trying to argue that we need the F-35 or that it will provide any kind of strategic military value is absurd.
To a certain extent, this has been true for more than two decades. I used to work as a radar engineer for the RAAF, and every time we went on exercises against US forces (both teams flying F 18s, but with different missile payloads, we had AIM9s, the Americans had AMRAAM), we would see our aircraft swatted from the sky before we could even get the bogeys on weapons-system radar. Talk about dog-fighting maneuverability and visibility is just ridiculous - if you're using those characteristics, you've already lost the battle. In the control room we used to joke that the USN could have sent P51s equipped with AMRAAMs and AWACS support and they would still win.
Modern fighter aircraft need to:
a) not be seen b) be fast (time to target is still important!) c) carry a decent payload of weapons.
Ideally target selection should be provided by AWACS, and missile-sensors provide the final kill guidance, allowing the fighter (AKA missile-launch platform) to remain stealthy. In the absence of AWACS, the fighter will need to carry it's own sensor suite.
Modern air warfare is all about sensors, ECM and stealth. The airframe is almost inconsequential.
Small teams with tight deadlines can do wonders. This is why Skunkworks stuck. But it's important to note that Kelly Johnson was behind a lot of the big successes there and he was an amazing man. Absent organizational genius, you can run into trouble. The JSF is pretty much the antithesis of "small teams with tight deadlines".
So when you see hostile planes driving towards you, you send some fighters to go and shoot them down.
Meanwhile the AWACS can be supporting air, sea and ground battles happening for hundreds of kilometres in every direction. They really are powerful tools.
The point is to deal with what exists currently and what is likely to exist in the service life of a military system.
You're right though. Space will eventually and inevitably be much more militarised.
But at the price of $1T they better be thinking of the future and think about opponents who are also willing to spend around that order of magnitude on defense.
Sure the space-borne laser or railgun is fun, but it's probably not the first thing that the Taliban or their equivalent will attempt. Unless they can find a way to hijack one that we've conveniently installed for them.
Yeah it seems big defense is building for two opponents. Strategic opponents -- basically anyone who has nukes and is not an friend.
Then there is a need to build for guerrilla warfare, roadside bombs, urban combat, target assassinations.
Recently the later seem to matter more. But big and high tech projects will get funding and will do so. Now the system is broken and often the only reason these projects get funded is because there is some defense contractor extending its hand waiting for the next $200M to keep profits up and people employed.
Now it would be interesting to research how to combat or counteract drones? What can someone in a poor country oppressed by a more powerful enemy with drones do to defend against them. Can they be detected easily?
Now if you did get close to one, considering that the popular ones are visibly repurposed airliners they would probably go down pretty easy. But that's a little like saying "I can sink your aircraft carrier with my 16" gun" without the proviso that "... as long as you let me get way too close first".
>Modern fighter aircraft need to: a) not be seen b) be fast (time to target is still important!) c) carry a decent payload of weapons. Ideally target selection should be provided by AWACS, and missile-sensors provide the final kill guidance, allowing the fighter (AKA missile-launch platform) to remain stealthy. In the absence of AWACS, the fighter will need to carry it's own sensor suite. Modern air warfare is all about sensors, ECM and stealth. The airframe is almost inconsequential.
Why even bother putting a pilot into a steel tube with wings so it can fly some distance ahead, launch another faster steel tube with fins, then turn back.
The only reason to even have a person in there is for dog-fighting for what I see. Otherwise with specs you described, it is just a pointless waste of money.
Drones seem sexy and safe, but I'd be very surprised if we didn't keep pilots in the plane for a long time.
The federal government does not analyze spending the same way we do because __spending benefits the economy__, which is part of the government's responsibility. They intentionally spend money to stimulate the economy.
So when the military spends $1 trillion on planes, they are really trading $1 trillion for planes plus economic stimulus.
In other words, the planes don't literally cost $1 trillion. Rather the cost of the planes = $1 trillion minus the economic benefit of spending.
I have seen lots of articles that discuss wasteful DoD spending. But I see very few that discuss __why__ the DoD spends money this way. And why it continues. This type of spending is not a new phenomenon.
To me these "why" questions are the most important and intellectually interesting aspects of these issues. But they are often ignored.
1. If you don't believe in globalization, you can legitimately lock out foreign competition and insist on an all-American supply chain, keeping jobs and money in the US.
2. It allows you to bring home the pork. Military contractors have a proven willingness to situate assembly plants to deliver jobs in politically convenient locations.
3. It's compatible with Libertarian/Tea Party beliefs, as military spending tends to get a free pass from the balanced budget brigade.
4. People will call you "a hawk" and "strong on defense" and "supporting our troops". Or at least they won't call you the opposite of those things.
5. Spending on things like DARPA funds cool things like the internet and the DARPA Grand Challenge and robots and things. Pretty sciencey and cool.
6. $60 million in lobbying in 2012 https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=D01&yea... with Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin all in the top 20 individual donors https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=s&showYe...
Compare that to funding boring old schools and bridges and things which have none of these benefits.
Tea Party, maybe, but not libertarian. Reason, Cato, and the like are highly critical of military spending and very frequently chastise mainstream Republicans for focussing on discretionary and entitlement spending while ignoring the military spending.
Hayek originally debunked this line of thinking in the Parable of the Broken Window: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
I agree that Military Keynesianism is not the best way for the government to stimulate the economy. That does not change the fact that it is the de facto economic policy of the United States.
Here are some relevant analyses from inside and outside the Pentagon.
- Spinney's "Defense Power Games" http://www.dnipogo.org/fcs/def_power_games_98.htm * Chomsky's -
- "The Pentagon System" http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/PentagonSystem_Cho....
/libertarian
...or, maybe, education?
Education is good for figuring out how to acheive your goals, including if those goals are "killing your enemy".
> Why would that be the purview of the military?
Because its a substantial force multiplier.
And a insurgency with smart engineers and chemists will be one hell to contain.
The $3k cost per person of a $1T plane makes me feel inclined to think about what else could be done with that kind of money.
So, while drones might be a "better" way for the military to spend $1T, I think it's worth entertaining the idea that there might be a better way for a nation to spend that money. Like, say, on education.
In fact that's one of the big reasons the U.S. requires their pilots to be commissioned officers, is because they have to be cognizant of the laws of war, current Rules of Engagement that are in force, the effect of a given attack on the geopolitical framework, etc. and this has to happen in an environment where they are the only ones with an accurate (or semi-accurate) understanding of the actual picture on-the-ground.
The increased performance of unmanned vehicles, as well as the cost savings of the whole life-support system (and perhaps, reduced pilot risk = lower training/HR embodied costs as well) seem like they might make such a system practical.
[1] Taking it a step further, you have a central control platform surrounded by defensive drone cloud responsible for point defence, active sensors (which you don't want to do personally since it tells enemies exactly where you are), and mesh/onion routed control links to your offensive drone swarm (so enemies can't infer the controller location from lines of sight intersections to the stuff they can see).
Even even further down the line, distribute the human controllers into the defensive swarm, so they're hard/impossible to distinguish from the "dumb" drones, and less of a Single Big Target worth hitting.
You'd look for the larger drones that never pull turns over 8.5g.
AFAIK it works by lowering the signal/noise ratio to the point the channel is useless for it's intended purpose.
Something with extremely tight focus via aimable directional antenna or phased array, along with spread spectrum hopping would be extremely hard to jam, because you need to get enough energy into the channel to mess with it.
GPS jamming can be countered by a better inertial nav system, and even the tightbeam comms themselves can be used to locate approx positions with enough links.
Regarding combat capabilities, is there any fundamental reason for their relative lack of performance beyond it being unnecessary/risky with high-latency comms? From a quick scan of current costs, you could get >10 Avenger/Predator C drones (~15M ea) for a single F-35 (~200M) or F-22 (~150M).
I suspect (but am utterly unqualified to say) that such an encounter would go badly for the (human) fighter, especially if everyone has modern AMRAAM or similar BVR weapons ("... we only need to be lucky once").