Latest news with #F-35As
Yahoo
20 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Air Force F-35 buy would be cut in half under Pentagon spending plan
The Air Force would cut its F-35A purchase for fiscal 2026 roughly in half under the White House's draft defense budget. The service typically buys about four dozen Joint Strike Fighters each year, with some years' purchases topping 60. But a budget document obtained by Defense News shows the service would procure 24 F-35s next year, for a cost of nearly $4 billion. That is less than the 44 F-35s, costing $4.8 billion, the Air Force is on track to buy this year, and the 51 jets worth $5.5 billion the service bought in 2024. And while the number of jets the Air Force plans to buy would drop by 45% between 2025 and 2026, the savings would lag far behind. The cost of the F-35 purchases in 2026 would drop less than 18% over the 2025 cost, suggesting economies of scale would suffer from the reduced buy. The slow emergence of budget documents and administration spending plans in this way is highly unusual, even for an administration in its first months. Proposed budgets for the upcoming fiscal year are often released formally sometime in the spring and accompanied by briefings explaining the spending plans. But President Donald Trump's administration has not rolled out its full budget proposal for fiscal 2026, though it has trickled out broad outlines of spending plans. The House Appropriations subcommittee on defense advanced Tuesday its own version of a Defense Department spending bill that looks closer to a typical F-35 purchasing plan. That bill would provide $4.5 billion for the Air Force to buy 42 F-35As, as well as another $1.9 billion for the Marine Corps to buy 13 short takeoff and vertical landing F-35Bs. Another $2 billion was included for the Navy and Marine Corps to buy the F-35C carrier variant. While the Air Force has sought to pare back some F-35 purchases in recent years, primarily due to dissatisfaction with delayed upgrades known as Technology Refresh 3, the apparent plan to slash purchases to this degree would be a surprise. Top Air Force leaders have stressed consistently that the F-35 is the centerpiece of its fighter fleet. Some have referred to it as a 'quarterback' that uses advanced data sharing capabilities to tie together multiple assets. The Air Force's fighter fleet is rapidly aging, and older F-15s and F-16s are retiring. Air Force leaders have often said the service needs to buy at least 72 fighters each year to modernize its aircraft and bring down the average age of its fleet. US Air Force warns of aging fighters, poor purchasing efforts Buying 24 F-35As, along with 21 F-15EX fighters also budgeted in the Pentagon's plan, would leave the Air Force far short of that goal in 2026. The Air Force's future budget plans, which it released last year, included proposals to buy 42 F-35As in 2026, 47 apiece in 2027 and 2028, and 48 in 2029. The service eventually wants to buy a total of 1,763 F-35As. Doug Birkey, executive director for the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, said in an interview that cutting F-35 purchases this severely would be disastrous to the Air Force and irrevocably set it further back in its effort to modernize its fighter fleet. 'There's no way the Air Force or the nation can afford to bring down the fighter buy rate,' Birkey told Defense News. 'The legacy [fighter] assets are rapidly failing due to age, and we need 72 fighters per year just to tread water ... We will never regain the time.' A reduction in F-35 purchases would also throw the supplier base for the jet into disarray, Birkey said, not just Lockheed Martin, but also the more than 1,900 other companies that feed its supply chain. Without consistent targets to work toward every year, the supplier base will get 'whiplashed around,' he said. 'Everyone says we need to rebuild the defense industrial base, but this is not how you do it,' Birkey said. 'The workforce, access to long-lead supply — everything that's required for maintaining the ability to produce [F-35s] and surge [when more production is necessary], you destroy it through cuts like this.' Birkey said the Pentagon is likely considering such drastic cuts due to rising expenses that are squeezing its budget, but he expects Congress will ultimately bring the F-35 buy rate back up to normal. Trump has spoken highly of the F-35 and its stealth capabilities in the past. Former Trump adviser Elon Musk has been a prominent skeptic of crewed fighters such as the F-35, calling them 'obsolete in the age of drones.' Musk has dramatically and publicly fallen out of favor with the administration in recent weeks amid his criticism of the president's signature spending bill. Lockheed Martin's stock dropped more than 6% after news broke Wednesday of the possible purchase cut, although the company has since pared back some of that loss. The Air Force did not respond to a request for comment.
Spectator
2 days ago
- Politics
- Spectator
Why does Starmer want to grow Britain's nuclear arsenal?
The government published its National Security Strategy 2025 earlier this week, a strange pushmi-pullyu document building on some policy reviews and anticipating others. It is disappointing and unfocused. The national security strategy was accompanied by an announcement perhaps just as significant: the government will buy at least 12 Lockheed Martin F-35A Lightning strike fighters which are 'dual capable', that is, they can deliver both conventional and nuclear weapons. These aircraft will give the Royal Air Force a nuclear role for the first time since 1998, and the UK's nuclear capacity will no longer be reliant on the Royal Navy's Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarines. Keir Starmer has a peculiar and unsettling enthusiasm for the UK's nuclear deterrent This is significant in all sorts of ways: militarily, conceptually and in terms of doctrine and planning. There are currently nine states with nuclear weapons and the UK is alone in having a single method of delivery, the Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missile. By buying F-35As capable of carrying B61-12 tactical nuclear bombs, Britain can join Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Turkey in contributing to Nato's nuclear sharing arrangement. Here is the detail, however, and its attendant devil. Nato currently has around 100 of these bombs: they are all owned by the United States and could only be used with the permission of the alliance's Nuclear Planning Group and the American president. There is no suggestion that the UK is likely to develop its own tactical nuclear weapons. Its F-35s would join similar aircraft from Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, as well as ageing F-16 Fighting Falcons from Belgium and Turkey, in being available to conduct nuclear strikes. The new aircraft will operate from RAF Marham in Norfolk; the existing fleet of F-35Bs are also based at Marham but deploy operationally on the two Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, which the new F-35As cannot do. (The F-35A is also incompatible with the RAF's Voyager tanker aircraft so will be unable to refuel in-flight.) The government is not acquiring a sovereign capability here. The aircraft can be used for non-nuclear roles as well, of course, but it would be odd to choose to buy a small number of a different variant from the rest of the force if it was not intended for a specific purpose. We are buying into a nuclear club: helping our allies, certainly, but also paying for a better table, at a cost of around £80 million per aircraft. These are secondary issues. The more concerning argument is that Nato is strengthening its tactical nuclear capability in order, presumably, to provide a stronger deterrent against Russian or other aggression. President Vladimir Putin has threatened repeatedly to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and the logic seems to be that we must be able to match him. Downing Street described the plan to buy the F-35A aircraft as 'the biggest strengthening of the UK's nuclear posture in a generation'. This is self-evidently true: our policy since at least the end of the Cold War has been to provide leadership on non-proliferation, maintaining a minimum credible deterrence and ruling out using Trident as a first-strike weapon. Now, without any visible heart-searching or hesitancy, the government has decided that the geopolitical situation requires more, not fewer, nuclear weapons, so that it can deliver, in Starmer's words, 'peace through strength'. There is an argument that low-yield tactical nuclear weapons are de-escalatory, providing more options for varying circumstances and preventing the immediate resort to more powerful warheads. I am sceptical. Surely it is just as possible that tactical weapons would lower the nuclear threshold, which lies less between tactical and strategic nuclear weapons and more between conventional and nuclear warfare. Smaller tactical weapons are in some ways intended to make 'going nuclear' more, not less, likely. This is all theoretical. A nuclear weapon has not been used in anger for nearly 80 years, since the 21-kiloton 'Fat Man' bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. (The maximum yield of a merely tactical B61-12 bomb is sixteen times that of 'Fat Man'.) What targets would we deem justifiable for tactical weapons? Armoured formations, warships, military installations, infrastructure? What casualties would we see as regrettable but necessary? And once the nuclear threshold is crossed, how do we get back? Keir Starmer has a peculiar and unsettling enthusiasm for the UK's nuclear deterrent. He brandishes its power and necessity with such muscularity that it sometimes feels like overcompensation for Labour's unilateralism which was set aside nearly 40 years ago. The lead author of the Strategic Defence Review, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, told Parliament's defence committee that acquiring tactical nuclear weapons was not absent from its recommendations by chance. The fact that it's not there indicates that we weren't terribly enthusiastic about it. When I was defence secretary the last time round, I got rid of the free-fall bombs. To modify a catchphrase from the 2010 general election, which feels like a lifetime ago, I agree with George.
ITV News
3 days ago
- Politics
- ITV News
Starmer has bought nuclear bomb-carrying jets - what does this mean for UK defence?
The UK already flies F-35B jets, which operate from the Royal Navy 's aircraft carriers. Now the government is to swap out at least a dozen F-35Bs from its next order for F-35As which fly from conventional runways, have a greater range and which can carry American B61 tactical - or battlefield - nuclear weapons. These can deliver a smaller nuclear yield than the strategic nuclear weapons carried by the Royal Navy's Trident system. The theory is that the smaller yield allows NATO to respond in kind to the use of battlefield nuclear weapons by an opponent like Russia. Without lower yield nuclear weapons, the choice would be between a conventional response which might not work as a deterrent, and using a strategic nuclear weapon which would be a massive - potentially world ending - nuclear escalation. It's believed the United States stores around a hundred tactical nuclear weapons across six airbases in western Europe. The government isn't saying where the nuclear bombs for these new jets will be stored. Britain's nuclear warheads are built in Aldermaston in Berkshire and stored at Coulport near Faslane, but the new aircraft will be based at the other end of the country at RAF Marham in Norfolk. One option for storage is RAF Lakenheath which held American nuclear weapons until 2008 and where the US Airforce has reportedly been refurbishing aircraft shelters with underground vaults. The big question is who would command these nuclear armed jets. The answer is - not us. While the new jets belong to the RAF and the US retains 'absolute control and command' of the nuclear bombs, any mission combining the two would have to be approved by the 31 members of NATO 's Nuclear Planning Group. As a member the UK would always have the option to opt out. But this decision is controversial. Campaigners are accusing the government of nuclear proliferation and are already planning protests at airbases.
Business Insider
4 days ago
- Politics
- Business Insider
The UK is bringing nuclear bombs back to its air force, a Cold War-era practice that it shut down in the 1990s
The UK is buying 12 F-35As that can carry nuclear weapons, and it's making it clear that it's buying the American aircraft for that capability. "The purchase represents the biggest strengthening of the UK's nuclear posture in a generation," UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer 's office wrote in a statement on Tuesday evening. The move will bring back the Royal Air Force 's ability to conduct nuclear strikes, a capability that the UK decommissioned in 1998 when it withdrew its own air-dropped nuclear bomb from service. Since then, the UK's only official method of launching a nuclear attack has been from its Vanguard-class submarines. Every other nuclear-armed nation has at least two of the three typical methods of launching an attack: by air, land, or sea. The US, Russia, and China are known to possess all three, what's known as the nuclear triad. In his office's statement, Starmer said his government was re-establishing the air-based leg of its nuclear forces amid an "era of radical uncertainty." "The UK's commitment to NATO is unquestionable, as is the Alliance's contribution to keeping the UK safe and secure, but we must all step up to protect the Euro-Atlantic area for generations to come," he said. Starmer's office said the new fighters will be stationed at RAF Marham in eastern England. The UK is already on schedule to receive 138 Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters, and the F-35As announced on Tuesday are coming from the next batch of this order. British forces already have roughly three dozen of the fighter jets, though these are the F-35B, a variant that can land vertically and take off with an extremely short runway. The F-35A, the baseline version of the aircraft, was the only variant to be certified to carry nuclear weapons. In March 2024, the stealth fighter was certified to carry the B61-12, an American 800-pound nuclear bomb. The B61-12 is a gravity weapon, meaning it's dropped from above and has no propulsion system. Starmer's office said it made its decision to purchase the F-35As after a review of UK defenses urged it to boost its deterrence posture. "The Strategic Defence Review recognised that the UK is confronting a new era of threat, including rising nuclear risk," the statement reads. Global fears of a nuclear arms race While the UK and France have their own nuclear programs, Western European nuclear deterrence relies heavily on the US through American missiles stationed on the continent. NATO, which is gathering its leaders at a summit in the Hague on Tuesday and Wednesday, has also been pushing member states to build up the alliance's fleet of dual-capable aircraft, or warplanes that can drop both conventional and nuclear bombs. The UK's decision comes amid fears of a full-blown nuclear arms race between the three largest nuclear powers, and as tensions among them continue to worsen. The US and Russia, which own close to an estimated 83% of the world's nuclear warheads, are both undertaking wide-scale modernizations of their nuclear weapons and launch systems. China has not publicly admitted to an expansion, but international observers say that it's rapidly building up its arsenal by at least 100 warheads a year from 2023 to 2025. By that rate, it could reach 1,550 warheads — the deployment limit kept by the US and Russia — by 2035. The UK has an estimated 225 nuclear warheads, but has said it intends to increase its stockpile to 260. It's also developing a new submarine, the Dreadnought, to replace its four Vanguard-class nuclear submarines.
Scottish Sun
4 days ago
- Politics
- Scottish Sun
RAF pilots will get NUCLEAR bombers for first time in 30 years as Keir Starmer says UK must prepare for threat of war
The Government said the jets would support Nato's nuclear mission RAF NUKES RAF pilots will get NUCLEAR bombers for first time in 30 years as Keir Starmer says UK must prepare for threat of war Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) RAF Top Guns will get nuclear bombers for the first time in 30 years — after PM Sir Keir Starmer said we must prepare for possible war. The F-35As will be based at RAF Marham in Norfolk, which housed Britain's air-launched nuclear weapons until 1998. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 4 RAF Top Guns will get nuclear bombers for the first time in 30 years 4 PM Sir Keir Starmer said Britain must prepare for possible war Credit: PA That was the year then—PM Tony Blair scrapped Britain's air-launched bomb, the WE-177. The new B-61 bombs, made by US-firm Lockheed Martin, can take out small areas — unlike Trident 2 missiles on Britain's submarines which can obliterate whole cities. The F-35As can also carry conventional weapons. The announcement came as a new National Security Strategy warned: 'For the first time in many years, we have to actively prepare for the possibility of the UK homeland coming under direct threat, potentially in a wartime scenario.' READ MORE ON THE RAF MARCH MAYHEM Moment protest chaos erupts as group behind RAF base raid to be 'BANNED' The Government said the jets would support Nato's nuclear mission. Ahead of today's Nato summit in The Hague, Sir Keir said: 'In an era of radical uncertainty we can no longer take peace for granted, which is why my Government is investing in our national security.' The strategy highlighted Russia's invasion of Ukraine as the most pressing example. And it warned Kremlin-backed cyber attacks and Iranian hostile activity in the UK are also increasing It added: 'Some adversaries are laying the foundations for future conflict, positioning themselves to move quickly to cause major disruption to our energy and/or supply chains, to deter us from standing up to their aggression.' The new plan focuses on three areas — protecting the UK at home, working with allies to strengthen global security, and rebuilding Britain's defence industries and technological capabilities. RAF planes SABOTAGED by protesters in 'grotesque' security breach at UK military base The F-35 deal supports more than 20,000 UK jobs, with British firms making 15 per cent of the supply chain. The UK is expected to buy 138 F-35s in total from the US government, with the A variant offering savings of up to 25 per cent per aircraft compared to the B models already in service. Nato chief Mark Rutte called the announcement 'yet another robust British contribution to Nato'. The UK is also building 12 new nuclear submarines, and investing £15billion in Britain's sovereign nuclear warhead programme. Ministers yesterday also said they will send 350 air defence missiles to Ukraine using £70million from seized Russian assets. The ASRAAMs can be fired from UK- supplied Raven launchers. Sir Keir is facing pressure to explain how we will meet the Nato target of spending five per cent of GDP on national security by 2035. 4 Ahead of today's Nato summit, Keir said: 'In an era of radical uncertainty we can no longer take peace for granted, which is why my Government is investing in our national security' Credit: Getty 4 Nato chief Mark Rutte called the announcement 'yet another robust British contribution to Nato' Credit: Getty
