Could the U.S.Navy Replace the F-35 With an ‘Advanced’ Super Hornet?

By Dave Majumdar,The National Interest

(This first appeared back in 2016.)

President-elect Donald Trump’s tweet on Dec. 22—where he stated that he had asked Boeing to “price out a comparable F-18 Super Hornet” because of the sheer expense of the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter—was met with derision by journalists and Washington’s political elite.

While it is true that no version of the F/A-18E/F will ever be able to offer an exact analogue of the F-35’s capabilities, the reaction inside the Beltway was typically biased. Trump’s statement cannot be interpreted exactly literally. More likely, the President-elect was suggesting that a variant of the Super Hornet airframe could meet many of the capabilities that the F-35 offers at a more reasonable price.

For the U.S. Navy, there is a strong argument to be made that an Advanced Super Hornet derivative could offer an 80 percent solution for a lower price than the F-35C. And while such an F/A-18 derivative would not precisely meet all of the U.S. Air Force’s requirements as embodied in the F-35A, the Super Hornet is a perfectly capable shore-based strike fighter as the Royal Australian Air Force demonstrates on a daily basis. Only the U.S. Marine Corps—with its insistence on the short takeoff/vertical landing capability found on the F-35B—would have to completely revamp its air arm in the exceedingly unlikely event that Trump were to cancel the Joint Strike Fighter program. That being said, all three flying branches would have to give up on the notion of penetrating strike and rely on standoff weapons—the F/A-18E/F is not and will never be a stealth aircraft.

Stealth:

The one area where no version of the Super Hornet can compete with the F-35 is stealth. Stealth more or less has to be baked into an airframe design right from the outset—no ifs or buts. However, Boeing has tested a version of the Super Hornet with a significantly reduced radar cross-section—particularly in the frontal sector. The company has also tested conformal fuel tanks that can carry 3500lbs of additional fuel and an enclosed low-observable (LO) weapons pod that can carry 2500lbs of ordnance onboard the Super Hornet that would allow the jet to fly without bulky external fuel tanks or external stores during the first day of a conflict. Those features would greatly reduce the F/A-18E/F’s visibility on radar, however, even with those enhancements, the Super Hornet will never be a true stealth aircraft comparable to the F-35. It just is not physically possible.

Electronic Warfare: