Former F-35 pilot explains how the US Marine Corp's version makes China's 'carrier killer' missiles irrelevant
- Recent developments in China's missile forces threaten to deny US aircraft carriers and the US Navy access to vital warfighting domains, but the Marine's F-35B concept was designed to shatter those missile forces from the inside out.
- The F-35B can land just about anywhere and take off with a fresh load of bombs and fuel, complicating China's warplan and giving the US a fighting chance.
- F-35Bs are getting ready to deploy on small aircraft carriers, where they'll come face to face with China's burgeoning navy and missile capabilities for the first time.
As China builds out its network of militarized islands in the South China Sea and expands a sphere of influence designed to keep the US out, the US Marine Corps is putting the finishing touches on a weapon to burst its bubble - the F-35B.
China's People's Liberation Army Rocket Force has turned out a massive number of ballistic missiles which can target ships up to 800 or so miles out at sea, even testing them against models of US aircraft carriers.
But theories and lines drawn on paper won't beat the US military in a battle.
In pursuing the strategy of anti-access/area-denial, known as A2AD in military speak, China assumes that the US must launch aircraft from bases or aircraft carriers. But the F-35B, the US Marine Corps' variant of the most expensive weapons system of all time, doesn't work that way.
"You can fly the F-35B literally anywhere," Retired US Marine Corps Lt. Col. David Berke told Business Insider. "If your traditional places of operation are unavailable," perhaps due to being cratered by Chinese missile fire, as would be their likely tactic in war, "the F-35B can be there," said Berke.
By taking off in just a few hundred feet or so and landing from a vertical drop, the F-35B frees up the Marine Corps from worrying about large, obvious bases.
If China targets carriers, than the US won't use carriers
The Marines have been training for this exact operating concept in the Pacific as well. In mid-January, they landed an F-35B on a sloped platform, showing that in the future the pilots can land their plane almost anywhere.
Throughout 2017, F-35B crews trained on tactics like "hot loading" and "hot refueling," which turns reloading the F-35, usually an affair that takes time, space, and a massive air base to support it, into the equivalent of a NASCAR pit stop.
In the F-35B, the ground crew runs up to the jet while its still running and pumps in more fuel and loads up more bombs. In just a few minutes, atop a dirt floor with minimal support infrastructure in an improvised location where China's missiles won't know to hit, the F-35B can take off again and do work.
"Find me 600 feet of flat surface anywhere in the world and I can land there," said Berke, who compared the F-35B to the A-10 Warthog, the beloved US Air Force flying gun that's famous for landing on dirt roads, getting roughed up, and fighting on regardless.
So while China has focused on pushing back the US's aircraft carrier-bound fleets of F-18s, the Marines have cooked up a new strategy involving smaller carriers like the USS Wasp and heavy lifting, quick flying helicopters for support. Using the V-22 Osprey and the CH-53's extreme lifting capability, Marines can set up makeshift bases inside China's supposed A2AD bubble.
From there, the stealth F-35Bs can take out the threats keeping the carriers at bay, poking holes in China's theoretical bubble.
"If you're looking at warfare two dimensionally, you're looking at it wrong," Berke, a former F-35 squadron commander, said of the A2AD concept. "You don't beat me in a boxing match cause your arms are longer than mine."
The US is sending the F-35B to the Pacific ASAP
The US's faith in the F-35B's ability to shake up the balance of power in the Pacific is evident in recent deployments. The first F-35B deployment outside the US was in Japan. Now, as tensions rise with North Korea, an F-35B capable aircraft carrier will station itself in Japan.
"You're about to put off the first time ever fifth-generation fighters on a ship at sea and put it into a highly contested area that is fraught with geopolitical risk and controversy and tensions," Berke said.
"The implications of a fifth-generation airplane being in [the Pacific] is impossible to overstate," he added. "They're going to provide capability that nobody knows exists yet."