Are stealth fighters an expensive mistake?
There are real trade-offs being made, and the true tests are yet to come.
It’s hard to look back at the timeline of military aircraft development in the United States in the stealth aircraft era without saying that some mistakes were clearly made. Stealth aircraft programs have experienced serious cost overruns and delays, and older airframes have remained in service even as the stealth aircraft intended to replace them have been cancelled. All previous stealth aircraft programs had their original production targets cut severely in response to failures; the F-35 has survived to become the fighter that the United States will rely on in the future.
Or rather, the three fighters that the United States will rely on: The F-35A, F-35B, and F-35C really are three different planes that happen to share some common parts and design features. This is one reason for the protracted development and extensive cost overruns: The plan to develop one common affordable lightweight fighter ballooned into the development of three separate main-line fighters.
While the F-35 may now be the most capable fighter in the world, it’s possible, even plausible, that the US has invested too much in developing stealth fighters - to the point of neglecting other aircraft that would contribute more to the interests of the United States. For nearly a century, the most powerful tool for ensuring the continued liberty of the United States has been the function of the United States as the arsenal of democracy.
For that role, the F-35 might be too advanced - too advanced for some allies to keep them reliably operational and too advanced to allow to slip from the hands of precarious allies into enemies.
What is stealth? And why does it matter?
All aircraft have some capacity for stealth - just as they have a certain capacity for speed, range, and payload. No aircraft can be successfully detected and identified under all circumstances by all sensor systems; for example, the MiG-29 is not considered a stealth fighter by any stretch of the imagination, but Ukrainian MiG-29 fighters in early 2022 frequently evaded detection by Russian radar systems by flying low to the ground. In order for a plane to be hit with a guided missile, it must be targeted; and in order for it to be targeted, it must first be detected.
On the other hand, no stealth fighter is invisible. The F-117A Nighthawk was one of the stealthiest aircraft in the skies of 1999 when one was shot down by a 1960s-grade Soviet air defense systems. Stealth fighters are harder to detect with radar rather than impossible … and no stealth fighter can avoid showing up as a hot object in infrared imaging.
Asymmetry in detection and targeting range has been the major advantage of American planes over Soviet-made planes. Fourth-generation American fighters have proven their superior capabilities not just in the hands of American pilots, but by Israeli pilots in F-15 and F-16 fighters and Iranian pilots in F-14 fighters.
The cost of stealth
On a theoretical level, one of the major issues with stealth aircraft is the risk of significant improvements in sensor technology. If sensor technology (or signal processing) improves enough, a stealth aircraft can start to resemble a slower and more expensive non-stealth aircraft. There are few free lunches to be had in aeronautical engineering; stealth aircraft usually pay a premium cost in aerodynamic efficiency and maintenance hours.
In 1977, the B-1A bomber was canceled - publicly, the reason was delays and cost overruns.1 Privately, the reason was that the B-2 stealth bomber was in development, and it was thought that the B-2 would be superior. Four years later, the timeline for the development of the B-2 bomber had stretched for long enough that one hundred B-1B fighters were ordered as an interim measure.
Eventually, the B-2 program was canceled with only 21 built out of a planned 132, thanks largely to massive delays and cost overruns. The F-22 was cut from a production run of 750 to a production run of 187. The F-35 has experienced enormous delays and massive cost overruns as well. Stealth planes also have generally been finicky. The B-2 has been a notorious hangar queen with high maintenance costs and difficulty staying in ready condition. This brings us to a pointed problem.
The United States has the kind of defense budget that allows it to spend over $20 million per year per plane keeping F-22 Raptors operational. However, close allies of the US do not have the same level of military spending. Germany, for example, seems to be unable to successfully maintain its fleet of Eurofighter Typhoons. This is in spite of expert estimates that Typhoons cost about 30% as much to operate as Raptors.
The trust problem
In addition to the massive expense, low production counts, and high operational costs, the F-117A, B-2, and F-22 have something else in common: There was never any real consideration of exporting any of these planes. The stealth technology involved was so heavily classified that the United States was unwilling to share it with even their close allies. Stealth technology (and sensor technology) are inherently sensitive.2
Concerns over the potential release of sensitive technology have played a role in denying the export of the F-35 to multiple US allies, including Turkey, Thailand, Taiwan, and the United Arab Emirates. The trust problems related to advanced stealth technology are real and difficult to surmount.
The United States takes a risk when exporting sensitive technology. For example, in 1972, President Nixon decided to offer cutting-edge fourth-generation jet fighters to Iran, at the time an ally of the United States. After a revolution in 1979 that replaced the US-friendly Shah with a theocracy hostile to the US, this meant that some of the most advanced American aircraft were in the hands of an adversary … which then used them highly effectively in war, with an air-to-air kill ratio exceeding 10:1.3
Since American fourth-generation fighter technology still rivals or exceeds the technology available to potential adversaries, the United States remains cautious about exporting fourth-generation fighters even as it begins to export fifth-generation fighters to key allies. This is particularly true for versions of those fighters with fully updated sensor technology.4
American interests will frequently align with supplying armaments to nations that may not be able to keep sensitive technology secret. This includes democracies whose existence and future territorial integrity are precarious (such as Ukraine and Taiwan). It includes democracies whose alignment with the United States is more circumstantial (such as India). It also includes allies that may have more limited technical or financial capacity for maintenance of advanced fighters, as keenly demonstrated by recent German Typhoon readiness levels.
The lost art of building for efficiency
There was a point in time at which the United States was manufacturing a jet fighter that was designed to be easy for allies to operate and maintain and avoided the use of sensitive technology. This was the F-5 Freedom Fighter (contemporary with the F-4 Phantom II), later updated into the F-5E Tiger II in 1972 (contemporary with the “teen” series fighters).
The role for this fighter in United States service was in training, both in a two-seat trainer variant and as an “opposing force” machine for exercises simulating combat against MiG fighters with similar performance profiles. However, it could be freely exported to at-risk allies without concerns over the release of sensitive technology. This niche took a sharp blow in 1977 when President Carter limited arms exports outside of NATO and personally blocked export of an updated version of the F-5 (F-5G, later rebranded as F-20 Tigershark) to Taiwan.
In 1981, President Reagan pushed the pendulum the other way, loosening restrictions of exports of the top-of-the-line fighters used by the United States. The F-20 Tigershark went from being blocked from being exported outside of NATO to competing directly with the F-16 Falcon for the export market. While more cost efficient and easier to operate, the Tigershark faced the stigma of being a “second-tier” export machine and failed to take off.
Ukraine and the arsenal of democracy
At this point, it has been a year and a half since Russia launched a massive invasion of Ukraine. It has been nine years since Russia first deployed troops to Crimea and the Donbass region to annex the former and create a separatist “client states” in the latter. Ukraine began the war with a poorly-equipped but skilled and determined air force relying heavily on leftover Soviet-era MiG-29 fighters.
Ukraine still has a determined and skilled but poorly-equipped air force relying heavily on Soviet-era MiG-29 fighters, additional spares having been donated by former Warsaw Pact neighbors, and promises that eventually Ukraine will receive F-16 and Gripen fighters.5 The F-35 will sit out this war for the foreseeable future, waiting for something theoretically more important than the largest European war since 1944.
Even the F-16 was delayed on account of being a high-maintenance machine, allegedly too complex for Ukrainian pilots to learn and for Ukrainian mechanics to learn to service quickly enough. Not suitable for operations from the kind of rough forward air fields that the Ukrainians would need to use. Too full of sensitive NATO-grade avionics that need to be removed lest they leak to the Russians. Whether or not those concerns are justified is something we won’t learn for a while.
Unfortunately, the United States hasn’t focused on building the kinds of planes they can afford to easily send to a precarious democracy whose existence is threatened by an aggressor bent on conquest.
Both the cost overruns and the delays were modest in comparison to those experienced by the B-2, F-22, or F-35 programs.
Greater knowledge of stealth systems means a greater ability to detect and identify stealth aircraft. A brief weak radar return from a stealth plane can easily be misclassified as noise or some type of spurious echo.
The generally quoted air-to-air kill record of the Iranian Tomcats during the Iran-Iraq war is 130 to 4, which is a 32.5:1 kill ratio. The precise reliability of these figures can be questioned, but it’s quite clear the ratio is at least 10:1.
This has come up in discussions of supplying F-16s to Ukraine, but also see the blocked sale of Israeli F-16s to Croatia, where upgraded Israeli avionics were a key sticking point.
The Gripen is designed to have a low operational cost, be easy to maintain, and with the capacity to operate from rough fields.