Flying the F-35 stealth fighter can leave pilots looking aged

I hear the F-35 has a lot more off axis G forces - any test pilots confirm?

Not in a combat configuration, which is what matters. The reported numbers for 4th generation combat aircraft are only when they fly "clean" i.e. nothing hanging off them externally like weapons and various pods. Performance degrades markedly with a full weapon load out due to drag and changing aerodynamics. Since the F-35 typically carries everything internally, it actually delivers its top performance when it matters.

How do you define the boundary of what is and is not weapons?

A small portion. The US is the world's #2 manufacturer. The US military spends less than $100 billion per year on purchasing military hardware (and the US exports less than that annually in an average year).

Lockheed's sales are smaller than Tesla's. The military industrial complex would fit into Apple's pocket.

Granted, the war in Ukraine has temporarily bumped up some export/trade numbers (2022 saw a big spike, around 50%+).

It depends on how you define it, but the number is small. The combined global revenue of Lockheed, Raytheon, and General Dynamics is only ~$170B. A significant fraction of that revenue isn't weapon related e.g. General Dynamics owns Gulfstream and other commercial aviation businesses.

No matter how you slice it, the answer is going to be a fraction of a percent i.e. quite small.

That's gonna be hard to piece out. Defense industry spending is usually grouped with aerospace, and furthermore defense industry contracts include a loooot of stuff that isn't weapons manufacturing - maintenance, random near academic style research, stuff that isn't even weapons (like... furniture and random supplies and shit), as well as labor or even pmc stuff.

So you can probably figure out hard upper boundaries, but determining the percentage that is weapons even of just that industry will be difficult.

If I had to WAG it, I'd say easily it's less than 10% of a single individual large industry (like gasoline or cars or whatever), so probably well under 2-3% of total industry.

so ya nerd sniped me-

military budget, at least requested for 2023: total requested is $773B [0]

"FY 2023 budget request for procurement and research and development totaling $276 billion is the largest in the history of the Department and ensures combat-credible forces across all domains"

so if I understand that, R&D is $276 billion, plus a bunch of extra money for more ammunition and stuff like that.

The 2021 US GDP is $23,315.08B [1], which means that the military budget is ~$4.28% of the GDP. Turns out that the 5% number is about right, or at least it was in 2015 [2].

So general military procurement (so food, bombs, and probably 401k's & pensions) is about 5% of the US economy, but that doesn't include non-military use, like ensuring that there are more guns than people in Texas (not actually [3]).

If you want to see the breakdown of which types of guns sell the most in the US, this is a pretty good read [4]

I couldn't figure out what combination of words to google to get any further - there's also research labs that get funded out of state and government grants that may not get included in that, and I know that's also probably a decent chunk of change as well.

So to answer your question - probably about 5% of US industry caters to the military specifically. A decent amount of that doesn't go to weapons, but instead people and facilities (which we have a ton of). Civilians can also buy guns, and the US also sells a bunch of weapons across the world.

I would guess about 7-8% of the US economy directly goes into the manufacturing or development of weapons, weapon systems, and military vehicles, but I have no idea where I should be looking for a better answer than a guess.

0 - https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudg...

1 - https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/gdp-...

2 - https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2015/08/19/d...

3 - https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/guns-per-ca...

4 - https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/report/2021-firearms-comme...

The data links can be hacked or jammed that’s why they use pilots

>This is a machine that would benefit greatly from remote control.

Sonewhat. The machine must be able to effectively fight on its own. EW will be part of every modern fighter engagement. And having a plane with that level of autonomy is difficult, to say the least. It will have to make automatic decisions about identifying the situation and whether to engage the enemy or what priority certain mission parameters have.

I completly agree that at a certain point the meat in the machine becomes the limiting factor and whoever manages to eliminate it will have a more effective fighter. The trend already goes in that direction, with UAVs becomming more and more important.