That being said, with all the problems the F-35 has, much like the Eurofighter before it, it might be no match for what another advanced economy could produce.
Harder to jam a human sitting in a plane.
And before someone chimes in about drone fighters, that's a good 20+ years out.
If you try to build drone with all of features of F-35, you may get even more expensive project.
https://russia-insider.com/en/putin-stunner-3-dagger-invinci...
There are a number of reasons to believe that the future of warfare will look much more like Syria, i.e. states implode from within and then break apart into a number of warring factions, each fighting over territory & resources within the carcass of the state. Actually, most of the bloodiest 20th century conflicts were of this type (eg. Russian & Chinese civil wars, Rwandan genocide & Congo Wars, civil wars in Nigeria/Sudan/Ethiopia), and historically the highest death tolls have usually occurred in civil wars where an empire breaks up or in conquests when a much more developed power invades a less-developed power (eg. Mongol conquests or European conquest of America).
WW2 was a historical anomaly in that it was fought between developed nations. It's an anomaly we pay a lot of attention to, though, because it led to the current international system of American hegemony and history tends to get written by the victors.
A bunch of Syrians (peacefully) protested Assad's power. He started killing people. The protests stayed peaceful for months, but eventually, the protesters got tired of getting killed, and the violence turned into a civil war. That wasn't "induced" by the US.
> Nobody disputes that...
False.
Because major historical powers like Rome, China, Mayans, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Macedonia, France, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, Britain never fought any wars against other powers that were at their same level of development. Oh, wait, all of them did.
The anomaly is the past two centuries or so, which have been the most peaceful times on record, particularly between major powers. (Since the Napoleonic Wars, the sum total is Crimean War, Mexican-American War, Austro-Prussian War, Franco-Prussian War, Spanish-American War, Russo-Japanese War, World War I, Russian Civil War, World War II [noting that there's a lot of related conflicts getting summed up here], Korean War, maybe War of the Pacific and the Russo-Turkish Wars). Compare that to the Early Modern, which is replete with constant conflict on Europe: 18th century alone has Great Northern War, War of Spanish Succession, War of Austrian Succession, Seven Years' War, American Revolution, and the French Revolutionary Wars, all of which were far nastier than the brief wars in the 19th century (save the American Civil War and the Napoleonic Wars).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll
Categorized into great power wars (between well-defined states of roughly equal power levels), civil wars (where a single state breaks up into multiple factions that then fight each other), rebellions (where a state breaks up, but into an asymmetric power balance between one province and the rest of the state), and conquests (where a much more developed power - at least in terms of military technology - invades and destroys a less-developed one) and ordered by death toll, you have:
WW2 (great power)
Mongol conquests (conquest)
Three Kingdoms war (civil)
Qing conquest of Ming (rebellion, against backdrop of civil)
Spanish conquest of Aztecs (conquest)
Taiping rebellion (rebellion)
Second Sino-Japanese war (great power, but against the backdrop of the Chinese Civil War)
An-Lushan rebellion (rebellion)
Germanic wars vs. Rome (effectively a civil war in that Roman territory was breaking up and many of the adversaries were trained in the Roman army, but you can quibble about this)
WW1 (great power)
Conquests of Timur (?)
Dungan Revolt (rebellion)
Chinese Civil War (civil)
Spanish conquest of Incas (conquest)
Reconquista (great power?)
Russian Civil War (civil)
Thirty Years War (civil - breakup of Holy Roman Empire)
Ottoman Wars (great power)
Moorish Wars (great power)
Napoleonic Wars (great power)
Mughal-Maratha Wars (?)
Yellow-Turban Rebellion (rebellion)
Second Congo War (civil)
French Wars of Religion (civil)
Indian Rebellion of 1857 (rebellion)
Hundred Years War (great power)
Vietnam War (civil, but with great power involvement)
Crusades (great power)
You have a strong need to separate out civil wars from great power conflicts, but many of them, particularly the ones that lead to lots of deaths, have very strong international involvement, and the destruction is driven in large part by foreign involvement. The Congo Wars and the Russian Civil War are good examples of this. Beyond that, you basically jump at the opportunity to classify wars as civil wars: the Germanic incursions into the Roman Empire and the Thirty Years' War [1] are in no way civil wars.
Placing importance of wars on the raw numbers of people killed is a bad way to go about things. First off, we have trouble establishing these counts even in modern contexts where sophisticated bureaucracies exist to keep track of everything (these bureaucracies have a way of breaking down in war); historical counts involve a fair amount of guesswork, and especially in list mode, you're not seeing similar methodologies being applied to ensure that the estimates are comparable. Even keeping track of wars with similar methodologies is difficult: why do we roll up all of the 14th century Anglo-French conflicts into the Hundred Years' War, yet insist on keeping World War I, World War II, the Russian Civil War, Second Sino-Japanese War, and the Spanish Civil War all separate instead of a Forty Years' War?
Most importantly, however, is that raw death totals don't reflect the impact of destruction. The deadliest war in US history is not the American Civil War, but King Philip's War, which killed 10% of the population. The Thirty Years' War was hardest in Northern Germany, where it killed about 50% of the people, while World War II only managed to kill 17% of the Poles (and most of that due to the Holocaust). Raw death counts inflate the relative importance of Chinese wars, since the Chinese river plains were historically able to support far larger population densities than in, say, Europe, so conflicts in China necessarily involve more people even at a comparable level of technological sophistication.
[1] For most of its existence, the Holy Roman Empire was not properly a country as we would understand it in our modern terminology. Admittedly, the Habsburgs were trying to reestablish it as a strong centralized state at the time, but the Thirty Years' War was effectively the point at which they gave up. It's more proper to think of the HRE at this point as closer to a 17th century organization akin to the current European Union than the modern United States.
If we're going to fight in 3rd world countries, we need more A-10's and Super Tucano's and less F-35's.
Part of the F-35's justification is that it's supposed be able to go head to head with other 1st world nations airforces.
These are but rounding errors in the ~5000 year history of advanced civilization.
The world wars had a lot more to do with mechanized nations dominating their neighbors than you might think. Consider Japan crushed China and Germany crushed the majority of Europe. Those where not fights among equals.
Step back further and India and China both lost a fight with England. That's the kind of fighting that's appealing to first world nations, lot's of resources minimal effort.
Japan attacking the US is a better argument, but the US was not exactly neutral either.
Anyway, I am not saying you're wrong, just that history is vastly more complex than just looking at the relative sizes of each nation on a map.
The only thing that would have saved Germany was if Japan had fought the Russians in the Far East. But after the Battle of Khalkhyn Gol (1939) where the Soviets handily defeated the Japanese, this wasn't going to happen.
So, I agree it was a strategic blunder, but perhaps a closer fight than many assume.
It's true England provided a significant material directly at the end of 41, but IMO a larger role was covering critical shortages. The Soviet Union could cover gaps in their supply chain with foreign assistance vastly increasing the value of that aid independent from the total quantities of aid. A factory without a few critical pieces of equipment can be crippled.
On top of that, 30 to 40 percent of the entire heavy and medium tank strength of Soviet forces at Moscow was from lend lease but that's not just useful there it also means they could spread forces around more of the front. Under a minimum number and tanks are far less useful and fairly easy to take out.
Longer term all those trucks and other equipment allowed the soviets to focus more production on the war effort. They had finite steel production for example and needed to make the best use of it possible.
So, assuming Germany a one front war where Germany would have advanced further and forced the USSR to deal with even more decimated supply chains. AKA, a pure 1v1 situation I suspect the USSR would have folded fairly quickly abet still inflicting heavy casualties.
Again though, this is an alternate history without a England or USA being involved so no resistance in Africa etc.
If Russia wins, then Syria remains independent and Russia benefits somehow, perhaps with steep discount out for the next 50 years.
Given that the F-35 was built with the latest tech that no other advanced economy even has I have no idea how anything could be built in the next 10-15 years that will significantly outclass it.
This might be true about F-22 (or not), but F-35 does not have much of latest tech as countries are suspicious of sharing cutting edge military tech on a multinational project.
As long as the F-35's principal advantage of being somewhat stealthy holds up it will be fine against opposing air forces and AAD's. But if that advantage is sufficiently whittled away it could find itself outgunned and outclassed.
Capabilities on paper are useless if they don't deliver in real world usage.
When you have missiles traveling at speeds exceeding Mach 2 whether you can win in a dogfight is irrelevant, what is relevant is who sees who first.
Maybe outclassing is only necessary when people fight under the most ideal and conventional of conditions.
Could F-35s take on 10x their number of F-16s? The answer is not obviously yes to me, particularly in light of the Yugoslavian kill against an F-117a.
And F-35 test pilots have continually said that the ACM performance is underrated. Sure a "clean" F-16 might be able to outmaneuver an F-35, but F-16's don't fly clean. All their shit hangs off their pylons, and cause drag etc. So it's not clear who would win. If you factor in all the sensors the F-35 has, and the fact that it will almost always get first shot on the Falcon, it's no contest. In Red Flag etc, the F-35 has dominated the F-16.
However, despite the media continually looking for fodder for "military waste," the consensus I've heard is that the F-35 dominates 4th gen fighters. How it will fair against the likes of the J-20/J-31/Su-57 remains to be seen. All of them have issues; and it's not as if the fights will be 1v1.
Outclass it at what though? Dogfighting? Bombing? Ground support?
The problem is that it will be outclassed in any single role by a much cheaper aircraft dedicated to that role.
Attacking ALIS. Or denying the maintenance regime - you could ground the RAF easily simply by knowing that they have to do engine maintenance on the opposite side of NATO in Turkey. That’s a long way to go for repairs if you’ve got no air superiority. Block that and just wait...
https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2015/09/more-questions-f-...
F-35 does something like Mach 1.6 where the F-15 Eagle hit ~Mach 2.5 and F-14 Tomcat hit ~Mach 2.4.
That's not because we can't make a much faster jet, just other compromises are vastly more useful.
Start combat at lower speeds and it's going to take even longer to hit high Mach.
Which is not to say it's useless, just not as useful relative to other tradeoffs.
Su-57 is still in infancy stage and judging from Russian problems, there's high chance it won't be around soon.
And for the F-35, it's easy to think of it as a dogfighter, but it's really intended more for the ground attack role. It can defend itself, but it's not going to be performing CAP when the F-22 or F-15s are around.
I'm not sure it's hugely relevent though. The F35 procurement was structurally unsound. The result is an aircraft that's a jack of all trades and a master of none..
...or nearly none. I understand it currently holds a marginal and very expensively won advantage at long range air-to-air. Or at least it will once all the kinks are ironed out.
1. lives are relatively cheap
2. there is an ejection seat
3. most flights will complete without a failure
You can fight a war even if every flight has a 1% chance of a random engine explosion. There were worse odds over Europe in World War II.
GE decided to make passenger jet engines in China. There should be no doubt that the reliability (likely a function of the factory) will find its way back into fighter jet engines.
Regarding performance, that ought to match the Russian engines that were cloned.
Passenger jet engines don't really map to fighter engines. It's like comparing an F1 race car with a Volvo semi.
The country that is at a disadvantage because they cannot compete with the F-35 will simply nuke the other country. We're talking desperate actions from desperate nations at this point. The F-35 is not useful in proxy wars because proxy wars are not allowed to get that hot. If they were to get that hot that F-35 is necessary, then nukes are very much on the table.
You might be overestimating the quality, reliability, stealth of drones. Up until a few years ago, you could capture (read) drone feeds[0] with COTS software / hardware. I don't mean as a hypothetical, I mean insurgents were doing this.
> Putting a human in the cockpit of an aircraft for any form of warfare really doesn't feel like thinking about future wars to be honest.
One would assume the tech simply isn't ready for a stealth plane without a human driver. AI surely isn't, and one would assume that transmissions for a remote-based pilot, as drones are operated, would be a giant signal that an advanced stealth craft is in your airspace.
The F-35 has a smaller radar cross section than the F-22 which has a smaller radar cross section than the B-2 which has a smaller radar cross section than the F-117. The B-2's radar cross section was described as a bumble bee. If you combine that with ECMs and support for EW like Growlers, the F-35 becomes difficult to shoot down with missiles.
During the initial stages of an armed conflict, the first thing you do is go after your opponent's air superiority. That means targeting Radars, SAMs, runways, and Drone stations. This is where the F-35 is suppose to shine. It works in squadrons of 8 or more simultaneously spot, targeting, and engaging multiple targets.
How do you counter that? Will an air superiority fighter playing an intercept role to engage and take out the attacking force. That's where the F-22 comes into play. The F-22 is an air superiority fighter that will provide operational support to the F-35 engaging any threats well before they can pose a risk to the F-35.
Yes, but the F-35 was also dreamed up as a way to dramatically reduce costs by sharing components. Parts commonality was supposed to be something like 80% between variants but in reality it's more like 25%. It was supposed to be substantially cheaper than the F-22 but it is almost just as expensive per unit.
And all of that points to the fundamental truth that the F-35 is not as capable as it could be because it was built with a fundamental compromise in mind. In particular, designing the airframe for the V/STOL requirement meant it had a wider radar cross section, worse cockpit visibility and worse aerodynamic performance from the start.
Had they at least broken off the V/STOL requirement into a separate airframe they could've end up with a higher performing aircraft that may have been cheaper to boot. Instead they took the mistakes of the F-111 program and doubled down on them.
It's a jobs program for engineers and aerospace mech shops.
Imagine they actually made that huge trillion dollar infrastructure program. A lot of people would rail against the expense, and worse, every single exposed misstep, story of corruption (which we have from the military too of course but that does not lead people to demand a stop to financing the military), and story about inefficiency or waste will create a lot of bad press and pressure on politicians.
I must say we have pretty much exactly the situation that the overall compound will of the people wants, unfortunately. If the people could accept the level of incompetence, waste and worse that is pretty much normal for any big enterprise (including what we see in private enterprise or dilbert.com would not be so popular) then the politicians/government could experiment with massively funding something non-military for a change.
Each time I hear a story that could be changed by some people who seem to be in control (but I would like to point to the king in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's "The little Prince") I briefly try to imagine what would happen if they would actually do that. I usually conclude that people with public power (from CEO to politician) don't have nearly as much power or control as seems to be assumed, instead they just go with the flow (they have to!) and the problem is actually caused by all of us. Nobody individually though. There is a certain network dynamic that prevents the individuals from really doing things differently, there always are forces that keep us on our tracks even when individually we see other paths.
That leaves two options: maintain a superior fleet of manned aircraft or develop drones with fully autonomous combat capability.
"Cyber warfare" should be the #1 concern. An F-35 isn't going to prevent the power grid from going down.
The F-35 reflects a 20th century mindset. This is very troubling.
Aside from ICBMs / Nukes, it seems like superiority weapons are the best weapons of war.
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Cyber is incredibly important in today's world of spycraft and intelligence. But if war actually starts, then the little cyber toys don't really hold a candle to straight-up killing a bunch of enemies.
Now, one might be worried about the philosophy or ethics about building incredibly powerful and expensive weapons of war. But with regards to efficacy? A stealth fighter that is nearly undetectable by enemy radar that is equipped with multiple long-range missiles that can be delivered beyond the horizon is going to be a useful tool.
Furthermore, __anyone__ can be a cyber threat. Sure it might take time but the barrier to entry is significantly lower than an F35.
Then next UBL isn't training his/her to fly planes; they're looking for them to wear black hats.
Indeed: black hats seem to have some degree of "kids gloves" on. It doesn't seem very common for Militaries around the world to respond with lethal force vs a hack attack.
North Korea hacks the USA. Response?? Sanctions. Mostly non-military. Because if we responded FOR REAL, then it'd be seen as an unnecessary escalation. China repeatedly hacks the USA. Again: we mostly have a non-response. Its not worth it to respond with real force.
One day, real military force will become necessary to use (And I hope this day will come long after I die. But... its best to be prepared just in case...). And no number of black hats will be able to make a true military threat to another nation. At best, cyber warfare will be a precursor to actual war: a step in the escalation process.
In 2018+ a handful of well trained cyber threats can do more disruption than a F35. We need to update our "software".
And how is this any different from a potential cyber-attacker attacking the US? They can't just harm the US without repercussions either.
But at the end of the day, death is permanent. If you want someone to die, shooting them with a weapon is outrageously effective.
The fact of the matter is: the current world order has a lot of bluster. But we generally don't want to kill each other. That's why Cyber is so "effective", because we aren't killing each other. We just sorta annoy each other with relatively minor inconveniences.
If we REALLY wanted to kill someone, we have ICBMs and other such weapons of war. But really, we don't like killing people. So we don't use those tools. The F-35 is one such tool, in preparation for the day that we might start killing each other for real.
Unless the solution is AI.
I wouldn't rule it out.
>That's a massive disaster in space that would destroy their own satellites.
As long as it hurts the US more than it hurts them.
The F-35 is really a success in its true intention: for those at the top to funnel money into all the people and companies they need political support from. Those company heads gain support from all the people under them, all the way down to the people working in the factories that span multiple states.
Who are the United States real enemies? No one. Russia and the US act like enemies, when both countries benefit in arm sales from their many proxy wars. The US literally has no enemies, except all the enemies it intentionally makes. War machines are essential in keeping people in power, and the money of war machines are essential in keeping supporters allied, by paying for them and their businesses.
You're looking at the F-35 the wrong way entirely, and same with drones. The programs exits to preserve superiority, dominance and empire. It provides funding to cronies all the way up and down the military industry stack. Any hope of it being an actual military tool should have been shelved years ago.
The United States has 11 air craft carriers in service. That is literally more than every other nation in the world combined. Endless war is necessary to sustain those in power, and be certain those in power in the US have only changed in their percentage of influence depending on the puppet elected to be on stage.
It was even before I read this: https://www.google.pl/amp/s/www.popsci.com/amp/ai-pilot-beat...
If not, then there is definitely a big problem with the F-35 (not future proof)...
Iraq? (The battle against Hussein, not the occupation afterward.)