Comment by bawolff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bawolff | Hacker News Reader

In the intro:

> Meanwhile, modern conflict, from Ukraine’s drone war to naval engagements in the Red Sea to Iran’s own mass missile and drone salvos, increasingly favors systems that can be produced at scale and replaced when lost.

In the conclusion:

> The lesson of the Iran campaign is that the F-35 performed superbly in exactly the kind of fight it was built for. The lesson for force designers is that the next war may not be that fight.

What a weird article. It starts out by saying f-35 is not fit for modern war. Concludes by saying it works perfectly in modern war.

The middle part talks about combining f-35 with drones to get the best of both worlds, but isn't that what people already are doing? Iran war allegedly had lots of drones on both sides.

And of course blowing up iran is going to be totally different from some hypothetical war with china. Will the f-35 work well in a conflict with china? I have no idea but the article didn't really make any convincing arguments about it.

> I have no idea but the article didn't really make any convincing arguments about it.

It did.

It pointed out that the bases from which the F-35s would have to operate in a war with China would be very vulnerable:

"The concentration of high-value equipment and personnel at each operating location makes the F-35’s basing problem qualitatively different from that of simpler aircraft. The loss is not just one jet but the capacity to generate sorties from that site."

It pointed out that you can't produce F-35s at scale, which fucks you in the long run:

"At over eighty million dollars per airframe, with Lockheed Martin delivering fewer than two hundred aircraft per year across all variants and all customers worldwide, there is no surge capacity waiting to be activated and no precedent for accelerating a program of this complexity on wartime timelines. When one side can produce weapons by the hundreds and thousands — missiles, loitering munitions, and one-way attack drones — while the other relies on small numbers of exquisite platforms, the advantage shifts toward the side with scale."

The key message of the article is simply this (which should not be "weird" to anyone):

"The corrective is not to abandon the F-35 but to redefine its role. A smaller fleet should be reserved for the missions that truly require its unique capabilities — penetrating advanced air defenses, gathering intelligence in contested environments, and orchestrating distributed networks of unmanned systems. The marginal procurement dollar should shift toward platforms that are cheaper to build, easier to replace, less dependent on vulnerable forward infrastructure, and expendable in ways that manned fighters are not."

> "At over eighty million dollars per airframe, with Lockheed Martin delivering fewer than two hundred aircraft per year across all variants and all customers worldwide, there is no surge capacity waiting to be activated and no precedent for accelerating a program of this complexity on wartime timelines. When one side can produce weapons by the hundreds and thousands — missiles, loitering munitions, and one-way attack drones — while the other relies on small numbers of exquisite platforms, the advantage shifts toward the side with scale."

The article gets this wrong as well, the f35 can be built at scale, no other fighter aircraft is produced in such high numbers, its also significantly cheaper on a per airframe basis vs Gen 4 aircraft and its more advanced. This article is nonsense and the author doesn't know what they are talking about.

> the f35 can be built at scale

Really? Can you indicate how many can be produced yearly?

More than any other non wartime fighter in recient history. and if war breaks out we can produce a lot more once we gear up factories - as every other war needed-

That's a non-answer. You're comparing it within its category when the point of contention is specifically and explicitly that its production can't match that of drones etc. In a broader sense the entire category of manned fighter jets can't scale to keep up with drone production.

Ukraine produces thousands of drones a day, including interceptor drones.

A valid question is how the investment in drone warfare is best balanced with that in traditional warfare, but that is besides the point of the difference in scaling production.

If the headline of the article was that fighter jets are bad in general instead of just F-35, i suspect the convo would be very different.

But still, even if you assume that was what the author meant, its still a confusing article. The status quo already is that we dont just use fighter jets.

The pacific theater is a way different combat environment then Ukraine. The ranges involved and china's IADS is just a whole different beast. The cheap drones that we have been seeing in Ukraine and Iran are just not as useful in a war against china. Cheap drones don't have the range or survivability to penetrate china's airspace or hit moving targets(most go to fixed gps coordinates), this is a job for stand off munitions and manned stealth aircraft. There's no current UAV or CCA that exists that has the capabilities needed to replace manned aircraft for the majority of missions that would need to be flown. Wargaming shows that the b21 and f47 as well as stand off munitions are the workhorses. Although something like a Barracuda-500 seems very interesting but again its like 10x the cost of the drones being used in the Ukraine theater and its production lines are just now being set up.

Yeah, you're not producing 5000 a year.

But it's a bit irrelevant because we couldn't produce enough pilots either -- the training pyramid means you can only graduate so many new pilots each year, capped by the number of instructors at each level.

There is a similar problem with drone pilots -- it took Ukraine and Russia years to scale up and get to the current level of skill. However, training drone controllers is cheaper because the aircraft cost nothing.

> There is a similar problem with drone pilots -- it took Ukraine and Russia years to scale up and get to the current level of skill. However, training drone controllers is cheaper because the aircraft cost nothing.

Unlikely that pilots would work for drones in a fight with China over the pacific, the jamming and electronic warfare environment would make remote piloting nearly impossible, which is why CCA efforts are looking at onboard AI piloted aircraft. Even in Ukraine the EW environment is so harsh that FPV drones have resorted to using physical fiber optic cable connections so the drones cant be jammed out of the sky.

Any sort of drone that has the range, speed(shaheds only go ~180 km/h), and survivability to last in or near Chinese airspace is going to be expensive and complicated.

I'm using pilots in the loosest sense, it wouldn't be FPV. Regardless, there is a significant skill requirement.

The lesson from Ukraine and Iran is that 180km/h is fine if you have enough of them. If you have a Jetson Nano and comms link on each one they could be a real PITA to intercept.

Toward the end of WW2, even though the US and UK were turning German cities into rubble, the manufacture of german planes was still so great that empty planes sat around in warehouses because they could not find pilots to fly them.

That is why autonomous drones are very promising, because for manned flight, you will run out of pilots long, long, long, before you run out of planes. I don't think it's ever happened, that a nation with a large air force ran out of planes before running out of pilots.

So complaining about manufacturing capacity of planes is a bit goofy. I'd worry about surge capacity of things that are not gated by human operators. And only in the context of a regional war of choice overseas, since we'd just nuke anyone who tried to invade us at home.

Once you understand these constraints, you can better interpret why US production is allocated the way it is.

It says right in the article ~200 a year. The base scenario in recent war games, the US lost 270 aircraft total, of which 206 were USAF. Japan lost 112, Taiwan's air force effectively ceased to exist. Across iterations, Air Force losses ranged from 168 to 372(mostly on the ground)in a fight with China over Taiwan. Those are substantial losses but assuming all the losses were f35(they were not) even at current non wartime production rates the United States could replace that in a few years time.

Also the war games showed that when LRASM supplies were depleted, the f35 became the primary anti ship and strike asset as it was one of the few aircraft that could fulfill the role and survive.

> The base scenario in recent war games

January 2023. Specifically focused on an invasion of Taiwan. And the analysis report hardly mentions drones. Not saying it isn't useful info, but it is in essence not much more than an educated (but outdated) guess. Using terms like "showed that" is thus highly unwarranted.

> Those are substantial losses but assuming all the losses were f35(they were not) even at current non wartime production rates the United States could replace that in a few years time.

You make that sound as if it is not that much, even though the losses (were theorized to have) occurred within a matter of weeks. If anything, it strengthens the point that F-35 production is going to be inadequate in a longer-lasting conflict.

Which specific drone models are likely to be effective in a major air and naval conflict in and around the Taiwan Strait?

Sea Baby

Doubt it. The sea states tend to be higher around Taiwan.

There are semi- and fully submersible variants on the way, that can stay underwater for prolonged periods of time! Sea Baby is growing into quite a few different things over the months.

The submersible drones are quite slow, and require significant support from external sensor platforms. They're useful for defending or denying constrained areas but they can't do much to protect a Chinese invasion fleet near Taiwan.

It remains to be seen whether your assay is correct or not

Wargames for things that will never happen is not a good reason to build more planes now, in the real world.

There are over 1300 F35s in service, 500 in the US and the rest with various allies. It is the most successful weapons system in the last century.

And you want to build more of them? Because of a wargame?

They delivered 191 last year. So roughly 1.5 days per plane currently?

Yes, and surge requirements are generally quadruple of the normal runtime, but with lead-time. Still, no way we can train pilots at a rate of even 1 pilot every 1.5 days. And imagine the lead times on that!

I don't think that's the key message.

He says basing is a problem, but doesn't mention that we have answers to basing problems. He says F-35 production doesn't scale. Then he says F-35 production doesn't need to scale.

The F-35 is a multi-role jet. It wasn't built for what it's doing in Iran, it's just that it can do it. There are other older jets doing similar things in Iran just fine. Compared to past jets we lose fewer of them, so that has to be factored into the overall cost.

If we say, ok, let's just put fewer of them on this base to reduce concentration. They are still there. He didn't get rid of the F-35s, he didn't get rid of his argument that bases are vulnerable. So what is the point? Now if a successful attack gets through and takes out some F-35s....you now have less spare F-35s to do the critical mission you wanted, because you put fewer there to start with.

We have other solutions for this problem, but in peace time it's more efficient to concentrate things. The nature of escalation tends to mean you have some time to reorganize before the real battle comes.

We're still going to have F-35s _and_ drones _and_ missiles. If the enemy has anti-missile and anti-drone defenses, it won't necessarily be the drones and missiles taking those out.

The F-22 or F-15 would have also performed superbly in Iran, they don't have modern anti-air capabilities.

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