(Luft) Lockheed Martin F-35 - Lightning II

[Quintus Fabius]

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The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the Pentagon’s newest and most expensive weapons program, will only offer limited close air support when it begins operational flights in the Air Force next year, a top general said.

“In many ways, it won’t have the some of the capabilities of our current platforms,” Gen. Herbert “Hawk” Carlisle, head of the service’s Air Combat Command, acknowledged during a briefing with reporters on Friday at the Pentagon.

Carlisle said the F-35A won’t initially be able to perform “advanced” close air support “because those are systems that are going to be coming onto the airplane in later blocks.”

The technologies the aircraft will initially lack include the large area, high-definition synthetic aperture radar known as “BIG SAR,” which is needed to get the best functionality out of the electro-optical targeting system, as well as a pinpoint glide bomb known as the Small Diameter Bomb II, or SDB-II, the general said.

Carlisle said the systems are slated to be integrated into the aircraft as part of a Block 4 software upgrade, the first version of which isn’t scheduled to arrive until 2021. “All of those are things that are going to be coming on in Block 4,” he said.

Even the F-35’s 25mm, four-barrel GAU-22 gun won’t be ready for at least a couple of more years.

So which weapons will the airplane initially carry? The Marine Corps’ F-35B will enter service with Block 2B software, which lets pilots fire a pair of AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air to Air Missiles, AMRAAMs, or drop a pair of satellite-guided bombs or laser-guided weapons