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Rafale F5: France upgrading Fighters for Sixth Generation Era of Aerial Warfare
The growing discrepancy in capabilities between European fighter aircraft, and those produced by the industry leaders China and the United States, has led the French defence sector to respond by accelerating the development of a new enhanced variant of its Rafale fourth generation fighter – the Rafale F5. The Rafale program in July marked 40 years since the type’s first flight in 1986, with the aircraft even at the time being well behind the cutting edge as the U.S. and Soviet Union had reached advanced stages in developing their first fifth generation fighters.
A significant and growing inability to compete on a top their level has left French and other European fighter industries struggling to react to prevailing technological trends, with the Rafale F5 program seeking to minimise the type’s growing disadvantages. The new Rafale variant is expected to enter service from 2033, potentially behind China’s first sixth generation fighter.
At the core of upgrades to the Rafale is the development of the Thales RBE2-XG radar, which will use gallium nitride technology, much as new radars developed for Chinese and U.S. fighter programs such as the J-20 and F-35 already have. This generates less heat and has the capacity to operate at higher voltages, allowing output power to be increased while component size can be reduced, and thus providing a much needed improvement to efficiency for the Rafale’s relatively tiny main sensor. The Rafale’s radar significantly smaller that of the F-35, and more so other twin engine fighters such as the F-15, J-16 and J-20, which is one of the fighter type’s most significant limitations.
More powerful engines
The integration of a new radar will be complemented by a substantially redesigned electronic warfare suite. The F5 version of the Rafale’s SPECTRA self-protection suite is intended to employ a largely digital architecture, providing improved detection and jamming capabilities against increasingly sophisticated threats. This is particularly critical due to the Rafale’s lack of even basic stealth capabilities, at a time when rapidly improving stealth technologies are leaving even fifth generation fighters such as the F-35 behind.
The Rafale’s extreme reliance on its own inbuilt electronic warfare suite for survivability contrasts sharply with top tier U.S. and Chinese fighters, which are not have cutting edge stealth capabilities, but can also benefit from support from dedicated electronic warfare aircraft such as the EA-18G and J-16D. The Rafale’s current radar has just 836 transmitting/receiving modules, compared to 1,600 on the F-35’s AN/APG-81 and between 2,000 and 2,200 on the J-20’s Type 1475 radar.
Another major component of the Rafale F5 program is the introduction of a significantly more powerful propulsion system. Safran is beginning preliminary design work on the M88 T-Rex, which is intended to increase thrust from approximately 16,500 pounds on the current M88 engine, to almost 19,850 pounds, representing an increase of approximately 20 percent. The additional electrical power generation capacity is particularly important because the Rafale’s F5’s new avionics, including its sensors, processors, electronic warfare systems and communications equipment, will place greater demands on the aircraft’s power generation and cooling systems. More powerful engines will also help compensate for the fighter’s expected significant increase in weight. The current M88 produces less thrust than any other fighter engine currently in production worldwide, which seriously constrains the fighter’s flight performance.
Integration with an unmanned stealth aircraft
The most significant aspect of the Rafale F5 program is its emphasis on integration with an unmanned stealth aircraft based on the nEUROn unmanned combat-aircraft demonstrator. The UAV will have a degree of autonomous operation while remaining under human control, and provide a ‘wingman’ similar to those which had been developed for U.S. and Chinese fifth and sixth generation fighters such as the MQ-28. This approach effectively transfers some of the concepts originally associated with recently cancelled pan-European Future Air Combat System stealth fighter program to the Rafale.
Serving as a central crewed platform for an ecosystem of UAVs and offboard sensors is considered a key requirement for ‘5+ generation’ and sixth generation fighters, including future iterations of the U.S. F-35 and Chinese J-20, with the Rafale F5 program intended to modify the fourth-generation fighter to do the same. Integration with unmanned stealth aircraft has the potential to be a major force multiplier for the Rafale’s combat potential, albeit to a much lesser extent that is the case for more modern fighter types, in particular those such as the J-20S and future U.S. F-47 which were designed from the outset around such operational concepts.
Keeping the fourth-generation fighter viable for high intensity operations
The Rafale F5 remains an effort to keep the fourth-generation fighter somewhat viable for high intensity operations, and while likely obsolete in more technologically competitive theatres such as the Pacific, it could retain some viability in Europe and the Middle East, particularly when operating alongside allies’ more advanced stealth fighters such as the F-35 Block 4.
With the United States and China having no near peer competitors in fighter development, while the discrepancy between the ambitions of their programs and those of other countries continues to grow, the Rafale F5 highlights how France is continuing fighter development with its much more limited means, and without a realistic chance of competing at a top tier level. The Rafale is very far from an ideal basis to develop a platform for aerial warfare in the 2030s, but remains France’s only viable option in the near and medium term due to its technological and economic limitations.
Photo credit: A. Pecchi / Dassault Aviation and U.S. Air Force
