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Comment by digi59404 | Hacker News Reader

“The F-35 has failed” is a strong statement that depends on what your definition of success is. Did it fail because it couldn’t replace the F-16? Did it fail because it’s expensive and bloated?

Do those things even matter?

I’m not defending the F-35 but anyone deeply and intimately familiar with the platform knows and understands that it is a Ferrari. You don’t bring your Acura TSX to a Formula 1 race track to win a race. Just like you don’t bring your Ferrari to the farm to haul material (not anymore anyways).

The F-35 may be a Ferrari; but the thing about Ferraris is that their technology trickles down. Now we have electric cars with carbon fiber shells. The same is true for the F-35. The technology inside it has and will lead to the resurrection and long standing use of older planes like the B1 and U2. Where the airframe is solid but the tech and stealth is not. It will also lead to revolutionary new planes which are cheaper to make and build.

Through the F35s use of distributed computing and treating hardware components and their software as services, we’re not going to be doomed to the same fate as the F16 where we can’t find hardware. Instead, we’ll have more component oriented aircraft systems where each aircraft is no bespoke and can use from a menu of technologies.

So did the F35 fail because we spent too much? Depends on how much it saves us later.

Did it fail because it didn’t replace the F16? What if it makes the F16 viable again? Did it still fail?

Some may see this as a slippery slope. What matters is the objective outcome that comes from this project. Not the success criteria some folks have perpetuated or thrust upon the project.

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Allow me to restate your comment more briefly: "The F-35 depends on your definition of success. It has not achieved the goals in its original funding application, but some of its traits might inspire future traits in future other things that might turn out to be good and worth the money we've spent so far, so therefore it's not right to call it a failure yet."

That's not a friendly restatement, no. "Might" does not make right.

That's mis-categorizing my statement. There is no "might". The innovation that's occurred in the F-35 program has already produced fruit in many other airframes and the US Air Force has already "re-written the playbook" on what it means to have a new airframe and what revitalizing an old airframe is.

It's not about whether it may or may not - It has, that's a definitive statement.

The US air force didnt need a new airframe

The old airframes were not survivable in a contested environment, and there was no practical way to make them survivable. That's still true today.

This may be a statement that the U.S militaries post-ww2 doctrine of air superiority is no longer viable. Large Battleships once had to face a similar reality that it was impossible to make them survivable if the enemy had air superiority.

Drones are cheap, good missiles are 1/100th the price of an F-35. It's possible that aircraft will no longer be able to enter contested space without significant risks just as it was pre-ww2 where it was impractical to achieve air superiority or to destroy anti-aircraft placements.

Considering the extreme investment of the US into aircraft as a means of projecting power and winning wars against conventional militaries, there is a chance that an opponent with a much smaller military budget could "win" in a conventional fight - making the multi-trillion dollar aircraft projects pointless.

What replaces it? Loitering missile drones + a big expansion of satellite imagery?

Absolutely.

A tomahawk cruise missile isn't too far off from a one-shot fighter jet when it comes to attacking fixed, or very slow-moving targets. They also don't need a human pilot, which cost an extraordinary amount of money to train, way more than their salary.

China has already developed what is effectively an ICBM designed to sink/punch through warships from above.

In any major future conflict our satellites will be the first casualties. They won't be available for overhead imagery, communications, or navigation. So remote piloted drones will be useless. Loitering missiles will be important but only work against a limited set of targets.

For the price of the f-35 a defensible satellite installation could be placed in orbits that would be difficult to shoot down.

There is nothing stopping a satellite from maneuvering out of the way of an incoming missle, or for it deploying counter measures.

Satellites can be launched on arbitrarily large rocket boosters with an arbitrary number of in orbit assembly/refueling flights. Anti satellite missiles require that the missile can be deployed to a useful location that can’t be immediately disabled.

There is no such thing as a defensible satellite installation. The only way to make a satellite really difficult to shoot down is to put it in a high orbit, but that makes it less useful for reconnaissance. While launch costs have come down slightly, the total cost for building and launching a large military satellite remains far higher than an F-35. Even large satellites carry very little maneuvering fuel and have small thrusters which don't allow for effective evasive maneuvers. Adding more fuel and larger thrusters would drastically increase costs and reduce the mass available for useful payloads. And that's not even the biggest problem. Satellites lack the sensors necessary to detect when they are under attack. It's just not practical to load them up with multiple radars and IRST sensors that would be necessary to detect an incoming antisatellite weapon.

So in short your idea won't work in the real world.

Nothing, we don't replace it because we don't need it

It's a tremendous waste of money

Contested is the point. Contested by other jets, I'd say no. All other air forces with modern fighters are still using Gen 4 fighters at best. The true threat comes from anti-aircraft weapons. To the point developers of FCAS are worried about man-held missiles. These missiles can take down legacy as well as 5th gen fighters. That's also why saturation is a thing, overwhelming the enmy with numbers. At 100 mil a piece, that startegy might be a tad expensve with the F-35. Hence drones. Whether rones work or not has to be seen.

my bestguess is, that n a conventional conflict between industrilized states the air campaigns will be over after the first three major engangements or so. Because by then replacing the losses would ruin everyone.

China has two Gen5 fighters in serial production right now. And show me a manpad that can take down a Gen 5 fighter at 30K feet. No manpad is energetic enough to do so.

Who said at 30k feet? At low levels, that's what people are planning for, yes.

Most flights aren't conducted at low levels, unless you're fighting 3rd world insurgents. And again, which manpads are you claiming can down a Gen 5 aircraft?

It sounded more as if waffling about possible future results than a description concrete present results. The F-35 has cost $4e11 so far, says a random site on the web. What are the results of its innovation, the results that definitely and already have occurred and arguably are worth $4e11?

The Ferrari metaphor is revisionist at best. The F-35 program wasn't created to build a Ferrari, it was designed to build the best, cheapest commuter car possible using economies of scale and shared cost. That the only role left for it is as a Ferrari (after the design was butchered by stakeholders) is a testament to how far it fell from its goals, not a success story.

The race car/pickup truck analogy is useful here. The F35 failed because they tried to make a vehicle that could be both a race car and a pickup truck, and wound up making one that is more expensive and worse at both jobs than building two different vehicles. Or just using existing fleets of vehicles.

Although personally I think that in the event the US military needs to scramble a bunch of F35s to serve as in legitimate air to air combat we'll have bigger problems than a costly jobs program not producing something useful.

So you’re saying the F35 is the El Camino of fighter jets?

> Not the success criteria some folks have perpetuated or thrust upon the project.

This isn't an art project where interpretation is in the eye of the beholder. This is a taxpayer-funded set of contracts; the success criteria are defined as part of said contracts, they're not "thrust upon" the project by "some folks".

Your trickle down benefits would come from any innovative project, whether it were a success or a failure. They'd just be more generally beneficial due to more extensive application in a successful project (and probably more cheaply usable by other areas of industry). Either way they would exist in either scenario: if their existence is what defines success, then failure is impossible.

In industry when you realize a project is going to fail it is common to pack it with a bunch of marginally related things that you want in your project but cannot afford. Then when they complete what you want you take it for no cost. It makes your project look better on the bottom line (ROI or whatever metric accountants use to judge), and the other project eventually is written off.

Would the company be better off just paying for the things they want in each project and accepting a lower ROI is an open question. I just watch the game, not make the rules.

Is the project a fail for Lockheed Martin?

Didn't they get paid a bunch of money for it?

Don't they get paid again each time there's a rev?

Hard to say. Do they lose reputation? Did they not do something else?

>Your trickle down benefits would come from any innovative project, whether it were a success or a failure.

Take the $3e11, convert them to physical banknotes, burn all $3e11 bills in Texas last week for warmth, and according to the grandparent the program would still be a success because the money ultimately provided utility to people!

>Grandparent: What matters is the objective outcome that comes from this project.

No one froze to death! We gained _something_ from the program! Operation successful! /s

Well, it failed to replace the F-16, for starters. And the A-10. It failed in becoming the NATO / Western end-all jet. It is expensive, there aren't that many. The stealth capabilities are lacking by modern standards. Maintenaince if expensive and the combat aircraft equivalent of an iPhone.

Compare that to the cold war fighters. High numbers, used by the majority of US allies and even comparable cheap. Desiged to be usable under cold war circumstances. And modernized to this very day.

The biggest issue I see, also with stuff like the FCAS (French and German Eurofghter / Rafale replacement) is cost. Just imagine you loose, say, 50 of them in a war against Russia or China. How many you can reasonably replace? At that price tag? All other enemies, you hardly loose legacy fighters against those. And that is not even taking training into account.

Well, the B-52 is still flying. Maybe it will reach 100 years of service.

How has it failed to replace the F-16? It is objectively superior to the F-16 in just about every performance parameter. It costs less than 4.5 Gen peers like the Eurofighter and Rafale, while having more build at a total of 600 thus far with over 100 more built per year now.

As for losing them, yes it would be bad, but it's the most survivable jet being produced today. Recent conflicts have shown just how lopsided a conflict is if you have a technological edge over your adversaries.

Survivability is not a given. They successfully tagged F-35s at various occossions with ground based radar. There are also account sof F-22s loosing dog fights against Rafales and Eurofghters. And the F-22 is the better dog fighter compared to the F-35. And there are still thousands of F-16s to be retired for F-35s, seemingly not going to happen if the Air Force is axing F-35 procurement.

Air Force isn't axing procurement. Just because it has been tagged under ideal conditions on various occasions doesn't mean that it's survivability isn't vastly better than it's non stealthy alternatives.

Yes F-22's have lost dog fights, that's why their K:D's ratios aren't infinite. I really don't understand what your point is though, because the F-22 has lost a dog fight it's overwhelming win rate no longer is relevant?

And sure the F-22 is a better dog fighter but it doesn't have active production line and the costs of restarting production are exorbitantly expensive.

My pint is that all air forces agree, to a certain extent, that stealth alone is not enough to over come modern air defence. It is even not sufficient to beat other somewhat stealthy fighters. And the F-35 isn't even that stealthy to begin with. The examples are to show that the F-35 is alread now, at the very beginning of its service life, hte real risk of being not as surviveable as thought.

The point of the F-35 is to be so technologically superior that you do not get into a war of attrition where you are bleeding planes at the same rate as your enemy. If that was the case it would mean none of the technology upgrades actually gave an advantage, which would be strange given their fundamental nature.

What really matters is how many F-16s or cold war era aircraft an F-35 could take out before being shot down. There is a discussion of such numbers below.

And that fact has, more or less, been answered. And even the to-be-delveloped aircraft are expected to fight in enviroments in which they more often loose against air defence and have equal odds against same gen fighters with slight adavtages against fighters one gen behind. The latter largely depends on Command-and Control. And on radar. Basically, stand-off attacks only work against between stealth and non-stealth fighters. Between stealth ighters, it's up close again.

Radar already now can tag, reliably, the F-35. And will tag next gen stealth jets. The same radar already now can trace 100s of contacts per installation, making saturation difficult. Air combat really is getting expensive... The problem steath jets have , is that you need only a handfull of ground based radars. Which can be develeoped and deployed fatser than new stealth jets. Stealth, so, is loosing its usefullness over the service life of a model. And that service life will be long.

Stealth will still be needed to not be at a disadvantage against other stealth jets, so. Unfortunately for the F-35, it is the fisrt of these fighters.

Radar can tag any aircraft currently in public flight. Whether that radar can provide accurate and adequate targeting information to weapon systems is not proven at all.

~1.7 Trillion dollars so we can have a bleeding-edge Ferrari while our "enemies" in the PRC and Russia are still driving around in Yugo 45s

So many people seem to still buy into the Cold War mindset that we just need the latest bleeding edge platforms or the Soviets are going to invade and we'll all be reading Trotsky.

The US and NATO militaries are so far ahead of the Russians and China it's comical to claim another 1.7 trillion dollars for a "ferrari" is a prudent use of taxpayer dollars.

China can't even field a blue-water navy yet. I guess they're only about a century behind the US there lol

> The US and NATO militaries are so far ahead of the Russians and China it's comical to claim another 1.7 trillion dollars for a "ferrari" is a prudent use of taxpayer dollars.

Russia and China don't need a Yugo to out-speed the US's Ferrari, they have ICBMs and the Russians have nuclear subs that work well enough.

And the US's Ferrari did a really, really poor job in the off-road terrains of the Middle East, with Iraq at best a draw (and a huge loss for the local population, but who cares about that?) and a definite defeat in Afghanistan.

I'm talking about the conventional fight.

Once you get into nukes it's another ballgame.

How does the F35 or its cool successor prevent MAD?

Iraq and Afgh were counterinsurgency fights. Any China or Russian fight will not be the same.

And the US absolutely crushed the Iraqi military within a matter of days in both Desert Storm and OIF. The problem was the "nation building" COIN fight.

Well you certainly don't stay ahead of your adversaries by resting on your laurels.

You don't stay ahead by spending way over yours means.

it is a key reason the Soviet union collapsed. They were trying match US spending in many sectors and capitalism can outspend communist economies any day.

Diverting spending from say infrastructure to miltary does not help a country in the long term.

It doesn't seem to me like the Ferrari analogy works. The Ferrari excels at a narrow use to the detriment of other potential uses.

The F-35 however was made to do everything, but excels at seemingly none of them.

“By learning from our mistakes we have successfully failed.”

The vibe I’m getting from this thread haha.

This reads word-for-word like an email from a PM to management talking about how their project that imploded embarrassingly has so many intangible future benefits that really, it's a huge success when you think about it.

Exactly, unless those were the upfront deliverables of the projects, its a failure. Sure, not all the effort was 100% completely wasted but the goal didn't get achieved.

No - I doubt any PM would write what I said. What I said is more a IC in tech saying

"Sure, what the PM asked for an laid out was X. But really, in the middle we found out the architecture didn't work as expected. So we pivoted and in doing so found more success using Y's Suggested Architecture"

Innovation and Tech is messy. More often than not, Your definition of success changes as time goes on as you get further into a project that's groundbreaking.

> Your definition of success changes as time goes on as you get further into a project that's groundbreaking.

If you fail to meet your original goal because you are not capable of doing it, and then you change your goal to accommodate this reality, it doesn't change the fact that you failed in your original goal.

If my goal is to go to Mars and I only make it to the moon because it turns our Mars is just too far away, even though I did something revolutionary, amazing, and extraordinary, it does not change the fact that I failed in my original goal.

I don't even consider this to be semantics. It's people trying to justify to themselves that there is no failure. You've literally failed by your own definition of what success is. Changing the definition of success doesn't change reality.

I disagree that this is justification of failure. If anything, it’s the opposite.

We failed in our goal. We also learned and developed things of real value while pursuing that goal.

This is salvaging what can be salvaged to make headway in an adjacent goal. That said...

> Your definition of success changes as time goes on as you get further into a project that's groundbreaking.

Sometimes the goal is, itself, a failure. It was born of not fully understanding the problem at hand. When the goal is stupid, but that is only discoverable by pursing that goal (ie “intent”), then redefining success is the right thing to do.

> We failed in our goal.

Simply by admitting this, you've already contradicted the person I was responding to.

His entire scribe is "what is failure? have we really failed? no" instead of "yeah we failed, but we can learn from it"

Failure is fine. Failure is expected. Failure is the best way to learn an iterate.

But then don't say "well we always got what we wanted out of it anyway, which was to learn" when your goal was "to build the ultimate fighter jet at this budget in this timeline"

I didn't get the same thing out of the comment you were responding to...but I otherwise agree with you entirely:

> Failure is fine. Failure is expected. Failure is the best way to learn an iterate.

and

> don't say "well we always got what we wanted out of it anyway, which was to learn" when your goal was "to build the ultimate fighter jet at this budget in this timeline"

> I didn't get the same thing out of the comment you were responding to

This is my fault, as I was mostly paraphrasing what he said in other comments. So that's just lazy commenting on my part, and probably I deserve downvotes for it.

(fwiw it was clear to me that you were commenting in good faith and received my upvotes)

It's a fail because we are moving into unmanned fighting vehicles. Something that F-35 program has failed to foresee.

Basically F-35 is the fighter of tomorrow fighting threats of yesterday.

But that's not what this article says. They're claiming the air force requesting a new manned fighter is evidence it failed.

Meanwhile the F-35 is explicitly designed to control swarms of unmanned drones.

The F-35 program did not fail to foresee the rise of unmanned vehicles, they built and adapted the aircraft and avionics around this concept. The F-35 cockpit, avionics, and helmet are designed to allow an F-35 pilot to command a fleet of drones performing roles ranging from scouting and EW to SEAD and direct attack.

Human flying and directing drones to do some tasks is such a 20th century thinking. For one, human pilot in F-35 directing drones would be the weakest link.

Why would you want to send a human pilot to face drone(s) that does not care for it's survival, can pull more Gs, calculate trajectory and make decisions faster?

This comes up in every HN thread about fighter jets.

Modern fighter aircraft are mobile missile launchers. They are judged primarily by whether they can get close enough to where they need to go without being detected, detect what they need to, and then launch good enough missiles. The missile is effectively the drone. Modern missiles are basically self-piloting autonomous drone rockets. In that regard the F-35 is fine, and automating the pilot is not necessarily a win because the AI isn't going to be doing ultra-high G dogfight turns anyway. The humans job is to react to unexpected situations and figure out something smart in situations where remote control isn't reliable or desirable (e.g. due to risk of detection).

I think it boils down to this: F-35, compared to unmanned aircraft, does not cost less than 6 million dollars a piece and it exposes American life to enemy fire.

Why would you want to send a human pilot to face drone(s)

Because an F35 can communicate over direct line-of-sight to its accompanying drones, so the whole package is very resistant to jamming or other interference.

Sounds like a last minute add-on to try to stay relevant.

Trickle down, whether it's in the economy or here, is bullshit.

Spending a trillion dollars on a program may lead to some good coming out of it, but it's about as disingenuous as saying that spending $3000 on a shitty computer that crashes all the time is OK because the cat got a box out of the deal. Yes, it's technically true, but completely unrelated.

[upvote for reference to Ferrari tractors :-)]

Lamborghini started out making tractors.

The F-35 may be a Ferrari; but the thing about Ferraris is that their technology trickles down.

Wait a second. The F35 was supposed to be the trickled-down thing from the F22.

The F35 is far more advanced than the F22 in everything except actual kinematics. The F22 is faster and more maneuverable, and that's the least interesting thing that separates the F22 and the F35.

I know nothing about the F-35, but it sounds like it's basically the Servo of aircraft?

As in, it hasn't evolved into a complete product that can wholesale replace its predecessors, but its innovations will be incorporated into them over time.

>Did it fail because it didn’t replace the F16? What if it makes the F16 viable again? Did it still fail?

Yes, because lots and lots of F-16s have been replaced with something that isn't what it was bought as. So unless you count it as a win that allies now have worse capabilities than they should have had and paid for because it might make them also buy F-16 parts, I would say it is a huge fail.

The F-35 failed because fighter jet airframes aren’t particularly relevant anymore. You can stick the same sensor systems and missiles on just about anything.

Improved stealth etc is useful, but F-35’s are only slightly better than 40+ year old jets. Thus hardly worth the price vs cheaply manufacturing a minor update of an older design.

Or as the saying goes “quantity has a quality all it’s own.”

Curious what your background is to make those statements. My experience from Red Flag and other exercises is that the 5th gens (22 & 35) have a much better K/D and survivability. When you expend all of your stand off weapons or need to get a B-2 deep into a contested airspace, including against SAMs, you need a 35 going in to do sanitization. No F-16 is fighting off both SAMs and a huge ass wave of J-10s or any J-20s while protecting a bomber.

Now is that 35 worth the price? If our policy continues to insist for preparing against an impossible push peer adversary landmasses, then maybe. Personally I don’t see those pushes happening, but that’s more due to the tyranny of distance and having like 10 minutes of play time before needing to refuel.

I have some background wargaming for the DoD. As to Red Flag numbers generally reported, it was setup to heavily favor F-35’s. Amusingly at one point they further boosted the K/D ratio after the fact from 15:1 to 20:1.

Actual air war looks very different, with a significant focus on cruse missiles early on etc. But again, comparing the F35 with outdated equipment is missing the point.

Yet you're the one comparing the F-35 to 40+ year old aircraft that would get smoked in combat by the F-35.

No. Modern sensors, communications systems, missiles, etc are absolutely crucial on a modern battlefield.

Further, the F16’s people are talking about very much needed a replacement. The newest was built in 2005 and while it’s a solid multi-role, all weather, air-to-air and air-to-ground fighter the design is showing it’s age.

But, the F35 isn’t simply a modernized F16 now it does stealth, STOVL, etc. So you need to consider what it could have been not compare it to what’s being replaced.

PS: I very much believe stealth aircraft are needed, but the same F35’s are eventually facing the sensors of 2050+. That’s the context where it starts to look very questionable.

Where are you getting your information the the newest F-16 was built in 2005? F-16s are still in production. Whether it's the Block 60 or the Block 70/72, the F-16 is being equipped with AESA, can carry almost every Western weapon, and other than lacking stealth, is still quite competitive in the air.

My understanding was the last US F16 was delivered in 2005 with remaining production going to international partners. EX: https://www.defenseworld.net/news/24742/Lockheed_Martin_Deli...

Modernization of existing aircraft continued, but the US’s physical aircraft are only going to last to ~2040.

Is this really realistic though? I'm curious about your professional perspective.

My impression of the present/near future of air combat is a stealthy fighter with AMRAAMs in front, radar off, and a quarterback aircraft in back out of missile range, with the radar on. The front fighter fires and turns around, and the missile gets mid-course updates from the quarterback aircraft. When the AMRAAMs are depleted, you leave. It seems like if you get into Sidewinder range and you're outnumbered, you're going to have a torrent of medium range missiles coming at you from all sides.

It's not clear to me how well newer radars can track the B-2, but it's hard for me to see how fighters could really protect it. I'd expect that in a conflict with China, if they can track the B-2, that the B-2 would be withheld until the fighter threat was neutralized.

That's essentially loyal wingman.

So if you buy into the concept of maneuver warfare you want to hit the enemy's center of gravity and reduce their will to fight. If you're trying to do that to China, you need to hit them hard and fast deep in their country's borders (I mean, Russia too to an extent). If you play this tit for tat fighter threat game, that doesn't happen and you're essentially in a war of attrition. That means you don't hold B-2s until a fighter threat is neutralized, you send them in to hit the CoG early so the war lasts days instead of years.

F-35s are really going to be doing counter IADS so their loadout reflects that. Maybe you get a couple A2A missiles loaded in, but primarily for self defense. If you want offensive counter air, you're bringing the F-22s (or probably the NGAD) loaded out appropriately.

Anyway all this just affirms the original idea, which is that you can't prosecute a war against peer adversaries with 4th gen fighters. Our 4th gens can still take down the enemy air threat, but the IADS means those 4th gens are not even getting into the air space.

Makes sense. It seems to me that the key question is whether or not the B-2 is trackable. I've never had a clearance, so I don't know, but I suspect that over China's own territory, it probably is. Maybe not "weapons quality", but good enough to get a fighter within IR missile/cannon range. It seems difficult to get the B-2 through reliably under those circumstances, and I'm not sure a fighter escort is of much help, because they will allocate a lot of fighters to a B-2.

The unknown then is how much can be done with decoys and EW, or even things like cyberattacks on radars and control nodes.

Yeah, that's what the Egyptians, Syrians, Jordanians and Iraqis thought in their various fights against Israel through the years. Yet somehow, the Israeli quality came out on top every single time.

Stating the F-35s are "only slightly better than 40+ year old jets shows a stunning lack of knowledge.

Oh and if you compare the flyaway cost of the F-35A to the F-16 Block 60 or 70/72, the F-35 is cheaper...

The US doesn’t have any Block 60 or 70/72 so it’s a tricky comparison due to low production numbers. Looking at the US’s actual fleet the F16 was a much cheaper aircraft and likely would have stayed at roughly those numbers.

Anyway, we already had the F22, the F35 was supposed to be the cheaper alternative and it mostly delivered on that. But now we have a very capable aircraft with far to many roles to excel at all of them while still being quite expensive to operate.

Roles for the F-35:

1. Supersonic stealthy STOL for the USMC. Check

2. Supersonic stealthy replacement for A-7/F-18. Check

3. Supersonic stealthy replacement for F-16. Check

Despite its detractors, the F-35 is an excellent aircraft that is doing quite well in squadron usage. The USMC loves their B model, operating off of their mini carriers. The USAF is getting enough on the line that sustainment costs are bending down, and flyaway costs are cheaper than the newest F-16s that would get crushed by the F-35.

The only service that isn't as in love with the F-35 is the Navy. They've slowly been realizing that the short legs of the F-18 have hampered them in the Pacific. The F-35 has better range, but is still far shorter than older strike aircraft like the A-6.

To be clear I think the F35 is a very solid aircraft, but don’t gloss over the details.

The F35 is aiming to be both an air superiority and strike aircraft, and do electronic warfare and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, while being stealthy and cheaper than the F22.

Now add F18 missions like fighter escort and fleet air defense which add yet more demands.

You get less stealth, less speed, less range, less payload, and or fewer sensors etc than an aircraft dedicated to a smaller range of roles. Meanwhile you need to pay for all the capacity that aren’t particularly relevant when doing any specific mission.

Sure, generally being capable of Mach 2.2+ for example isn’t such a big deal. However, if you’re deep in enemy territory and low on munitions it’s quite valuable to quickly escape any reinforcements that show up. On the other hand when escorting a fleet all that extra engine is mostly wasted and costing you fuel.

Even if it is a Ferrari, are squadrons of Ferraris is what needed to fight wars?

Sometimes you need a Ferrari. Sometimes you need a bunch of hooligans with bullets in a converted tractor.

But being caught without either, when you need one isn't a good place to be in.

Not one Ferrari but many. Sticking to the analogy, in what circumstances do you need many Ferraris?

Peer state war where everyone has Ferraris? Or at least fleets of Benzes, so you want to one up them with fleets of Ferraris.

Even without getting into a shooting war, you could argue your Ferraris will terrify the Benzes from even coming out to play, thus avoiding war. Not to mention the Toyotas and the Volkswagens.

That said, I know some people will argue a peer state war between superpowers (say, US, Russia, China, etc.) will inevitably escalate to nuclear. I don't claim to know enough to say how valid that is.

Also, at full production, the US is supposed to have a ridiculously overwhelming large zerg fleet of F-35s (more than 2000 between the branches, according to wikipedia). That totally eclipses anything planned by Russia or China for their own 5th gen fighters.

Define many?

When your operational area is most of the planet, you obviously need more than one! I could describe 25 as "squadrons" but that wouldn't be too many.

Building a handful of an experimental, envelope-pushing design is reasonable. Mass-producing hundreds of a mainline fighter is reasonable. Combining both in the same aircraft, and ramping up production before you've validated the design, always seemed crazy to me.

>So did the F35 fail because we spent too much? Depends on how much it saves us later.

It might not be a lot. The concept of flying Corvettes is strong, culturally and industrially, but it might be on the verge of becoming like cavalry with the advent of drone swarms.

Drone swarms that can counter fighter jets is a concept that makes no sense. At best you can make something like a guided missile that can loiter. But I can't really see much benefit to that. It would still require the same the avionics and performance as a guided missile. Not to mention stealth aircraft counter the concept even further.

> But I can't really see much benefit to that

Look at the recent Nagorno-Karabakh conflict to see how much UAVs are a game-changer:

https://www.csis.org/analysis/air-and-missile-war-nagorno-ka...

But how do you translate that into hitting something going Mach 1 at 40k feet? A UAV capable of attacking a jet can exist. My point is that it would need to be a fully capable aircraft not something that can be produced cheaply and deployed in swarms. There's a lot of space in the sky.

Makes you wonder, is there a time for an unmanned jet?

At some point these jets must be at ground, not ? A swarm of UAVs can do a lot of damage on these situation.

Hence counter-swarm swarms. Either single use, fired from a canister, or with their own little runways, flying low level CAP and ready launch at any time, unsleeping vigilance. Plus a bunch of CIWS (C-RAM), which are very effective despite scaring the fuck out of you as they tear open a portal to hell.

https://youtu.be/AcTXYtB9Lfs

How do you get those UAV's there? The combat radius of a F-35A (without drop tanks or refueling) is 1000km's. If this UAV is going to travel 1000km's then it's going to be quite big, expensive, and likely easy pickings for defending F-35's. If it's carried by something then that something too would be an easy target and would probably need to be escorted by something which would fight said fighter jets.

It's just really not that simple.

They can be produced cheaply because all of the life support, human facing controls, and armoring aren't included. This reduces weight which shrinks the airframe and reduces operational costs significantly.

The largest cost for a fighter is its engine, followed by radar and weaponry. The cost for including a human is a nit. And there isn't any armor in modern fighters. The A-10 has titanium , but fighter jets don't pack anything like that.

There's dollar cost, and then there's political cost. A pilot shot down and killed or captured is a political liability and military planners have to take that into account when deploying manned aircraft vs drones.

Agreed, but that doesn't mean that an autonomous aircraft will be cheap simply because it lacks a pilot. The cost for a Global Hawk is north of $250M, and it sure isn't a fighter bomber.

The drone swarm concept is irrelevant to the high and fast fight, but very relevant to infantry and armour. Of course HN is getting it confused. '3D printed jets!' they cry.

However smart jets will be a thing, as evidenced by the Boeing Loyal Wingman program (awful name). The uninhabited jet will push further into the engagement envelope, pull higher Gs, risk SAM lock-on to take out the SAM, fly in the dust like Tornados used to. And it will get task guidance from the X band data link from a human piloted jet. But that UAV will likely be as expensive as a regular jet (more including development cost of AI tech, retrofitting remote control into other jets).

Swarms of loitering munitions make sense in countering mobile SAM sites, as the Syrians/Russians (in Syria) and Emiratis(in Libya) are finding out -- so many Pantsir-S (SA-22) point defence systems destroyed by Turkish drones. So how long before S-400 systems (long range AAAD) get eaten?

The failure of Pantsir in Libya has been fascinating. One has to wonder if it's a failure in design/tech or in training and operations? Same with the drones that were used with impunity in Nagorno-Karabakh. I also wonder if the Russian's have been hyping their SAM systems too much. Not that they're not formidable, but they often seem to make their A2AD systems sound impenetrable.

If you're flying an Apache and you crest a hill and there's a ZSU or an SA-9 on the other side that is a brown pants situation. Obviously you try everything possible to avoid that engagement envelope. But with a drone it is feasible to push harder.

It's possible that the Pantsir-S export firmware isn't as good, but being totally spanked can't be good for export sales. The Turkish drones (eg Bayraktar TB2) have the indigenous KORAL EW system for both sensing and jamming, and given the platform SWaP constraints it must be pretty smart, though I don't know how they are preventing algorithm compromise given drones get shot down fairly often. Crypto presumably.

Given the relatively static setup, it is likely that the positions of the SAM sites is heavily compromised via local informants, leakage from cell phones and aerial surveillance. And rather than integrated A2AD it is probably more isolated sites. But still very impressive for a 659kg drone to be able to take them out.

Indeed.. There was another article today about how onboard systems saved 2 fighter pilots that passed out.

I was wondering even then, why do we still put pilots in these things? They'll fare better on their own and will have less performance constraints.

I think part of it is the military adolation of the fighter pilot. Probably not the only reason though, a hacked swarm of armed drones is a frightening prospect.

You put a pilot in there because we are nowhere near giving an autonomous drone command authority on a kill. The pilot is also smarter than any UAV and has situational awareness that even a drone ground control station lacks. Oh yeah, and that F-35 can be commanding portions of that swarm of armed drones.

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