Am I reading this right? The software has bugs, so it limits flying time, so it limits testing, so they're reducing the number of tests it has to make to qualify?
That's like going "QA is identifying a lot of bugs. QA are a problem. Fire QA. There we go. No more bug reports.".
This'll end as well as it has gone so far - I wonder how many pilots will need to die from malfunctioning hardware and software for them to consider a different course of action.
The reasoning, explained at Aviation Week, was that Lockheed Martin couldn't put together enough units [F-35s - gvb] in that configuration to run the Block 2B OUE in time.
The Block 2B tests were also impacted by restrictions imposed after a June 2013 engine failure in an F-35A unit. That impacted software tests, because the restricted flying hours “reduced the number of accessible test points”.
It looks like there are not enough F-35s in the correct configuration to run the tests. Unfortunately, this is typical of all programs I've been involved in in my career - software development gets starved for hardware and software test gets screwed over for lack of both hardware and software. The reason is simple: hardware is first in the timeline, software is second and gets hammered by hardware slips, and test is last and gets nailed by both hardware and software slips.
Nowadays, software can make a lot of progress on surrogate development systems, but software/hardware integration and software/hardware test still requires real hardware.
Given how utterly blown their timeline is, I'm surprised that it's even a concern at this point. Safest and most economical option at this juncture would be to chalk it up to experience and walk away. Who wants or needs a fighter jet in this day and age anyway? The tech is increasingly obsolete in modern warfare.
Ask the populace of Ukraine what modern warfare looks like, because the US and its allies haven't been fighting any modern wars for a while.
Russia and China haven't stood still over the past 15 years while we've been otherwise engaged. What we've done with drones has been excellent, but you're not going to be loitering for hours over enemy airspace in a "modern war" against even a close peer adversary.
Drones have a part to play in modern warfare - and some of the smaller man portable versions are going to be revolutionary. But the ones capable of playing in the big leagues where you'd quite like them to come back are just as expensive as manned aircraft.
> Russia and China haven't stood still over the past 15 years while we've been otherwise engaged. What we've done with drones has been excellent, but you're not going to be loitering for hours over enemy airspace in a "modern war" against even a close peer adversary.
The Su-25 is actually deploy as part of Russian Army regiments for that exact purpose. If you're not familiar with the Su-25, it is the Russian analog to the A-10 Warthog. Both aircraft fulfill the Close Air Support (CAS) role for ground troops and are designed to loiter in enemy airspace for hours. The Su-25 was used in Chechnya, Georgia, Northern Iraq, and Syria to provide CAS to group troops.
CAS is inherently dangerous to pilots as is evident by the fact that both the Su-25 and the A-10 have titanium bathtubs that the pilots sit in to protect them. The United States has been successful in using Drones in the CAS role in order to save lives. The cost of a drone is mostly irrelevant until it exceeds that of a conventional aircraft in the same role. As long as there is at least a cost and performance parity, the drone will win out because it doesn't put a pilot in danger.
So I'm not really sure what you're saying but it seems wrong.
The Russians don't rely as much combat air support - they do not care about the cluster munition bans at all making the US seem positively humanitarian.
They'll remove entire map grid squares with artillery. The Russian army has always been an artillery force that happens to also have lots of tanks, planes and infantry.
Combine that with the disparity in willingness to take casualties and you can see why perhaps the West isn't that interested in risking a conflict with Russia or China over regional aggression. The really interesting part will come if Putin decides to test NATO over a small Baltic member state...
> The Russians don't rely as much combat air support -
Russia is not using aircraft in Ukraine because regular Russian military is not "technically" there. It's kinda hard to deny your presence if your planes are bombing the country. Most of Ukraine's meager air fleet was grounded in the beginning of conflict so that whole thing turned into artillery war.
On another hand take a look at Syria. Pretty much everything Russia does there is air support.
In fairness, manned aricarft is superior if the pilot is capable of attacking and defending at the same time. But mannfed aircarft is expensive because a good pilot takes many years to train and many hours to fly, and many hours of real combat to gain real experience. But modern days you don't really have wars soldiers and pilots are trained through simulation (but virtual and real life).
unmanned drones are expensive because the technology to develop a good one takes forever. R&D is expensive (naturally, and commercially). So both sides have pros and cons. Except, to be real fair, if you can mass produce unmanned military drones at an affordable cost, unmanned drones are the superiors.
> In fairness, manned aricarft is superior if the pilot is capable of attacking and defending at the same time.
I'm not sure what you're driving at. I'm assuming by your "attacking and defending" remark that you're referring to fighter aircraft, there are not currently drones to fulfill the roles of a typical fighter aircraft. Like any aircraft, drones are best suited for a particular role.
I am not. When you are flying to do drone attack, you still have to defend yourself against enemy aircraft and anti-aircraft units like AA, and this means you are doing both attack (destroying your target) and defending your mission and your aircraft from getting shot. I am not familiar with how air battle works, but my understanding is, there are fighter jets to protect bombers and drones. But still, you need to kind of defend yourself. Bombers have machine guns equipped for example so bomber can still defend itself.
There really hasn't been a situation like that since the Korean War. Modern warfare relies heavily on radar and ballistic missiles. Fighter jets usually operate far ahead of any ground forces or bombers eliminating threats before they even pose a risk.
Drones are quickly replacing aircraft like the A-10 because the primary threat to these aircraft comes from ground fire, drones however operate out of visual range.
> the ones capable of playing in the big leagues where you'd quite like them to come back are just as expensive as manned aircraft.
Yes, the US relies on expensive technology in either drones or manned aircraft. What they are loosing is the ability to have pilots get close to the enemy and actually utilise their eyes.
I guess a question I have is does the lack of pilot eyes on the target present a problem? It seems like the move is away from pilots having eyes on target because it puts them at greater risk. The primary weapon of most CAS aircraft, with the AC-130 being a notable exception, are guided missiles. One of the notable upgrades to the Apache Longbow was the Hellfire II launch system that introduced fire and forget capability so that the Apache, or ground forces, didn't need to paint the target until the missile hit.
Has the effectiveness of CAS aircraft gone down with the introduction of these types of systems?
Actually the Apache has a reasonably effective 30mm cannon that works well in many CAS situations.
As far as guided weapons go, the GPS guided bombs are the preferred CAS solution. Current laser designators compute the map coordinates of target locations. These are then uploaded to the aircraft, and then to the weapons. Shortly thereafter the weapons land within a couple of meters of the designated spot. The "eyes on the target" are the eyes of the ground troops, who have the greatest interest in eliminating said target.
The use of GPS guided bombs means that CAS aircraft can loiter at fairly high altitudes (> 5000 ft), and drop munitions as needed. This eliminates the need for titanium bathtubs and the like.
> Actually the Apache has a reasonably effective 30mm cannon that works well in many CAS situations.
The cannon on the Apache is secondary, the Hellfire II system is the primary weapon of the Apache Longbow.
> As far as guided weapons go, the GPS guided bombs are the preferred CAS solution.
I would say that any fire and forget system is preferred, which includes smart bombs but also the Hellfire II system utilized by Apache Longbows and drones.
> The use of GPS guided bombs means that CAS aircraft can loiter at fairly high altitudes (> 5000 ft)
I'm not disagreeing with you but the Hellfire II system is fire-and-forget, has an 8km range, and is utilized heavily on drone platforms operating at high altitudes.
That was the "Sherman Tank" strategy in WWII, if I'm not mistaken. Shermans cost a lot less than Tigers, and one-on-one they were no match. But because of the cost difference the US was able to build so many more of them that they were an overwhelming horde, despite the heavy losses among the crews.
With modern drones, we're not losing crews anymore, just hardware. So we could build enough of them to be overwhelming against any opposing force. (Except, perhaps, an even larger swarm of enemy drones.)
"Who wants or needs a fighter jet in this day and age" sounds similar to the reason given to Canadians when the Avro Arrow was cancelled in the 1950’s. At that time, the reasoning was new missile technology obsoleted fighter planes.
The navy has a much better case for drones. They need to attack at a very long range to avoid land based missiles. They are likely to strike targets that are strategic like airfields or ships, which are easier to identify.
Still probably a good idea for carriers to have a mix of manned and unmanned aircraft.
Fighter jets and aircraft carriers are basically war penises. Whoever has the coolest, fastest, and most powerful ones will look amazing to the rest of the world, but in the event that someone actually wants to go to war, the penises will be the first to go. No one needs a penis.
I'm pretty sure at some point we will have a cheap, sub-100k drone that would be able to take out this fighter. Okay fine maybe it'd take 30 of those sub-100k drones. But for every take down, the US loses 1 BILLION DOLLARS while probably 20 of the drones survived, so the cost was ~ 1 million.
#1 rule of war. Never take to war what you can't afford to lose.
It was noted the navy has the same issue. If we lose an aircraft carrier we lost the war economically. At that point its cheaper to just give up.
Also, we certainly haven't lost the war economically from a loss of just one carrier -- we have a few. Our opponents (whoever they might be) would though.
It's not a bad example actually -- US economy and military spending are so far ahead of competition, that if we can keep $$ losses under ~1 to 5 (their 1 to our 5, that is), and probably much more than that if you account for production capabilities and strength of the economy, that any opponent would be economically devastated. WW2 and the cold war demonstrated that quite well: Soviet costs were technically lower in absolute terms, but in relation to the size of the economy they were absolutely destructive.
A loss of a carrier doesn't incur by itself any economic cost, however building it does.
Your Soviet analogy makes sense, even though their mistake was building it (and not losing it - I don't know about great losses of the Soviets after 45)
Also, IANA expert but I think carriers today only make sense against pre-missile and pre-jet militaries. IMO a carrier can only operate under air superiority and effective missile defense one of which probably even small countries can contest these days.
I think opinions also vary on that one, and effectiveness of anti-ship missiles vs carriers has obviously not been combat tested -- a carrier group has a lot of means to defend against cruise missile attacks though, the aircraft themselves being a pretty major one. There have been developments on both sides of that equation, but I doubt anyone who actually knows much about the current state of affairs is going to tell us :)
One problem with the missile strategy (which is the one Soviets tried) is that even if you might be able to cost-effectively attack a carrier group with missile cruisers, they are pretty much useless for anything else.
>> If we lose an aircraft carrier we lost the war economically. At that point its cheaper to just give up.
That's not the Navy's approach. The general thinking is that carriers are so valuable, their crews so difficult to rescue, not to mention their nuclear payload, that the loss of a carrier in heated combat will likely precipitate a full nuclear exchange. See TheSumOfAllFears for some of that scenario. The economics are beside the point.
F-35 has lots of problems, but it does not cost a billion a piece to build. And I'm not sure that drones vulnerability to ECM will ever be solved, so quite likely there is always going to be a role for a manned fighter.
Whether F-35 should be that fighter is another question, there is a lot of disagreement on that one among people far more qualified than me, so I have no opinion there.
You nailed it perfectly. I've dealt with this problem so many times in my career it makes me sick. Continual pounding on hardware/systems to let them realize that we really can't finish software without actual hardware (simulators only go so far) and that a few weeks of integration at the end of a multiyear hardware/software/chemistry project just ain't gonna cut it.
While this is meant I think a little tongue-in-cheek, it's always important for everyone to contribute value. QA is vital to the success of any project, if all it is functioning as is a Boolean check at the end that says "good" or "bad" and it keeps spitting out "bad" then it is not providing value.
QA needs to be implemented throughout the process, and it needs to be capable of feeding changes into the system at different stages to make sure that it's providing feedback at the earliest possible moment.
I know nothing about this project, so I don't know what their issues were along the way. Definitely they need real hardware at the end to test with, but I hope that they had mocked out the expected hardware interfaces such that they could have quicker turnaround earlier in the cycle.
If the Emperor has no clothes, and QA keep saying "naked", there is value there. The value lies in highlighting the fact that there's a bunch of advisors that either have been actively profiteering from the fake garment con, or where negligent in their duties and failed to notice the problem before.
Either party would have strong interest to cover up their negative-value-added actions, but since they cannot directly challenge QA statement, they go and say that "it does not add value". In the strictest sense of the word they are true, QA does not add value, it helps prevent/correct that would destroy already-added value in the product if left unchecked.
Which part exactly is bullshit? The "QA is vital to the success of any project", bit? or the "QA needs to be implemented throughout the process", bit?
Because, I'm confused. I quite literally said that QA needs to provide value THROUGHOUT the process to help increase the success (value) of the project. All I said in anyway that disagrees with you, is that it doesn't provide value if it only exists at the END. I can't believe that any modern developer/qa would disagree with that.
The part I disagree with is looking at a disfunctional system, taking the component producing the loudest symptoms and declaring it "non value added".
I agree that, in general, QA needs to provide specific feedback to development in order to accomplish its goals. I disagree with the unstated asumption that the problem with F-35 is a QA problem. I know nothing about planes, but for what I have read online, this has been a basket case of Project Management vices and mispractices.
In my mind, claiming that QA is not adding value in this case is the equivalent of "fixing" your car by clipping the cable that goes to the "Engine Maintenance" led. I agree a one bit message is not enough to actually solve the problem, but ignoring the one bit of information you already have is just wrong.
.. then it's quite possible that the software is bad and not improving. Possibly in a way that will get people killed. Ignoring the quality concerns and carrying on gave us the Challenger disaster (approx 30 years ago today).
Where did I say "ignore"? I'm saying provide earlier feedback in the system such that it's not one big "bad" signal, it should be lots of minor signals, each one easily fixed.
Try to look at the bigger picture. Quality software does not have to come at the cost of development, and development does not need to come at the cost of quality.
Actually, this sounds a lot like the F22 program. They had tons of software bugs as well and management basically came in and told them they were behind schedule to screw testing and get back on schedule.
> Mission “data load” software is also causing concern. This software is loaded on a mission-by-mission basis, working in conjunction with the permanent systems, to operate sensors and respond to conditions for a particular battleground (Aviation Week gives identifying hostile radars as an example).
"Damn, they have radars here. We'll have to go back and do a software reload, sorry guys."
I've never been in the military aviation community. But I'd assume that ID'ing radars is so basic that you'd want to carry it around with you all the time. You know, just in case.
It does everything. Eventually. Not all at once. And maybe not even when you need it.
Military flight computing hardware isn't designed to carry everything you might possibly need, for a variety of reasons.
It is technically possible to input your flight plan and everything else you might use later from the in-cockpit keypad, but that means you will be either sitting on the ground for a long time or doing the aerial equivalent of texting while driving.
So what typically happens is that the military commissions a custom bit of software to translate the output of a common flight planning program into the specific format that aircraft uses. Then they carry that file to the aircraft and upload it.
Military avionics now has a ridiculous amount of required data, with dozens of different kinds of navigation points and a bazillion radios and sensors and weapons system modules.
So in order to write the custom data file creating software, you need the hardware spec. And you need to translate data from the flight planning software's format into the specific form that the flight computer expects. As you might expect, they never quite match up, because all the software is divided up among a gazillion contractors, who aren't allowed to publish a common standard or share code because some stuff is classified.
So it's not a matter of loading all the radars. The code to load even one radar probably hasn't even been written yet, because the contractor is still working on the module for the radios.
This problem would be much less severe if the military could hire software pros directly at anywhere near fair market value.
> This problem would be much less severe if the military could hire software pros directly at anywhere near fair market value.
I think this is a big piece of it, and we see this at NASA too. It's hard to convince experienced software engineers to start out in gov't service at ~$50k (roughly a GS-9 master's graduate degree level), and there is very little that individual agencies can do to pay more reasonable market rates.
Turning to contractor companies is one option, but the overhead tends to be massive.
You would think so, but just like everyone else, hiring the right people is very difficult for LM. Note that this is not saying anything about how successful they are at hiring.
If you had to have a computer for 20-30 years, you would definitely want to be able to load new data. Even if we could fit all the current radar data into the computer, as weapons change we would need new data. And there is much more to mission data than just radars. You can’t fly around with all of google earth.
And this doesn’t even account for the general crappiness of military aviation technology. People assume the latest fighter jets are cutting edge, but the F-35 technology is probably already 10 years old. Flying F-18s from 2002-2012, the max number of GPS points we could store was something like 256. We had “bricks” the size of a brick that could hold kilobytes. We updated to cards that could hold a MB. This is when thumb-drives where moving into GBs.
Cheaper, specialized aircraft, both man and un-manned is critical for our national defense. Aircraft that are more expendable and can be upgraded with new tech quickly and at less cost. The industry, however, just builds what they want and then the Generals and Admirals get board seats so everyone is happy. When I left, the F-35 was pretty much considered a turd by most pilots, but a hand-full of senior leaders where pushing hard and based their careers on it.
> Aircraft that are more expendable and can be upgraded with new tech quickly and at less cost.
I'm just a putz in an armchair, but I've been reading a lot of the think tank docs about this stuff recently. We could get a ton of value out of a simple platform. My guess of what it looks like:
* 2 seat, enough cabin for long manned missions
* optional autonomous or remote piloting features
* primarily subsonic, but perhaps with a dash capability
* no expectation of high speed high g maneuvering
* oversized electrical generation
* bomb truck for 16+ SDB's
* missile truck for enough AIM-120's, etc to defend itself
* open platform designed for continuous upgrade of radar, EW, EO, etc
* only low cost stealth features
* enough fuel capacity to loiter in theater
Something like this could be pretty cheap to fly and provide a lot of flexible capability as a truck for state of the art electronic systems and the emerging generation of smart munitions. It'd still be relevant in an increasingly drone dominated future as an optionally manned node in the "flying network". Leave the missions that require more extreme capabilities to more specialized aircraft. Do all the basic stuff with something cheap.
I’m not 100% sure how I’d tackle this problem, but the plane you described could play a roll. It’s not poorly thought out by any means. Generally, I’m a fan of a diverse set of assets for survivability and cost. Focus on specific missions instead of trying to do everything. For Air-to-Air the Mig-21 Bison is an interesting example of upgradable lower tech aircraft.[1] Currently, I think the ability to go fast is still an asset to defeat missiles and would be a severe limitation of a slower platform (okay if it’s unmanned and cheap though). High tech stealthier fighters with lower tech fighters and drones in support. Mainly all working as missile trucks or targeting platforms.
For a mission such as Close Air Support the perfect tools are the AC-130 [2] and the Super Tacano. [3] For Strike I think drones, cruise missiles, and JSOW [4] are the main way to go. As for Air-to-Air, a mix of assets is critical so defeating one doesn’t defeat others, and they can’t all depend on one commonality such as GPS. Would probably keep a few high tech and more lower tech manned bombers available and ready too.
Complicated, interesting problem with strategy, logistics, and politics all involved, but the bankrupt the country super weapons definitely is the correct course in my opinion.
> I've never been in the military aviation community. But I'd assume that ID'ing radars is so basic that you'd want to carry it around with you all the time. You know, just in case.
You do carry that basic capability around all the time. Without going into too much detail, what is causing concern is the development of files that accurately describe areas of operation. It's the difference between having a general ability to identify things and having detailed knowledge of what you can expect.
> I've never been in the military aviation community.
Most people haven't, which is why this all looks and seems so strange to them.
Presumably something that would tell the avionics that:
'Radar system X (location ...), working on frequencies (...), using these waveform patterns (...), is effective out to range Y, is only effective above altitude Z'
Which would prompt the pilot with a warning if it's detected in operation (as you can detect radar before it can detect your return signature) to reduce altitude if needed?
>> ... you can detect radar before it can detect your return signature.
That's old thinking. Cutting edge radar tech involves transmitting in way that is very very hard to detect. It's basically a strong signal spread thin across a wide band so it looks like background noise to the target. The radar receiver then relies on a massive, literally heavy, computer system to differentiate the returns mathematically from the background. I've even heard this called "encrypted radar" as it adds creates an asymmetric situation not unlike public key cryptography. The days of assuming that the target will always hear the radar before detection are over.
This works particularly well for aircraft viewed from the ground. They, looking down at the ground, see a much noisier background than those looking up at them against the sky.
Also, much work is being done on very long wavelength radars, with the possibility that an aircraft might not be able to carry a dish large enough to detect the incoming signal while remaining stealthy.
True, but if you know you're fighting in Florida and they have 3 radars... you probably don't need to load the two radars which are known to only exist in Alaska. The world is a big place with many kinds of radars. Or maybe, yesterday, you received new information about the three Florida radars. Wouldn't it be good to be able to bring that new information when you head out today?
You seem to be describing a circumstance in which no new information about the radar was available at the time the mission began. Regardless, would it not also be good to be able to record that new information so your friends can take advantage of it?
Having the correct data load is the difference between the RWR telling the pilot, "Something with the capability to track you with high enough resolution to shoot at you is painting you" and "An SA-6 is painting you".
The problem here is the mismanagement, the crooked procurement, and the rush to flight because potential customers and diplomatic influencees are fleeing.
Mismanagement started very early to the F-35. I know nothing about planes, but I do know that if you want a software system to do EVERYTHING, it will never live up to expectation, if it's ever delivered.
The rational of having just the one type of plane makes sense if you're Ryanair (who only fly Boeing 737-800). Of cause they only have ONE role for all their plane. Having just one type plane take the role of multiple others just gives you all of the complications of each of these plane all rolled up in one, plus a series of its own unique issues.
I understand that Lockheed Martin just tries to deliver a product that request, but that's really the issue with many government contracts. You get what you request, and if someone tells you "Yeah, that might be a bad idea", the contract is just rewarded to a less honest company. It would be a bit shocking if no one with Lockheed Martin questioned if the F-35 was a good idea.
At some point someone is going to dictate that the F-35 is done, true or not. The US will fly them for a short while and the other nations, that can't afford new planes for another 20-30 years will be stuck with this thing.
The F-35 was a bad idea. In theory it made sense: fast, high tech, and stealthy. Then reality settled in:
The plane can only really support a small handful of missiles, nothing close to the Arsenal the Navy's F-18 used to be able to haul into battle. It's fast, sure, but that comes at a cost to fuel efficiency, so while infantry in remote Afghanistan can get air support in less time than a pizza, "one pass, haul ass" means that if the air strike wasn't perfect, they need to call in a second strike group and wait again, not to mention the immense cost for the first few jets and bombs.
The military is trying too hard to make a one-size-fits-all solution, when there has been one for close air support since Vietnam: the rugged and powerful A-10. In fact, with more and more of the fighters being forcibly retired, special ops teams are rightfully concerned, since they could previously rely on the A-10 to make 10+ passes before having to refuel, giving ground forces a significant advantage.
The moral of the story is that more tech, more cost, and more complexity does not always culminate in more value. We have become so accustomed to the notion that things will always get more advanced, and therefore better, that we have forgotten to look to the past to replicate the same success in the future.
Note that the A-10 was designed post Vietnam and saw its first active service in the 1991 Gulf War, not in a jungle. It happened to do well. I find the engineering management of the A-10 quite interesting. The plane has done well, it is loved, but it's also had the most friendly fire kills of any aircraft of the modern era. There is a engineering case study review of the creation of the program, the multiple attempts and successful killing of the project in the 80s here (note that was for construction, taking our current planes out of service is a work in progress since they will be flightworthy through most of the 2020s): http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a530838.pdf
The EA-18 is probably the most interesting aircraft the air force has. At the rate technology is advancing, electronic warfare seems like it'll win over passive stealth.
True, although the stealth capabilities are nowhere near the F-22 or F-35. Still, it helps to pack more than a couple missiles or bombs when the enemy inevitably discovers that you've dropped in to say hello.
The A-10 is a disaster that needs to be retired. It's completely incapable of facing modern air defences, so is useless against enemies like China or Russia, and has operating costs 30 times higher than a dedicated COIN aircraft like the Super Tucano, meaning you have a lot fewer aircraft supporting your troops than you should have, or end up spending way too much money.
Calling it a disaster is a bit much. I don't think anyone expects the A-10 to face modern air defenses from China or Russia. It's current use is similar to what it was designed for in the first place. Since it appears the US military does have an interest in something like the Tucano, it would stand to reason that the A-10s currently in service will be used for that role until a replacement is ramped up.
This is how I've understood the aircraft: "aircraft designed solely for close air support, including attacking tanks, armored vehicles, and other ground targets."
Essentially, a prime mission objective is to loiter over an area and provide air support. Something most fast-moving aircraft are not exactly made to do. If a request comes in to target a tank; the plane kills the tank. If a request comes in to target a truck; the plane shreds the truck, and whatever happens to be inside, to shreds. If a request comes in to strafe a defensive position; then the plane puts big holes in those defenses. As for personnel, the plane may not kill them but it sure as heck puts a good scare into them. Stories indicate friendly soldiers like seeing, and hearing, the plane in the area during a firefight. It has more uses than the bullets it fires.
Also, keep in mind that the A-10 can carry other weapons than just the cannon it's built around.
Now, is it expensive in today's world for that purpose? Probably so.
Apaches are nice too. I'm sure one day someone will consider them an expensive disaster as well.
The A10 is an example of "the right tool for the job."
Give it the wrong job and, sure, it will fail.
What the last decade plus had demonstrated, is that there is still plenty of work around at which it excels. And for which the military as yet has no comparable nor superior replacement.
Ongoing, critical work (well, if you insist on being in that theater, to begin with).
In the middle of building a house, you don't throw out your existing hammer two weeks before the new, improved model with the carbon nanotube handle maybe becomes available.
Developers aren't ditching their monitors because in 1 - 3 years maybe Oculus and the like are going to give us "infinite", 3D viewspace.
I'm sorry to get a bit emotional and strident, here. But a problem the U.S. military has, is -- in good part, for politics, personal power, and money -- bypassing more effective and economical systems for marketing that has yet to be substantiated. They have enough raw resources and innovation to eventually brute force and trick around the resulting limitations, but it costs a lot -- including sometimes lives.
I am describing the use case of using a wrecking ball when a sledgehammer would do, while your example is of using a sledgehammer when a wrecking ball is needed.
Nobody is suggesting the use of a decades-old aircraft against a modern air power. But when you already have air superiority, it is better to use dedicated aircraft like the Super Tucano, as you mentioned.
My emphasis is not to bring back the A-10, but to remember the effectiveness of that style of fighter and why it has a place on the modern battlefield, especially when the enemy is in inaccessible terrain and they lack the resources to achieve air superiority.
Those are nuclear powers. The only possibilities of F-35s shooting at Chinese or Russian jets is "accidents" like the Turkish border incident. In the event of actual war they'll be destroyed on the ground by ICBMs, along with everything and everyone else.
I think the sad reality is that no western government will be buying Super Tucano, simply because it's not a jet. The image that buying a propeller aircraft sends is that your air force is second rate.
The US is buying some Super Tucanos, but they seem to be going more to Afghanistan than staying in the Air Force's arsenal [1]. Though the bigger problem is that the Air Force really resents having to do fixed wing close air support, and would much rather have the army just get helicopters for the job, even if helicopters have weaknesses in such a role, so they don't even like having to fly the A-10.
Several years ago I worked on one Lockheed project (Not the F-35, but part of another large defense program) as a subcontractor (at a Lockheed facility). The most dated development practices imaginable. Waterfall, no source control (they brought in subversion near the very end of the project in order to meet govt requirements but only the 'architect' was allowed to commit anything (or even to use the 'svn' command)), SLOC used to measure "progress", even the office furniture looked 70s vintage. The project was one giant clusterf*k from start to finish, and I swore an oath never to work on anything involving "Lockheed" ever again.
I had my software installed in a Lockheed system. It was incredibly surreal - the amount of time spent assigning blame for problems was orders of magnitude more than the time spent solving problems.
One of their sysads, in a meeting with the Important People, blamed my system for extremely high network and disk load. He showed graphs that spiked and plateaued a few minutes after system load, pointed at the spike, then pointed at my face and said, "It's his software that's making this whole thing slow. Get him out of here and we'll build something that actually works."
I got unparalleled satisfaction when I got to say, "I haven't installed my software yet."
Multi-role aircraft aren't a bad idea, so long as each role somewhat overlaps the other in requirements. Many well designed aircraft do 2-3 roles very well (e.g recon/attack/fighter roles).
If you mix in another role that doest't match the hardware requirements of the first role that's when you are asking for problems. CAS, SToVL are such examples that won't blend with the first 3 without massive compromises. Full stealth is also a requirement that is rarely absolutely necessary, but adds to the cost and lowers performance of every other aspect of the plane.
When these compromises had been discovered the project should have been scrapped, the SToVL elements thrown out and a separate plane should have been procured for that role. Lots of components could be shared, just not the airframe.
I too believe the project is very near the edge now. It will survive as there is too much prestige invested, but if a few big players like Canada or Australia decide to get zero F-35's the unit development cost would skyrocket which would force other buyers to to back out. If was LM I'd be sending huge lobbying checks to Canada right now.
> The rational of having just the one type of plane makes sense if you're Ryanair (who only fly Boeing 737-800). Of cause they only have ONE role for all their plane. Having just one type plane take the role of multiple others just gives you all of the complications of each of these plane all rolled up in one, plus a series of its own unique issues.
In addition to that, they didn't manage to build just one type of plane. They actually built three types that look sort of the same and share a few parts (apparently not enough to actually save money).
> At some point someone is going to dictate that the F-35 is done, true or not. The US will fly them for a short while and the other nations, that can't afford new planes for another 20-30 years will be stuck with this thing.
I like the idea of building updated versions of existing designs as a hedge against the failure of this project. It looks like some of those are getting more interest:
Note that you can have multiple types of plane with very similar controls & software, IIRC that's one of the advantages of Airbus the systems are pretty uniform so once a pilot's qualified on one plane it's much easier to qualify on others.
I've seen it mentioned in at least one article that the VTOL requirement is driven by the USMC's institutional memory of Guadalcanal. They don't want to get left on the beach without air support again, so they insist on having their own aircraft with VTOL capability. How valid a concern that is is..up for debate, in the era of nuclear supercarriers and jet aircraft.
And russians still have planes with hydraulic commands from the cold war (50 yo) that outperform F35, F16, F15, F14, B2 :)
They even flew near UK exactly one year ago with a turbine powered bomber from the 50s and a nuke inside and no planes intercepted it during its 5 hours flight over "modern air farce" doted countries.
Notably the UK are lacking interceptors because they planned to replace theirs with the F35.... and the F35 is not there.
Does not it sound ridiculous?
And the stealth technology are nowhere to be stealth for long. It leaves heat signature, signal distortions.
And why do US stealth planes have so much sharp angles when we all know it is bad for being stealth?
Because their software don't let them do curbs...
To avoid software bugs remove software from where it is not useful
Of course it allows curves! It's just that they can't have curvature less than a great circle....~
Due to the way the military produces software specifications, it is very likely that the unbroken chain of subject-matter-experts from the days of ochre pictograms on cave walls to today have ensured that the software program functions exactly the same as drawing lines on charts by hand.
Since human navigators did not initially possess the capability to continuously recalculate courses, bearings, and headings, as would be required in a curved flight path, the ground-based and flight computers don't do it now. So planes still keep a fixed heading between a set of points, and any possible roundness is encoded into the turn data or a specialized, predefined pattern.
I was speaking of the angles in the shape of the planes design.
Have you ever seen a diffraction pattern caused by any discontinuities?
I have seen thousands of them ... the fourier transform of any discrete functions makes very nice detectable pattern that says : "NOT NATURAL". And that what radars are trained for spotting.
And the more symmetries the more the pattern reinforce itself saying: human made technology spotted. (Curie principle : symmetry in causes get propagated in the effects)
Have you seen a lot of natural object that are both discontinuous and symmetric and the size of a plane?
EDIT : I forgot to explain the relationship between convolution of signals and FT but I guess everyone is educated enough to know that convolution of signal is the base of radar detection and that Fourier transform are related to convolution.
Oh.... I thought you were talking about curves in the routes programmed into the flight computer!
AFAIK, stealth planes use all flat surfaces and no curves because a curved surface is more likely to reflect a signal from an active radar beam back in the direction of the detector instead of somewhere else.
If you shine a flashlight beam on a reflective sphere, you will always see a tiny spot of reflected light somewhere on the surface. If you shine a light beam on a perfectly flat surface, and it is not angled correctly, you will not see the reflection.
So stealth surfaces are designed to be as black (to radar frequencies) as possible, and as flat as possible. And if possible, you should make as many of your flat surfaces parallel to one another as you can manage, because each one sends a reflection of a radar beam to a new spot, and you don't want the spots to be widely dispersed.
In order to classify a radar reflection as natural or artificial, you have to detect it first.
Detection is always a business decision between true/false positive/negative, the costs of sensitivity that is non linear per stage (breakthrough are non predictable) and the costs of stealth.
And since science have improved at increasing detection by using distributed measures coupled with active correction the detection is getting easier and cheaper.
There is a pace at which technology are cheap and efficient. And money (especially when GPB is not growing) is really the nerve of war. Technologies should be used opportunistically according to their costs that can change faster than the design/delivery process.
The blindness on the cost efficiency and long term bets is taxing a lot the normal economy that in turns slow down and has difficulties feeding back military with useful cheap innovative realiable real innovations. We cannot predict the future. Especially when it comes to innovation.
And look: we rely on the best of our technology to build weapons, but these technologies don't seem to deliver.
Maybe the F35 story is an allegory of how our economies are in bad shape. And maybe the greatest military decision would be to diminish the defense/NASA budgets and fix the market and society.
PS I insist that these software problems are not unique to USA. Rafale, A400M, Typhoon, probably russian planes have been suffering "outstanding delays" & "budget slip" and software are often involved.
I do not think this is only a military problem. Something is rotten in the R&D department. Maybe the way we organize ourselves.
Remember with turbine powered bombers the flight takes 5 hours crossing the aerial zone of at least 5 NATO countries with modern aircraft and radars. And we know it was loaded with nuclear weapons, because of radioactivity.
In fact, maybe the paradigm of airplanes is outdated since USSR giving cheap missiles and crude radar to the viet kong have proven that in terms of costs planes can be shot down with a 1/100 ratio in terms of costs. Plus aerian superiority paradigm (a WWII idea) works against developed countries relying on a dense industrial country. But, it does not work against people relying on AK47 and propane bottles coupled with a simple radio system.
Money is the nerve of war.
Angles: Sorry I can't find the article explaining how the DOD imposed using a software for B2 (and not F35) that limited the possibility to make nice curbs.
However just look at the plane. And remember any physics lessons you have been taught : sharp angles make discontinuities. Discontinuities are easy to spot.
Stealth anyway is a scam.
B2 were spotted by US radars technologies bought by french since 1991 with networked radar (thomson). Validated during 1st iraki war while radar operator could put a name on the weired stuff they were seeing on screen they already saw flying over European space without authorization. (Spying allies is really not nice)
You can evade one radar by deflecting signal. But if in a network of radar the signal is reintercepted, then it is bad for the plane.
Also since 2000 it has been proven that the flight of a stealth plane above a normal "cellular phone grid" can be detected by the additional energy that it bounces back.
Still with networked radar, stealth planes can make "holes" of expected energy. (ionosphere does reflect a little part of energy, and stealth fighter makes "shadows/holes") it may require bigger wavelength though.
With IR detection, plane still leaves energy traces (like air friction).
Stealthiness only value is in plane vs plane fight to diminish the electronic signature, thus a frontal stealth is more than enough.
Stealth is a costly arm race. That is exactly what killed USSR that tried to fight USA IDS program (that was a scam).
Strategic thinking must address the costs problems.
Your BBC link says fighters were scrambled to approach the bomber that did not enter sovereign airspace. I'm not sure what your argument is.
I would say it's always been cheaper to shoot down an airplane than to build, use, and maintain it. That's nothing new.
I don't recall anyone ever claiming that stealth would make the planes undetectable, only harder to detect. You do realize that what we know as stealth technology today was developed 30 to 50 years ago? I would assume new technologies have been developed to defeat it. Even accidentally, such as your cell phone grid example; which did not exist when the stealth technology was developed. Doesn't mean it has always been a scam. Today's planes are "stealth-like" which means they have similar technologies but no one expects them to disappear into the night.
As for the cost, I agree. This trend of bigger, better, and more expensive is stupid.
And I cannot find the UK articles from 1 year ago saying the exact problem with typhoon and why UK wanted to replace them with F35. I remembered something about costs, availability attrition and budget. Like typhoon were to expensive and that 24/7 battle readiness was kind of a joke given the budget.
I was in the french navy for my conscription. The aeronaval would have preferred F16 over rafale ~2000 for exactly this:
1 rafale = 10 F16 (at the time) and OPEX of rafale >> F16.
And they could have had another diesel carrier thus france could have had a fully usable aeronaval task force for the same price.
Anyway: cellular grids where not that developed yet, but efficient distributed radar were. And every "refinment" is kind of another order of magnitude in the equation. Harder to measure, harder to counter, harder to build but it can be anticipated : every generations are almost an order of magnitude more expensive.
Can you see a pattern? Stealth like aircraft (Typhoon, Rafale, F35, F22) are hard to sell because they cost a lot due to complexity (in software notably). Thus government HAVE to subsidize them ...
Thus, people try to make them polyvalent BY DESIGN (waterfall model) and like any jack of all trades they tend to master none of them and inflates OPEX and KPEX with erosion of the benefits and a LONG development time that make them likely to be obsolete when delivered.
A lot can be said on the history of aircraft industry. I dare say we lost the art of being smart that requires some fast feedback loops (agile but correctly done) with minimal correct design (waterfall but correctly done) and cost efficiency.
That is the difference between the spitfire and the Me109.
Can a general purpose warbird be built during peace time?
I do not think so. They are like hammers built without knowing which nail will need to be hammered or may be screwed.
But simple cells (F4, mirage, F16) with awesome lines (ok, I am found of nice looking planes so it is not serious) that can sustain modifications (like the spitfire) have proven to be good planes ... on the long run when you have good workers, engineers, (tests) pilots, industrial able to make them evolve in a reasonable time and price constraint.
The quality of out warplanes reflect the actual problem with our civil economy : Quality and costs do not matter when industries relies on finance and not production for making benefits.
It does come off as a wasteful arms race but I think it's a bit much to call it totally useless due to theoretical weaknesses and occasional spotting. You clearly are more involved in this area so can probably answer, "Did they track the planes the whole mission or just get a glimpse of them on the way with long-range radar?" If the former, your claim is right and they're blown out of the sky by any non-3rd world country. If the latter, then they lack a full element of surprise but otherwise hit a local target with little opportunity to react.
Anti-stealth tech being sold by Russia, etc might change the situation with wide deployment if they're effective and quick response. Otherwise, it would seem stealth is still useful for hit and run attacks on key targets with less risk than easy to track and lock aircraft.
Modern F16 inferior to Mig29 ? Very likely. I don't have the time to search for the article about it, but it is a fact acknowledged by benchmarks that US air planes have been slowly gaining mass and loosing maneuverability since decades and they re-evaluated the F16 performance recently. Even F16 vs "old F16".
Anyway. Mig29 Su30 are pretty cheap compared to US air planes and roughly close in terms of performance. Maybe a 1v1 scenario favors F16. But in $v$ you can align more Su/Mig per F16. And surviving a 1v1 situation is easier than 3v1.
I wonder if it makes sense to develop these next gen fighter jets. 10 years from now, could air forces just use swarms of drones? Stealth wouldn't be as important when you don't have a pilot that dies when the plane gets taken down.
Reads like the typical big budget product that has a deadline that "absolutely cannot move" but does move because ain't no one going to sign their name to that mess. Really comes from having too many people in the decision making process and none of them accountable.
Currently the Danish government keep deferring the selection of new fighter planes for the Royal Danish Air force. Partly because it's a huge decision to buy plane we can't really afford, but I also suspect it has to do with the F-35 not being done. It really seems like the plan was to just pick the F-35, because that was going to be the plane the US and many other allies fly.
I have no proof of this, but I won't be surprised that the moment the F-35 is deemed operational, the Danish government will announce a contract for buy a small number of planes. In the mean time all other potential supplies are going to leave the table because they believe their losing money trying to bid, and rightfully so.
Honestly at this point I really wish the UK government had just bought the Super Hornet under license and handed it to BAe to modernise.
It would have done everything we could reasonably expect to want to do off our carriers, is a proven design, can carry a heavy payload and has decent legs.
Instead we are going to spend billions on a couple of dozen planes that are already a disaster.
I wonder if this project has struggled so much, because of the increasing difficulty in acquiring talent and talent getting poached in tech. Perhaps they left for SpaceX. I'm sure a project like this has an intense amount of technical debt that needs a stable workforce in order to churn out a quality product.
This project has struggled because the concept is fundamentally flawed, and when those fundamental flaws started causing problems the program kept cutting corners, ignoring reality, and making bigger and bigger bad bets.
From the start there was the idea of one aircraft for three services with a STOVL requirement and stealth was a huge gamble. Then, inexplicably the DoD decided that instead of providing detailed requirements for the platform like they usually did, they would let the contractor write many of the requirements since 'they have the expertise in building warplanes'.
Then, on top of that they decided to implement concurrent development, where they'd be doing testing and verification of the aircraft in parallel with production. In theory this would save time but in practice the reason you do testing and verification before production is to avoid expensive retrofits when problems are identified. Of course, many expensive retrofits have resulted.
On numerous occasions performance requirements have been lowered, deadlines blown, and the cost is tracking to be so expensive that it's making the F-22 look like a bargain.
Then there's the fact that production of parts of this program are spread out over 47 states, meaning every Congressman has incentive not to stop this runaway freight train of waste and negligence.
Agreed, but I think there's more to it. The tech industry has a lot of turnover in general. I would imagine that turnover is only aggravated when you throw in short term contracts and a high demand for cleared individuals.
I'll point out salaries for cleared software engineers tend to be above-average. I've looked outside the defense industry (often) and haven't yet found another company willing to match (or beat) my current salary.
Yes, this industry requires a stable workforce of bright, motivated people to produce a high quality product. Things are looking uncertain as the systems design and development phase comes to an end and follow on testing begins.
This should be no surprise to those following the years of this national embarrassment. Yes the "potential future war" use case does justify high risk expenditures, but this crossed over into pork barrel fraud long ago. That is also on top of the antics of bidding process in the first place. I can't help but speculate as a laymen that the entire joint strike fighter concept is flawed. Part of the reason for having separate branches of armed forces is, or at least should be, strategic and technical diversity. If you consider that it is a form of investing, it becomes clearer to not put all the eggs in one basket. Cost is most damn sure a factor in warfare. Functioning fighter jets is also pretty high on the list.
But what? LM was smart : every production units has been given to enough different states and organizations not to bribe the MPs (oh no) but to improve efficiency.
Airbus had trouble coordinating up to 4 countries and nearly died of it, 40+ states is logically way more complex.
EDIT : Did I said that the modern version F16 with all its "modern electronic warfare" get beaten bad by its 40 yo counterpart? USA industry is declining bad. The IT bubble has even contaminated the military production.
> Mission “data load” software is also causing concern. This software is loaded on a mission-by-mission basis, working in conjunction with the permanent systems, to operate sensors and respond to conditions for a particular battleground
Why? Why load information to the system for areas outside the plane's current mission range? Why load radar information for Southeast Asia when the plane is currently stationed in Europe?
The financial success for the producing company of a military jet has nothing to do with his fighting capabilities, reliability or whatever. The main factor is how good the bribery engine works. Take a look at the starfighter history.
I wonder if a "Tech Surge" like the one used to repair the ACA exchange would help here, or just end up causing more trouble. I'm afraid Brook's Law comes into effect here.
At its base description level, the ACA exchange is something that's been done before. What made it so complex was the sheer number of systems the exchange had to properly communicate with. But there were teams of people with enough domain knowledge to come in, figure out what the problems were, and fix them. I don't know if aircraft are the same. You might run into the problem that all the people who have the knowledge who could help you solve the problem are already working on the problem! Some of this stuff is so specialized and so different than what is done anywhere else that you won't get experience with it unless you do it.
I've seen this idea tried in the defense industry a number of times and it's not really successful.
That's like going "QA is identifying a lot of bugs. QA are a problem. Fire QA. There we go. No more bug reports.".
This'll end as well as it has gone so far - I wonder how many pilots will need to die from malfunctioning hardware and software for them to consider a different course of action.