SINGAPORE — The Indo-Pacific is becoming a global hotspot, and as a result the aerospace industry and countries across the region are investing heavily to upgrade their military aircraft, particularly fighter fleets.

In the days leading up to the Singapore Airshow in February, Singapore’s Chief of Air Force Maj. Gen. Kelvin Khong — who as of press time was set to transition out of the role on March 22 — released a written interview providing an update on the state of the country’s air force.

From Ukraine to Israel to the Red Sea, today’s “conflicts have clearly demonstrated emerging threats that future air forces need to address,” Khong wrote. The Ukraine conflict in particular has “reinforced the importance of achieving air superiority,” he said.

“I believe that if either side had achieved air superiority the conflict would have taken on a very different trajectory,” Khong said. “There is a higher probability that it would not be so long and protracted.”

Singapore is acquiring its next-generation fighter fleet as it prepares to sundown its current fleet of F-16s starting in the mid-2030s. In 2020, the U.S. State Department’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency approved an estimated $2.75 billion sale of up to 12 Lockheed Martin-built F-35B short take-off and vertical landing fighters to Singapore — the first four of which will be delivered by 2026, Khong said.

The week after the airshow, Singapore’s Ministry of Defense announced that in addition to the 12 F-35Bs, it will also be acquiring eight F-35A conventional take-off and landing variants.

“For the acquisition of our next-generation fighter fleet, the [Republic of Singapore Air Force] adopted a phased approach to ensure we make timely and cost-effective purchases that best meet our current and future operational requirements,” Khong wrote. “The F-35 with its advanced capabilities — such as advanced sensors and communication suites — will work together with our multi-role F-15SGs to enhance the RSAF’s warfighting edge in contested threat environments.”

Steve Over, Lockheed Martin’s director of F-35 international business development, said a major benefit of the platform for international customers such as Singapore is interoperability with the United States and other allies and partners across the globe.

“If you think about these conflicts, virtually no one is facing conflict alone, and so it’s about [building] coalition capacity,” Over said in an interview at the airshow. “The beauty of F-35 is you’ve got an airplane” operated by not only the United States but also other nations in the Indo-Pacific such as Japan, Australia and South Korea, as well as several European countries.

The F-35 also has the potential to be the “perfect integrator in … a joint all-domain environment,” Over said. “There’s absolutely a future world out there where the pilot of an F-35 is only going to contribute a very, very accurate set of targeting coordinates that then some other” land- or sea-based “effector is then going to actually target.”

For example, “an F-35 flying at 30,000 feet, the horizon is almost 400 miles away … if there’s a target out there, the F-35 is going to see it, it’s going to detect it, it’s going to locate it, and it’s very likely going to identify what it is just based on its onboard sensors,” he said. “And then it’s capable of handing off that set of targeting coordinates … to a terrestrial-based system.”

And in a coalition force made up of multiple nations, “anybody’s F-35 can be plugged in the network” to provide that targeting data, Over said. “It doesn’t have to be a U.S. airplane, it doesn’t have to be a Singaporean airplane. And that level of interoperability is one of the things that is becoming a hallmark of F-35 for all the customers that are using it. It’s really an incredible force multiplier.”

Along with the F-35s, Singapore’s Boeing-made F-15SGs — which have been in service since 2009 — “remain an important part of our fighter fleet,” Khong said. “Nonetheless, we will continue to review our platform capabilities and refresh them when necessary … to meet our operational requirements.”

Boeing’s latest variant of the F-15, the F-15EX, completed its first flight in February 2021, and the company began delivering the aircraft to the U.S. Air Force a month later. Robert Novotny, director of F-15 business development for Boeing, said the company speaks regularly with F-15 customers such as Singapore, “and everybody sees … the capability that’s resident in the F-15EX as it comes off the line, and they’re all looking for a little bit of that.”

Some customers “want all new planes,” while others want to integrate some of the F-15EX’s advanced capabilities into their existing fleet without having to buy new aircraft, Novotny said at the airshow.

One such capability is the F-15EX’s fly-by-wire technology. Previous F-15s featured an analog flight control system made up of pulleys and wires so that when a pilot pulls “on the stick, the flight controls move,” Novotny said. “If I’m a bad pilot … I could put it in a weird position,” resulting in overstress to the aircraft or the plane spinning out of control, “because the jet will give me what I want as the pilot.”

The all-digital fly-by-wire system, on the other hand, “gives the pilot what they need, but at the same time within the envelope limits of the airframe itself,” he said. “So, the fly-by-wire basically allows me to get better performance, much more stable performance, really eases the pilot workload, but it doesn’t take away any of the handling characteristics that all the fighter pilots want.”

And because it’s an all-digital capability instead of a mechanical one, the fly-by-wire system “opens up different portions of the wing to carry additional weapons,” he added. The F-15EX can carry up to 12 air-to-air missiles as well as other payloads such as air-to-ground ordnance or external fuel tanks, he said.

Having that additional payload capacity could be a major factor in achieving the air superiority Khong described, Novotny said.

“Here we are, it’s 2024, air superiority still needs to be gained and maintained — albeit maybe for … smaller amounts of time to go in and conduct operations, or for long distance,” he said. “I think the EX platform is one of those things that can go long distances, carry a ton of ordnance, sense the environment and gain and maintain your superiority even in those really hard spaces.”

Indonesia is set to be the F-15EX’s first international customer after the country in August 2023 signed a memorandum of understanding with Boeing to acquire up to 24 aircraft, pending U.S. government approval. Finalizing the sale will be a “government-to-government discussion,” but Novotny said he is “super excited about where the momentum for the [F-15EX] campaign is going,” with other countries such as Poland also expressing interest in the aircraft.

Looking ahead to future platforms, Japan, the United Kingdom and Italy are jointly developing a sixth-generation supersonic fighter through the Global Combat Air Program, or GCAP. The partners are aiming to begin the development phase of the program in 2025 and have the aircraft in service by 2035.

The three countries signed a treaty in December to establish a GCAP International Government Organization. The program headquarters will be in the United Kingdom, while a to-be-determined Japanese official will serve as the project’s first CEO, according to a U.K. Ministry of Defence release.

Jonathan Moreton, Future Combat Air System export partners director and military advisor for BAE Systems, said the government organization “will feed into a joint venture” between the three prime contractors — BAE from the United Kingdom, Leonardo from Italy and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries from Japan — with both organizations standing up in 2025.

The program is “progressing well,” he said at the airshow. “We’re in the work allocation phase at the moment, which … can be challenging,” but the partners are “on track for achieving our program goals for the end of this year.” A BAE Systems spokesperson said in an email the GCAP partners are “rapidly progressing” through “joint concepting activities, which have seen a series of core platform options assessed” ahead of the start of the development phase in 2025.

Moreton did not provide many details when asked if the GCAP team is in communication with the U.S. Air Force as it concurrently develops its own sixth-generation fighter called Next Generation Air Dominance, but said that “interoperability will be key going forward.”

Along with the NGAD fighter jet, the U.S. Air Force is developing unmanned collaborative combat aircraft to fly alongside the manned platform. GCAP is conducting an “operational analysis” of a similar concept called autonomous collaborative platforms, Moreton said.

These unmanned aircraft could take one of two forms, he said: “loyal wingmen” that can fly alongside the manned fighter at supersonic speeds or “disloyal wingmen” that are non-supersonic but provide additional capabilities such as sensing or weapons.

The analysis of the autonomous collaborative platform concept “will probably progress for the next year or so before we come to a conclusion,” he said.

One potential hangup for GCAP is export controls. Exportability of the aircraft is a “key user requirement for the program,” and the United Kingdom and Italy both “have quite a long history of exporting” defense technologies, but Japan “less so,” Moreton said. Japan is “moving forward with a series of changes that will hopefully allow us to be able to have that export regime that we’re all looking for inside the program,” he said.

Along with exporting the aircraft to potential buyers, the treaty signed in December also “effectively opens up the view that we will have new partners enter the program” if approved by all three nations, Moreton said, declining to name any specific countries that could join GCAP. Saudi Arabia — which in March 2023 initiated a “partnering feasibility study” with the United Kingdom to explore future opportunities for collaboration on combat aircraft — has been mentioned as a potential addition to GCAP.

“We are interested in new partners, we are looking at opportunities, and we have some traditional ones that we would use as well,” Moreton said.

Along with the Indo-Pacific nations investing in combat aircraft, the U.S. Air Force is observing developments in the region to inform its own acquisition priorities, said Andrew Hunter, the service’s assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics.

As part of its effort to reoptimize for great power competition, the Air Force is “really intensifying and tightening the relationship with the operational community to inform our acquisition programs, so that we’re actually delivering capabilities that make a difference in the near term, and in the far term against the operational challenges that they see,” Hunter said during a briefing at the airshow.

There’s “a huge focus in the Air Force” on the Indo-Pacific and Southeast Asia, “so it’s really important to us to strengthen, nurture and extend and deepen all of our relationships with the partners in the region” as well, he said. ND