F-35's Towed Decoys
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
In all seriousness, this article is pretty interesting and kinda stands on its own.
Once I saw drunken Chinese soldiers spinning circles in the middle of a small town with a stolen tractor. Super weird scene. The locals were not happy about it.
I had the sense that mainland China IS pretty safe from petty theft because all the police. However, what is up with all the open prostitution when is it supposed to be illegal?
What were we talking about?
People are more likely to submit what they're reading if a similar post has already proven to be popular.
Overall JSF program aside, this is a fairly interesting and in depth (at least for this audience, this is probably just a high level overview to someone who works on electronic warfare technology) article on a particular subsystem so why wouldn't it be popular here?
1) Once you've noticed something, you tend to notice it more often.
2) Novel (or uncommon) articles on HN that get to the front page tend to attract other articles on the same topic. I can imagine this along the lines of:
Human 1: Hey apparently there's an audience on HN for topic X that I enjoy! I wonder if HN is also interested in this related article on topic X.
Or Human 2: Hey here's this interesting related article I discovered while looking at front-page article Y on topic X.
The summary of all of this is to say that my guess is that like attracts like and uncommon topics die down fairly quickly in time. I imagine that it is less of a concerted effort by stakeholders to push and direct topic X than just the effects of a curious and diverse group.
For an article that came out before this recent press rollout began, try this one: "The F-35 Is a $1.4T National Disaster"
article: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-f-35-14-trill...
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869679
A trillion dollar plane that's cutting edge probably has a pretty decent opposition market budget behind it from adversarial nations, and it's not very difficult to assume that these articles are part of that somehow.
Could also be a paid PR campaign if you're the cynical type. 50/50
Most likely a bit of both, you are not alone in noticing the pattern.
While at it also found some stories about F-35 helmet targeting systems, if it's anything like BAE Striker II for Eurofighter [3]
1. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/navys-version-f-35-ha...
2. https://militarymachine.com/f-35-helmet
3. http://home.bt.com/tech-gadgets/future-tech/inside-baes-stri...
One addition you have a lot of readers hitting one story, google or someone notices and ... someone(s) is going to be exposed to that topic more even if only because Google decides to push it on some of those folks.
Advanced military toys are always good for nerd sniping, recommender algorithms know this, and they will eagerly amplify a small amount of demonstrated interest into a deluge of recommendations. I'm pretty sure that's what's happening here.
So yes, it's certainly a bought and paid for PR effort, but I wouldn't conclude that it's localized in time, just that HN recently wandered into it. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll take my leave to go read about the fabulous toys my tax dollars are paying for.
That and active measures. Eroding public support for your enemy's shiny new military hardware is a cheap way to destroy morale and increase the chances it'll get cancelled.
I don't need a foreign actor to explain why people in America today are unsympathetic to a new technologically advanced fighter jet. Even the foreign threats of today aren't the type where air superiority would help at all.
In the case of domestic extremism the theatre gets pushed to surveillance + communication monitoring.
If they had any sense they would have cancelled the F-35 program long ago and rerun a set of competition trials for each of the three separate roles.
Gun violence has little connection to budget. That’s a straw man. Dangerous water is a failure of local governments (such as Flint;) the vast majority of American water is perfectly fine. As far as government workers being “paycheck to paycheck” — that’s a problem with financial literacy. Government jobs generally have great benefits and aren’t minimum wage. Americans need more Dave Ramsey and not necessarily more Bernie Sanders.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms in not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
Address by President Dwight D. Eisenhower "The Chance for Peace" delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16,1953.
The F-35 is designed to be more expensive but cheaper to maintain. Fleet maintenance, especially in the US eats up a massive, massive chunk of the budget. So while the F/A 18 might be 1/3rd the price, once you count in maintenance, it might not be much cheaper...and it's last generation. There is a complex math behind it. There is absolutely waste, fraud and abuse in the military...but it's probably not as much as you think since the majority of military spending in the US is actually on pensions, healthcare, housing, salaries and maintenance of aging equipment. Things that in other countries are much cheaper or just not given to soldiers. Comparing the US to China and Russian (at least their public spending numbers) is so misleading. New research and projects is a drop in the bucket.
Quiet the opposite. I would not be surprised if discrediting the f35 is a US physiological warfare
Most of the negative coverage is more around that such very expensive aircraft (and program) may not be that useful, for example, to fight terrorism or low-tech nations (and like another person mentioned in this thread, there may be more pressing matters in the US).
In the longer term however, it can be argued that maintaining that kind of advanced aerial capability may be paramount to keep balance vs countries like China.
And if you think the F-35 is too expensive, check out the F-22 which was purely air superiority!
Now that the thing is actually flying, and we're starting to hear from pilots and people have gotten to see it at airshows, etc., naturally it's getting better press. This is the payoff, it's what the thing is designed to do. So it better damn well fly well and look good doing it.
There's still an open question and a debate to be had about whether the aircraft is WORTH the insane cost, and WHY the damn thing cost so much to begin with, though. I suspect it's like most things American at the moment -- we pay far too much, and get far too little for our money, compared to literally anyone else on the planet who might choose to build the same thing. (See also: healthcare, education, public transportation, physical infrastructure... we pay more and get less. Military equipment is no exception.)
But yeah, I'd expect to see better press now than when the thing was all but vaporware and a big bill.
There's no question about why it costs so much. The cost is including ~3,000 planes and covers up to 2070 in maintenance costs. That's a ridiculous number of planes to be maintained for decades. We'll never come close to building 3,000 however, the program will end long before that.
Russia's new Su-57 planes are at least $50 million each. Their GDP per capita is 1/6th that of the US. Imagine paying for that if you're them. Equivalent to $300 million in the US economy, except Russia is a very poor nation and can't rationally afford anything close to spending even $50m per plane.
Let's go with Russia's $50m number however. 3,000 planes at $50m = $150 billion just to get them built. Russia would probably spend another $600 billion maintaining those planes over four decades. The F35 unit cost is around $80 to $110 million depending on the version.
The US is getting a stellar deal in scope to its economy compared to what the Russians are spending on their latest planes.
The MiG-35 will cost at least double what the last MiG-29 variation did, or around $40 million. $240 million when adjusted to US per capita output figures.
For Russia it's even worse if we look at the absolute scale of their economy (from which the cost of those planes must come out of), a mere $1.6 trillion, or nearly 1/13th the size of the US economy. If you adjust the cost on that basis, it's like the US spending $650 million per F35. Nobody would think that's a deal. Russia isn't even remotely close to matching the US in adjusted terms on its new jet costs, their wild spending is on another planet entirely.
The Chengdu J-20 looks to cost $50 million per unit or more. That's in China, where they should be able to do everything radically cheaper than the US, and where they also have a GDP per capita 1/6th that of the US. $50 million is an astronomical sum for them to be spending per plane based on their economy. Or if we adjust based on the absolute size of their economy (the US economy is roughly 47-50% larger), it still pushes that unit cost up near the cheapest F35 variant.
The Eurofighter Typhoon, an older plane, costs as much per unit as the F35.
I'm not seeing any evidence that the F35 is expensive compared to other jets in the latest generation when you adjust for the US economic output level.
"The fusion of information ... degrades a stealthy aircraft's ability to remain undetected" to "this was cutting edge stealth when conceived, but as aircraft has been in the works for so long (work started 1992, first flight 2006) its stealth is kind of useless now. We have to depend on towed decoys :(
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/the-drive-cms-content-sta...
The exotic curves are visually exquisite, and I'm curious what the production and fabrication technique and processes are.
Particularly for the jet engine housing. Is it comprised of a few large sheets, or many smaller pieces? Not sure how to get the curvature and bends consistently correct within tolerance limits for large sheets. It seems like it would be extremely challenging.
It looks like it might be titanium?
If you know about this or have ideas, please do tell!
P.S.
What a cool read! This is the type of article I come to hacker news hoping to find :)
"Tanner says Lockheed uses more aluminum than steel on its aircraft projects, which in addition to the F-35, include the C-130 cargo plane, and F-16 fighter. And the F-35 uses more titanium than aluminum and steel, he said. "
https://www.defenseone.com/business/2018/03/how-much-do-amer...
So before computer assisted drafting/manufacturing showed up, it was quite common to see Rubber Mallet in use on the production floor of the expensive planes. Workers literally had to beat certain parts of the plane into place using Rubber Mallets.
Sort of like hand-grinding a telescope mirror, or polishing stuff. The dents average out.
Not a good way to build anything with close tolerances, but a way to manually build a thing.
it's a coated composite similar to carbon, but with specified radio properties. It looks like carbon fiber with a large weave before coating.
I dropped a panel almost exactly like the one in question that was scrap from mis-machining, and it nearly deafened me, it rings like a toilet lid; like a ceramic.
source : I had a small involvement with recent US planes.
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HighTechHexagons
I would even say there is some sensual, if not sexual, feminine reminiscence.
And it has been an incredible success!
Lost lives hurt morale quite a bit, and play badly on domestic news.
I don't follow military news but even I know that US military lagged YEARS behind private contractors in adding ground transport for troops that were safer against road-side bombs during the first few years of the Iraq War starting in 2003.
Also the price means you have fewer jets. If there is a tech flaw and handful get shot down... you're really low on jets.
I can't imagine we 100% know how effective all this tech is. We've seen how much ground warfare changed where the Humvee was found to be severely lacking, the US found that lots of high explosive bombs were less desirable now and very low explosive accurate bombs were needed.
I almost wonder if a two tiered system would be better. Top of the line, then high volume lower line where tech trickles down over time.
This would especially be handy in situations where you have air superiority and ... now still have a lot of work in the air to do, don't need expensive planes to do it, and really just want high volume coverage.
My understanding was the F-16's goal was initially to have a lower cost plane compared to the F-15 with some other goals that I think were regarding matching Soviet single engine aircraft's maneuverability and etc.
One major issue that the US has run into with deploying that strategy, in the absence of great power opponents, is that the largest long-term costs are not the airframes, but pilots and pilot training. An F-16 pilot isn't cheaper than an F-15 pilot, and getting hours for an F-16 pilot isn't cheaper than getting hours for an F-15 pilot, other than the lower fuel cost for the F-16.
That said, the F-15X that the USAF is procuring is basically going to be used as a lower-cost-than-F-35 "missile truck," so not incompatible with what you suggest.
Of course this should have been applied along with improved 3D thrust vectoring to a new block of F-22’s, but that doesn’t satisfy the Military Industrial Complex’s desire for endless money, and congresses insatiable need for pork barrel projects. Plus you have the usual pissing contests and budget infighting between services, all of whom basically want their own customized air force.
I expect a request for a dog could turn into robotic dog that can take out satellites in space....
Specifically the 3 major components has to be of the 5th generation - body, engine and radar. The SU-57 body is pretty much there. The radar isn't there yet where it was promised and is required to be (ie. distance, number of tracked items, etc.). The worst situation is with the engine. Russia still doesn't have 5th gen "stealth" engine. What is being flown currently is "4.5" gen - a well improved 4th. You can see it clearly here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sukhoi_T-50_Maksimov.jpg
Um, what?
Russia invaded far off lands when they had the capacity, don't think they wouldn't do it again if their economy and population weren't shrinking.
They probably can do that even now, the question is about distance of such lock. If F-35 has a high lock distance advantage especially with AWACS in the back - it will have much higher probability to win the fight.
The F-35 is only intended to dogfight as an absolute last resort. It's normal mode will be to detect the enemy without being detected, and to kill the enemy without being successfully attacked. In exercises it's had around a 20-1 kill ratio.
The fully networked nature of the F-35 brings huge advantages. One F-35 can use its radar briefly (the radar is also frequency-agile), find targets, and then relay target information to shooters anywhere in the area. In a recent exercise, a F-35 cued a Navy SM-6 missile from over the horizon to hit an air target.
This neatly works around concerns about limited F-35 weapon stores.
> The real issue however is that it won't be long before nations like Russia and China will be able to reliably get a weapons-grade lock on the F-35. Some people even think Russia already has this capability (and it's very realistic to think that they do).
First off, as the article points out, stealth is not perfect. It simply reduces the acquisition range of certain systems.
These towed decoys provide insurance in the case that stealth is defeated.
At any rate, there are physical barriers to putting F-35 detecting radars on fighters. IR is another matter, of course.
> Electronic warfare is progressing very quickly and might render stealth completely useless long before the next generation of planes is built.
You have it backwards. Electronic warfare is progressing very quickly, and will be use to vastly enhance the effectiveness of stealth aircraft at the expense of adversary systems.
The article makes it sound like the F-35's stealth isn't so great at avoiding detection, but it's there to frustrate weapons trying to lock onto it:
> Stealth fighters, as we know them today, are not highly optimized to evade a broad range of radar types. Instead, they are optimized to give fire control radars used to actually engage targets, as well as detect them in many cases, a very tough time. The classic appendages of a fighter aircraft—nose, tail surfaces, exhaust nozzles, and even wings—do not lend themselves to broadband radio frequency low-observability, but they are conducive to maneuverability and speed. So, while aircraft like the F-35 are effective at hiding from the most threatening radar types, and especially when viewed by those sensors from certain aspects, with the frontal-hemisphere profile being most optimized, they are less adept from doing the same when it comes to radars operating at lower frequencies or when viewed from rearward angles.
BVR It's quite limited by its limited weapons load. Disregarding external weapons (if it uses any, it's no longer stealthy) it will either have 2 long range missiles or 4. Most likely the former, if it wants to also accomplish an attack mission in which it will use 2 bays for ground attack and 2 bays for medium range AA.
Now consider that it's not uncommon in BVR to launch 2 missiles at each BVR target in order to raise the chances of a hit. So basically: a stealth F-35 can attack one aircraft in BVR Then it is out of missiles. An aging fourth gen opponent will likely carry six. So the math doesn't work out in favor of the F-35 in BVR if it faces even two fourth gen aircraft. It likely fire and turn back - because it's out of AMRAAMs after the first engagement.
Any airforce with a huge fleet of aging 4th gen fighters and a lax attitude towards losing them and their pilots, can be a very effective defense against F-35's.
I wonder how much less stealthy it using external weapons. I mean, it's not like an AMRAAM has a gigantic radar signature already. Is radar signature additive? Would an F-35 with external missiles have a radar signature of an F-35 + those missiles, or does having those missiles attached to the body have some sort of interaction that makes the whole signature much bigger?
Because if mounting missiles externally results in reduced but still a decent degree of stealth, you can cram 8x AMRAAMs and 2 sidewinders on the F-35.
Fighter airplanes have many roles, dogfight being one of them.
US also has cheaper F-14s, F-15s and F-16s to match.
If the planes are there to support the carrier then why is the carrier there?
You’ve got the whole concept backwards - the carrier is there to support the planes.
But why do you think the carrier is there in the first place? It's to support the planes. The planes are the whole point. If they could do without a carrier and just have the planes they would.
Either way I know the major benefits of the F-35 and US fighters in general are data sharing and pilot skill. The F-35s greatest strengths lean into this.
There are downsides to drones (loss of control is a worry), but without the need for a cockpit, you can make the plane much smaller with a much better thrust to weight ratio, and also capable of pulling off maneuvers that would render a pilot unconscious.[1]
Quantity has a quality all it's own. I would bet against a F-35 even if it was up against 30-40 P-51 Mustangs from WWII. The sheer amount of lead they could fill the sky with (for a short time) is daunting.
1: I remember 5-6 years ago someone on HN commenting that an F-16 (I think?) was capable of enough forces exerted on a pilot to easily break their neck, and was limited.
If attacking, it could definitely circumvent older planes (but newer drones, maybe not so much). If defending against an attacking force, it doesn't seem all that effective.
Warning: Command is less of a game and more of a battlefield simulator and has a very steep learning curve if you're not used to the systems and tactics required to deploy modern combat power. I've been 'playing' it for years and without my background I'd have a very tough time. I can still only really play NATO scenarios as I'm not familiar enough with Chinese or Russian systems to use them effectively.
My point is, at $3-4 million each (or $2-3 million as I saw in some sources, which I included in another comment here, that's still 20+ of these drones to to each F-35 in equivalent cost. So:
- Can the F-35 actually mount enough long-range weaponry to attack 22 separate targets?
- Do the drones even need to have an equivalent sensor suite in every instance? If defending, there may be ground stations with expensive sensor packages to help to coordinate. If attacking, the impetus is on the F-35 to destroy or render all units incapable of carrying our their mission. Destroying most of them and retreating without confrontation is useful only inasmuch as it prevents the attackers mission success, or lessens its impact.
That said, given the information you presented above about the F-35 being a drone coordinator, that makes it a much more useful and effective weapon in my eyes. If it can basically act as a force multiplier for the drones by providing a much more effective sensor suite, and coordinate them so it's like one large attack vehicle, then that's providing the benefits of both types while minimizing the downsides of each. For example, I would imagine an F-35 + 20 drones would be much more effective and deadly than either two F-35's or 40 drones.
In some ways, it's a lot like how Aircraft carriers worked in the beginning of or just before WWII. Having one in a battle group provided a much larger scouting range, and the ability to harass or incapacitate some types of enemy prior to the battle group arriving (they shifted more into an attack role as the war got under way, is my understanding. Prior to that there wasn't a lot of practical experience in using them in engagements).
One or both adversaries can escape.. it can happen in seconds with two supersonic aircraft.
It's not like a video game where they exist in a modeled world where no one else is around and they both have unlimited fuel and radar works perfectly, etc..
If the two fighters "merge" at 600kts each and keep going they'll be 20 miles apart in 1 minute.
If one of them decides to light the afterburners and accelerates to 1000kts and go supersonic to escape the other one has to turn around and try to accelerate to catch up.
Not easy. The harder the chaser turns around the more speed they'll bleed off, and the more time it will take to reaccelerate. If they turn a wider circle they'll be further away and have more distance to make up.
Meanwhile the plane that has decided to "exit" might have flown into the cover of friend AAA/SAM sites or friendly fighters.
If you start talking about swarms of supersonic drones instead of an enemy fighter then suddenly the drones sound awfully expensive.
Which is mostly useless if the one escaping is in a defending role. Good job saving the aircraft and pilot. Unfortunately your adversary is now clear to proceed to the actual target.
In war, it doesn't just matter which soldier is better. It matters how quickly they can get to where they are going, how many of them you have to field, and whether they are defending or attacking, and whether they can be easily detected while moving. Different attributes have different values in different circumstances, but being able to field an order of magnitude or more covers up a lot of downsides.
What's more powerful, 1000 trained soldiers with combat gear and automatic rifles, or 10,000 conscripted citizens with hunting rifles? It depends on the specific circumstances.
Even in an attacking role, if you're still able to be denied actual air superiority over your target after you run out of missiles (i.e. because you're unwilling or unable to dogfight and clean up the rest of the enemy's air assets), then congrats, mission failed, we'll get 'em next time.
So the argument is that a small number of high performance fighters like the F-35 could very well not be a good match for a huge number of drones that individually are a fraction of the price.
the analogy sort of breaks down at this point.
It's not entirely analogous to the current discussion, because there's not really a commensurate difference in maneuverability of F-35 to the drones, but other similarities persist.
Which led to the huge, gun-less American fighters of the 1960s, the epitome of which was the F-4 Phantom II (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-4_Phantom_...).
Which led to embarrassingly bad kill/loss ratios over Vietnam (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-4_Phantom_...), when those big, porky fighters went up against smaller, more nimble, gun-still-included Russian planes like the MiG-17 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-17).
Which led to guns being hurriedly added back on to the F-4s, first in an external pod mounted on a hardpoint, and then internally on later production models.
Which led to the development of training programs to teach dogfighting skills like the Naval Fighter Weapons School at Miramar (the school immortalized in the 1986 film Top Gun), because it turned out that the conventional wisdom had sunk in so deeply that a whole generation of American fighter pilots didn't know how to fight with a gun, even when they had one.
Which led to the Lightweight Fighter Program (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_Fighter_program), an effort to use the lessons learned in Vietnam to design a maneuverable, gun-included dogfighter affordable enough to produce in volume.
Which led to the development of two new fighters, the F-16 Fighting Falcon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-16_Fighting...) and the F/A-18 Hornet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F/A-18_Horne...), both of which have been hugely successful in service and make up the bulk of the US Air Force and Navy's fighter forces to this day.
But the people who learned those hard lessons over Vietnam are all retired or dead now, so when people say "planes don't dogfight" nobody challenges it.
Which is how the conventional wisdom of the 1950s becomes conventional wisdom all over again.
This does, of course, beg the question: how well would an F-35 do in a conflict with restrictive rules of engagement, such as might be found in future US-Iraq/Afghanistan-style conflicts.
The thing is though, if history is any indication, wars so total as to have completely permissive RoEs aren't the wars that we actually ever fight. Even if you imagine a war with a full-on peer competitor like Russia or China, it's not hard to imagine scenarios where RoEs are restricted in an effort to keep the scope of the conflict from widening -- an important consideration when both sides have nuclear weapons!
So I think the general point still stands. If the balloon ever goes up on World War III, we probably won't see a lot of dogfighting. But there's a whole spectrum of conflicts underneath that, and building an air force entirely around fighters that can't handle the rest of that spectrum at least competently is going to be a problem.
The lessons of vietnam you cite really aren't as you claim. The gun was never the issue -- really poor missiles may have been. Better missiles fixed the problem, not the gun.
The idea of dogfighting drones makes very little sense. If you build a lot of expendable tiny planes with a high thrust to weight ratio and high-G maneuvering, there's no point having those then try to shoot some secondary projectiles at the target. It's far simplier to just fly them into it or detonate them close enough to cause fatal damage.
The older planes were just to drive a point home. How does an F-35 defend against 20-40 times as many adversaries attacking? If the F-35 is attacking, it might be faster and be able to go around an intercepting force, but that's a big if, and it's more dangerous because it may put it closer to other defensive armaments that the original path was routed to avoid.
A propeller driven MQ-9 Reaper cost over $16M in 2006.
If you mean an F-16 class vehicle capable of catching an F-35 (supersonic) and carrying half a dozen missiles, then you're in the F-16 cost range. Not having a pilot might only save a few hundred pounds.
But why use a drone to carry missiles. The US can launch missiles from Navy ships or B-52s under the control of the F-35 super AWACs.
As someone else said, the idea is not to defend against an attack by 20 drones, the idea is to blow up the drone base.
It depends on the role. Probably a few million at least, you're right, but when comparing to ~90 million dollar planes, comparatively cheap. The Air Force actually already has plans for this, and the F-35 makes a bit more sense in light of that, as it can help control a swarm of drones and they can take advantage of it's enhanced sensor suite.[1][2]
> If you mean an F-16 class vehicle capable of catching an F-35 (supersonic) and carrying half a dozen missiles, then you're in the F-16 cost range. Not having a pilot might only save a few hundred pounds.
Not having a pilot would save a few hundred pounds of flesh. Having a vehicle that isn't designed around a cockpit allows for a different fuselage, with a smaller cross section, which is more aerodynamic and uses less material.
That said, the drone I referenced above cruises at close to the same speed as the F-35 from the info I've seen, and at one of the articles notes that the stated cost is $2-$3 million each.[1] It's not currently specced for any air-to-air armaments, but I imagine if they see a benefit, they'll alter it as needed.
1: https://www.businessinsider.com/air-force-tests-xq-58a-valky...
2: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2019/03/27/killer-dr...
The F-35 would fly by unnoticed most likely to go hit it's target. If it was noticed the F-35 would not engage the enemy fighters. The Mustang could get to ~40,000ft but wouldn't perform at it's best there, it can't travel anywhere near it's max speed at that altitude and it won't be able to maneuver very well at all. Any modern jet fighter could just sail on by even at 40,000ft without a concern.
Mustangs held about 1800 rounds of ammunition. If they were trying to "fill the sky with lead" they'd expend all their ammunition in about 30 seconds. 72,000 rounds doesn't fill that much sky either.
1. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/13851/north-koreas-rec...
I think two Tuskeegee Airmen shot down German jet fighters with their guns and K-14 gyro compensated gunsights. But to get that shot, they had to be in a "furball" and they were shots of opportunity.
IIRC quite a few Me-262s were shot down by P-51s. But Me-262s had a bunch of weak points and were very immature.. IIRC some of the shoot downs were when the Me-262s were taking off or landing or otherwise vulnerable.
Real life the better plane doesn't always win. P-51s would have no trouble shooting down a marine F-35 if they snuck up on it while it was trying to do a vertical takeoff or landing.
My understanding was that stalking the Me-262s on landing was kind of a "thing."
Anyone who has an F-35 on-hand would have a myriad of other resources that would be more effective in dealing with a swarm of P-51s. Why not send those out instead?
Know what's a good drone? A dozen Navy SM-6s launched from a destroyer, cued by a nearly invisible F-35.
A more likely scenario is that one side's aircraft are destroyed on the ground using stand-off munitions. Or they get ambushed in the air and never knew what hit them.
[1]https://breakingdefense.com/2019/03/red-flag-2019-first-grea...
Agreed, and it's also very likely that the F-35 and F-22 would be leading and providing high quality targeting data to F-15s, F-16s, and F-18s, carrying dozens of long range air-to-air missiles.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a22355833... https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/boeings-touts-new-16-air-t...
Modern combat is not at all the same thing as WWI/WWII "turn and burn" stuff or what gets depicted in Star Wars.
"Turn and Burn" was already out of favor with US pilots in WWII.
If the F-35 enters into a turn-and-burn in a 3-1 situation the pilot has already failed.. if he gets out of the situation alive he's getting chewed out.
They have all kinds of training & procedures around different scenarios and those don't involve flying straight at the enemy and then getting into a turning match.
We haven't seen the deployment of a drone which can threaten manned aircraft yet. That's going to be fascinating to watch.
I'd envision "kamikaze" drones being the most feasible thing to be effective first. Basically much smarter missiles. A vision of a swarm of something that looks like a DJI phantom threatening fixed wing aircraft is pretty much fantasy right now though. Too slow, not enough weight capacity, range & loitering time & service ceiling too low, etc.. the only way I seem them being useful is 1000 of them in a dense cloud around a target.. like stationary mines in the sky hoping to be struck by attackers like a bird strike.
In WWII, F4 Wildcat pilots soon learned not to get into turning contests with Mitsubishi Zeros. Instead, they maintained altitude and speed, using their advantage in a dive to execute "slashing" attacks.
something that looks like a DJI phantom...the only way I seem them being useful is 1000 of them in a dense cloud around a target.. like stationary mines in the sky hoping to be struck by attackers like a bird strike.
Those drones are plenty fast enough for tanks. Why not a tank equivalent of an aircraft carrier? The tank would act as a mobile charging station and command center. Most modern tanks could be severely disabled by a shaped charge placed directly onto the barrel of the main gun, or directly onto the tread mechanism. The machine guns and targeting systems are also quite vulnerable, the loss of which would also severely degrade the tank's combat power. Tanks have acquired countermeasure systems like Trophy, but those could be overwhelmed through saturation attacks and on current tanks, they are externally mounted and themselves vulnerable.
If such a vehicle could operate without infantry support, it might be worth doing the R&D.
Fun trivia that I read a while back: After getting hold of a zero, they discovered that the carburetor design would cause the engine to sputter on high speed dives. https://www.history.com/news/the-akutan-zero-how-a-captured-...
Also, their controls could become sluggish at the right conditions near their top speeds.
1. https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/why-boeings-design-for-a-7...
2. https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/sys...
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_P-8_Poseidon
4. https://www.reddit.com/r/MilitaryPorn/comments/1b5tyd/kawasa...
The main downside that I can think of is that you really need air superiority to use them effectively, because they can't outfight, outmaneuver, or run away from any sort of enemy fighter. That's not a big deal against ISIS, but it's no good for prospective conflicts with China or Russia or whatever. Also, modern tactics tend more towards precision strikes rather than massive carpet bombing or, God forbid, nukes.
Agreed, and that's what scares me the most. All drones "pilots" will safely return to their families, their families won't lose any loved ones, therefore they'll become even easier to brainwash into voting anyone who supports wars. Circle closed, war becomes a 24/7/365 business worldwide and if you happen to live in the wrong place you're pretty much screwed.
It's also important to note that in the last few decades very few US pilots have been shot down or killed, so switching to drones doesn't significantly change the equation. The majority of the dying is going to be from the infantry on the ground, which aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
http://web.archive.org/web/20160217174724/https://squid314.l...
Put like this, it really makes you wonder if drone warfare is the worse alternative.
and we're back to missiles. those are just missiles. next you'll invent MIRVs under the premise of saving on the cost of the "cruising" since targets tend to be clustered.
F-35 is not air superiority fighter, so it has no speed or acceleration to leave the chasing aircraft behind after it has launched the missiles.
In general, one of the things that sets the F22/F35 apart from most of the competition is their AESA phased array radar, which is allegedly the best in the world. It can find enemy aircraft long before they can find it. Also, it can allow the pilot to lock and fire missiles before the enemy is close enough to target it. The dogfighting days where men such as the Red Barron or Chuck Yaeger ruled the skies are pretty much done forever. Soon enough we'll have UCAVs which can do > 12G rolls and will win every single dogfight because turns that fast cause humans to simply lose consciousness.
These aren't inconsistent arguments, but one wonders how far down the turtles go and how much we're willing to pay.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/f-35-beast-mode-new-v...
I think I the balance is to use each platform for what it is amazing at and supplement the weaknesses with other platforms that are better in various areas. Combined forces hit the hardest, but the electronics / SIGINT packages in modern fighters truly does set them apart. After an F35 has expended all of its rockets it can still designate targets for other combatants to destroy. The sensor fusion going on (thanks to Moore’s law and smaller / faster compute) really is something.
That seems incredibly underwhelming. Isn't that less than the capacity of a single ground based vehicle?
And wouldn't a fixed position defensive system have hundreds of missiles?
I can't quite see when four bombs per mission is ever going to be "an unbelievable amount of firepower".
Let's compare that to one of the more recent Soviet air superiority fighters, the Su-57[1]. For air-to-air combat, it has 4 beyond visual range missiles and 2 short range missiles. The F35 in beast mode has 16 (14 long range and 2 short range) air to air missiles in addition to its machine gun. Pretty big difference even excluding the massively better AESA phased array radars in the F35 and additional jamming / spoofing hw in the F35.
It might seem underwhelming to you, but it is still an overwhelming amount of firepower. A ground based vehicle doesn't need to be stealth or deal with gravity. Ground based vehicles also don't need to go supersonic whereas the F35 can go mach 1.6. The US anti-aircraft patriot missile launcher, the M901, can be loaded with 4 PAC-2 patriots for anti-air, or 16 PAC-3 patriots for shooting down ballistic missiles. Do they keep some extra missiles with each unit to reload? Absolutely! Hundreds? Not even close. We worked with them when I was a UAV Pilot (Shadow 200 TUAV aka a "drone" that was about 11'x13'x2.5ft).
What I can tell you, from experience, is that when a single bomb can literally level a city block, four bombs per mission is an unbelievable amount of firepower. For serious missions, you'll also have entire wings of planes continuously dropping ordinance, flying back to base, rearming and doing it again. You end up with a lot of destruction, but this is real life and not a video game. I flew many missions in OIF II (482 combat flight hours) on the reconnaissance drone the Shadow 200. We did a lot of targeting and one of the more memorable missions involved a Kiowa scout helicopter being shot down. They made a military channel special about it[2] and what ended it was dropping a single GBU50 500lb bomb on a huge weapon cache the militants were using to rearm before trying to blow up the downed chopper and the pilots time and time again.
For a huge and daring operation to blow up a lot of Syria's chemical weapon production facilities look at the number of planes involved. Note that Syria has the S200 and newer Pantsir, supposedly some of the best anti-air in the world. The mission was a total success with all targeted facilities destroyed and not a single allied plane shot down.
Does this maybe answer your question? It might not seem like a lot, but these can be very big bombs and it isn't as though the enemy is spread evenly over a city the size of New York City.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_Su-57#Armament
[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0845577/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_missile_strikes_against_S...
I'd envision "kamikaze" drones being the most feasible
thing to be effective first. Basically much smarter
missiles. A vision of a swarm of something..
And all of that is only in case you haven't already been hacked or spied on by other means.
There were a few public talks on youtube from relevant engineers about other possible countermeasures but I can't find them now. But the summary is that while war planes take 20 years to build, most countermeasures can be coded and iterated in a week on some existing platform as new info becomes available. Usually in the form of coordinating a swarm in certain ways and synthesising radio signals for different purposes.
The F-35 was conceived of for a different kind of fight, more like a contest of swarms than a series of related but independent jousts. The F-35 is formidable because it works better in a pack than anything else out there. For example, it can fly out ahead of a mass of 4th generation fighters into an environment they couldn't survive and remain there, low-observable, long enough to feed targeting data back to the swarm who can launch a salvo of missiles from over the horizon, out of harm's way. As the article explains, stealth isn't about remaining 100% invisible, which is impossible, rather it's about preventing anyone from shooting while you get the first shot off instead.
Whether or not the F-35 lives up to this hope is another thing, but it was never conceived of as primarily a dominant dogfighter so it's fun but maybe not hugely relevant to stack it up against planes that were designed to win that fight. The F-35 seeks to win it before it even starts, instead. It remains to be seen if anything was learned from the F-4's introduction and if all of this works against peer states, but this is the idea behind it.
Actually, a lot of the WWII fighters used their advantages in flight ceiling, armor, and speed, instead of getting into turning fights. (Though the later allied fighters could also turn.)
The Japanese even made a fighter that deliberately sacrificed turning for speed.
ADDENDUM: this is a somewhat related article https://warontherocks.com/2019/03/the-developing-fight-for-t... that talks about the comparison between a bunch of cheap drones vs. a single F-35 in terms of combat capabilities.
According to most simulations and exercises--yes. The F-35 absolutely wipes the floor against cheaper adversaries.
This gets under-appreciated. One of the big reasons the Battle of Midway was such a turning point, wasn't mainly the destruction of ships, but the loss of so many well-trained Japanese carrier pilots. Over time, the American advantage in trained carrier pilots paid very huge dividends:
1) Because of better pilots, the American carriers were at an advantage over Japanese carriers.
2) Because there were already a large cadre of trained carrier pilots already, the US pilot schools could afford to spend more time training the student pilots before they ever got into combat. In Japan, the carrier pilots were rushed out as as fast as possible to meet the demand.
1 - https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/f-35-faces-mos... (was posted here in the past couple days)
The F-35s and F-22s can get up closer to the adversarial aircraft and air defense than non-LO (Low Observable) aircraft (B-1s, B-52s, F-18s, F-16s, and F-15s). A lot has been invested in the interfaces and data-links for F-35 and F-22 pilots to relay information to other platforms (Land, Sea, and Air) The key is to get better stand-off range and higher resolution targeting data for your non-LO aircraft to minimize risk and maximize hitting air and land targets.
My overall opinion of the F-35 is that it's not really a fighter, but more like an EA-35, because it has a very capable electronic warfare suite (AN/ASQ-239), and it has the ability to take that suite and collect data passively up close and personal with lower risk of detection, and can transmit a lot of high quality intel very quickly, while keeping great emission control (EMCON) with directional antennas and near-noise floor communications. It's also the only LO aircraft that can take-off a carrier. The capability to carry these towed decoys only adds more tricks and tools to the EW suite. I don't have a very high opinion of it's air-to-air combat performance, but it definitely has it's place as a great EW/SIGINT/COMINT platform.
The desc of the book includes: 151 combat missions, 21 hard kills on surface-to-air-missile sites, 4 Distinguished Flying Crosses with Valor, 1 Purple Heart.
I've been into historical aspects of war/plane/ship/weapon so I've read lots of books and viewed many pics/videos related. However I had never heard of towed decoys off of a modern fighter jet like F16 until reading above book.
The book is awesome to read if you are into that kind of stuff.
I remember reading in the book where he talks about getting into a fight with the towed decoy deployed. When he was out of the fight and tried to tow in the decoy, it was gone. Meaning it had done its job and sacrificed itself and therefore saved the F16 itself.
Btw, there's been lots of discussion of MCAS on Boeing 737 MAX and how some are uneasy that software HAS to be involved for 737 MAX to stay airborne at certain times. I believe F16 was first production fighter jet where computer has to be involved in controlling every moment it's airborne. If computers on it stopped working, F16 will supposedly stop being a flying object almost immediately.
I think the article as an overview of towed decoys in general is interesting and a not very well covered topic.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/26/australia/australia-artificia...