Comment by gvb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gvb | Hacker News Reader

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Two quotes:

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.

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.

Hmmm...this analogy fell apart.

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.

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.

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.

Also, IANA expert but I think carriers today only make sense against pre-missile and pre-jet militaries.

The Falklands war suggests otherwise. The Argentines had the most advanced weapons the French would sell them.

>> 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.

Defense contractors need fighter jets. Drones are too cheap.

https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/cheap-drones/

How many drones would it take to get $500 billion into the bank accounts of defense contractors?

At a guess, enough drones to blot out the sun. Give each infantry fire team its own drone, maybe? :P

"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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_CF-105_Arrow

Many Canadian aerospace engineers went to work for NASA on the Apollo program.

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.

> 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.

> 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...

That doesn't at all explain why you think the US strategy of CAS is inferior to the Russian approach.

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 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.

When Reaper drones cost $15M and an F-35 costs $200M, it sure seems like cranking out drones would be a reasonable tactic.

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.)

The navy tried to pull out of the program at one point, Robert Gates yanked the leash hard to keep them in line.

Interesting. Where did you learn this?

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.

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.

So glad I finally got out of that industry!

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