An F-35 Pilot Explains Why the Jet's Bad Press Misses the Point
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While I don't doubt that it is better to fly than the F-16, so would every other plane we would have developed instead of this nightmare. I also am worried that it will be obsoleted with the development of advanced military drones. Why risk a human life when you can just send a robot to the battlefield instead?
Until we develop the technology to build an AGI, there’s still a need for fighters with human beings on board for autonomy.
That's literally the point of the F35: to stealthily penetrate enemy airspace and act as a command and control combat platform for drones. It observes the battlefield with it's amazing "eye of god" sensory field, drones are sent into the battle space automatically where they are then taken control of by the pilot.
As it is right now Russian VHF radars can already guide dual-guidance missiles onto an F-35 close enough for them to detect the F-35 with their radars.
The Chinese and Russians have set up VHF radars in Syria and use them to observe Israeli F-35s every day too, so the fog of war in their favour.
The fact that stealth is only a temporary advantage has been known for a long time. It's part of the reason why the USSR decided not to pursue stealth aircraft development despite their lead on stealth design technology relative to the US - until the Soviet bureaucracy in it's classical ineptitude decided to declassify the algorithms they developed which Lockheed Martin happily adopted.
Many compromises were made in the pursuit of an advantage known to become greatly diminished 10 years into a 50 year lifespan. I don't think this can be written off by the arms race argument.
The trade-offs made for stealth are beyond the plane itself, the entirety of US military strategy (and even diplomacy to some extent) is deeply affected by a stealth-focused air-power strategy.
As for stealth advances beyond 2025, I don't see it personally. As long as your doctrine requires you to fly your planes over enemy radars, there's not much you can when the wavelength of the enemy radar is bigger than most features in your plane. It's a physical limit as solid as conservation of energy.
If stealth isn't very helpful, why would you fly the slow and expensive F-35? I don't really understand it.
I'm sure the people behind the F-35 were aware of these technical factors, maybe not the extent of Russian/Chinese investment though, but I don't think that their interests were anything beyond making as much money out of maintenance as possible.
As for the people making the purchases, many of them do think that the F-35 made the wrong tradeoffs and a lot of them are pushing for a plane that would fulfill the same role as the F-35 was designed for but with a very different set of tradeoffs.
But that's considering the system outside of the doctrine. The purpose of these air defence systems isn't going to mount an eternal and fully insurmountable wall against air power.
Rather, the purpose is to greatly reduce the initial effectiveness of US airstrikes for hours to weeks until American military infrastructure can be struck.
Stealth does not increase the complexity of radars. They simply operate on a different wavelength. This took some engineering to increase the precision but there is no reason for a VHF radar to be any more complex than an X-band radar.
VHF radars in many ways are more practical than X-band radars because the lower frequency allows for more mobile and more survivable radar infrastructure. For example, Israel struck Chinese VHF antennas in Syria. But because the antennas were relatively cheap and decoupled from processing, the Chinese were able to swap out the antennas and repair their radar in a day or two, thousands of kilometers away.
The replacements will lose the tail fins giving much, much greater stealth capabilities. I suspect at that point that the F-35 will become far less desirable and will start retirement soon after.
https://www.defensenews.com/air/2021/05/13/the-f-22-is-going...
NGAD will be stealthier at figher radar frequencies. The issue is VHF stealth, and removing the tailfins won't help for that.
Stealth is NOT about becoming invisible. It's about reducing detection range until it's all but too late to intercept. Even worse, most of the ordinance those planes will be delivering will keep the plane many miles away when firing making interception time even shorter. The AGM-158 fires from around 230 miles away (575 miles for the ER variant). The S-400 can't even detect that far out let alone get enough resolution to react.
Physically smaller reflected cross-section means more stealth no matter the frequency. Giant flat panels radically increase the reflection from the side and marginally from the front.
VHF isn't magic. It's very imprecise to begin with. It's very vulnerable to jamming. It's super-vulnerable to weather patterns (a tropospheric ducting event could have most of the energy trapped in the wrong location). Longer wavelengths vs the X-band make it easier to absorb (E=hv). VHF installations are also very easy to target due to their size and massive power output trying to compensate for that E=hv problem.
Once you know a plane is somewhere within a few dozen miles, you have to send out fighters. They don't exactly have room for those large VHF arrays and those arrays aren't accurate enough to actually target. For that, they need to fall back on X-band, but that's the range that the stealth is optimized for. Once again, the stealth plane can see them from a long way off (maybe even passively) while they can't get their own lock until much closer which usually decides the winner.
Cross section is not a number you can compute in a vacuum. The cross section is associated to the frequency of the wave.
It's not viable to use AGM-158s for everything. When running these missions you are racing against time, you need to deliver the most munitions as fast as you can without missing faster than the enemy can strike your supply lines, bases, and carriers.
"Somewhere withing a few dozen miles" is a wildly inaccurate characterization. VHF AESA radars are accurate to 350x100m, and this number is improving every year as radar processing techniques improve.
Yes, the fighter can detect the radar from farther than the radar can detect the plane. This is true of every single radar system. The issue is that the fighter can only fire blind weapons unless it moves away.
That's the issue with the AGM-158 and other standoff weapons - the radars it's targeting can pack up and leave in a minute. It will then hit an empty field. Meanwhile you're making your attacking fighter jets a lot less stealthy carrying it.
And 350m accuracy is more than enough for a huge tactical advantage. The stealth jet has to use its radars to lock onto the other fighter jet, while the defending jet can launch munitions without turning on its radar at all or until it is way too late.
They also can't pay to get the parts that easily. It's not how these kinds of projects work. The people that designed much of it are dead or retired and the production lines are closed. Planes have to get cannibalized sometimes. Opening the lines back up after they are closed can be extremely costly and technically difficult and can involve reverse engineering.
Longer wavelengths are actually harder to absorb. I don't know where you got that they are easier to absorb? You need a lot more material to absorb a wave of longer wavelength of the same material.
E=hv is the wrong equation, because the amplitude is not fixed - the power is fixed. Larger wavelengths means thicker elements that can carry much more power without running into cooling limitations.
VHF isn't magic. Stealth isn't magic either. You can't avoid scattering and diffraction, these are physical limits. They limit VHF radar accuracy too because of the basic Rayleigh scattering equation, but you can fix this by making your aperture larger and applying some clever processing algorithms. If you're a plane, the only solution is to become bigger. Which is much more difficult.
Beyond that, neither Russia nor China are trading-off anywhere near as much as the US for stealth. Both of their designs are less stealthy but carry better weapons over a longer range with better kinematics at a lower cost.
They are in Syria in a pure intelligence capacity.
Beyond Russia and China (and possibly Venezuela), there are no fully operational VHF capable air defence systems
It's also incorrect to consider stealth as a yes/no. It's not a yes/no. It's a sliding scale with tradeoffs. Clearly China and Russia judged stealth to be much less important than the US did.
The USSR could definitely afford stealth aircraft and had all the necessary technology to make it before the US, yet they didn't, and for a reason.
As far as fighting the US Navy, the Chinese doctrine against the USN doesn't involve Chinese airplanes getting within VHF radar range of American large surface vessels before a crippling blow is already delivered.
You can say that the F35 trades off too much and that a "less stealth" would be better. But that's fundamentally baseless speculation.
Russia and China have no plans to attack the US within the next few decades, so they continue to research, but not to implement. It also doesn't help that US radar is a couple generations ahead as well.
Their current interests involve countries where a fast, hard-hitting plane is just as good as a stealth plane, so they save money at every stage from design to building to cost per hour flown.
US VHF radar is likely not ahead at all. The US has never fielded a VHF radar, while the USSR and by extension Russia and China have done so since the 70s. The US has UHF radar and is definitely ahead in conventional radar though.
The interests of China and Russia do involve attacking sophisticated opponents such as Japan or Western Europe in order to destroy American infrastructure in a defensive war. It's just that instead of using stealth fighters to do so, they intend on using overwhelming numbers of missiles including hypersonic cruise missiles, of which the US doesn't even have a prototype yet.
These decisions weren't made in the last few years. They are tactical decisions as a matter of doctrine that were made in the late Soviet era. It's not a coincidence that these countries are ahead in counter stealth and ahead in hypersonics but behind in other things, they invested in what was most useful to fit their doctrine.
One of the fairly easy ways to defeat stealth is by operating your radar at a low frequency. As the wavelength becomes "much longer" than any characteristic dimension of the airplane, the shape of the airplane matters less and less and the wave will penetrate deeper and deeper layers of radar absorption material.
But there's no such thing as a free lunch.
The problem is that the resolution of your radar depends on the physical size of your antenna relative to the wavelength (either the diameter of the dish, or the spacing of the antenna elements in a multi-static or phased array). So low frequency = long wavelength = bad resolution. You know a plane is in your airspace, but not where in your airspace.
You can solve the resolution problem by installing a physically large antenna. The size of the antenna should be several times longer than the wavelength. That might mean having a single very large dish or it might mean coherent transmitters located hundreds or thousands of meters apart. Great, now we have defeated stealth and have high resolution.
But remember how we were talking about wavelengths much longer than the airplane? How do you carry an antenna that is several times longer than the wavelength for a wavelength that is several times longer than your airplane? I can think of one way: trail wires behind you--but that turns you into a flying bullseye. You might as well file a flight plan.
That creates an asymmetry: It's much easier for the side on the ground to get a good picture of what is going on in the air.
Citation needed
This is close, and it's from 2014
https://news.usni.org/2014/07/29/chinese-russian-radars-trac...
VHF and lower frequency radars see right through any stealth coatings and bounce off the airframe, engines, etc.
At a range of 60km that means 350m inaccuracy in azimuth and 100m inaccuracy in range.
350m is within IR and optical range, so any IR-capable missile can be cued in. The 9M96 missiles are rumored to have IR/optical capability but this is just a rumor, while the 9M100 missiles do have that capability.
As for radar missiles, the F-35 has a minumum RCS of 0.0015 sqm. Being generous to the F-35 and saying it must be detected by 1km, it means that any radar capable of detecting a 1sqm target at a distance of 25km can detect and F-35 at a distance of 1km.
This does require estimation but 25km range against 1sqm target is realistic.
You also need to update the missile's course using updates on the plane's velocity changes - so again, you need even greater accuracy on the radar.
Finally, because it's all a lot more nebulous, it is easier for the plane to take evasive action. It's generally a lot easier to detect a radar / missile launch than it is to detect the airplane. With radar countermeasures in place, the SAM radar really has an uphill struggle to overcome.
I'm not saying it's not doable (though not too long ago I remember reading that these radars are just not accurate enough to guide a missile), merely that these dry numbers don't necessarily convey the full picture.
The F-35 is going to be going at around 300m/s, and the time for the missile to get there from 60km away is going to be around 100s. You should be able to integrate position to get a +- 10% estimate of velocity with our 300m error, then. In reality a lot of the error isn't stochastic either so you can get a lower velocity error.
Again you don't need the radar to guide a missile. You just need to get the missile close enough for it to pick up the F-35.
If you read an article that said that the VHF radars can't guide the missiles, they are definitely right. But the Russians and Chinese don't plan on that. Their missiles now have on-board guidance, they just need to get close enough for their own guidance systems to pick up the target. That means that instead of needing 10m of accuracy, which I agree with those articles the VHF radars cannot do, you only need to get within a kilometer.
I understood this is why you need that precise radar fix: you need a pretty good idea of the target trajectory so the chasing missile is not only in the right place, but also flying at an advantageous angle relative to its target.
As for on-missile guidance, I thought that was a thing since a long time ago? The radar guides initially, then the final stage is done by the rocket. Is there something newer/different now?
Ground based missiles are quite different from A2A missiles in that they are much larger and have much more kinetic energy to spare.
Maneuvering always kills kinetic energy though. So what these missiles do is that they gain altitude before maneuvering, reducing speed and drag, and once the maneuver is done (lock acquired), they maneuver and gain a lot of kinetic energy by coming back down.
There is basically zero chance a ground based missile fired from 50-60 km will lack energy even if it has to maneuver a few hundred meters to correct for inaccuracy.
If Nato didn't exist its debatable whether western Europe could maintain their existing level of defense expenditure. The EU would also need to manage increased defense expenditure amongst member nations to avoid an arms race.
* Assuming that Germany remains responsible and doesn’t go NK route. Maybe that’s not reasonable.
* also assume we are talking about modern thermonuclear weapons
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rev...
Western Europe is over 40% while the US is at 27%. And the US figure include all public healthcare spending which is 60% of all healthcare in the US. So even adding private spending it’s still lower.
https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2019/04/08/us-workers-a...
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/international-health-policy...
I don't believe you. I think if you originally accounted for it, you would have known that your original value of 27% was misleading and you would have expanded on it.
If you did account for it, you wouldn't only now be saying 35%.
The alternative is to believe that you DID know, and you deliberately misled; I think that's not the case though. I don't think you're a deliberate liar; I think you've got an ego. Got one myself and sometimes I do the same thing.
You have NOW accounted for it, yes.
EU GDP per capita is 46,888 US 68,309
68000/100*27 = 18360
47000/100*40 = 18800
I was kind of surprised by this, when I ran the numbers.
Some of the examples I gave actually have a higher GDP per capita than the US.
The biggest countries (by population): Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland
All have lover GDP.
The countries with higher GDP than US (according to wikipedia): Luxembourg (pop: 638,153 ), Ireland (pop: 5,006,061), Norway (not in EU, pop: 5,457,423), Switzerland (not EU, pop: 8,717,698)
I am sure if you just take the richest few states, they are also richer than average US
It's not just about welfare though.
If they shut the plants down and something happens, what do they do? The assembly lines will have been shut down or retrofitted for something else and the experienced workers may well have gone to work elsewhere.
They already have to keep the plant available for readiness and the workers need experience building actual tanks, so they keep pumping them out.
Use the tanks we already have?
If actual combat kicks up, then tanks start getting destroyed or break down very quickly. If it takes a year to restart production, it's a very real possibility to not have enough before they start leaving the factory again.
Did you know that the Chinese state-run media is now hyping up nukes in preparation for a potential US war over COVID? [0] If they are actually working on increasing their nuke stockpile, they are definitely also working on increasing total military readiness.
If the US and China got into a conventional war, how long do you think the current tank stockpile would last? The US isn't going to take that chance and the very fact that they have a constant stream of available tanks is one more reason for China to avoid war.
On the whole, I'd rather pay a few dollars to help deter war rather than spend a bunch of lives fighting that war and in case the deterrent fails, at least we are ready.
[0] https://www.newsweek.com/china-state-media-says-country-must...
Indeed. "The purpose of a system is what it does"
It makes me think of when people say that there's no sense in debating if a supreme court decision was correct, because the supreme court is the highest legal authority.
If they are correct by definition, then what are they doing to decide cases?
I think the slogan should not be taken literally and means more like "don't let the (possibly many-faceted and disputed) purpose of a system blind you to what it does".
Another might be latency, if under active control. I imagine the purpose of the F-35 as a drone platform is less about active control and more about being a coordinator node though.
This is precisely why. Iran has shown that it can, on some level, interfere with long-range communications of drones. I'm sure the Chinese have even more such capability. Having a C&C platform within the same battlespace limits communication exposure.
Airborne Observation and control is a job handled by AWACS and JSTARS. While an argument could certainly be made for a stealth JSTARS, that's not what the F35 was intended to be, nor what it is optimized for. JSTARS planes should be long endurance planes, not super maneuverable supersonic VTOL jets. A stealth JSTARS would resemble the B2, not the F22.
The F35 does have an impressive set of sensors and communications abilities, but that's simply a consequence of being a more recently developed aircraft. It's really not too hard to appear impressive when your competition was designed to use core memory. A purpose built drone controller would put it to shame however.
They all shipped incomplete and have been continually pulled back to be upgraded piece at a time at a huge cost.
Insult to injury is that they wound up with 3 variants that aren't super compatible anyway.
F-35 was not agile in any sense, it was one of those. The agile work on the software side has been SAFe which is dogmatic, inflexible garbage. However even that was not originally the case, SAFe came much later after the more traditional (and closer to Waterfall) approach led to a clusterfuck of 24-hour a day development and testing to get the thing airborne.
Drones are certainly cheaper and more capable without having a pilot to protect and whose presence limits the max acceleration. However telemetry links and autonomous decision making have limitations also. When drones start taking down F-35's is probably when pilots and F-35's become obsolete.
This makes me think about naval development before WW2. Everyone had lots of ideas about battleships and how to pack more guns onto a faster ship and all these other things, but lots of people missed how aircraft carriers would change things. I'm sure the next war will be different. The obvious development is drones, but I also think about the plotline of the second Battlestar Galactica series where the protagonists only initially survive because their ship eschews network connections. It seems like we aren't quite sure what future battles will look like and the US is making a guess in the form of a $1.5tn plane project.
Drones have already shown their potential in the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict recently. From large swarm based attacks to kamikaze mode, I think drones should overtake frontline fighter planes in capability soon.
This of cause meant that the navy gradually took over the "first strike"/"suppression of air defenses" from the Air Force and the F-35 was born as an attempt to bring that back into the ranks of the Air force as stealth theoretically allows the F-35 to almost compete with submarine launched cruise missiles.
The problem is that the F-35 is way to expensive/fragile for the CAS role and might be so expensive to operate that it begins to make sense to depend entirely on missiles and drones for pre-planned strike missions, making it kind of the modern equivalent of post dreadnought battleships.
I always wonder if the next big military development is actually going to involve more technology, rather than less. America’s main military weakness is that it is very reliant on things like GPS or connections to other devices. What’s to stop a foe from developing jamming tech and counteracting the US’ lead? From what family tells me, the army still teaches people to dig trenches and use old-fashioned maps (among other things) just in case.
1. Ship- and ground-based transmitters are ridiculously powerful, and use lots of jamming-resistant tech like spread spectrum.
2. Viewed at the right wavelengths, jammers are like looking at Las Vegas at night. They’re very visible, and attractive targets for RF-seeking munitions.
This may not be super intuitive until you start playing around with the technology and understand what’s possible with phased array antennas. I’m fairly confident that somewhere in the planet is an integrated, real-time, broadband view of RF illumination over the surface of the earth.
However, the skills are not reinforced or even practiced really. It is not as easy to conduct EW against GPS as you would think, at least not military specific capabilities. There are contingencies and capabilities in place for that.
Bigger concern would be the GPS satellites being destroyed altogether.
Which is also why when you hear news reports about China or the US destroying their own satellites using ship launched missiles, the message intended to be conveyed is more than meets the eye.
Those demonstrations are really about telegraphing to adversaries what you can/would do in the event of a conflict.
[1] https://www.microsemi.com/product-directory/clocks-frequency... ,
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_laser_gyroscope ,
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibre-optic_gyroscope ,
and other
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microelectromechanical_systems
gizmos like
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibrating_structure_gyroscope#... ?
Especially when global
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_elevation_model
fit multiple times on the equivalent of some micro-sd card nowadays?
Seems like something like this
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_vision_system
wouldn't need to depend on GPS at all, maybe some sensor fusion for things like radar/infrared/whatever.
Anyways, what I linked to are the key components for inertial navigation systems. Not all of them together, but several options. The first is that chip-scale 'atomic clock' thing from microsemi, a very precise time source. Something like that would be needed in every case.
The others are different possible paths to precisely measure (speed of) movement and (change of) orientation. Based on those you could construct inertial navigation 'on the go' in small form factors. Not smartphone-like small at the moment, but close to.
Regarding the scale of fielding/roll-out, ask Apple, Honeywell, or someone like that...
Thinking about it, maybe that is why 'the others' play at shooting things in orbit because they allready have 'Mao's mighty map' available? Who knows? Whatever. The end of GPS/GNSS wouldn't necessarily have to be 'the end of navigation'.
With the advent of UAVs (ex: from the ordinary to the RQ-170 and beyond), hypersonic capabilities (ex: SCRAMJET), and even action in space (ex: destruction of satellites enabling GPS & remote communication, to severely limit an opponent’s capabilities), I have to agree.
I imagine the “next war” will be one with severe consequences, perhaps through means which the general public is not even aware of, despite those known & listed above.
That said, there are always new things to try on the battlefield as well and they are. Stealth bombers in Serbia, "three layer" attacks (top B-52, middle F-18, low Tomahawk) or any of the other tactics that appear as "new" in a conflict and then become "Yeah, they always do that." One of my classmates in high school went to West Point and at a reunion we were talking about the difference between engineering school and military school. There is a very deep base of knowledge there. And while it wasn't my destiny to go that path (even though the Marines tried really really hard to recruit me :-)) I recognize that fighting effectively is just as complex and nuanced as making a circuit that has 160 dB of noise margin.
What has been interesting about F-35 project is what was called out in the article, developed during unprecedented visibility into the unvarnished ups and downs. And there are always people who exploit that to paint a narrative of incompetence and gross negligence. The real test though is when they go to war and whether or not they provide the capabilities that overcome the enemy or not right?
The trouble is that by the time you find that out it's too late. Indeed we may never find out.
I believe the last time that happened was with the F-111.
This passage caught my eye:
> The last major reason the F-35 has seen so much criticism is that it was the first jet developed in the social media age. The paradigm shift, cost, and early problems, coupled with concurrency, led to an explosion of negative social media that grew into mainstream media coverage.
Cost buried second in a list of factors contributing to…social media as major factor?
If it weren't for those pesky kids on the Internet!
Without answering that question, how can you say that the F35 costs too much? Personally i have no idea what the true US military budget should be and I'm not even sure how you'd begin to calculate that as a civilian. One of the few things that gets passed in a bi-partisan manner by the US legislature is the military budget (apparently for 59 straight years).
It's easy to look at a big number and say it's bad. But it's also easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. The average FAANG team probably costs their company multiple millions of $ per year in just employee costs. It's easy to parachute in and say that you could do it for less, and you'd probably be right. But that also loses track of bigger picture.
How much is too much to spend on bayonets pre WW1 to face the machine gun?
The F-35 is a 1.5 trillion dollar bet on human dog fighters who cant execute high G maneuvers in a world dominated by fleets of cheap, disposable, AI piloted drones that can. Nagorno-Karabakh and Yemen have already shown a taste of this.
>One of the few things that gets passed in a bi-partisan manner by the US legislature is the military budget
The F35 is curious in this regard because it is so heavily criticized by Congress yet still funded.
This is coz Lockheed distributed F35 jobs across the country on the basis of congressional votes. A vote to kill the F35 is thus a vote to destroy jobs in your district. Lockheed engineered the world's most unkillable military program and then milked it to kingdom come. The shareholders are certainly happy.
This is, sadly, the most impressive form of F35 engineering.
We will look back on many things after the next war and shake our collective heads but I suspect the most glaring and shameful error will be our willingness to indulge corporate profit margins at the expense of the body politic.
"High G maneuvers" is a meaningless capability. Each of those "AI piloted drones" will require a support radar (putting the radar on each drone will make them cost $10+ million a pop, eliminating the throwaway strategy), if a F-35 can destroy the support radar you've just lost all your drones because they cannot detect the F-35.
They'd be broke in record time.
With a lifetime cost in the $1.5 trillion range.
When you're talking about trillion dollars to acquire some aircraft, I think the word expensive is justified.
War is about winning the economics. Can your economy and industrial output out pace what your enemy destroys, vs your opponents output and what you can destroy.
Even in peace time, this is a major factor. Keeping up with the US on military spending bankrupted the USSR, at the same time as Japanese and German industries where able to leap ahead of both, since they didn't spend on military post WW2.
The US may want to have a good Military to defend against China, but if it spends too much, and not enough on civil industry (and education) China may crush the US economically, without firing a bullet.
You can have the most Nukes of any country, but at some point, you have enough nukes to do anything you want, and after that, any nuke you add is a drain on your economy. Having the "best" or "most" weapons isn't the same as having the right allocation of resources.
If we have enough nukes to do whatever we want (we definitely have more than enough nukes), then it follows that we do not need giant conventional forces, right? We are already invulnerable to invasion/defensive war because of the nukes/geography so what is the point of conventional forces from a defensive standpoint?
This means the F-35 is about offense and conflict escalation - about increasing the reach/power of the American empire. The most cost effective strategy for a nation that is not an empire in this situation would be to drastically downsize conventional forces since we already have a deterrent. Expensive new fighter jets are no longer needed for defense.
So I see the F-35 program not as a counter against the U.S.’s enemies, but as a way to more effectively attack other countries.
The F35 is able to defend US strategic interests in Taiwan (mainly chip making) in a way nukes cant. On the other hand The budget of the F35 could buy TSMC 3 times over, so it may not be the most cost effective way to defend your interests...
Does the bad press miss the point?
So much that "point" is the cost per aircraft is nutso for what you get. Something that's stealth, dogfight, and close-in air support.
And perhaps the article is right, the stealth is fantastic. Lets you fire without being seen. But after you've fired it, then what? Now everyone knows where you are and a potential dog fight is coming.
It's well known its dog fighting is weak even compared to other older fighters, but maybe it's also fair to say dog fighting is a thing of the past[1].
Being a stealth mobile missile battery... Is a good long range offense a strong defense? These kinds of things can only be tested, so... jury's still out.
My personal criticism comes in the close in air support, what good is all that money that was dumped into stealth doing as it just hovers above in plain view/access? Also, it does a poor job at flying slowly. It's just not specialized in it.
Time will tell if the price tag is even close to being justified, but I'm still a strong skeptic.
[1] https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/f-35-pilot-heres-wha...
This is probably a valid criticism, but aren't the current generation of military helicopters simply way better than jets could ever be at this? And they have the advantage that they can land and evacuate people.
No it is not. The poster is appears to mistakenly believe that F-35B's would hover for purposes of close air support. It would never do that because the VTOL capabilities of the F-35B are exclusively for short range take off and landing.
The US has around 10 Amphibious Assault Ship which now thanks to the F-35B's are among some of the most capable carriers in the world. Factor in the ability to take off from rapidly constructed airbases throughout the pacific and the F-35B is one of the most dangerous airplanes currently in production. A squadron could sneak up from completely unexpected directions from bases which had not existed in your satellite reconnaissance just a day ago.
There are actually better fighters on a $/hr basis. The A-10 is a bit pricy to maintain. The A-29, propeller plane, holds a promising position[0].
Helicopters tend not to be the platform of choice, but I'm not well versed enough to know why. Many times it comes down to which branch flies helicopters vs fixed winged aircraft. And simply that branch doesn't have the "rights" to fly the right kind of craft given the mission... weird stuff.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Attack/Armed_Reconnaissa...
An apache helicopter has a cruising speed of around 165mph while the A-10 has a cruising speed of around 340mph.
The army had a helicopter design (Lockheed AH-56 Cheyenne) back in the 1960s that in it's final prototype tests was going 255mph. The Air Force got upset and politics killed it off. The Lockheed/Sikorsky S-97 Raider seems to use a lot of the same design ideas (pusher propeller, fixed rotor, small wings) and is very fast (250mph cruise speed), but almost 50 years later. Maybe politics are less of an issue this time around.
I suppose the v22 Osprey could play the CAS role, but it seems much too expensive. You can buy almost 6 Apache helicopters for the cost of one v22 (13m vs 75m per unit). That cost is an issue because -- adjusted for inflation -- the A-10 cost 16.5m per unit and can withstand much more damage before needing replacement.
>It's well known its dog fighting is weak even compared to other older fighters
It's more nimble than a combat loaded F-16. Sure it isn't super maneuverable like a F-22, but it actually is able to do maneuvers which other planes need thrust vectoring to achieve.
>And perhaps the article is right, the stealth is fantastic. Lets you fire without being seen. But after you've fired it, then what? Now everyone knows where you are and a potential dog fight is coming.
You misunderstanding the nature of the F-35's first shot advantage. It is not merely remaining unseen and firing first. Even if a AWAC's or L band ground radar directs you toward a F-35 it will be the first to fire because it can get a firing solution on a 4th gen before it can get one on the F-35.
Furthermore, it's also not a forgone conclusion that an adversary would know where it is after firing. A F-35 pilot could have moved serious distance in that time from whatever heading the missile originated. With stealth the pace of combat is dictated by the pilot who actually has situational awareness.
That doesn't seem like a role the Air Force is very concerned about. The USAF has been trying to kill off their best low and slow flying close air support aircraft for awhile now. [0] The planes are made to lay down hell [1] and take a beating that would destroy just about any other aircraft [2], and the ground troops love it. [3]
Supposedly the F-35 is going to fill the role of the A-10 in the future but I just don't see how that's possible.
[0] https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a34907462...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Republic_A-10_Thunde...
He also calls it a supersonic fighter, which isn't true. The coatings cannot withstand sustained periods of supersonic flight.
From an engineering perspective local political optimization of a national project is what I would call ineptitude. But you can call it by another name.
Which is another area where F-35 is lacking: range. Without external fuel tanks it can't fight in the Pacific.
If only we had large floating aircraft bases and the plane also had versions that supported VTOL for even more expansive capabilities at sea.
If you're going to base your availability of air power, which is the main determinant of success given the American military doctrine, on having a secure and available carrier at all times, you may be putting yourself in a bind when anti-ship weapons start proliferating and you become forced to increase distance between those defenses and your carriers.
It also puts a hell of a single point of failure.
The best thing that could be done would be to have enough range to be able to fly out from a carrier that's relatively safe from antiship missiles. But that may well become impossible anyways as antiship missile evolve.
The difference between the F-18 and the F-35 is that while the F-18 might need extended maintenance after prolonged (read : more than a minute) supersonic flight, the F-35 may suffer catastrophic coating degradation that may be fatal in the same flight.
As for other operational fighters, the Dassault Rafale can supercruise indefinitely the Gripen indefinitely at Mach 1.3, the Eurofighter indefinitely at Mach 1.8, the Sukhoi-35 can if outfitted with the AL-41F-1S (meaning, some operational Su-35s can supercruise indefinitely, but not all). The F-22 is far from the only one.
Can’t the Eurofighter Typhoon supercruise?
If you need a fighter to fly 500 km and engage a target, why wait 25 minutes for a super-cruising mach-1 fighter when a Mach-2.3 craft without super cruise can get there in 10 minutes?
Actually, it does for me:
"Just imagine how the F-16 program would have been covered today when they were crashing an aircraft almost every two weeks during several years in the ’80s and ’90s (the F-35, by comparison, has only crashed 3 times in over a decade of flying)."
I had no idea that an F-16 crashed roughly every two weeks while being debugged. I imagine I'm not the only one.
True.
And also, the author is an operator, but not necessarily someone involved in the engineering or acquisition.
Nonetheless (and I say this as someone who was severely soured by my involvement with the program), people get tribal as to whether the JSF (provides an unmatched capability) XOR (is the zenith of acquisition malpractice). It's not either/or; both are simultaneously true.
No one in DoD R&D/acquisition fails to appreciate how expensive these things are and this realization is certainly driving long-term decision-making.
[1] https://www.aetc.af.mil/News/Photos/igphoto/2002209050/
[2] says, "Maj. Justin Lee, USAF is an active F-35 Joint Strike Force pilot"
[3] says, "I'm an F-35 fighter pilot for the Air Force."
... both of which seem to suggest that he's still active?
It IS a very capable war-plane for many of its roles. Much more capable then the harrier and with many capabilities that the F-16 & F-18 lack. It has different solutions to the problems it faces though.
Many of these new approaches to old problems that are arguable. Is a stealthy approach (F-35) more effective then raw manoeuvrability (F-16) in fighter vs fighter combat? Probably if the stealth can be maintained. Is high flying precisions guided weaponry as better then what an A-10 can do in close air support? Maybe? These points will be argued by airchair air marshals until we have another big war to "answer" the question.
But the F-35 has failed at being the cheap general purpose aircraft it was promised to be. It has been earmarked to replace the F-16 in its entirety, as the low end fighter to the F-22 raptor as the high end. This was one of the reasons the F-35 has a single engine. Recent moves are to make the F-35 the new high end fighter w/ a new lightweight fighter the low end that can be cheap enough to fulfil this need.
It's well worth the hour if you're an aviation geek.
That was the idea, but it is also why the program has performed so poorly on cost, timeliness, and capability.
The F-35 was supposed to achieve 80% parts commonality among the three variants. This would have delivered massive cost savings. Instead, the reality is less than 25% parts commonality. Also, the compromises made to accommodate all three requirement sets means the F-35 has worse aerodynamic performance and a worse radar cross section than it otherwise would've had if the Air Force and Navy could've had their own dedicated air frames from the start.
The much lower degree of parts-sharing wouldn't be so bad, except that the JSF program eschewed a lot of real world testing in lieu of computer simulation. And to make matters worse they employed "concurrent development", which meant that production were getting made while the testing phase was still in progress. The result was that as problems were uncovered, expensive retrofits had to be applied to all the airframes that had already been produced.
In a more traditional development strategy, the vast majority of teething issues would've been found before series production began. But concurrent development was used to try to speed up the timeline, but also make it more difficult to cancel the program.
The F-35 has a lot of capabilities but it is fundamentally compromised because of the attempt to make it a jack of all trades. It has had an extremely long gestation period, very high development costs, very high operational costs, and compromised performance on several fronts. Had the DoD at least split off the USMC STOVL requirement it seems like this project would've gone a lot better.
Are these expected to be in any theatre at all in the near future? Any fighters like that seem at least a decade or two in the future, if not three.
The actual point is that we are absolutely stuck with the F-35, so had better make it good--or at least take up thinking it's good, where we can't.
It is not correct to compare it to an F-16. It needs to be compared to a whole fleet of aircraft, because it costs as much as much as a fleet. Could it take on 8 F-16s at once?
It is not correct to compare it to an F-16 because you can afford to fly your plentiful F-16s in harm's way, but have to keep your paltry few F-35s a hundred miles back, out of any possibility of danger.
The reason we are stuck with the F-35, despite its still suffering over 600 class-A design flaws (each risks loss of airframe), is that it is built in 48 states. To kill it you would need to get senators from 24 of those states, and the other two besides, to vote against it. It could explode every time the gear doors shut, and we would still be stuck with it, and they know. Be glad it can take off and land.
Sounds like the national defense equivalent of rewriting your website from scratch in $LATEST_WEBSHIT_FRAMEWORK. Sure, it's a worse product, but just imagine how great it _could_ be if we halt development of the working version and spend a trillion dollars making the new one work. See? It's better! And the customer is paying hand over fist, so everyone wins.
And eventually the Air Force came to its senses, accepted the "pull request" for upgrades on its big workhorse F-15 "library"....and now we are getting the awesome F-15EX. Something we should have been working on before they even cancelled the F-22.
This is why I like the Russian approach to military R&D: they do a small number of cutting-edge products to keep their engineers employed and their tech as current as possible given their constraints, but the bulk of their actual inventory is continuous refinements of solid legacy systems, tweaked and rolled out at fairly low cost.
Su-27 -> Su-30 -> Su-34 and 35 (honestly even the Su-57 planform is clearly an extension of this airframe if you look at it closely)
T-72 -> T-90 -> latest upgrade packages for both (T-72B3M and T-90M Breakthrough-3)
I imagine that a Chinese fighter probably costs a lot less to get into the air than an F-35 does. The airframe and engines might not have a higher MTBF than F-35 (or maybe they do) but they are certainly cheaper and easier to replace, regardless.
There's an obvious economic and industrial capability question to all of this. A player with cheap planes can erode the benefits of the technologically superior one by simply encouraging them to be used more, or forcing the decision to not use them for fear of stretching supply lines... Thus reducing the required response time when it's decided to actually deploy the expensive weapon.
[1] https://www.stripes.com/news/pacific/japan-denies-report-tha...
Whether the F-35 will be successful or not does not matter whether there are armchair journalists or mainstream reporters covering the project, but in this case we can enjoy the increased accountability. This should be seen as a positive effect of social media, if anything.
This had me wondering how many mistakes in previous projects were smoothed over by clever marketing, and how many are being exposed now. Does social media make it easier or harder for the general public to get accurate information on this sort of thing?
https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Strike_coordination_and_reconnais...
Just to be clear, your answer as someone invested in the defense industry to the question of "What military role does the F-35 fill in the modern world that unmanned drones can't?" is to say:
>A mission flown for the purpose of detecting targets and coordinating or performing attack or reconnaissance on those targets. Strike coordination and reconnaissance missions are flown in a specific geographic area and are an element of the command and control interface to coordinate multiple flights, detect and attack targets, neutralize enemy air defenses and provide battle damage assessment
Forgive my ignorance, but are you saying that we basically need a trillion-dollar endeavor to develop manned fighters which have just barely caught up to the existing technology to go pick fights abroad that we could have already been doing?
What new threat are we facing here, other than a slowing of contractual dollars?
The F-35, as a low-observable, sensor-linked, MANNED platform, has an important role to play for striking targets in a jammed, high-threat environment. That's all I was saying. I'm not defending the PRICETAG of this ridiculously-expensive and (IMO) poorly-managed boondoggle, just the unique capabilities of the platform. I think the US procurement system in the 21st century is badly broken and has probably contributed to an erosion of our overall military overmatch. I hate gold-plated profiteering junk and argue that hard, realistic training + rugged, simple tech will deliver an economically-viable force that punches above its weight. It's like the US learned all of the WRONG lessons from the WW2 German mil-industrial complex. But my solutions aren't sexy, and definitely aren't a license to print money. Probably why my personal interest is in teaching the militaries of developing economies how to "level up" their capabilities quickly without breaking the bank.
>>>What new threat are we facing here
See my other response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27376597
But, like a lot of things with the JSF program, concurrency made it much more difficult to cancel. Sunk costs and all that.
This should be all you need to know.
However it’s pointless to keep making them since adversaries aren’t close to competing with it yet and the next best thing is the F-35 which is far cheaper to produce.
I’ve heard F-22 can do things even many of the pilots of them aren’t necessarily aware of as their training is reduced to omit certain highly classified aspects.