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Comment by 3rdAccount | Hacker News Reader

Does anybody in the industry know why there was a push to move away from specific role planes that excel in one area to ones that can do any area decently? I know in theory that there would be savings having one platform, but making one jet modular for 3 different roles is seeming to be more difficult than just designing 3 different jets. It can't beat the EuroFighter in a dog fight and can't match the stealth bomber for ordinance carried (actually a guess...please correct me if wrong) and can't match the A-10 for ground support. It just seems like a massive mistake that is now too big to fail.

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Because of the theoretical cost savings, as you mention. The JSF was aggressively fashioned toward futuristic notions of distance warfare. Missiles today have phenomenal performance, versus Vietnam era seekers that would fly into the sun. This might have been premature with the unexpected turn into asymmetric warfare. Also, any internet discussion on the A-10 (or SR-71, or Concorde) devolves into uninformed fanboyism, so I won't even go there.

> Vietnam era seekers that would fly into the sun

Hehe. Have a link?

It was worse than that. The sidewinder worked fairly well, but the other missiles took 4 seconds to arm, so got many US pilots killed. Top Gun was created because the US was in a draw with the Soviet-advised N. Vietnamese air force.

It was first experienced by Taiwanese F-86 pilots during the Quemoy clashes with China in 1958. Their AIM-9B early-model Sidewinders had unfiltered seekers that considered the Sun as attractive a target as jet exhaust. Later models had bandpass filters to prevent that.

The contemporary AIM-4 Falcon missile had a much more sophisticated seeker but had to be cooled before firing and was useless once the coolant ran out, for example if the pilot took too long to get a lock.

Modern IR-guided missiles use imaging IR sensors and actually recognise target shapes.

Can you blame them? I mean come on, it is called a Warthog, it looks like one and has the unexpectedly unpleasant personality of one. Adorable :)

>premature with the unexpected turn into asymmetric warfare

This boggles the mind. The US military have had trouble facing asymmetrical opponents close to continually since the Vietnam war. It's not like they haven't had time to see it coming.

I think the embarrassment that was the Millennium Challenge war game[0] showed just how out of touch the top brass is.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

It's not about actually figting the war. It's about maintaining the capability so that China doesn't push around Japan, Korea, etc in a way that is bad for US economic interests.

Using the Navy as an example since their aircraft fleet is somewhat more simplistic than the AF, historically there were a lot of different airframes on carriers. The iconic 80s cold war fleet was a mix of the following:

* F-4 - older multirole fighter, SEAD/STRIKE/CAS

* F/A-18 (A/B/C/D aka legacy hornet) - replacement multirole

* F-14 - interceptor

* A-4 - strike, SEAD etc

* A-7 - strike, SEAD etc

* A-6 - strike, CAS

* EA-6 (significantly different from the A-6) - ELINT/EWAR

* E-2 - AWACS

* C-2 - COD

* S-3 - Anti submarine, Tanker

These were pretty much all replaced in the mid 90s leaving the following:

* F/A-18 (E/F, basically a different airframe) - multirole fighter, SEAD/STRIKE/CAS and Tanker

* EA-18G (basically the same airframe as the E/F) - EWAR/SEAD while retaining marginal A2A capability

* E-2 - AWACS

* C-2 - COD

That's a pretty drastic reduction in airframes to manage so it's understandable why those managing them want to try to maintain consolidation to an extent. Now whether this is the best way of going about it is an open question. The F-18 platform has shown that it's possible but it's also much more mature, having had many decades to work out the bugs. There's also the question of how they managed to talk the navy into a single engine platform but that's a rant for another day...

Note: the first list was never all deployed at the same time on the same carrier AFAIK. They travel as squadrons between carriers depending on the carriers mission. The second gets deployed together regularly as they comprise the bare minimum for an operational air wing.

Does anybody in the industry know why there was a push to move away from specific role planes that excel in one area to ones that can do any area decently?

It's the same disease that McNamara caught, resulting in the F-111. The F-111 was supposed to be the super plane for the Navy and the air superiority platform for the Air Force. Synergistic with this is that idea that there would be no more dogfighting and it would all be done with missiles.

Tactical data sharing, complex systems like missiles, and the infrastructure which supports them all involve a lot of planning. No plan survives contact with the enemy.

There's nothing wrong with the idea of having multirole aircraft. Hell, the EuroFighter was originally designed as an air superiority fighter, but is used for a variety of ground attack missions as well. And the F-35 isn't intended to replace the B2 Spirit stealth bomber, nor the A-10 (though the USAF would really like to); it is meant to replace the F/A-18 and F-15, which are themselves multirole aircraft.

The issue with the F-35 isn't that it is intended to perform both air superiority and ground attack missions. The basic objection to the F-35 is designing a single airframe with several variants capable of conventional takeoff and landing (F35-A), short takeoff and vertical landing (F35-B), and catapult assisted takeoff and arrested recovery (F35-C). These are completely different ways of taking off and landing, with different design constraints, and it is difficult to create an airframe that can be modified to perform any of them. That's the primary philosophical objection to the F35, at least. There's another whole debate about whether we need aircraft dedicated for the close air support role (like the A-10), and the rest of the complaints are specific to F35 design choices.

>It can't beat the EuroFighter in a dog fight

It's not clear that this is the case. While the Eurofighter is better in a turning fight, it may not matter against the f35. The f35's stealth helps it choose the engagement parameters but the f35 has another advantage in a dogfight. Apparently it has the bizarre ability to point its nose very quickly allowing it to casually snap off kill shots with a minimum of fuss.

All the earlier reports of f35 dog fighting abilities involved very early f35 models which were operating under pretty severe software restrictions. In addition, no one really understood the f35's flight characteristics so they were trying to fly them like f16's and f15's, which is a big problem. Every fighter aircraft must flown differently based on its flight characteristics.

There was a movie Pentagon Wars about this type of scope creep.

See this 10m clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA

> can't match the stealth bomber for ordinance carried

It's "ordnance", not "ordinance". Different words.

Apologies. That makes sense to me too off of the way I've heard it pronounced.

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