MARINE CORPS AIR STATION MIRAMAR, California—While Marines wait for new F-35s, officials say recent delivery delays haven’t altered their goal to fully switch to the fifth-generation stealth fighter jet by the end of the decade.
The service is replacing its aging F/A-18 Hornets with F-35s, a massive effort complicated by a year-long pause in deliveries of the newest version of the jet.
“It’s not gonna happen all overnight, but right now, I think the forecast still has us completing it in 2030,” said Col. William Mitchell, commanding officer of Marine Aircraft Group 11, which includes two F-35C squadrons, an F-35B training squadron, two F/A-18C squadrons, and a KC-130 aerial refueling squadron.
But for that plan to work, Lockheed Martin needs to finish clearing a backlog of deliveries caused by technology-development problems that led the Pentagon to stop accepting the aircraft for a year. In July, Lockheed received the green light to resume deliveries without the full version of the upgrade, dubbed Technology Refresh-3.
“We need Lockheed Martin to deliver the jets, and we need to continue to procure them, but on paper, that is what the plan is right now,” Mitchell said.
The delays have caused some “nuances” to the schedule but won’t necessarily have a “ripple effect” that will extend the overall transition, Mitchell said. The Marines’ second F-35C squadron, VMFA-311, was supposed to have all 10 of its F-35s months ago, but is currently short four. The squadron likely won’t get its first TR-3 jet until May, but the exact date is still up in the air.
“It’s an impact, just that we have fewer jets to fly…but no deployment has been held up. They’ve still been able to fly their six aircraft and get a lot of great training and do a lot of great events with what they have,” he said.
Despite software-development problems with TR-3, the software VMFA-311 is flying with now is solid, Mitchell said. “The jets that we fly here, no issues, aside from any anomaly you might get in any aircraft, but it’s very dependable, very resilient. But obviously in the test world, I can’t really speak to that. That’s where the delays seem to be.”
Eventually, the two remaining F/A-18 squadrons will become F-35 squadrons, and MAG-11 will have four F-35C squadrons, Mitchell said, in addition to its F-35B training squadron and KC-130 squadron. The Marine Corps also plans to increase the number of F-35s per squadron from 10 to 12, but that likely won’t happen until the early 2030s, he said.
Under the service’s 2022 aviation plan, the Marines plan to buy a total of 67 F-35Cs and 353 F-35Bs, at a rate of roughly 20 aircraft per year. The service has yet to release its new aviation plan, which was supposed to be published by the end of 2024.
Mitchell hasn’t seen the new document yet, but said he doesn’t think much has changed in the F-35 transition plan “other than some delays in squadrons that are standing up due to the TR-3 delays.”
In the coming years, all F/A-18 infrastructure will become F-35 infrastructure, and three new hangars will be built here at Miramar to support the new squadrons. In the meantime, Marine aviators and maintainers have started to switch to the new jet, and more Marines will move over once the Hornet squadrons sundown.
“Marines will be up for reenlistment, and then they’ll put in a reenlistment [lateral] move package and then, the next month, they’re at school to learn how to work on the F-35. So that happens throughout the course of a year. Same thing with the pilots: they can put in a package to transition to an F-35 and there’s a board process for that, and so that’s managed through Headquarters Marine Corps Manpower,” he said.
While the service prepares for its future fleet, it’s squeezing all the life out of its remaining Hornets. The F/A-18s are getting a version of RTX’s APG-79 active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar, which is already in service on the Navy’s F/A-18E/Fs. The service is about halfway through the radar installation, which will bring a ton of new capability to the Hornets, Mitchell said.
The F/A-18s are also getting beyond-line-of-sight reception for communications, and an upgraded GPS system, Mitchell said. “There’s some upgraded navigation, but there’s really kind of not a whole lot more we can do, but where we can, we are.”
The Hornet squadrons have enjoyed high readiness rates, despite their age, since the squadron can take parts from retiring aircraft, Mitchell said.
“As we transition to the F-35, we’ve been able to take the best jets that we have with the most life on them, and then place them in our operational squadrons, and harvest a lot of parts from the aircraft that were going to be retired. So the supply system is very healthy in the F-18, pilots are getting a lot of flight hours in the F-18. The readiness is some of the best I’ve seen in many years,” he said.
The service maintains that the Hornet is the “Swiss Army knife” of the Marine Corps air component, since the F-35 is still waiting on some capabilities, like maritime strike.
“There are certain maritime strike capabilities that the F-18 have that aren’t mature yet in the F-35 so, we’re basically help each other out, whereas the F-35 is more survivable in INDOPACOM against some of the advanced threats that our adversaries have than the F-18, so they can push in a little bit further and help mitigate some of those threats, to allow the F-18s to employ their tactics,” Mitchell said.
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