A new parliamentary report questions whether Britain’s Royal Air Force has enough aircraft and questions whether cuts in the planned fleet of F-35 stealth fighters leaves enough aircraft to take on a peer adversary. The report urgently recommends increasing the number of available aircraft, and suggests low-cost drone ‘loyal wingmen’ to accompany the crewed fleet could be the best solution.
From ‘The Few’ To Too Few
Winston Churchill famously spoke about ‘The Few’, the handful of RAF pilots who defended Britain in 1940. More than 2,900 pilots and aircrew made up The Few; now the U.K. has less than 160 combat jets and according to a new report it is too few.
The report, Aviation Procurement: Winging it? was published last month by the House of Commons Defence Committee, made up of ten British lawmakers from across the political spectrum.
The report emphasizes the importance of airpower to the nation — “Whether it be provision of UK Air Defence, global power projection, rapid delivery of humanitarian aid, strengthening relationships with our allies, or delivery of decisive and lethal action” – and the requirement for a sufficiently large and balanced fleet of aircraft to carry out all the necessary missions this entails.
The biggest concern is with ‘combat mass’ and the sharp reduction in the number of aircraft available since the Cold War. While all air forces have gradually replaced older types with fewer, more capable aircraft, the drop off for the UK is shown to be much steeper than for France, Germany or Italy.
“It is true that mass alone does not win wars,” states the report, but notes that even the most advanced aircraft are likely to suffer major attrition in a serious conflict and that would rapidly eat into the UK’s reduced air force.
“There are serious questions as to whether the UK’s diminished combat air fleet can successfully deter and defend against enemy aggression,” states the summary. “The MoD and RAF must urgently address this lack of combat mass”
The linchpin of the combat fleet is the F-35B. The original plan was for 150 F-35Bs; this was scaled to 138, a number which stood until 2015. Since then total procurement has amounted to 48 aircraft plus 27 more in order for a total of just 74. As the report notes, it is not clear whether any more will be ordered.
The F-35B fleet has grown much slower than planned, which witness told the committee was due to maintenance issues, a situation which the committee finds ‘inexplicable’.
Who Gets The Jets – Air Force Or Navy?
Each of the UK’s two new aircraft carriers can take up to 36 F-35Bs, so in theory the entire fleet could be dedicated to this mission. But sending them away as part of a carrier strike force with the Royal Navy would deprive the Royal Air Force of aircraft to carry out its own missions. This has created tensions between the two arms over who will actually get the jets.
“Are the F-35s that we have in the UK carrier-borne air systems that are able to operate on land, or are they land-based systems that are able to operate at sea? “ a retired naval captain asked the Committee. “Fundamentally, we make the choice to not decide. That drives double accounting over what you are using those systems for.”
Similar problems over whether this multi-role aircraft is used for reconnaissance, strike, electronic warfare or air superiority: it cannot do everything all the time.
One answer would be simply to buy more F-35Bs. However, the committee notes that while the acquisition cost of this aircraft is down to a mere $101m, it
“However, although acquisition costs for the aircraft may have reduced, sustainment costs remain unacceptably high,” says the committee. “The RAF’s failure to correctly calculate the number of maintainers required to service the aircraft is simply inexcusable. At present there are too many unresolved questions about the development and operational deployment of the fleet.
The Committee does not even mention the other issue with F-35 sustainment: serious problems mean that fewer aircraft than planned are ready to fly at any given time. A report by the U.S. General Accounting Office released on 21 September found that “The Lockheed Martin F-35 is available to perform its scheduled missions 55% of the time.” The report blamed shortcomings in the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) line and depot maintenance practices.
These numbers suggest that the U.K.’s eventual 64-aircraft fleet will only be able to generate 40 combat-read aircraft at one time, split between the RAF and Navy and between national defense, expeditionary warfare, training and reserves.
‘Affordable Mass’
The committee points to drone aircraft as cost-effective means of increasing combat mass, mentioning previous recommendations along the same lines made in their 2021 report “We’re Going to Need a Bigger Navy.”
In this vision, each expensive crewed jet is assisted by a number of uncrewed jet aircraft. These are less capable, but are can still make up numbers and crucially, they can be lost when necessary – the term ‘attritable’ is usually applied.
There are already several advanced projects in this field , in particular the X-58A Valkyrie from Kratos, part of the U.S. Air Force’s Low-Cost Attritable Strike Demonstrator (LCASD) program, to prove that drones can take on missions which previously required human pilots. The Valkyrie currently costs around $6.5 million, though Kratos have previously said that could drop below $2m per plane if it produced 100 a year. You could buy around 50 Valkyries for the price of a single F-35, so buying a few more F-35s and a lot more drones looks like a far more efficient option.
Similar developments include Boeing’s MQ-28 Ghost Bat (also known as Loyal Wingman) being developed by Boeing Australia in collaboration with the Royal Australian Air Force, the Fury developed by Blue Force Technologies which has just been acquired by Anduril who aim to give it a major boost into the global market.
The UK has its own version the Lightweight Affordable Novel Combat Aircraft (LANCA) but the status of the project and its progress are not clear after the cancelation of the related Mosquito combat drone a year before it was due to fly.
“The MoD must rapidly progress its work to develop and deploy UAS [Uncrewed Aerial Systems, meaning drones] alongside the UK’s existing combat air fleet,” says the report. “Publication of the Autonomous Collaborative Platform strategy should be accompanied by clear (and ambitious) timescales and an adequate funding commitment for a UAS capability program.”
Interestingly, the same expression – ‘affordable mass’ – is also a key driver of the Pentagon’s new Replicator low-cost, mass-produced drone program.
The report pulls no punches in demanding action. The U.K. government though is beset with many other urgent problems from the national health service to crumbling schools and a disastrous infrastructure project, all of which call for billions of pounds to remedy. Whether there is anything extra to buy aircraft, even low-cost ones, is very much open to doubt.
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