The F-35 deserves the bad press. Development has been a mess because it is trying to fill every niche for every branch of the military. We could have developed several specialized planes at a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time that it took for this one plane to come into production.
While I don't doubt that it is better to fly than the F-16, so would every other plane we would have developed instead of this nightmare. I also am worried that it will be obsoleted with the development of advanced military drones. Why risk a human life when you can just send a robot to the battlefield instead?
> Why risk a human life when you can just send a robot to the battlefield instead?
That's literally the point of the F35: to stealthily penetrate enemy airspace and act as a command and control combat platform for drones. It observes the battlefield with it's amazing "eye of god" sensory field, drones are sent into the battle space automatically where they are then taken control of by the pilot.
It wasn’t literally the point of the plane when it was being designed. It’s the fourth or fifth public justification. It’s actual literal point is to make a lot of people a lot of money. It does that very well.
I've come to think of it as a public works project. Employs a huge number of people, provides corporate welfare for Lockheed and their suppliers, but no one is going to fight a world war with it. It's already close to obsolete to way cheaper, recent radar systems and non-meatspace crafts.
In total taxes paid per capita the US isn’t far off from the countries of Western Europe. But they get universal health care and mass transit that’s actually good, we get F35s, surgeons that drive Ferraris, and tens of thousands of college administrators.
In fairness, the basic premise of NATO was that the US would handle military protection of Western Europe in exchange for solidarity on foreign policy, trade, and economic development.
If Nato didn't exist its debatable whether western Europe could maintain their existing level of defense expenditure. The EU would also need to manage increased defense expenditure amongst member nations to avoid an arms race.
If Nato didn't exist, Western Europe could focus on building defending forces against Russia rather than spending their defense budget on expeditionary forces that need to tag along on American-led adventures like Iraq or Afghanistan.
Western Europe is over 40% while the US is at 27%. And the US figure include all public healthcare spending which is 60% of all healthcare in the US. So even adding private spending it’s still lower.
Don't forget to add employer contributions to health insurance in the US. That adds about 10% to the US rate (in as much as one can come up with a single figure for hundreds of millions of people).
I did account for it and the tax rate is still lower. Public spending is about the same as private and public is 8% of GDP, so the US goes from 27% to 35%. Still significantly lower than Western Europe.
I don't believe you. I think if you originally accounted for it, you would have known that your original value of 27% was misleading and you would have expanded on it.
If you did account for it, you wouldn't only now be saying 35%.
The alternative is to believe that you DID know, and you deliberately misled; I think that's not the case though. I don't think you're a deliberate liar; I think you've got an ego. Got one myself and sometimes I do the same thing.
You're using averages across all of the EU which includes both countries with a higher GDP per capita than the US and countries with lower GDP per capita.
Some of the examples I gave actually have a higher GDP per capita than the US.
Yes but most of such countries are small in population.
The biggest countries (by population): Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland
All have lover GDP.
The countries with higher GDP than US (according to wikipedia): Luxembourg (pop: 638,153 ), Ireland (pop: 5,006,061), Norway (not in EU, pop: 5,457,423), Switzerland (not EU, pop: 8,717,698)
I am sure if you just take the richest few states, they are also richer than average US
I can think of a few ...most recently probably Sanders, but I'm pretty sure Dwight Eisenhower warned about the MI Complex in speeches, and probably Kennedy too.
Read “War is a Racket”, written in 1935 by retired USMC Major General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient Smedley Butler for an excellent historical perspective.
The army says it has enough tanks, but the US government still approves several hundred per year. They go straight to the scrap bin to be used as parts.
It's not just about welfare though.
If they shut the plants down and something happens, what do they do? The assembly lines will have been shut down or retrofitted for something else and the experienced workers may well have gone to work elsewhere.
They already have to keep the plant available for readiness and the workers need experience building actual tanks, so they keep pumping them out.
Why keep IT around if everything is working right now? Because by the time you need them again, it will take months to get a new crew up to speed and catch up. In the meantime, the business will suffer.
If actual combat kicks up, then tanks start getting destroyed or break down very quickly. If it takes a year to restart production, it's a very real possibility to not have enough before they start leaving the factory again.
Did you know that the Chinese state-run media is now hyping up nukes in preparation for a potential US war over COVID? [0] If they are actually working on increasing their nuke stockpile, they are definitely also working on increasing total military readiness.
If the US and China got into a conventional war, how long do you think the current tank stockpile would last? The US isn't going to take that chance and the very fact that they have a constant stream of available tanks is one more reason for China to avoid war.
On the whole, I'd rather pay a few dollars to help deter war rather than spend a bunch of lives fighting that war and in case the deterrent fails, at least we are ready.
I don't doubt that what happened here was primarily the result of constellations of self-interest and incompetence, but do governments ever tend to change their public justifications for programs to be more accurate once the potential advantage to competing nations of having known about them ten or twenty years ago has faded away?
It makes me think of when people say that there's no sense in debating if a supreme court decision was correct, because the supreme court is the highest legal authority.
If they are correct by definition, then what are they doing to decide cases?
I would say that the purpose of something is what is proper or correct for it to do.
I think the slogan should not be taken literally and means more like "don't let the (possibly many-faceted and disputed) purpose of a system blind you to what it does".
The ability to "stealthily penetrate enemy airspace" is only temporary. As VHF radars improve and dual guidance missiles proliferate the F-35 will only be barely more stealthy than what came before it.
As it is right now Russian VHF radars can already guide dual-guidance missiles onto an F-35 close enough for them to detect the F-35 with their radars.
The Chinese and Russians have set up VHF radars in Syria and use them to observe Israeli F-35s every day too, so the fog of war in their favour.
The fact that stealth is only a temporary advantage has been known for a long time. It's part of the reason why the USSR decided not to pursue stealth aircraft development despite their lead on stealth design technology relative to the US - until the Soviet bureaucracy in it's classical ineptitude decided to declassify the algorithms they developed which Lockheed Martin happily adopted.
The F-35 was developed to be used until 2070. It was done so at a time where it was clear that stealth could not be relied on past 2025 at the most.
Many compromises were made in the pursuit of an advantage known to become greatly diminished 10 years into a 50 year lifespan. I don't think this can be written off by the arms race argument.
Do not conflate SAMs and integrated air defence systems. An IADS that cue in interceptors and guide missiles from various different platforms is massively more capable than an SAM alone and massively more survivable.
But that's considering the system outside of the doctrine. The purpose of these air defence systems isn't going to mount an eternal and fully insurmountable wall against air power.
Rather, the purpose is to greatly reduce the initial effectiveness of US airstrikes for hours to weeks until American military infrastructure can be struck.
Stealth does not increase the complexity of radars. They simply operate on a different wavelength. This took some engineering to increase the precision but there is no reason for a VHF radar to be any more complex than an X-band radar.
VHF radars in many ways are more practical than X-band radars because the lower frequency allows for more mobile and more survivable radar infrastructure. For example, Israel struck Chinese VHF antennas in Syria. But because the antennas were relatively cheap and decoupled from processing, the Chinese were able to swap out the antennas and repair their radar in a day or two, thousands of kilometers away.
Sorry, my previous comment was probably overly dismissive. I'd argue that developers and users of the F-35 already understand that stealth gains are not permanent. Countries and military organizations that purchased the F-35 definitely hope that the stealth advances last longer than 2025, but they will pay for improvements, new planes, and new tech long before 2070. It seems comically naïve for them to take claims of "2070" at face value without verifying, but that's just conjecture on my part.
Is it? The B-52 has now been in service for 69 years. 50 years is certainly not impossible.
The trade-offs made for stealth are beyond the plane itself, the entirety of US military strategy (and even diplomacy to some extent) is deeply affected by a stealth-focused air-power strategy.
As for stealth advances beyond 2025, I don't see it personally. As long as your doctrine requires you to fly your planes over enemy radars, there's not much you can when the wavelength of the enemy radar is bigger than most features in your plane. It's a physical limit as solid as conservation of energy.
I don't work in radar/military stealth, but my argument isn't that you're wrong about any of your technical claims. Rather, my argument is that the F-35 was designed and purchased by people who are at least as aware of those technical details as you are. This is an assumption, but I don't think it's a huge one. As a nitpick, the F-35 may still be operational in 50 years, just as the B-52 is operational today. The question is whether its stealth will still be useful, not whether it can get airborne. Nobody is using the B-52 for its stealth anymore (happy to be proven wrong), and the decision to lean on the F-35's stealth capabilities for 50 years won't simply be "The B-52 has been running for 69 years, nice!"
If stealth isn't very helpful, why would you fly the slow and expensive F-35? I don't really understand it.
I'm sure the people behind the F-35 were aware of these technical factors, maybe not the extent of Russian/Chinese investment though, but I don't think that their interests were anything beyond making as much money out of maintenance as possible.
As for the people making the purchases, many of them do think that the F-35 made the wrong tradeoffs and a lot of them are pushing for a plane that would fulfill the same role as the F-35 was designed for but with a very different set of tradeoffs.
They're now looking to retire the F-22 decades earlier than anticipated (announced a couple weeks ago).
The replacements will lose the tail fins giving much, much greater stealth capabilities. I suspect at that point that the F-35 will become far less desirable and will start retirement soon after.
If they were happy with the F-22, they'd pay to get the parts. I guess that when you pick a plane because of politics instead of capabilities, you get bitten (really should have gone with the YF-23 even if it didn't put jobs in as many states).
Stealth is NOT about becoming invisible. It's about reducing detection range until it's all but too late to intercept. Even worse, most of the ordinance those planes will be delivering will keep the plane many miles away when firing making interception time even shorter. The AGM-158 fires from around 230 miles away (575 miles for the ER variant). The S-400 can't even detect that far out let alone get enough resolution to react.
Physically smaller reflected cross-section means more stealth no matter the frequency. Giant flat panels radically increase the reflection from the side and marginally from the front.
VHF isn't magic. It's very imprecise to begin with. It's very vulnerable to jamming. It's super-vulnerable to weather patterns (a tropospheric ducting event could have most of the energy trapped in the wrong location). Longer wavelengths vs the X-band make it easier to absorb (E=hv). VHF installations are also very easy to target due to their size and massive power output trying to compensate for that E=hv problem.
Once you know a plane is somewhere within a few dozen miles, you have to send out fighters. They don't exactly have room for those large VHF arrays and those arrays aren't accurate enough to actually target. For that, they need to fall back on X-band, but that's the range that the stealth is optimized for. Once again, the stealth plane can see them from a long way off (maybe even passively) while they can't get their own lock until much closer which usually decides the winner.
We are no longer in the 1960s. VHF radars now use AESA and have home-on-jam capabilities. Missiles have dual or even triple guidance systems.
Cross section is not a number you can compute in a vacuum. The cross section is associated to the frequency of the wave.
It's not viable to use AGM-158s for everything. When running these missions you are racing against time, you need to deliver the most munitions as fast as you can without missing faster than the enemy can strike your supply lines, bases, and carriers.
"Somewhere withing a few dozen miles" is a wildly inaccurate characterization. VHF AESA radars are accurate to 350x100m, and this number is improving every year as radar processing techniques improve.
Yes, the fighter can detect the radar from farther than the radar can detect the plane. This is true of every single radar system. The issue is that the fighter can only fire blind weapons unless it moves away.
That's the issue with the AGM-158 and other standoff weapons - the radars it's targeting can pack up and leave in a minute. It will then hit an empty field. Meanwhile you're making your attacking fighter jets a lot less stealthy carrying it.
And 350m accuracy is more than enough for a huge tactical advantage. The stealth jet has to use its radars to lock onto the other fighter jet, while the defending jet can launch munitions without turning on its radar at all or until it is way too late.
They also can't pay to get the parts that easily. It's not how these kinds of projects work. The people that designed much of it are dead or retired and the production lines are closed. Planes have to get cannibalized sometimes. Opening the lines back up after they are closed can be extremely costly and technically difficult and can involve reverse engineering.
Longer wavelengths are actually harder to absorb. I don't know where you got that they are easier to absorb? You need a lot more material to absorb a wave of longer wavelength of the same material.
E=hv is the wrong equation, because the amplitude is not fixed - the power is fixed. Larger wavelengths means thicker elements that can carry much more power without running into cooling limitations.
VHF isn't magic. Stealth isn't magic either. You can't avoid scattering and diffraction, these are physical limits. They limit VHF radar accuracy too because of the basic Rayleigh scattering equation, but you can fix this by making your aperture larger and applying some clever processing algorithms. If you're a plane, the only solution is to become bigger. Which is much more difficult.
>As it is right now Russian VHF radars can already guide dual-guidance missiles onto an F-35 close enough for them to detect the F-35 with their radars.
At a range of 60km that means 350m inaccuracy in azimuth and 100m inaccuracy in range.
350m is within IR and optical range, so any IR-capable missile can be cued in. The 9M96 missiles are rumored to have IR/optical capability but this is just a rumor, while the 9M100 missiles do have that capability.
As for radar missiles, the F-35 has a minumum RCS of 0.0015 sqm. Being generous to the F-35 and saying it must be detected by 1km, it means that any radar capable of detecting a 1sqm target at a distance of 25km can detect and F-35 at a distance of 1km.
This does require estimation but 25km range against 1sqm target is realistic.
I think it's a bit more complex than that. This is the accuracy of a point detection. For a SAM system, you need to shoot the missile roughly where the plane is going - it's moving pretty fast. So your estimate of velocity will be vastly lower quality than the point estimate of position.
You also need to update the missile's course using updates on the plane's velocity changes - so again, you need even greater accuracy on the radar.
Finally, because it's all a lot more nebulous, it is easier for the plane to take evasive action. It's generally a lot easier to detect a radar / missile launch than it is to detect the airplane. With radar countermeasures in place, the SAM radar really has an uphill struggle to overcome.
I'm not saying it's not doable (though not too long ago I remember reading that these radars are just not accurate enough to guide a missile), merely that these dry numbers don't necessarily convey the full picture.
Not really. New AESA radars are able to home on countermeasures, so if the F-35 decides to use ECM or jamming, then all the better, the missile will be able to discriminate when it gets close.
The F-35 is going to be going at around 300m/s, and the time for the missile to get there from 60km away is going to be around 100s. You should be able to integrate position to get a +- 10% estimate of velocity with our 300m error, then. In reality a lot of the error isn't stochastic either so you can get a lower velocity error.
Again you don't need the radar to guide a missile. You just need to get the missile close enough for it to pick up the F-35.
If you read an article that said that the VHF radars can't guide the missiles, they are definitely right. But the Russians and Chinese don't plan on that. Their missiles now have on-board guidance, they just need to get close enough for their own guidance systems to pick up the target. That means that instead of needing 10m of accuracy, which I agree with those articles the VHF radars cannot do, you only need to get within a kilometer.
I don’t want to labour the point as I’m no expert, but is it enough to be close enough to the target and lock on? The rocket has some amount of kinetic energy for manoeuvering, and presumably less at the terminal stage. If the initial radar fix puts it in the wrong position/velocity relative to the target, can it make up for it with its own late lock-on?
I understood this is why you need that precise radar fix: you need a pretty good idea of the target trajectory so the chasing missile is not only in the right place, but also flying at an advantageous angle relative to its target.
As for on-missile guidance, I thought that was a thing since a long time ago? The radar guides initially, then the final stage is done by the rocket. Is there something newer/different now?
Until pretty recently, missile used semi-active guidance. Basically, they would have a receptor that would detect the radiation scattered back from radar. The issue in this case is that the signal would not be much more precise or even usable due to the low frequency. So active guidance fully from the missile is needed.
Ground based missiles are quite different from A2A missiles in that they are much larger and have much more kinetic energy to spare.
Maneuvering always kills kinetic energy though. So what these missiles do is that they gain altitude before maneuvering, reducing speed and drag, and once the maneuver is done (lock acquired), they maneuver and gain a lot of kinetic energy by coming back down.
There is basically zero chance a ground based missile fired from 50-60 km will lack energy even if it has to maneuver a few hundred meters to correct for inaccuracy.
Because neither Russia nor China are planning to use their stealth aircraft over the airspace of another superpower. Good luck fitting a meter-wave AESA on an aircraft.
Beyond that, neither Russia nor China are trading-off anywhere near as much as the US for stealth. Both of their designs are less stealthy but carry better weapons over a longer range with better kinematics at a lower cost.
Why does it matter whether you are over another superpower's land? As you said, these systems are deployed in Syria and anywhere else.
Besides, China is certainly designing their planes to be able to fight to US navy.
The fact of the matter is that if a country can afford it, they design stealth aircraft.
> Why does it matter whether you are over another superpower's land?
One of the fairly easy ways to defeat stealth is by operating your radar at a low frequency. As the wavelength becomes "much longer" than any characteristic dimension of the airplane, the shape of the airplane matters less and less and the wave will penetrate deeper and deeper layers of radar absorption material.
But there's no such thing as a free lunch.
The problem is that the resolution of your radar depends on the physical size of your antenna relative to the wavelength (either the diameter of the dish, or the spacing of the antenna elements in a multi-static or phased array). So low frequency = long wavelength = bad resolution. You know a plane is in your airspace, but not where in your airspace.
You can solve the resolution problem by installing a physically large antenna. The size of the antenna should be several times longer than the wavelength. That might mean having a single very large dish or it might mean coherent transmitters located hundreds or thousands of meters apart. Great, now we have defeated stealth and have high resolution.
But remember how we were talking about wavelengths much longer than the airplane? How do you carry an antenna that is several times longer than the wavelength for a wavelength that is several times longer than your airplane? I can think of one way: trail wires behind you--but that turns you into a flying bullseye. You might as well file a flight plan.
That creates an asymmetry: It's much easier for the side on the ground to get a good picture of what is going on in the air.
The systems are not fully deployed in Syria. Israel routinely flies F-16s in Syria without much of an issue.
They are in Syria in a pure intelligence capacity.
Beyond Russia and China (and possibly Venezuela), there are no fully operational VHF capable air defence systems
It's also incorrect to consider stealth as a yes/no. It's not a yes/no. It's a sliding scale with tradeoffs. Clearly China and Russia judged stealth to be much less important than the US did.
The USSR could definitely afford stealth aircraft and had all the necessary technology to make it before the US, yet they didn't, and for a reason.
As far as fighting the US Navy, the Chinese doctrine against the USN doesn't involve Chinese airplanes getting within VHF radar range of American large surface vessels before a crippling blow is already delivered.
The point about Syria is that if Russia and China want to fly over _any_ other country then they must assume that they will encounter VHF radar.
And if VHF radar does render stealth technology useless then any include it at all in their designs? Why not slide that scale to zero? Well, probably because there are benefits to stealth and VHF radar is not as easy or cheap as you believe it to be.
You can say that the F35 trades off too much and that a "less stealth" would be better. But that's fundamentally baseless speculation.
Russian and Chinese stealth fighter-interceptors are fundamentally based on air defense and area denial missions. You're exactly right, their main use case is not to fly over enemy countries as much as flying over friendly countries, the ocean, and their own soil.
Stealth is necessary for attacking, but not defending. Further, stealth is only necessary for attacking sophisticated enemies.
Russia and China have no plans to attack the US within the next few decades, so they continue to research, but not to implement. It also doesn't help that US radar is a couple generations ahead as well.
Their current interests involve countries where a fast, hard-hitting plane is just as good as a stealth plane, so they save money at every stage from design to building to cost per hour flown.
Stealth is just as useful for defending and for attacking, and arguably I'd say even more useful for defence because the attacker will never be able to field counter-stealth radars. Stealth when combined with counter-stealth radar on your home turf gives you a huge advantage as you now know a lot more about your enemy than your enemy knows about you. Non stealth aircraft plus counter stealth radar is a lot less of an advantage.
US VHF radar is likely not ahead at all. The US has never fielded a VHF radar, while the USSR and by extension Russia and China have done so since the 70s. The US has UHF radar and is definitely ahead in conventional radar though.
The interests of China and Russia do involve attacking sophisticated opponents such as Japan or Western Europe in order to destroy American infrastructure in a defensive war. It's just that instead of using stealth fighters to do so, they intend on using overwhelming numbers of missiles including hypersonic cruise missiles, of which the US doesn't even have a prototype yet.
These decisions weren't made in the last few years. They are tactical decisions as a matter of doctrine that were made in the late Soviet era. It's not a coincidence that these countries are ahead in counter stealth and ahead in hypersonics but behind in other things, they invested in what was most useful to fit their doctrine.
That's not what the F35 does. It is a strike fighter. It is meant to stealthily penetrate enemy airspace and strike targets, as well as survive air combat after its strikes make it abundantly clear that enemy airspace has been penetrated.
Airborne Observation and control is a job handled by AWACS and JSTARS. While an argument could certainly be made for a stealth JSTARS, that's not what the F35 was intended to be, nor what it is optimized for. JSTARS planes should be long endurance planes, not super maneuverable supersonic VTOL jets. A stealth JSTARS would resemble the B2, not the F22.
The F35 does have an impressive set of sensors and communications abilities, but that's simply a consequence of being a more recently developed aircraft. It's really not too hard to appear impressive when your competition was designed to use core memory. A purpose built drone controller would put it to shame however.
Why do the drones need to be controlled by a pilot who's already flying an aircraft? Couldn't a drone sensor platform perform the same task with remote operators?
At least one reason might be backup communication when jammed. Line of sight might allow for direct laser communication (either to the piloted plane or a nearby relay to retain some stealth) in the case of radio spectrum jamming.
Another might be latency, if under active control. I imagine the purpose of the F-35 as a drone platform is less about active control and more about being a coordinator node though.
> At least one reason might be backup communication when jammed. Line of sight might allow for direct laser communication (either to the piloted plane or a nearby relay to retain some stealth) in the case of radio spectrum jamming.
This is precisely why. Iran has shown that it can, on some level, interfere with long-range communications of drones. I'm sure the Chinese have even more such capability. Having a C&C platform within the same battlespace limits communication exposure.
The iterative & incremental or evolutionary model has been applied to aircraft for a few decades now. It can work, it lets you build a solid plan (but not necessarily full plan), build a working but incomplete system, and validate and verify your work as you progress.
F-35 was not agile in any sense, it was one of those. The agile work on the software side has been SAFe which is dogmatic, inflexible garbage. However even that was not originally the case, SAFe came much later after the more traditional (and closer to Waterfall) approach led to a clusterfuck of 24-hour a day development and testing to get the thing airborne.
I would think that would be more justification for the F-35 as a drone coordinator or controller. It might allow for alternative control mediums (direct or relayed laser, for example), even if maybe eventually only used to update the general mission parameters of the drone if it's controlling itself (i.e. abort, change target, etc).
I was once told many years ago that the reason fighter aircraft have pilots is as backup insurance to bring the multi million dollar aircraft home if the computers stop working. It was meant as a joke at the time (or maybe not?) but it may be truer today (as long as the fly-by-wire is still working). On the other hand todays fighters are not stable without computer control, so maybe it is no longer true at all, and if the computers die the aircraft can't be flown?
Drones are certainly cheaper and more capable without having a pilot to protect and whose presence limits the max acceleration. However telemetry links and autonomous decision making have limitations also. When drones start taking down F-35's is probably when pilots and F-35's become obsolete.
"Survivability and lethality in a contested environment now have more to do with stealth, sensors, data fusion, and the ability to network, than just pure turn performance. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to quantify these capabilities in an unclassified environment."
This makes me think about naval development before WW2. Everyone had lots of ideas about battleships and how to pack more guns onto a faster ship and all these other things, but lots of people missed how aircraft carriers would change things. I'm sure the next war will be different. The obvious development is drones, but I also think about the plotline of the second Battlestar Galactica series where the protagonists only initially survive because their ship eschews network connections. It seems like we aren't quite sure what future battles will look like and the US is making a guess in the form of a $1.5tn plane project.
Its a well known proverb, "Generals always fight the last war" going back to at least 1934 as a criticism of military doctrine. And while it is true, it is also inevitable because nobody wants to lose knowing that the enemy did X in the last war and they didn't bother to develop a countermeasure Y to defend against that.
That said, there are always new things to try on the battlefield as well and they are. Stealth bombers in Serbia, "three layer" attacks (top B-52, middle F-18, low Tomahawk) or any of the other tactics that appear as "new" in a conflict and then become "Yeah, they always do that." One of my classmates in high school went to West Point and at a reunion we were talking about the difference between engineering school and military school. There is a very deep base of knowledge there. And while it wasn't my destiny to go that path (even though the Marines tried really really hard to recruit me :-)) I recognize that fighting effectively is just as complex and nuanced as making a circuit that has 160 dB of noise margin.
What has been interesting about F-35 project is what was called out in the article, developed during unprecedented visibility into the unvarnished ups and downs. And there are always people who exploit that to paint a narrative of incompetence and gross negligence. The real test though is when they go to war and whether or not they provide the capabilities that overcome the enemy or not right?
I'm okay with not ever needing to find out :-) I think there is a Sun Tzu saying about not fighting a war is the best way to win it. But yeah, it would be disappointing to need it and have it not meet expectations. That is always true of course.
I believe the last time that happened was with the F-111.
I think it will be a combination of drones and cyber/electronic warfare capabilities.
Drones have already shown their potential in the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict recently. From large swarm based attacks to kamikaze mode, I think drones should overtake frontline fighter planes in capability soon.
Suicide drones (aka cruise missiles) have been on the forefront of any first strike mission the US have conducted in modern times with manned planes being relegated solely to roles where they need to drop larger quantities of cheap munitions or fly Close Air Support missions.
This of cause meant that the navy gradually took over the "first strike"/"suppression of air defenses" from the Air Force and the F-35 was born as an attempt to bring that back into the ranks of the Air force as stealth theoretically allows the F-35 to almost compete with submarine launched cruise missiles.
The problem is that the F-35 is way to expensive/fragile for the CAS role and might be so expensive to operate that it begins to make sense to depend entirely on missiles and drones for pre-planned strike missions, making it kind of the modern equivalent of post dreadnought battleships.
I think it will all come down to one plucky and very clever outsider who stumbled into the situation by accident. Oh yeah, and the girl who needs rescued from the system against which she has rebelled.
The thing is, if increased cyberwarfare capabilities allow you to exploit some large percentage of the drone force, then that would leave an extremely large gap to exploit by the enemy. If you can't fly drones because you risk them being crashed (or worse, turned on you), then you need some backup force. That might be real pilots, or it might be non-remote-controlled drones, or some combination of things like that.
> the protagonists only initially survive because their ship eschews network connections.
I always wonder if the next big military development is actually going to involve more technology, rather than less. America’s main military weakness is that it is very reliant on things like GPS or connections to other devices. What’s to stop a foe from developing jamming tech and counteracting the US’ lead? From what family tells me, the army still teaches people to dig trenches and use old-fashioned maps (among other things) just in case.
As a former Marine (07-12), yes, they do still teach basic land navigation using a map and compass.
However, the skills are not reinforced or even practiced really. It is not as easy to conduct EW against GPS as you would think, at least not military specific capabilities. There are contingencies and capabilities in place for that.
Bigger concern would be the GPS satellites being destroyed altogether.
Which is also why when you hear news reports about China or the US destroying their own satellites using ship launched missiles, the message intended to be conveyed is more than meets the eye.
Those demonstrations are really about telegraphing to adversaries what you can/would do in the event of a conflict.
I’m not very familiar with the technologies you linked. However, bear in mind the military operates at a scale that’s hard to fathom. Fielding new capabilities requires substantial level of effort when it’s military wide. Aside from that, many times they already have some tricks up their sleeves if push ever came to shove.
Anyways, what I linked to are the key components for inertial navigation systems. Not all of them together, but several options. The first is that chip-scale 'atomic clock' thing from microsemi, a very precise time source. Something like that would be needed in every case.
The others are different possible paths to precisely measure (speed of) movement and (change of) orientation. Based on those you could construct inertial navigation 'on the go' in small form factors. Not smartphone-like small at the moment, but close to.
Regarding the scale of fielding/roll-out, ask Apple, Honeywell, or someone like that...
Thinking about it, maybe that is why 'the others' play at shooting things in orbit because they allready have 'Mao's mighty map' available? Who knows? Whatever. The end of GPS/GNSS wouldn't necessarily have to be 'the end of navigation'.
1. Ship- and ground-based transmitters are ridiculously powerful, and use lots of jamming-resistant tech like spread spectrum.
2. Viewed at the right wavelengths, jammers are like looking at Las Vegas at night. They’re very visible, and attractive targets for RF-seeking munitions.
> 2. Viewed at the right wavelengths, jammers are like looking at Las Vegas at night. They’re very visible, and attractive targets for RF-seeking munitions.
This may not be super intuitive until you start playing around with the technology and understand what’s possible with phased array antennas. I’m fairly confident that somewhere in the planet is an integrated, real-time, broadband view of RF illumination over the surface of the earth.
Yeah, your missiles don't need fancy GPS guidance when their programming can basically just be "travel towards the radio jamming signal and explode on impact"
With the advent of UAVs (ex: from the ordinary to the RQ-170 and beyond), hypersonic capabilities (ex: SCRAMJET), and even action in space (ex: destruction of satellites enabling GPS & remote communication, to severely limit an opponent’s capabilities), I have to agree.
I imagine the “next war” will be one with severe consequences, perhaps through means which the general public is not even aware of, despite those known & listed above.
If scifi has taught us anything it's that destabilizing currency, hacking infrastructure, biological warfare & moon trebuchets are the next/current stages in waging war if you're attacking a nation with unmatched stockpiles of nuclear and conventional weapons.
> The last major reason the F-35 has seen so much criticism is that it was the first jet developed in the social media age. The paradigm shift, cost, and early problems, coupled with concurrency, led to an explosion of negative social media that grew into mainstream media coverage.
Cost buried second in a list of factors contributing to…social media as major factor?
If it weren't for those pesky kids on the Internet!
This is like saying it got a lot of bad press because everyone noticed how bad it was. We never got to complain about top secret projects because we didn't know what they cost.
Assuming you think the USA should have the "most powerful military" (whether this should be the aim or not is a separate question); how much money is required to achieve that goal and what are your justifications for that amount?
Without answering that question, how can you say that the F35 costs too much? Personally i have no idea what the true US military budget should be and I'm not even sure how you'd begin to calculate that as a civilian. One of the few things that gets passed in a bi-partisan manner by the US legislature is the military budget (apparently for 59 straight years).
It's easy to look at a big number and say it's bad. But it's also easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. The average FAANG team probably costs their company multiple millions of $ per year in just employee costs. It's easy to parachute in and say that you could do it for less, and you'd probably be right. But that also loses track of bigger picture.
>Without answering that question, how can you say that the F35 costs too much?
How much is too much to spend on bayonets pre WW1 to face the machine gun?
The F-35 is a 1.5 trillion dollar bet on human dog fighters who cant execute high G maneuvers in a world
dominated by fleets of cheap, disposable, AI piloted drones that can. Nagorno-Karabakh and Yemen have already shown a taste of this.
>One of the few things that gets passed in a bi-partisan manner by the US legislature is the military budget
The F35 is curious in this regard because it is so heavily criticized by Congress yet still funded.
This is coz Lockheed distributed F35 jobs across the country on the basis of congressional votes. A vote to kill the F35 is thus a vote to destroy jobs in your district. Lockheed engineered the world's most unkillable military program and then milked it to kingdom come. The shareholders are certainly happy.
This is, sadly, the most impressive form of F35 engineering.
We will look back on many things after the next war and shake our collective heads but I suspect the most glaring and shameful error will be our willingness to indulge corporate profit margins at the expense of the body politic.
>The F-35 is a 1.5 trillion dollar bet on human dog fighters who cant execute high G maneuvers in a world dominated by fleets of cheap, disposable, AI piloted drones that can.
"High G maneuvers" is a meaningless capability. Each of those "AI piloted drones" will require a support radar (putting the radar on each drone will make them cost $10+ million a pop, eliminating the throwaway strategy), if a F-35 can destroy the support radar you've just lost all your drones because they cannot detect the F-35.
If a F-35 costs more than several 10 millions, throwing several 10+ million radar equipped drones to a F-35 fleet is now a viable and cost effective strategy.
The current military is like google saying: We're number 1 in browsers and search, but we need to spend 80% of our profits to ensure we stay ahead of the game. We also need to spend more than the 3x the next 10 competitors combined, or we might as well quit.
F35 is good, but the cost of an adversaries old planes times the number of air-to-air a 35f can carry is significantly less then the cost of an F35, it may not be the most cost efficient way to go about fighting your enemy.
War is about winning the economics. Can your economy and industrial output out pace what your enemy destroys, vs your opponents output and what you can destroy.
Even in peace time, this is a major factor. Keeping up with the US on military spending bankrupted the USSR, at the same time as Japanese and German industries where able to leap ahead of both, since they didn't spend on military post WW2.
The US may want to have a good Military to defend against China, but if it spends too much, and not enough on civil industry (and education) China may crush the US economically, without firing a bullet.
You can have the most Nukes of any country, but at some point, you have enough nukes to do anything you want, and after that, any nuke you add is a drain on your economy. Having the "best" or "most" weapons isn't the same as having the right allocation of resources.
> You can have the most Nukes of any country, but at some point, you have enough nukes to do anything you want, and after that, any nuke you add is a drain on your economy.
If we have enough nukes to do whatever we want (we definitely have more than enough nukes), then it follows that we do not need giant conventional forces, right? We are already invulnerable to invasion/defensive war because of the nukes/geography so what is the point of conventional forces from a defensive standpoint?
This means the F-35 is about offense and conflict escalation - about increasing the reach/power of the American empire. The most cost effective strategy for a nation that is not an empire in this situation would be to drastically downsize conventional forces since we already have a deterrent. Expensive new fighter jets are no longer needed for defense.
So I see the F-35 program not as a counter against the U.S.’s enemies, but as a way to more effectively attack other countries.
Not entirely. One could imagine that China would be willing to invade Taiwan, if the only possible response from the US would be nuclear strike. The US would not go to nuclear war over Taiwan and the Chinese know it.
The F35 is able to defend US strategic interests in Taiwan (mainly chip making) in a way nukes cant. On the other hand The budget of the F35 could buy TSMC 3 times over, so it may not be the most cost effective way to defend your interests...
I worry the author suffers from confirmation bias.
Does the bad press miss the point?
So much that "point" is the cost per aircraft is nutso for what you get. Something that's stealth, dogfight, and close-in air support.
And perhaps the article is right, the stealth is fantastic. Lets you fire without being seen. But after you've fired it, then what? Now everyone knows where you are and a potential dog fight is coming.
It's well known its dog fighting is weak even compared to other older fighters, but maybe it's also fair to say dog fighting is a thing of the past[1].
Being a stealth mobile missile battery... Is a good long range offense a strong defense? These kinds of things can only be tested, so... jury's still out.
My personal criticism comes in the close in air support, what good is all that money that was dumped into stealth doing as it just hovers above in plain view/access? Also, it does a poor job at flying slowly. It's just not specialized in it.
Time will tell if the price tag is even close to being justified, but I'm still a strong skeptic.
> Also, it does a poor job at flying slowly. It's just not specialized in it.
That doesn't seem like a role the Air Force is very concerned about. The USAF has been trying to kill off their best low and slow flying close air support aircraft for awhile now. [0] The planes are made to lay down hell [1] and take a beating that would destroy just about any other aircraft [2], and the ground troops love it. [3]
Supposedly the F-35 is going to fill the role of the A-10 in the future but I just don't see how that's possible.
The price point argument holds little merit considering that the A variants are cheaper than modernized F-16's. At best you can claim the flight hour costs are much worse, and that's a good point but unfortunately that is the cost of stealth.
>It's well known its dog fighting is weak even compared to other older fighters
It's more nimble than a combat loaded F-16. Sure it isn't super maneuverable like a F-22, but it actually is able to do maneuvers which other planes need thrust vectoring to achieve.
>And perhaps the article is right, the stealth is fantastic. Lets you fire without being seen. But after you've fired it, then what? Now everyone knows where you are and a potential dog fight is coming.
You misunderstanding the nature of the F-35's first shot advantage. It is not merely remaining unseen and firing first. Even if a AWAC's or L band ground radar directs you toward a F-35 it will be the first to fire because it can get a firing solution on a 4th gen before it can get one on the F-35.
Furthermore, it's also not a forgone conclusion that an adversary would know where it is after firing. A F-35 pilot could have moved serious distance in that time from whatever heading the missile originated. With stealth the pace of combat is dictated by the pilot who actually has situational awareness.
> My personal criticism comes in the close in air support, what good is all that money that was dumped into stealth doing as it just hovers above in plain view/access? Also, it does a poor job at flying slowly. It's just not specialized in it.
This is probably a valid criticism, but aren't the current generation of military helicopters simply way better than jets could ever be at this? And they have the advantage that they can land and evacuate people.
There are actually better fighters on a $/hr basis. The A-10 is a bit pricy to maintain. The A-29, propeller plane, holds a promising position[0].
Helicopters tend not to be the platform of choice, but I'm not well versed enough to know why. Many times it comes down to which branch flies helicopters vs fixed winged aircraft. And simply that branch doesn't have the "rights" to fly the right kind of craft given the mission... weird stuff.
An apache helicopter has a cruising speed of around 165mph while the A-10 has a cruising speed of around 340mph.
The army had a helicopter design (Lockheed AH-56 Cheyenne) back in the 1960s that in it's final prototype tests was going 255mph. The Air Force got upset and politics killed it off. The Lockheed/Sikorsky S-97 Raider seems to use a lot of the same design ideas (pusher propeller, fixed rotor, small wings) and is very fast (250mph cruise speed), but almost 50 years later. Maybe politics are less of an issue this time around.
I suppose the v22 Osprey could play the CAS role, but it seems much too expensive. You can buy almost 6 Apache helicopters for the cost of one v22 (13m vs 75m per unit). That cost is an issue because -- adjusted for inflation -- the A-10 cost 16.5m per unit and can withstand much more damage before needing replacement.
No it is not. The poster is appears to mistakenly believe that F-35B's would hover for purposes of close air support. It would never do that because the VTOL capabilities of the F-35B are exclusively for short range take off and landing.
The US has around 10 Amphibious Assault Ship which now thanks to the F-35B's are among some of the most capable carriers in the world. Factor in the ability to take off from rapidly constructed airbases throughout the pacific and the F-35B is one of the most dangerous airplanes currently in production. A squadron could sneak up from completely unexpected directions from bases which had not existed in your satellite reconnaissance just a day ago.
Yes, a lot of people forget that the F-35B dropped the cost of building a "carrier" equipped with supersonic jets by an order of magnitude. You can use the saved money to buy a lot of F-35Bs.
This article contains no new information, and could be accurately summarized "guy whose boss spent $1 trillion on the F-35 says the F-35 is a good idea."
He also calls it a supersonic fighter, which isn't true. The coatings cannot withstand sustained periods of supersonic flight.
And also, the author is an operator, but not necessarily someone involved in the engineering or acquisition.
Nonetheless (and I say this as someone who was severely soured by my involvement with the program), people get tribal as to whether the JSF (provides an unmatched capability) XOR (is the zenith of acquisition malpractice). It's not either/or; both are simultaneously true.
No one in DoD R&D/acquisition fails to appreciate how expensive these things are and this realization is certainly driving long-term decision-making.
"Just imagine how the F-16 program would have been covered today when they were crashing an aircraft almost every two weeks during several years in the ’80s and ’90s (the F-35, by comparison, has only crashed 3 times in over a decade of flying)."
I had no idea that an F-16 crashed roughly every two weeks while being debugged. I imagine I'm not the only one.
Most supersonic fighters can only do so for very short amounts of time. The F-22 is the only operational fighter with real sustained supersonic capabilities.
That is false. Maybe you mean "only operational US fighter".
The difference between the F-18 and the F-35 is that while the F-18 might need extended maintenance after prolonged (read : more than a minute) supersonic flight, the F-35 may suffer catastrophic coating degradation that may be fatal in the same flight.
As for other operational fighters, the Dassault Rafale can supercruise indefinitely the Gripen indefinitely at Mach 1.3, the Eurofighter indefinitely at Mach 1.8, the Sukhoi-35 can if outfitted with the AL-41F-1S (meaning, some operational Su-35s can supercruise indefinitely, but not all). The F-22 is far from the only one.
That is incorrect. They can all supercruise with an air-superiority loadout except possibly for the Gripen where we are not certain, for over 20 minutes.
"Supercruising" means flying supersonically for at least 20 minutes. In a fighter aircraft the salient requirement is often not the time that the plane can fly supersonically but the distance. The Mig-31 has a combat radius of 450 miles at Mach-2.35 and a top speed of Mach-2.85.
If you need a fighter to fly 500 km and engage a target, why wait 25 minutes for a super-cruising mach-1 fighter when a Mach-2.3 craft without super cruise can get there in 10 minutes?
That's absolutely true, and it definitely matters when you're designing something that will see productive use for the benefit of the people paying for it, but it's not obvious that that's the case here.
Not really. The main limiter for supercruise in the F-35 is sub-par stealth coatings that unlike the F-22's cannot handle the heat. Otherwise it could supercruise, maybe with some engine tweaks.
You can see it that way. It's really more politics than cost in this case though.
From an engineering perspective local political optimization of a national project is what I would call ineptitude. But you can call it by another name.
That's a little disingenuous. For other platforms, the constraint is fuel. Afterburner guzzles fuel. Only F-35 requires expensive and protracted maintenance after supersonic flight.
Which is another area where F-35 is lacking: range. Without external fuel tanks it can't fight in the Pacific.
You do, but the closer they get to the target the greater the likelihood they have of getting sunk. The likelihood approaches 100% as the distance to the target is reduced.
Not necessarily, the US has land bases in the pacific.
If you're going to base your availability of air power, which is the main determinant of success given the American military doctrine, on having a secure and available carrier at all times, you may be putting yourself in a bind when anti-ship weapons start proliferating and you become forced to increase distance between those defenses and your carriers.
My point is that if there's a war with China then the US will seek to contain it to the East China Sea. Kadena is 700km to the Chinese mainland, which is well within the F-35's combat range of 1000km.
The issue with Kadena is that it now become too close to the Chinese mainland, enough that it could be disabled by missile strikes.
The best thing that could be done would be to have enough range to be able to fly out from a carrier that's relatively safe from antiship missiles. But that may well become impossible anyways as antiship missile evolve.
It IS a very capable war-plane for many of its roles. Much more capable then the harrier and with many capabilities that the F-16 & F-18 lack. It has different solutions to the problems it faces though.
Many of these new approaches to old problems that are arguable. Is a stealthy approach (F-35) more effective then raw manoeuvrability (F-16) in fighter vs fighter combat? Probably if the stealth can be maintained. Is high flying precisions guided weaponry as better then what an A-10 can do in close air support? Maybe? These points will be argued by airchair air marshals until we have another big war to "answer" the question.
But the F-35 has failed at being the cheap general purpose aircraft it was promised to be. It has been earmarked to replace the F-16 in its entirety, as the low end fighter to the F-22 raptor as the high end. This was one of the reasons the F-35 has a single engine. Recent moves are to make the F-35 the new high end fighter w/ a new lightweight fighter the low end that can be cheap enough to fulfil this need.
This reads like marketing. A pilot should be able to speak to problems with more nuance than that. This is just too awkward and too general to be taken seriously.
Slightly related, but there's a great hour-long lecture [1] by Colonel Randy Gordon, who's a test pilot, discussing the flight control systems for the F-22, contrasting it (a bit) to other jets, and even to a Cessna. He talks about the tradeoffs between human factors, mechanical engineering, software engineering, and shows how the software systems help the pilot.
It's well worth the hour if you're an aviation geek.
I think the point of the F-35 is it's one jet that can do it all. Maybe it isn't as stealthy or fast as an SR-71, and maybe it's VTOL isn't as good as a Huey, and maybe it's sensors aren't as good as a high-latitude balloon or satellite, but that's the point. It's versatile, so you can use it as the bread and butter and deploy various more specialized equipment if needed. The bad press about the jet is stuck in a 1980s mindset - no, not even that, they're stuck in a 1960s futurist vision of the 1980s that never came to pass (you can count on one hand how many "dogfights" there were in the 1980s, and they were pretty meager examples of such).
> I think the point of the F-35 is it's one jet that can do it all.
That was the idea, but it is also why the program has performed so poorly on cost, timeliness, and capability.
The F-35 was supposed to achieve 80% parts commonality among the three variants. This would have delivered massive cost savings. Instead, the reality is less than 25% parts commonality. Also, the compromises made to accommodate all three requirement sets means the F-35 has worse aerodynamic performance and a worse radar cross section than it otherwise would've had if the Air Force and Navy could've had their own dedicated air frames from the start.
The much lower degree of parts-sharing wouldn't be so bad, except that the JSF program eschewed a lot of real world testing in lieu of computer simulation.
And to make matters worse they employed "concurrent development", which meant that production were getting made while the testing phase was still in progress. The result was that as problems were uncovered, expensive retrofits had to be applied to all the airframes that had already been produced.
In a more traditional development strategy, the vast majority of teething issues would've been found before series production began. But concurrent development was used to try to speed up the timeline, but also make it more difficult to cancel the program.
The F-35 has a lot of capabilities but it is fundamentally compromised because of the attempt to make it a jack of all trades. It has had an extremely long gestation period, very high development costs, very high operational costs, and compromised performance on several fronts. Had the DoD at least split off the USMC STOVL requirement it seems like this project would've gone a lot better.
That is how it was sold, for sure. Unfortunately now it has become 3 jets, that can't do it all (at this point). There was supposed to be > 70% commonality, but currently less than 25%. It can't do interdiction, doesn't have loiter time & is ordnance poor wrt. current platforms, is not a great interceptor (no supercruise launch). It is a significant advancement in sensor technology and integration, for sure. The reduction in type number, and the suggestion of the NGAD (both Air Force and Navy, which suggests that they think that joint acquisition is not the way to go next time) makes me think of the classic procurement death cycle. Very happy to be proven wrong on all of this.
The argument is that the result of that is a plane that isn't good enough for any of those roles, but is more expensive than dedicated alternatives. It will lose a fight against a true 5th generation air-superiority stealth fighter (an F-22 or equivalent). It can't support ground troops as well as an A-10. It is a more capable replacement for the Harrier (though many are sceptical that the USMC doctrine around that has ever made sense), and maybe it's good enough to replace the F-16, but it's supposed to replace all four of these (and will cost more to boot).
Well, the F-22 has been in service for over 15 years. The J-20 is probably not quite an equivalent, but I wouldn't want to count on that. Su-57 numbers might be too small to matter, but again do you want to count on that? The F-35 isn't equipped to fight against a peer adversary, so you're essentially relying on the geopolitical situation to continue to be that there isn't one.
Everything he says could be true, but still miss the point.
The actual point is that we are absolutely stuck with the F-35, so had better make it good--or at least take up thinking it's good, where we can't.
It is not correct to compare it to an F-16. It needs to be compared to a whole fleet of aircraft, because it costs as much as much as a fleet. Could it take on 8 F-16s at once?
It is not correct to compare it to an F-16 because you can afford to fly your plentiful F-16s in harm's way, but have to keep your paltry few F-35s a hundred miles back, out of any possibility of danger.
The reason we are stuck with the F-35, despite its still suffering over 600 class-A design flaws (each risks loss of airframe), is that it is built in 48 states. To kill it you would need to get senators from 24 of those states, and the other two besides, to vote against it. It could explode every time the gear doors shut, and we would still be stuck with it, and they know. Be glad it can take off and land.
> When the F-35 debuted, it was inferior to the F-16 and other 4th generation aircraft. However, its potential has been steadily unlocked by the engineers, and several years ago, it surpassed the F-16’s capability.
Sounds like the national defense equivalent of rewriting your website from scratch in $LATEST_WEBSHIT_FRAMEWORK. Sure, it's a worse product, but just imagine how great it _could_ be if we halt development of the working version and spend a trillion dollars making the new one work. See? It's better! And the customer is paying hand over fist, so everyone wins.
>>>Sounds like the national defense equivalent of rewriting your website from scratch in $LATEST_WEBSHIT_FRAMEWORK. Sure, it's a worse product, but just imagine how great it _could_ be if we halt development of the working version and spend a trillion dollars making the new one work.
And eventually the Air Force came to its senses, accepted the "pull request" for upgrades on its big workhorse F-15 "library"....and now we are getting the awesome F-15EX. Something we should have been working on before they even cancelled the F-22.
This is why I like the Russian approach to military R&D: they do a small number of cutting-edge products to keep their engineers employed and their tech as current as possible given their constraints, but the bulk of their actual inventory is continuous refinements of solid legacy systems, tweaked and rolled out at fairly low cost.
Su-27 -> Su-30 -> Su-34 and 35 (honestly even the Su-57 planform is clearly an extension of this airframe if you look at it closely)
T-72 -> T-90 -> latest upgrade packages for both (T-72B3M and T-90M Breakthrough-3)
Japan is denying that they have tightened the requirements for scrambling fighters against Chinese planes on course to enter Japanese airspace since they deployed F-35[1].
I imagine that a Chinese fighter probably costs a lot less to get into the air than an F-35 does. The airframe and engines might not have a higher MTBF than F-35 (or maybe they do) but they are certainly cheaper and easier to replace, regardless.
There's an obvious economic and industrial capability question to all of this. A player with cheap planes can erode the benefits of the technologically superior one by simply encouraging them to be used more, or forcing the decision to not use them for fear of stretching supply lines... Thus reducing the required response time when it's decided to actually deploy the expensive weapon.
> The last major reason the F-35 has seen so much criticism is that it was the first jet developed in the social media age. The paradigm shift, cost, and early problems, coupled with concurrency, led to an explosion of negative social media that grew into mainstream media coverage.
Whether the F-35 will be successful or not does not matter whether there are armchair journalists or mainstream reporters covering the project, but in this case we can enjoy the increased accountability. This should be seen as a positive effect of social media, if anything.
This had me wondering how many mistakes in previous projects were smoothed over by clever marketing, and how many are being exposed now. Does social media make it easier or harder for the general public to get accurate information on this sort of thing?
The author mentions the comms and sensors being the new killer feature, putting beside stealth can better sensing and interconnect not be retrofitted to existing aircraft? Why do you need to design a new airframe around better optics?
Good question! A few reasons. Weight and balance is super important so anything you add means something else needs to be added or balanced. Power requirements are also a problem. More electronics means more power maybe means new engines. Maybe that all means more weight, so you need to reinforce the structure. Which means you're heavier and need a better engine. Etc. Sensors can't just be installed, if you need to drill holes and break pressure bulkheads.
Sexy URL, sucks for you if anyone actually clicks it and/or examines your profile as a "Defense industry consultant".
Just to be clear, your answer as someone invested in the defense industry to the question of "What military role does the F-35 fill in the modern world that unmanned drones can't?" is to say:
>A mission flown for the purpose of detecting targets and coordinating or performing attack or reconnaissance on those targets. Strike coordination and reconnaissance missions are flown in a specific geographic area and are an element of the command and control interface to coordinate multiple flights, detect and attack targets, neutralize enemy air defenses and provide battle damage assessment
Forgive my ignorance, but are you saying that we basically need a trillion-dollar endeavor to develop manned fighters which have just barely caught up to the existing technology to go pick fights abroad that we could have already been doing?
What new threat are we facing here, other than a slowing of contractual dollars?
You're conflating a lot of different things in your response.
The F-35, as a low-observable, sensor-linked, MANNED platform, has an important role to play for striking targets in a jammed, high-threat environment. That's all I was saying. I'm not defending the PRICETAG of this ridiculously-expensive and (IMO) poorly-managed boondoggle, just the unique capabilities of the platform. I think the US procurement system in the 21st century is badly broken and has probably contributed to an erosion of our overall military overmatch. I hate gold-plated profiteering junk and argue that hard, realistic training + rugged, simple tech will deliver an economically-viable force that punches above its weight. It's like the US learned all of the WRONG lessons from the WW2 German mil-industrial complex. But my solutions aren't sexy, and definitely aren't a license to print money. Probably why my personal interest is in teaching the militaries of developing economies how to "level up" their capabilities quickly without breaking the bank.
Stealth technology aside, there is the question of why the new avionics technology wasn't retrofitted to existing airframes first to limit development risks and control costs.
The concurrency is a major reason for massive cost overruns. If you're building production aircraft before the testing and evaluation phase is done with prototypes, every time you find a major issue you have to retrofit dozens or even hundreds of planes.
But, like a lot of things with the JSF program, concurrency made it much more difficult to cancel. Sunk costs and all that.
I think it’s because the Raptors are just too advanced. They would beat out F-35’s pretty easily with their superior speed, climb, and stealth.
However it’s pointless to keep making them since adversaries aren’t close to competing with it yet and the next best thing is the F-35 which is far cheaper to produce.
I’ve heard F-22 can do things even many of the pilots of them aren’t necessarily aware of as their training is reduced to omit certain highly classified aspects.
Today? Nobody. In 2003? Iraq....and shitting on the Iraqi military with overwhelming air power made the ground war 10x easier...demonstrated twice. In less than 10 years, we quite possibly could be in an air war with China over Taiwan. We can't tear down and stand up military hardware like AWS VMs. The lead times for a viable, robust capability are sadly on the order of 2 decades. For China I'd argue it's maybe half of that... Our procurement process is screwed, and I'm not convinced most of it can be chalked up to "modern tech is complex".
While I don't doubt that it is better to fly than the F-16, so would every other plane we would have developed instead of this nightmare. I also am worried that it will be obsoleted with the development of advanced military drones. Why risk a human life when you can just send a robot to the battlefield instead?