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Comment by pirate787 | Hacker News Reader

The truly obsolete weapons platform is the $1.2 trillion manned F-35 program. A multi-role fighter that is too expensive to fly in this new combat space and cannot survive the multitude of anti-air missiles. The drone air war is a numbers game and unmanned fighters are both cheaper and have better operational specs.

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The US wants 2,456 F-35s that’s just a lot of freaking aircraft. It’s actually extremely well designed for this kind of combat. Stealth alone is overrated, but these things get to fight back and they don’t fight alone. Sam sites, manned or unmanned aircraft etc are targets. It’s exactly the same stupid expensive avionics and training programs that make the F-35 so expensive that make it effective.

The US can soften things up with cruse missiles and the F-22 or it’s successors, the F-35’s job is to crush what remains and it does that very well. Difficult enough to fight that you need expensive and therefore difficult to replace weapons systems while still being affordable enough to be plentiful.

And here come the F-35 haters...

The F-35 is fine. It's designed to be a replacement to the F-16 with a good level of stealth. NO fighter is 100% immune to SAMs, but the F-35 can survive on the modern battlefield against S300/S400 etc just fine. It would be cleaning up in Ukraine right now as long as the airbases it flew from were protected.

And what "unmanned fighters" are out there right now? Some low performance drones? Sure. But unmanned fighters that can engage in A2A combat are non-existent. Most current drones have the performance of a Cessna 172.

There's some silly idea that it's just a numbers game and 20 Cessna 172s would be able to take out an F-35.

How many AA missiles does an F-35 hold, 10? 20 Cessnas would certainly be able to take down a lone F-35 in favourable conditions. Quantity has a quality of it's own.

This is ridiculous. A Cessna 172 might be able to suicide into a parked F-35, but the idea that 20 would be able to engage it in a dogfight and win just shows a complete lack of aerospace knowledge.

Dogfighting is a thing of the past. 20 Cessnas approaching from different directions, with decently ranged AA missiles ( which is the point of the discussion, OP compared drone performances to a Cessna, and everyone is going in on the allegory, but the real question is if slow drones would be able to tackle an F-35, and the answer is it will depend on their armament, but probably) could overwhelm an F-35.

Slow drones won't be able to engage an F-35 in A2A combat because that's primarily determined by energy state. A Cessna 172 can carry about 100lbs of weapons after taking fuel and pilot into consideration. A Stinger weighs about 30 lbs or so, so three could be carried. Range of the Stinger is about 5 miles, so still sounds plausible.

So your cloud of Cessnas could conceivably carry 60 Stingers. How will they detect a fighter flying at 30K? A 172 can only get to about 15K in perfect conditions. It flies at like 100mph compared to a Mach 2 F-35.

Again, short of being a suicide bomber trying to kill an F-35 on the ramp, this idea is ludicrous.

To add, the primary advantage that A2A missiles have over SAM systems is that the missiles dont have to fly up 10s of thousands of feet to hit their target. Modern "dogfighting" is about achieving optimal launch conditions(Altitude, speed, heading) for your missile against the target. So even if a Cessna could detect the F-35 and carry the most advanced A2A missiles it would still be thoroughly ineffective.

To create a drone capable of threatening an F-35 requires creating something very similarly capable in all ways but without the pilot. This may exist one day but it isn't going to come at a discount.

> with decently ranged AA missiles

Those missiles are not cheap, and it would be unlikely for cheap Cessnas to get in range of an F-35. At long range the F-35 is difficult to observe by sensors that fit inside a Cessna.

I believe it is possible to shoot down low-radar-crossection aircraft if the missiles are spotted/guided by other sensor networks, but that is not easy, cheap, or mobile. And land based radars are sitting ducks.

Favorable conditions such as the F-35 being parked on the ramp and the Cessna crashes into it?

> 20 Cessna 172s would be able to take out an F-35

No, they would not. I believe they would seem easy-mode target practice for the cannon.

> but the F-35 can survive on the modern battlefield against S300/S400 etc. just fine

I don't think you could possibly know this. NATO countries have S-300s and the F-35 was probably tested against it, but it's highly unlikely it was tested against an actual latest gen S-400 in fighting condition ( if such a thing even exists, Russian military readiness is dubious at best).

Any SAM can shoot down any stealth fighter or bomber given the right conditions. Stealth isn't 100% invisibility. The US lost an F-117 in Bosnia due to both poor operational tactics and a clever foe.

You do realize that the S400 is just an upgraded S300, right? Hence it's original name of S300 PMU-3?

F-35 would do exceptionally well in this conflict. It is designed for contested airspace.

Let's hope we don't find out for real.

Are there any air superiority combat drones operational yet? I won't argue that it seems likely that manned dogfights are going to die eventually, but that moment also seems at least a decade away. Until then a F-35 with long range missiles seems to be one of the more lethal things in the air today, even if it is rather expensive. NATO has like 20x the defense budget compared to Russia though, so it's fine not to have the cheapest weapons available.

F-35 unit prices are not high and keep getting lower due to the sheer scale of production. Many 4.5 gen fighters are actually more expensive yet less capable than the F-35. Most anti-F-35 arguments are "informed" by the likes of Pierre Sprey.

Which systems are out there that are actually comparable to the JSF? Both the Eurofighter and the Rafale are one gen older (not sure if that actually matters that much so). Which leaves the Russian and Chinese planes, for which cost is hard to come by.

Maybe the f-22, although that isn’t in production anymore

Chinese FC-31 is close to the F-35 (in design and theory, but who knows about actual performance), but it's not in production yet.

Looking at pictures, it has two visible round jet nozzles which suggests it has much higher radar cross-section and IR-signature than F-35.

It's extremely difficult to evaluate RCS by looking visually at an aircraft. Who would have thought that the F-117 would be stealthy? And the reason the F-35 only has one engine is because it has a much higher thrust than the RD-93 on the FC31. This increase in thrust "might" increase its IR signature, and neither has any IR shielding like on the F-22.

The usefulness of long range missiles depends on the rules of engagement.

If the F-35 will be allowed to shoot targets over the horizon based only on instruments, it will most probably work as intended.

If visual confirmation will be required, it will be a boondoggle.

Could you expand on this? I'm struggling to imagine a realistic scenario where visual confirmation of a target would be a requirement. I also don't see why an F-35 is at a major disadvantage inside visual range of a target. (FYI Visual range is farther than short range air to air missiles and much farther than gun range.)

Roughly, because the stealthier an aircraft is the less maneuverable it an be. Also, you need ammunition for a dog fight, which is mostly carried on the wings negating any stealth characteristics. And large internal bays make an aircraft less maneuverable.

The AIM-54 Phoenix was used 2 times with exactly zero kills, because of ID concerns[1]. You don't just go around firing missiles to radar tracks you can't identify.

[1] by the US, Iran has used it more with more success.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-54_Phoenix#U.S._combat_exp...

The article you linked makes it sound like sensor and rocketry failures on some platforms that were retired 15 years ago, nothing to do with a general fear of BVR missile use. Also I believe the willingness to engage unidentified radar tracks has more to do with the nature of the conflict. I doubt the same restraint would be shown in a war against a near peer foe.

The point was not the zero kills, the point is that the US navy decided to use them in only two occasions.

In the case of the US involved conflicts it was working with allies and fighters lacking modern IFF that made the likelihood of friendly fire or collateral losses unacceptable to them.

It's a matter of acceptable risks. The AIM-54 was designed with a world war III in mind, employed in the middle of the ocean in closed airspaces were unidentified contacts could be treated as hostile with minimum political consequences.

The point I was making is here is an example of a time a major force decided not to use their prime BVR missile because of target identification concerns.

As a counter example, the US has continued to use the BVR AIM-120 even after accidentally shooting down one of their own helicopters in an IFF failure. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-120_AMRAAM#United_States_o...

In the particular case the missile was used after visual identification [1].

> The two F-15s now initiated a visual identification (VID) pass of the contact.

> Wickson's VID pass was conducted at a speed of about 450 knots (520 mph; 830 km/h), 500 feet (150 m) above and 1,000 feet (300 m) to the left of the helicopters.

Now I am not saying there is no room for BVR, ofcourse there is. The 2 tracks in formation coming from Russian airspace pinging you with their Russian military radars are definitely Russian fighters. But there are also a lot of times where there has to be a visual id.

A military jet with it's radars turned off is almost impossible to tell apart from a civilian jet based on radar data alone, and everyone errs on the side of caution, of course the side of caution occasionally is to fire first and id later[2][3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Black_Hawk_shootdown_inci... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_inc...

You are right that regardless of the reasons for phasing out AIM-7, there are reasons to take a look at your target before firing at it. I suppose I was only thinking about "hot war" scenarios, not police actions in civilian airspace.

> A military jet with it's radars turned off is almost impossible to tell apart from a civilian jet based on radar data alone The F35 can identify the type (and multiple times the model) of a specific aircraft in passive mode. Forget in active radar mode.

The Phoenix was never the prime BVR for the US. It was a niche weapon for the USN, to combat the Backfire/Bear threat. Even for the USN, it wasn't the prime; the AIM-7 Sparrow was the primary AAM carried. Tomcats rarely carried Phoenix except when qualifying. It was too heavy, and the F-14 couldn't bring back all 6 to the carrier due to weight. If the Tomcat had stuck around longer, the AMRAAM would have been qual'd for it, and the Tomcat would probably have lost out to it.

And the reason it wasn't used much wasn't just ID issues, but cost. It was supremely expensive, in limited stocks. Why use it against an Su-22 in the Gulf of Sidra? Or waste it over Iraq?

AIM-9X has a 22 mile range...

The horizon is hundreds of miles away at altitude. You have to consider that visual range includes optical enhancement (telephoto lens etc.)

IRST can help, but it's like viewing the world through a straw. It works best when cued by other systems. I'm unaware of any telephoto systems in use since the F-14 was retired (obviously excluding the few airframes Iran might still be using).

Unaided pilot vision is unlikely to spot a target at 22 miles without some type of guidance.

True overall, (although don't discount the effect of a pair of binoculars in the cockpit) but in this case we're talking about intercepting a radar target for visual confirmation. If you have a radar track, by definition you would have the type of guidance you need to put other sensors on target.

Air-to-air combat has been beyond visual range (BVR) for ages now.

There was not a lot of air-to-air combat between near-peer air forces going on in the last decades, was there? What little air combat we had was between top notch fighters and crew, supported by AWACS and all the fancy stuff that comes with it, against badly trained and coordinated almost obsolete fighters. Anti-air systems were the main concern.

> Are there any air superiority combat drones operational yet?

From what I have seen reported every major player is working on "loyal wingmen".

Autonomous drones that would fly along manned aircraft. That way you supposedly get the best of both worlds, the situational awareness and judgement of a human along the expendability of a drone.

Yes I know everyone wants such drones, but AFAIK nobody has them other than a few prototypes. Developing a prototype far enough to get to an fully operational platform (including things like logistics, training the operators and mechanics, developing doctrines, etc etc etc) can take decades.

> cannot survive the multitude of anti-air missiles

Where do you get that from? The whole point of the 1.2 trillion endeavor is survivability.

Yep and useless in the north, where the actual closest borders with Russia are.

Haha don't tell me it can't fly in the cold or something.

Can't land on a gravel strip

The US has 2 squadrons of F-35s in Alaska.

Finland also just recently signed a deal for 64 F35s after several years of research and comparing alternatives. I'm fairly confident that if there was some significant problem, they would have picked something else.

No offense but there's a huge difference between tiny Finland and pretty small Alaska and the giant Canadian North. Finland has a large border shared with Russia but it's nothing compared to the massive mostly undefended coastline along the arctic ocean that Canada shares with Russia. An absolutely potentially huge operating theatre.

Except for the minor detail that Finland shares a land border.

It might need a landing parachute on short or icy runways. The other concerns mentioned is that stealth is compromised with drop tanks which are needed for range. There might be other concerns?

I thought they fixed that already--software tweak for a sensor.

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