20110923 EDITORIAL: Pondering the F-35 mirage

EDITORIAL: Pondering the F-35 mirage

Is Taiwan’s decrepit air force planning to ask the US to retrofit it with a smokescreen? It must be, given sudden comments by Deputy Minister of National Defense Andrew Yang (楊念祖) in Richmond, Virginia, on Sunday, that Taiwan would welcome discussions about acquiring sophisticated F-35s from the US.

Floating the idea that Taiwan might buy F-35s at some point in the future was apparently Yang’s way of numbing the pain of the then-pending, and now definite US decision not to sell Taiwan F-16C/Ds, jets the air force needs if it wants to still call itself an air force in 10 years.

However, this ruse is highly disingenuous. There is no way Taiwan will ever get F-35s from the US. Other than the F-22 Raptors, which the US has discontinued and never exported, the F-35 is the US’ most advanced fighter jet. It is to the F-16 what a Formula 1 car is to a Porsche. In addition, the F-35 line has been plagued with problems — cost overruns, late shipments, design problems, you name it.

US President Barack Obama’s administration isn’t even willing to sell Taiwan F-16C/Ds, that went into production in the early 1980s, before that line is closed forever in the not too distant future. What on earth makes Yang think the US will sell Taiwan F-35s?

How long does Yang think it would take to negotiate an F-35 deal? The F-16C/D went into production in 1984, following the success of the F-16A/B program, which began in 1976. Taiwan has only just now — in September 2011 — gotten the final decision on negotiations to acquire those jets. That’s almost three decades just to be told: “No.”

The F-35 took its maiden flight in 2006. If we project the same time to negotiate an F-35 deal that it took Taiwan to negotiate the unsuccessful F-16C/D deal from the beginning of production, then the US will be refusing to sell F-35s to Taipei in about 2041.

It does not take a genius to figure out how advanced China’s air force will be at that point. How many generations of stealth fighters will they produce over the next three decades? Will their navy already have credible aircraft carrier battle groups by then? Probably.

Why then even bother suggesting that Taiwan might be interested in negotiating an F-35 deal? Yang might as well have said that Taiwan would try to convince the US to re-open its multibillion-dollar F-22 Raptor line, and then sell the world’s most advanced jet to Taiwan despite US legislation prohibiting Raptor exports.

The dismal truth is that Taiwan will have to make do with upgrades to its F-16A/Bs, and maybe not even upgrades to all of them. It will be forced to patrol the Taiwan Strait with jalopies while Chinese pilots zip around in Ferraris.

Suggesting that Taiwan’s air force could buy F-35s is like a school principal telling parents he could not afford to replace aging black-fume-burping gas--guzzler school buses with fuel-efficient minibuses, but would apply at some time in the future to acquire a fleet of sleek BMWs that would pick up each and every student at his or her home.

Keep dreaming, Yang.