While Tom Cruise heroically flies fighter jets in the film Top Gun: Maverick, which was vying for an Oscar for Best Film this year, two communities in the United States—Burlington, Vermont, and Madison, Wisconsin—are contending with the dangers caused by the basing of F-35s in residential neighborhoods.
These potential harms include exposure to damagingly loud noise, air and water pollution, and crashes in which the jets’ composite airframe materials burn along with the jet fuel, possibly igniting much worse fires. The F-35s are a weapons system whose ostensible purpose is to provide long-term safety and security for Americans, yet they are causing real and present damage to young and old alike in these communities.
The F-35’s story really takes off in 2001, when Lockheed Martin, one of the largest U.S. military contractors, won a contract to produce this state-of-the-art, fifth-generation stealth fighter jet that was intended to become the backbone of U.S. tactical aircraft power. Different models were built for the Air Force, the Marines, and the Navy. Controlled with an eight-by-twenty-inch touch screen by a pilot wearing a $400,000 helmet that projects flight and targeting information onto the pilot’s visor, the F-35 is designed to be linked to the military’s computer-command systems. This is the cutting edge of warfare, provided that the systems are not hacked or jammed.
On a broader scale, the F-35 is a U.S.-led international effort with sixteen other nations taking part in the design, manufacture, and use of the aircraft. The intent is to tie our allies into our brand of hardware and software, allowing for greater strategic military coordination between the nations and, of course, ongoing profits for Lockheed. The company gives some business to foreign partner firms while ensuring U.S. control over the provision of essential spare parts, software updates, mechanical retrofits, design changes, and service of the aircraft. This strategy keeps the United States, via Lockheed, at the center of a multinational corporate, military, and Congressional endeavor.
One specific task for the F-35s is to deliver B61-12 nuclear weapons. As a first step in the refurbishment of the entire U.S. nuclear weapons complex, the B61 has been remade into the B61-12, a nuclear weapon designed to be more usable. The two significant changes are variable yield—one bomb, dial-a-size explosion—and a motorized tail fin guidance system that makes targeting much more precise. A significant problem is that the combination of variable yields and precision guidance encourages the faulty and dangerous idea that a limited nuclear war is possible—the proverbial “surgical strike.” In fact, a “small” nuclear war can readily create a nuclear winter and lead to more than two billion deaths. There are also compelling reasons to believe that any use of nuclear weapons is likely to precipitate an all-out nuclear war.
The designs of the F-35 and the B61-12 were coordinated to allow the bomb to be carried inside the airplane in an effort to maintain the stealth feature of the aircraft, thus limiting the carrying capacity of each plane to only two nuclear bombs. In the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, issued by the U.S. Secretary of Defense, the F-35 is specifically mentioned nine times and identified as a forward-deployable delivery vehicle for the B61-12 nuclear bomb, potentially making the F-35 the tip of our nuclear spear in an attack.
Of notable concern, the F-35 is a single-seat airplane, so, in a combat situation, a single person would have full control over the use of nuclear weapons—meaning that a disturbed, incapacitated, or rogue pilot would have the fate of the Earth in their hands. All other current deployments require a two-person team working together to prevent one person having such power.
All of this is in pursuit of U.S. domination of airspace for decades to come. Now that we are more than twenty years into a sixty-year F-35 program, with about 900 of the approximately 2,500 scheduled units already built, how are things coming along?
The design concept is to make three different F-35 models: the A model for the Air Force, the B model for the Marines, and the C model for the Navy. According to defense analyst and former fighter jet designer Pierre Sprey and other F-35 critics, these three models are poorly suited to accomplish the three different military missions assigned to the aircraft: Air-to-air fighter capacity is hampered by deficient maneuverability, poor visibility, and the $400,000 helmet that has confusing video displays; bomber capacity is minimal due to pitifully small bomb loads and limited flight range due to excessive fuel consumption; and close support of troops is impossible because the planes can’t fly slow enough to see, assess, and survive battlefield conditions. The multiple compromises in design and performance needed to have one platform do so many different things means that none of them are done well.
In April 2022, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that cost and schedule delays continue with the F-35 program. The Department of Defense has not yet authorized full-rate production of the F-35, which is “the point when a program has demonstrated an acceptable level of performance and reliability” that justifies full production. “The delay in reaching this milestone stems largely from problems developing the F-35 simulator,” the GAO reported. “The simulator is needed to conduct key tests prior to making a full-rate production decision.”
In December 2022, the GAO noted that the Department of Defense needs to complete a portfolio analysis of its tactical aircraft and share it with Congress to inform future budget decisions. It also highlighted how, out of forty-nine types of aircraft, from 2011 to 2021, only four could meet their annual mission-capable goal for a majority of those years. The mission-capable goal is the percentage of total time that an aircraft can fly and perform at least one mission.
The multiple compromises in design and performance needed to have one platform do so many different things means that none of them are done well.
The F-35 is a high-maintenance plane that has been plagued with shortages of parts, software, and even jet engines. After flying a mission, an F-35 needs up to three days for maintenance and repair before it can fly again—hardly battle-ready and mission-capable. By comparison, older planes are able to fly three to five missions per day.
These F-35 performance shortfalls cost money and military readiness. Originally, the F-35 was designated as the replacement for F-16s, but that designation has been removed due to the multitude of problems and uncertainties with the F-35. At the end of fiscal year 2021, there were more than 800 F-35 deficiencies that still needed remediation. So while paying for the faulty F-35, we also need additional funding to keep the old planes in the air.
Another important factor: The F-35s crash. In 2022 alone, one of each F-35 variant crashed. An F-35C crashed while trying to land on an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea; an F-35A crashed at its base in Utah; and an F-35B crashed during testing in Texas. The latter, in December, caused a suspension in the delivery of new planes while the problem is identified and resolved.
Regardless of the multitude of problems, Lockheed Martin is undisputedly achieving its primary goal of making money. With sixty-seven full-time lobbyists working in Congress at a cost of $13.6 million in 2022, and manufacturing contracts with more than 1,300 F-35 domestic suppliers in forty-four states, the defense contractor remains firmly in control of a massive revenue stream and the Congressional appropriations that enable it.
For fiscal year 2023 alone, Congress approved more than $10.6 billion in discretionary spending for F-35 procurement, development, and modernization. From 2000 to 2020, spending on 1,481 Defense Department contracts for the F-35 totaled $164 billion. In 2000, the projected total production cost of the F-35 program was about $200 billion. And by 2020, that cost had doubled to approximately $400 billion.
But that is only the cost of building the planes. Today’s estimate of the sixty-year total operational cost of the F-35 is $1.7 trillion—meaning that only about a quarter of the total cost is to build these complex aircraft. Maintenance, repairs, upgrades, retrofits, spare parts, and service are all expensive for the F-35. And who knows how many more times the cost can double over the next forty years? At the current figure, each of us will pay $5,203.37 for this fighter jet program.
So the most expensive weapon in history doesn’t work very well. How did it end up based in two residential neighborhoods?
Former Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy was instrumental in Burlington, Vermont, being chosen as the first of two Air National Guard bases in the United States to host F-35s. Both of Vermont’s current Senators—Peter Welch, a Democrat, and Bernie Sanders, an Independent—are supporters of the F-35, both in terms of annual appropriations in Congress and the basing of twenty jet fighters in a low-income, diverse neighborhood. Some 500 students from preschool through fifth grade attend school about 800 yards from an active runway with hundreds of F-35 flights each month.
Senator Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin, working with Republican Senator Ron Johnson, also of Wisconsin, led the support for basing twenty F-35s in Madison, where 335 students—76 percent of whom are students of color, and 70 percent of whom are economically disadvantaged—attend school near the airport. Noise is a major issue, since F-35s are even louder than the F-16s they are replacing. Water contamination from firefighting PFAS chemicals is also of concern; in Dane County, Wisconsin, where Madison is located, an advisory against eating fish caught downstream from the airport was recently upgraded.
At the current figure, each of us will pay $5,203.37 for this fighter jet program.
A plane still in development, like the F-35, is more likely to crash than a time-tested plane like the F-16. In an F-35 crash, not only does the jet fuel burn, but so do the composite body and stealth coatings, producing a more toxic smoke and requiring more PFAS firefighting foam than needed for an F-16 fire, whose aluminum body doesn’t burn.
But, in return, each host community stands to receive about $100 million per year from basing the F-35s. For several years, Baldwin has cited the benefits of F-35 basing for Wisconsin, including some 1,650 jobs and an estimated economic impact of $4.8 billion over the basing period. Additionally, Lockheed Martin claims that F-35 production yields an economic impact of $15.8 million and $792.3 million in Wisconsin and Vermont, respectively, which are somewhat modest numbers compared with the $12.4 billion and $17.8 billion for Texas and California, where Lockheed Martin’s main production facilities are located.
In 2021, Baldwin claimed that her support of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2022 would bring some $2.9 billion to the state of Wisconsin, along with another $114.8 million for Wisconsin military installations and infrastructure.
While citizens in both Madison and Burlington have opposed the basing and operation of these fighter jets in residential neighborhoods near elementary schools and day care centers, their fundamental concerns have been ignored. In early March, Baldwin announced new federal funding for “community outreach and noise mitigation planning” in anticipation of the arrival of F-35s at Truax Field later this year.
Eugenia Highland Granados, a Madison mother who lives with her young daughter in the proposed flight path of the F-35s, tells The Progressive that every time she hears the noise of the F-16s that are currently flying, she is reminded of what they represent: the military killing people, terrorizing innocent women and children around the world, devoting resources to fighter jets rather than community needs, and white, male, colonial domination. She can’t disconnect what is happening in her neighborhood from what is happening around the world.
Meanwhile, Starkweather Creek, just two blocks from her house, is contaminated with PFAS chemicals used in relation to the F-16s flying in and out of Truax.