’s not very maneuverable (can’t be, it’s a wonder it can fly at all) and they usually work in singles or pairs, rather than the full-flight with SEAD, ECM, ECCM, etc support of usual missions. It relies completely on its low radar observability to stay alive, and if that doesn’t hold up (for whatever reason), then it’s in trouble.
Radar isn’t the only way to spot things in the air, either. For some inexplicable reason, the USAF hasn’t pursued IRST much, but most everyone else has. The Nighthawk is the coolest thing in the air, by far, and sure, it has performed well going up against obviously outclassed opponents. But, in the long run, it’s a one-trick pony. That alone makes its true value questionable.
Bomb bay, not missile. And “flying building” is a bit much. It does significantly increase its radar return, but it’s still not as large of an RCS as a similar aircraft its size. It doesn’t have to be open for long, and it’s not exactly a “design flaw” when there’s no way to prevent that from happening.
You used China as an example; I thought you were referring to China.
The only country in this hemisphere remotely inclined to strike at us might be Cuba, and they are so poor they can barely afford dark clothes and a Lone Ranger mask, let alone stealth bombers. Everyone else is at least an ocean away. (The Russians still play with flying planes near Alaska where they are always promptly intercepted, hardly “at will” flyovers, and Alaska doesn’t really rank as the US metropolitan heartland anyway.) The real threat is not some phantom plane streaking towards our airspace (after a journey of many thousands of miles!), but a warhead being simply smuggled into a city and set off.
Well let’s hear a few, Tom Clancy. Secret airbases in the Canadian rainforest? Really big submarines? Smuggling them inside narcotics shipments?
You used China as an example; I thought you were referring to China.
The only country in this hemisphere remotely inclined to strike at us might be Cuba, and they are so poor they can barely afford dark clothes and a Lone Ranger mask, let alone stealth bombers. Everyone else is at least an ocean away. (The Russians still play with flying planes near Alaska where they are always promptly intercepted, hardly “at will” flyovers, and Alaska doesn’t really rank as the US metropolitan heartland anyway.) The real threat is not some phantom plane streaking towards our airspace (after a journey of many thousands of miles!), but a warhead being simply smuggled into a city and set off.
Well let’s hear a few, Tom Clancy. Secret airbases in the Canadian rainforest? Really big submarines? Smuggling them inside narcotics shipments? (I’ll remind you up front that very few nations have air refeuling capability, and our “enemies” are not among them.)
I was just going by that Jane’s article I linked to. It says, “Two Anglo-French technology demonstration contracts covering non-stealth aspects of a future strike aircraft have been awarded to European Aerosystems to date, but unless the UK MoD lifts the stealth ban, BAE and EADS officials agreed, further collaboration would be difficult, if not impossible. It could also endanger the longevity of the Eurofighter relationship, in which BAE and EADS are partners they said.”
One thing that sticks out in the article is the claim by an unnamed German official that if BAE doesn’t pony up with information about stealth, their participation would be replaced by the Italian component of the European Military Aircraft Company. This absurd statement strikes me unlikely to amount to anything more than political posturing. Not to slam Italian industry, but Italy has no more access to LO tech than the Germans or French.
My apologies. I was referring to general “Tired of America” countries.
Actually, I WAS referring to Cuba. You’re too smart for me, RTF!
Anyway, my point is that it’s a good idea to take as many steps that are necessary to keep Stealth technology secret. It just occurred to me that the real danger isn’t so much towards the United States (I agree, smuggled-in nukes is a bigger threat… an even bigger threat would be smaller-scale or biological terrorism). The more plausible and likely threat would be to our allies around the world (as always!).
Although that’d be an interesting plot for a movie… a new VERY-stealthy fighter jet gets stolen, people have to go find it… lots of action, gunfire, and explosions, and gratuitous sex scenes…
European military even more so than the US.
You’re too smart for me, RTF!