Dassault Rafale vs. F-35

many of us are, actually, indirectly as taxpayers. the MIC is really good at unaccountable taxpayer spending. So while reviews of military tech might just appease our inner child they're also useful from a civics perspective!

I think some of the really challenging aspects of this piece is there's a lot of comparisons that really hinge on details that are both fixable (ie, not baked into the F-35 vs Rafale airframe selection per-se), or are details that -really- the greater community couldn't possibility -really- have insight into.

Examples:

* When discussing situational awareness, the article grants similar raw data gathering capabilities to both platforms, but then grants the overall win to Rafale because of better data presentation, claiming that the F-35 just dumps piles of raw numerical data at the pilot. Now, given the age of this article, I can connect to problems that Lockheed Martin had in delivering working sensor fusion software around that timeframe. To be fair to the article, that was actually a problem. But as a software problem, it's much more fixable. I can't find any recent discussion on broken sensor fusion or F-35 information overload.

* I automatically red flag high precision/confidence discussion about RCS, radar set and IR search/track performance. Like... it's for sure some of the most sensitive parts of fighter platform performance. I would take the entire section with a grain of salt as well.

* The entire engagement scenario chosen heavily boils down to missile choice/availability. There's no argument that AIM-120D has significant limitations in range compared to some of its peers, but this is also a solvable problem (AIM-260 in development). Weapons availability/compatibility is definitely a valid consideration when choosing between platforms, but should be weighed appropriately.

* The engagement scenario is also a bit weird. It doesn't consider for example a pair of Rafales vs pair of F-35 (which would be much more likely scenario... wingmen exist for a reason). It removes AWACS (while AWACS is obviously very vulnerable, it's unclear to me that they would be fully neutralized in a peer conflict). It doesn't consider that data-links might actually be hard to jam. Because it doesn't consider cooperation, it doesn't consider that perhaps F-35s could work together, with one using its radar and feeding it's data to the other. Basically, the engagement scenario removes the F-35's greatest structural advantage (it's radar stealth). Now, I think it's completely fair to consider that scenario, but to be honest you'd need to consider it against other engagement scenarios and then weigh the relatively likelihood/importance of the different scenarios.

There's a lot, so I'll try to skim over it.

The F-35 project started in 1993. It entered service in 2015. In that time frame, a lot of requirements changed, as technology advanced. So any talk about "changed rhetorics" is disingenuous without a lot of additional context to relate statements decades apart to each other properly.¹

The pilot skill section mentions the availability rate: In 2015², the F-35 hadn't even officially entered service and was a prototype, of course it's going to have a lower availability! Rafale had been in service for 20 years at that point, with most production airframes 10-15 years old. It's the sweet spot where the system is mature enough to not have many bugs left, but not so old yet that the hardware starts failing. It's not a fair comparison.

In addition to that, pilots can use cheaper training aircraft and simulators to keep up proficiency. The article mentions that the USAF massively improved pilot training during the later stages of Vietnam, but conveniently leaves out the how: Lots and lots of theoretical lessons, and comparative flight training involving T-38 jet trainers, all of which the author conveniently leaves out.

The situational awareness section talks a lot about systems whose true capabilities are classified. Both Dassault and Lockheed Martin are not at liberty to disclose the actual numbers to the public, and would prefer to be underestimated by potential adversaries. But the systems in the F-35 are 20 years newer, and are backed up by significantly more powerful computers to analyze their data better, including jamming resistance.

I also have no idea where the claims come from that the F-35 overloads the operator. Again, it has the most advanced avionics suite on the planet, to better fuse sensor data, and from all accounts it's working really well. This not only includes on-board sensors, but also data linked information streams from other F-35, from drones, and from AWACS aircraft. Even if the F-35's onboard sensors are somehow worse (doubtful, again), it can more than make up for any blind spots and weaknesses by merging data from multiple airplanes.

The stealth section just gives me headaches. The specifications of the systems involved are fundamentally unknowable, as the true capabilities of both Rafale and F-35 active and passive sensor and fire control suites are classified. Since the author has not been put in jail, I'll have to assume he doesn't have them either.

And all these calculations don't really make much sense. The optical sensors that magically double or triple the Rafale's detection range to make it "better" than the F-35 are by their very nature heavily weather dependent – cameras can't see through clouds, or at night, or directly into the sun, or behind the horizon, etc., and nothing forces the F-35 to remain subsonic and fly in a nice straight line, as the author insists it must.

The IR signature section is again nonsensical. The F-35 engine was by design optimized to minimize heat production (engine efficiency matters and is completely ignored by the author) from the start, which is better than retro-fitting it after the fact. And the author again fails at basic math: Two 70cm diameter exhaust plumes have less surface area than one 110cm diameter exhaust plume (square cube law, anyone?)

I'm not even going to bother with the rest of the text. This is giving me a lot of headaches, and fully debunking this nonsense is going to take days.

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¹: Arguably a project management failure in itself, but one that's hard to avoid when you want to leapfrog the competition by an entire generation. The Chinese and Russian approach of just stealing advanced designs to catch up quickly only works if someone else puts in all the hard work to make those designs in the first place. (And neither Russia nor China are all that successful with it. You cannot easily steal the entire supply chain behind a project, like e.g. sub-sub-sub-contractors' institutional knowledge about turbine alloy production.)

²: Why is the date not in the title as per HN guidelines? Lots have changed since then.

The second sentence feel like the plane names got swapped, it's the only way this would make any sense.

Dassault is no longer really competitive¹. The gap between 4th/4.5th generation jets and 5th generation jets is massive, no matter how many military bloggers use creative accounting to explain it away, and Dassault is really only competing in markets that would also be fine with an American F-16 if the price is right, and that's a 1970s design.

¹: Their engineers might still be, but their products are not, and France cannot fund the development of any.