Test Pilot Admits the F-35 Can’t Dogfight
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Because it's supposed to be able to dogfight, compromises in its other capacities have been reduced. Now we find out that, as everyone knew, it can't dogfight. So why even design it to do a mediocre job of dogfighting when they could equivalently eliminate that design constraint and allow it to do its other roles better?
The simple fact is that the military has tried to bite off more than it can chew by asking that the F-35 can do everything at once. Because the F-35A is slated to replace the F-16, other sacrifices have been made to make it sort of approach being kind of nearly as capable as the F-16. As a result, it is doing its other roles worse than what would be the case if the military instead accepted that one size does not fit all and removed that requirement.
Frankly, it doesn't matter how unrealistic the idea of dogfighting is. The military said 'make this thing able to dogfight at least equivalently to the F-16' so LM have gone away and made specific design decisions to try to achieve that. It's now fallen short of that target, and in doing so has also compromised other capabilities.
What really makes dogfighting unlikely, is the fact that United States hasn't fought anyone with airplanes in 40 years.
From everything I read, the F-35 is shit for two reasons. First, the Pentagon hadn't learned it's lessons from all the other times they tried to make one fighter for every service which almost always has failed. (The F-4 being the notable exception.) And Second, the Marines insisted on a damn VSTOL aircraft. Really, it's the Marines's fault. If ignored them (and really you should, because they're just insisting on duplicated effort), then you'd have much narrower, and thus maneuverable, airframe. The reason why the airframe is so wide, is because it must accommodate a lift-fan than isn't even installed in the Air Force and Navy versions. Even when the lift-fan is installed, the extra weight, and the need to take off and land vertically, causes the Marine version to have less range and less armaments. If you had cut the Marines out, you would have gotten the <a href="http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/amazing-photos-of-chinas-ne....
It's really a shitty plane, and what really pisses me off about it, is that this seems to be incredibly common place anymore. Read the <a href="http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/broken-booms-why-is-it-so-h... cluster fuck around the KC-X</a>. You can't read these things without wondering if the Pentagon doesn't actually know how to buy anything, and they're getting taken for a ride by overly complex (and thus very lucrative) contractors.
I don't think the Pentagon knows what it's doing. Actually, I don't think anyone involved knows what they're doing.
There were some actually good reasons to believe that dogfighting was a part of a bygone era. When those planes used in '68 were being developed, missiles truly had the kind of superiority that their designers expected them to have. Then better countermeasures and anti-missile tactics were developed, and suddenly dogfighting was relevant again.
The first part is again true today. Missiles are easier to update than aircraft. Taking an air-to-air missile from the 90's and ripping out the laughably outdated electronics and replacing them with a modern CPU and targeting software makes it able to completely bypass all countermeasures available to current fighters. Right now, if an enemy gets to lock a missile at you from within the envelope where you can't simply outrun the missile until it's engine runs out, you might as well immediately eject. Your evasive maneuvers are not going to beat a missile that is getting mid-course updates from it's firing aircraft, which can tell your decoys apart from your plane, and which can plan and simulate the optimal attack vector in ways that the 90's missile designers could only dream of. Near future missile designs using much improved engines like ramjets or the throttleable ducted rocket with a secondary ram combustion stage on the MBDA Meteor seek to increase the engine performance and longevity of missiles to the point that you really can't ever even outrun them.
So currently no aircraft can remain flying with missiles in the air. There is, of course, always the possibility that we develop new countermeasures that can beat modern missiles, returning dogfighting to relevance. However, even if missiles always beat aircraft in the future, that doesn't make a F-35 a good fighter. Because, if missiles always beat planes, why not just build lots of cheap planes with a lot of missiles?
Has any (unclassified) work been done on rear-mounted weaponry? I mean, if missiles can have modern CPUs and targeting software, can't the countermeasures have those as well? It seems like accurate, rear-mounted, auto-targeting machine guns (or heck, lasers for all I know) could still be an effective countermeasure, especially if you're in the position of trying to outrun one. That is to say, rather than trying to outmaneuver, outrunning would take you on a straight path, which would put the missile on a more-or-less straight path behind you until it hits. It seems like this is the perfect scenario for auto-targeting defensive cannons.
Upon further review it looks like Raytheon is also making one (again for tanks.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophy_%28countermeasure%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quick_Kill_active_protection_s...
Pilots' accounts of air combat in Vietnam routinely mention the firing of a salvo of missiles --rather than just one-- when a firing solution presented itself, due to the notorious unreliability of missiles.
And also, the sparrow had a decent hit probability -- that is, unless the target aircraft released chaff, in which case it was very unlikely to hit.
(If the answer is that they lack "mid-course updates from it's firing aircraft," that sounds like something that could be jammed.)
No maneuverability = no hit. Surface to air missiles are intended to target low, slow, or bulky targets and fighters are outside those categories.
It's fast, lots of bandwidth, and it's totally unjammable. Or even detectable for that matter.
thats the real reason they believe dog fighting is dead. having radar, drone, and satellite control of the sky is far above and beyond important. who cares if your multi core cpu enabled missle has a .0001% more accuracy when you know when the enemy's plain is fueling up in the hangar?
the US doesn't believe its going to get into a fight with a peer competitor, that's why they are ill concerned with dog fighting abilities.
The primary advances are the ability to distinguish signals returned by chaff/flares from the real aircraft, and to have a model of the target aircaft's capabilities, so that on each targeting step the missile simulates the most extreme maneuvering it's capable in all directions, aiming the missile so that it is capable of keeping it's seeker on it and following regardless of how the plane flies. That's something that a higher tick rate is quite useful for.
Then why don't they buy more AC-130?
That article also pointed out that for those reasons, the air force hates the A-10, despite the fact that it's actually the most effective planes for one of the most common mission types that they have. But it's not what they want to do, and it doesn't look like an F-15, so it's no good.
I imagine the option of having a microwaved Hot Pocket on a long mission without blowing the fuses would be nice.
Really, the biggest problem with the A-10 right now is that the airframes are getting old, but that's a problem with our entire aircraft inventory. e.g., the F-15 having been grounded multiple times in the past decades because of airframes literally giving out and breaking up in training flights.
The A-10 fleet is supposed to get rewinged to help with this; the USAF signed contracts with Boeing to build the wings before they started actively fighting spending money on anything that isn't the F-35.
This is flat out wrong. The US fought Iraq twice, and Yugoslavia/Serbia, both of which had significant air forces. But in both cases the battle was so lopsided due to technological/numerical/logistical imbalances that the other side only had a few engagements before deciding to avoid doing so. In the first gulf war more than 2 dozen Iraqi aircraft were downed in air to air engagements. In the quasi-war that persisted between the gulf war and the invasion of Iraq there were numerous air to air engagements and downings of Iraqi aircraft. During the Kosovo campaign the Serbian military decided to try to test the mettle of their Mig-29s against NATO and got their ass handed to them by F-15s and F-16s. In the Iraq war the Iraqis decided to keep their aircraft grounded.
Meanwhile, command and control systems were being hit including communication lines and upper echelon meeting places. The F-117, for example, was hitting high level targets in downtown Baghdad in the earliest moments of the gulf war. And then airfields were being hit, taking out runways and destroying planes on the ground.
When the airplanes took to the sky they flew air superiority wings protecting bombing wings, and the battlespace is monitored by AWACS radar planes. So you have a high number of planes that are working in a coordinated manner and making use of tons of data from radar facilities and so forth vs isolated, unsupported groups of planes that have numerical inferiority.
That alone would be a huge advantage even if the technology and the training were identical, but when you add in the edge that superior technology and training provide it becomes overwhelming.
Also, most people know of the "Topgun" school, but most do not know the details. There were tremendous changes in the nature of aerial combat in the 1950s and 1960s as planes transitioned to jets and became capable of supersonic flight, onboard radar systems got added, radios became better, and a whole host of guided missiles became primary weapons systems. Air to air guided missiles have many limitations and need to be fired only under certain relative conditions of trajectory and airspeed between the attacker and target, and it's not always intuitive how to transition from a given relative configuration to one where firing a missile will have the highest chance of hitting the target. Additionally, maintaining an upper hand in air to air combat is tricky and requires a special set of skills.
In the 1960s there were two seminal works that laid the ground work for training pilots in the future. One was the Ault report, which was a very brutal look at the performance of American pilots in Vietnam up to that point. It's not to say that those pilots were doing poorly, only that they were making lots of mistakes that could be avoided with better training, especially in terms of knowing how and when to fire their weapons to have the greatest chances of a hit. The other was the combined work of Col. John Boyd and Thomas Christie in formulating foundational theory of modern fighter jet combat. They came up with the idea of the OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) and "Energy-Maneuverability theory". The basic idea of OODA loop theory is that a pilot should be cycling through the Observe-Orient-Decide-Act phases as quickly as possible (without compromising the quality of each phase), and in so doing will maintain an edge in encounters. This is because the whole system, not just the pilot, is like an organism, and the OODA cycle time is characteristic of the reaction time of the organism. Having a faster reaction time is advantageous and can make it possible to steal the initiative from an opponent or to dull the advantage of the opponent having the initiative. This applies regardless of the maneuverability of the plane a pilot is flying, though more maneuverable planes tend to encourage a faster innate OODA-loop. EM theory forms the theoretical framework around which a pilot maneuvers their plane to avoid being at a disadvantage to the enemy while working toward gaining an advantage and to coming into a configuration where releasing weapons is most effective. That training has been the basis for fighter pilot performance in western countries since then, and it's resulted in extremely capable pilots.
The F-4 was developed to be a Navy fighter and turned out to be a decent all-around fighter which the Air Force could buy. That kind of reinforces your point about design and development, really.
> I don't think the Pentagon knows what it's doing. Actually, I don't think anyone involved knows what they're doing.
All the right people are getting paid. They know exactly what they're doing.
fixed links
[1]: http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/amazing-photos-of-chinas-ne... [2]: http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/broken-booms-why-is-it-so-h...
Stealing the plans is the easy part. The challenge is building an integrated military system top to bottom, from engines to electronics. If it were so easy to keep up by stealing, China would have a dozen aircraft carriers by now.
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So why even design it to do a mediocre job of dogfighting when they could equivalently eliminate that design constraint and allow it to do its other roles better?
All of the defence contractors are really good at implementing systems from requirement specifications. In this case, the requirement specification has been added to and added to by political desires until it represents an object that simply can't pass muster. Lockheed has some incredible engineering talent, but even they cannot implement a system that has specifications simply unachievable by current technology.
Something has obviously gone horribly wrong with the requirements capture stage of the program. The program sponsors (the military) have clearly asked for an impossible task. That's been bundled up in a specification and passed to engineers, who despite their best efforts are simply unable to make all the components play nicely together. Now we have a broken system because the subsystems just can't fit together. The textbook example is the VTOL aspect - a sleek and aerodynamic fighter can't afford to have a whopping great rotating turbofan in its guts, yet the requirements are both there.
If this isn't taught in systems engineering classes in 10-20 years as a case study on what not to do, I'll eat my hat.
Not so much as a military aircraft.
It seems no one is wondering what happens now - which is unfortunate, because there are serious strategic implications.
I don't think there's any in-between.
A tomahawk missile costs about $575k per unit, that lets you buy about 2 million tomahawks for $1 trillion. If you built a drone version that could loiter over an enemy airspace and then attack, sort of a tomahawk version of the Predator, you could buy a hundred thousand of them even if they were 10 million a piece.
You could also built UCAV fighters that could out-turn and fly most fighters by avoiding the need for the cockpit overhead and restrictions in g-force. Missiles make 40g turns, and drone airfames have been build to sustain 12-15g turning.
Are we spending a trillion dollars because the AirForce has a romantic notion of a human dogfighter in the seat when a guy with a joystick could do the job? Top Gun is a lot less interesting if robots or teleoperation is in play, but do we really that kind of engagement?
For a few hundred dollars I can jam your communications channel(s) to the drones. Asymmetric warfare sucks.
The problem is that once we're talking tens of millions of dollars and up -- no, you can't.
We're talking the swarm is likely operating in a shared point-to-point link mode, either using highly directional antennas that are essentially deaf to below, optical links, or (more likely) a mixture of both modes.
At 10,000 drones, they likely can form a stable mesh network over the city covering a wide enough area at a few miles in the sky that you're talking about having to run power plants or detonate magnets with high explosives to generate the kind of wattage needed to shout in to the directional communications gear.
Jamming a few hobbyist drones is nothing like jamming thousands of military grade drones, and the techniques you think will stop their communications aren't all that effective.
However, scanning the area under your bot swarm of amateur attempts to jam the network is probably a great way to target RF engineers in preparation for a ground invasion, and minimize their ability to improvise communications gear once the main communications networks are knocked out.
tl;dr: Taking out a $10,000,000+ swarm of military grade weapons isn't the same as disabling a few hobbyist trinkets, and may get you seriously hurt in the process.
Sure. If you're willing to build a new GPS system, because that's decently jammable for cheap.
Also are you proposing that all the drones will be individually piloted on missions as they are now? If so, I don't strictly have to jam the drones on the battlefield, I can just jam your satellite uplink or physically attack your operations centers. Add the cost of a plane ticket.
So far, we haven't used these weapons against any military that could be considered our peers. I wouldn't be so confident in our operational deployments without anything to base it on.
That's great, but you did not actually address the parent's point that GPS is jammable. Perhaps you are thinking of other methods of navigation that are accurate enough for long-term flying?
Enlighten us, please, rather than responding to people with your job description. Otherwise, you're not really adding anything to the conversation.
Also, jamming is far harder than you might think; anything you use becomes a really easy target.
Edit: After some thought, as long as your internal clock is accurate and you can keep an accurate orientation as to what's 'up', the stars should be able to give you arbitrary lat/long position. Weather + barometer + location + temperate gives you fairly accurate altitude.
Once you start doing the math on "I'm going to keep 1,000+ nodes in a mesh network from operating a phased array capable of keeping a lock on the signal from a constellation of satellites", things like jamming become extremely non-trivial, and only operate over relatively short timeframes or with hugely vulnerable base stations.
Most people are thinking about the capabilities of a single drone -- that's really not the way to think about drone swarms. In much the way that it doesn't make sense to talk about the capabilities of cloud services like AWS in terms of the limitations of single computers or switches of hardware, but in terms of the ability of the system as a whole to emulate high(er) performance equipment.
Similarly, once we talk about real drone swarms acting as a locally networked, single functional unit, presenting itself as single emulated devices or functions that the drones carry out, the whole game changes from what's effective techniques against single, standalone drones.
So to recap, drone swarm's GPS downlink is probably a phased array or something like that distributed over the mesh network of drones (using the local radio gear as localized timing and positioning information between mesh nodes), and nowhere near as easy to jam as it is for a standalone drone (at least, for approximate location; then using cameras and local sensors for say, fine bomb placement).
tl;dr: The power of friendship works for drones too, not just comic book heroes.
Pentagon procurement is a shitshow, but the DoD has many brilliant radio, radar, and signals guys working for them directly, or indirectly.
What then?
Here's something for you to puzzle over:
Your missile has up-to-date topographical maps of an area, and as-up-to-date-as-possible maps of all known anti-missile sites in the area. Thing is that you're not going to know about all of the anti-missile sites: many sites are portable (thus they move around), and some remain offline and nearly impossible to detect until enemy command determines that that site can kill a missile.
If your missile doesn't have commlinks, how do you tell it to avoid anti-missile sites discovered after the missile was launched?
Additionally, a careful reading of the comment that you replied to will reveal that the Tomahawk has -since the 1990's- been a fully autonomous missile fully capable of flying a pre-determined path to a target. Indeed, that is the least interesting part of the missile's capabilities. In short, we've had "self aware" warhead-tipped "drones" since at least the 1990's.
The same could be said for manned fighters. Granted, you still have a pilot who's there and capable of making decisions independently of communications.
But, I imagine if you threw up enough interference to screw with a drone, you'd probably make some very pretty lights happen on an F-35's radar.
I'm surprised weaponized drones aren't displacing cheap rockets.
You can make a fairly valid parallel can be made with web designers and bad clients. You start off with a clear goal and reasonable costs and deliverables, and through iteration after iteration of needless revisions, terrible requests, and changed requirements you end up with a clown hat, a fart button, all in comic sans at 10x the original estimate.
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Nobody wants to dogfight – the F-35 wasn't designed for it and modern strategy has nothing to do with it. You destroy the enemy with smart missiles long before either of you sees the other – F35 stealth is designed to delay detection as long as possible. This report takes the test completely out of context. It wasn't a wargame between A and B, it was a very specific situation under severe restrictions used to test the boundaries of the F-35's role. A real wargame would end with both sides never getting within miles. Not understanding the context of why the test was done leads to real misunderstanding.
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As for drones - it is true they have a huge future, but they aren't the only solution. Modern air superiority battles are as much about stealth and electronic warfare as anything else. If your entire enemy is remote-controlled robots, your real target becomes the communications. There is very real value to having a human in the theater of battle – many of the strengths of the F-35 revolve around it as a platform for the interaction of many different communications, intelligence, and weapons assets ... the pilot is the command and control center for a whole network of activity which is much more resilient than remote control satellite RC planes and missiles.
Dog fighting only happens when absolutely everything else fails and both sides can bring each other into the stone age of point-and-shoot flying.
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In a real war with a competent enemy, the first target (if we aren't all erased in a nuclear inferno) is going to be communications satellites.
Remember that a significant portion of how America fights battles is winning wars on paper so nobody ever thinks it's a good idea to start a real one, and by that I mean a war against a competent enemy playing at the same level – not regional conflicts and proxy wars like we've been fighting since WWII.
But in that case, if the F-35's real job is to serve as a sort of fast, stealthy Awacs, then surely it shouldn't incur all the compromises inherent in building a plane that looks like it was supposed to replace the F-16?
Air defences are difficult to overwhelm. Gaza/Hamas recently tried to overwhelm Israeli missile defence with primitive rockets with very no success. The rockets were very primitive but had the advantage of a short range, which is harder to defend against. OTOH, the intercepting missiles cost orders of magnitude more than the offensive rockets, so it might be possible to drain the ammunition supply.
"loiter over an enemy airspace" is only possible if you already have aerial control.
Overall, armies are conservative. It's dangerous to try and build a strategy around fighting styles that have never been tried at scale.
It's probably worth researching though.
This is the key, I think. As long as you can pound your enemy with cheap hardware forcing him to use up his more expensive one, you're actually successful in your attack - you're bleeding out their economy.
Remotely destroying things is not going to help us as a race. Keeping the human in the danger zone helps prevent violence, everybody has something to lose.
Well, there is nothing ethical about war. People in horses killed easily those not in horses. Then people in horses were killed easily with artillery as it improved.
The same happened with ships, making boarding unnecessary.
You know what they said about tanks when they appeared: they were not ethical. Then planes made possible to shoot someone kilometers away with heavy artillery(that before planes could not see far away). Not ethical at all.
Then came air bombers, the nuclear bomb. Today the US kills 10.000 people in Iraq annually with air drones just pushing buttons thousands of miles away.
It is already happening on one side. The only difference is when the other side starts using it too. Then we will consider it unethical(after decades using it on others).
That didn't last long.
While you can most certainly argue against the ethics of war, if you're going to permit war as a reality of human existence, then I'd say it's quite unethical to insist on waging said war with technologies that put your soldiers at any further risk than necessary.
It's not like we aim to fight fair wars.
Before manned US fighters enter a war zone, cruise missile attacks, HARM missiles, and stealth bombers usually take out the air defense system and bomb runways. The US really hasn't faced a challenge to air superiority in decades.
I'd prefer we find other ways to keep out of war rather than a few hundred pilots at negligible risk.
On a policymaking level, I can't think of too many air strikes called off from fear of the airmen's lives. Fear of terrorist reprisals, foreign policy debacles and ending up with people on the ground are far bigger issues to be considered which won't go away with drones.
Three Danish defence experts pointed out that while the F-35 is the most advance plane "available", it doesn't matter. While dogfighting is out date, high tech is equally useless. Neither Denmark nor the US have been in a conflict since WWII, where the advanced features of the F-35 would have made any difference.
Unless you decide to go to war with Russia or maybe China, the F-35 is so far beyond what you would reasonable require that the cost is completely unjustified.
Sadly for Denmark we pissed of SAAB and they will no long bid to deliver plane to the Danish Royal Air Force, despite them having having a suitable plane.
There are three nations I know off (Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium), where Wikileaks cables have revealed that the governments had reached an agreement to stack the deck in favour of the F-35 ahead of the official competitions. The Belgian Minister of Defense even went so far as to assure the US embassy that we would be buying them, years ahead of any public decision or even an evaluation of the options.
We have 2 capable European 4.5G alternatives - the Dassault Rafale or Eurofighter Typhoon - which would be able to perform the same duties while also supporting further development of European technology in this sector.
For the countries I mentioned earlier, the 4.5G Gripen NG would likely be just as adequate for any roles in any conflicts they would ever be part of, while being much, much cheaper to purchase and operate than any of the alternative options.
Instead of encouraging competition among developers and funding the design of European fighters (while also supporting the European economy a little), they're buying jets that are incapable of doing most the the stuff that it says on the box, sending billions of taxpayer money over to the the US military complex.
Notable complicating factor: Rolls Royce builds the lift fan for the F-35B. So panicky late attempts to cram cats into the CVs were cancelled after 3 months, because pork.
Meanwhile, the Eurofighter Typhoon was originally intended to be a carrier-capable fighter with an arrester hook and beefed up undercarriage, until France flounced from the consortium and went it alone with Rafale. An upgraded Rafale or a Typhoon derivative with carrier ops baked in would be entirely possible, cheaper than the F-35B, and vastly more effective as a fighter.
Also Italy and Spain, for the same reason.
Or were these fleets built from passed-on UK carriers?
Edit: Just did some research, and apparently the countries mentioned here (UK, France and Spain) are currently operating STOVL design carriers.
I did wonder why the decision was made to go for the STOVL version of the F-35 when the new carriers are obviously large enough to support CATOBAR - that explains it perfectly!
"We are going to spend an extra $25M on each fighter, in order to save on training costs."
$3.5Bn (we're buying on the order of 138 of these turkeys: the F-35B, as required for the STOVL role, costs $25M more per unit than the F-35C or A) will buy you a lot of CATOBAR training.
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[0]: http://nonukes.nl/the-netherlands-can-do-something-against-n...
The Norwegians planning to buy F-35s as well. This risks leaving the whole of Northern Europe exposed to a Russian strike. (Actually considering the existing F-16s are outdated the exposure is already there but it looks like the new investment will make it worse.)
What I don't understand is why is the Eurofighter Typhoon not on the table?
Edit: not really modern, but Belgium, the Netherlands and Poland have another 150 F16s between them. Poland also has 30 or so MIG 29s.
Isn't the exact reason for such planes to be able to have a credible defense vs. Putin and his ilk, so as to not tempt Russia to make advances on Europe. AFAIK, Denmark is patrolling the skies of the Baltic nations vs. Russia right now. I don't think Denmark wants to do that in an obsolete 1970s fighter plane.
The F-35 looks like a disappointment, but we can be 100% sure it will be able to carry the newest weapons-systems for the foreseeable future. That begs the question; is it preferable to have ageing weapons on a nimble plane, or the newest weapons on a clumsy plane?
I don't feel Europe has the luxury of skipping the F-35 (or equivalents, which the Saab is not, AFAIK) for a successful successor, when Putin is going crazy with propaganda inside Russia.
You can bolt very advanced weapons onto the Gripen, or the Eurofighter, but you can also buy two or three times the amount of planes.
European countries, as least not the small one, will just buy less planes if the cost goes up. So it might be better to have more of a 1990s plane, than a few of a 2015 era plane.
we're close to the turning point where for air superiority a fleet of missile armed drone seems the cheapest and more effective way to go
but we just love to design the best thing that would have won the previous war. I guess if that effect is known in psychology, because I see it even in the day to day life at way smaller scales.
I wouldn't be surprised if in the near future we see a drone capable of taking F-35's, F-16's, and any other human piloted plane out of the sky.
Why not put the newest weapons on the nimble plane? I don't see why you wouldn't be able to put the newest weapons on an F-16. Requires more electronics on the plane? You can put new electronics in an F-16. Planes get updated all the time.
SAAB dropped out twice, first time because the requirements for the plane kept getting changed so only the F-35 would qualify (SAAB was able to prove that the JAS 39 Gripen could match those requirements).
The Eurofighter is still an option, as is the Boeing Super Hornet.
Denmark is a level 3 partner in the F-35 program, and mostly work with the US when going to war, so interest wise the F-35 is politically sensible. We just don't have the money to fly the F-35 (my personal opinion).
It doesn't matter if the Super Hornet, Eurofighter or the Gripen is a little dated, they will have to last 30 years or more, like our current F-16s. So they will be dated for most of their lifetime anyway. The F-35 would limit the number of planes we can buy, the expert evaluation from earlier this month is that it would be better to have more plane, but less advanced. Link to a Danish article: http://ing.dk/artikel/derfor-skal-danmark-have-mange-kampfly... (ing.dk/Ingeniøren is the Danish engineers union)
I think there's an unspoken non-political agreement in Denmark, that when it comes to military actions, we'd rather build our connections with a party of resolve (be they wrong or right) than a fragmented alliance.
On top of that, Denmark has a special treaty with the EU, which states that we will not and can not join military forces. The Danish politicians wanted to go further into the EU adventure than the population in Denmark, so at first we voted "no" to a EU treaty which we then accepted the second time around, given these 4 "reservations" (no EU citizenship, no EU currency, no EU defence policy, no EU meddling with our "internal laws").
War is also an economical concern that the russian understood: it is all about the price of defense vs attack.
So CCCP developed the crude and cheap SAM batteries that where a pain in the ass in vietnam for the USA, israel...
It does not matter if a plane is good, it should just be thought in terms of the right price compared to the opposable defense of the enemies, and the balance with other tasks.
But what is more important than winning battles is winning war, and USA clearly lack something of a peace corp that would not antagonize local population, and help to maintain peace and social concord do some genie while they ... hum not occupy but ... help other countries.
Most countries are just fighting inefficiently without doctrines nowadays which stirs instabilities.
I would prefer to support an efficient dictatorship that would win war once for all and fast, minimizing the the overall victims than inefficient/corrupted republics that seeds discord someday.
Hum, by the way, russia lowered its budget USA said it was good news: they fired officers and trained soldiers hired more sergeants. Russia is making its army fitter for war with less money.
Oh! And some antique planes Tu95? flew other UK with armed nuclear missiles in January/February this year and UK could not send interceptor because they are waiting for the F35.
Let's say that time to market for F35 is a little to long too. War is not about gadget like planes. It is about people dying, social unrest, political instabilities, resources, economy and power.
Power to send others than your family die for a cause that does not exists, to fight other poor people commanded by other powerful people. No US/Europeans/radical politicians lost kids in wars with the same proportion as the population recently, did they?
War SUX.
Regardless of this choice, I would say that EU countries/companies should seriously collaborate on making a good UCAV, that's the future. Maybe the Neuron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dassault_nEUROn is a good first step, but it would be great if Germany and UK participated too, or on the next iteration of the project. On big projects like that EU needs to be united.
I do absolutely agree that there's no good reason why the EU at large shouldn't be able to produce a modern, top of the line fighter jet. We have the engineers, the means of production, a market to sell said jets, some European countries are already amongst the biggest arms dealers in the world, it doesn't make sense to me that countries of the EU would buy American jet fighters (with all due respect to the USA).
The funny part is that a fighter jet program starting now on the basis of an existing, successful design has a good change of getting completed before the f35 becomes fully functional, since all the issue on getting all the crammed feature to work nicely together.
Seems the UK have also ordered a shedload of F35s to replace a number of different roles in the RAF including the carrier launched Harrier jets. We've since sold the Harriers to the US which is quite telling really.
The UK's harriers were shagged after years of use, they were sold to the US so they could be cannibalised for spares. Plus we only had the GR versions which were not fighters, the Sea Harrier was retired even earlier.
The UK needs a STOVL multi-role fighter because of the Navy. The RAF are ordering the same planes because then they can fly them off the carriers as well. The cat and traps option on the carrier wasn't really a flier as no-one has managed to get a reliable EMALS catapult working. The US at one point was going to pay us to be the guinea pig for EMALS, but that's rather a risk if it hadn't worked out.
Never going to happen though.
It's almost as if everyone decided to plan for a war but no one was competent enough to bring weapons.
Maybe everyone involved can try boring and nickel-and-diming each other to death.
The Dutch air force is going to be reduced to about 30 F-35s. We've always had about 100 fighters, but the F-35 looks like it's going to be the end of the Dutch air force.
Do you have any info? I can only find basic press releases about SAAB not bidding because they did not expect to win against a plane that Denmark helped develop.
Is there more history? Sounds interesting.
The terms of the bidding is tweaked as to be in favour of the JSF/F-35, making it hard to bid, even if your offer is better.
It will be volunteers who just managed to steal the keys to the aircrafts.
According to Aviation Week, a reputable defense and aviation source, the F-35 has been doing loading tests. Meaning that if this report and dogfight happened then it was against a electronically limited F-35 against a platform that is very mature and limits understood. Here's a link to the story in question: http://m.aviationweek.com/defense/f-35-flies-against-f-16-ba...
That's the best praise that the lead test pilot will give it?
Also, did you have a look at those comments at aviationweek? Not a lot of love for the F-35 among readers there.
The F-35 is highly politicized, and that political fight takes place on the battlefield of public opinion, with both sides trying to manipulate the public with propaganda. And many here on HN are playing their roles perfectly, responding to the propaganda like mice responding to stimuli in a maze.
We're all susceptable to it and I try hard to learn to recognize it. I think a good sign of propaganda is the choice of phrasing. If someone is trying to manipulate you, they often try to arouse anger and outrage -- angry people aren't open to reasonable discussion and other opinions, so if you get people outraged on your side then they are innoculated against other arguments. You can see the lack of balanced, smart analysis and the widespread expression of outrage here. Someone trying to inform you will take a much different approach, carefully presenting information and avoiding distorting your understanding with provocation. For example, consider the phrase, "New stealth fighter is dead meat in an air battle" -- clearly it's meant to arouse and not inform.
The article represents the analysis, abridged and without context, of one tester in one test of a system that's in its test phase and not meant to be in production for 1.5 years. There are many other articles, representing individuals' opinions (including test pilots), some that praise the F-35 and some that criticize it.
I'm not saying the F-35 is a good deal; I don't know. I don't know much at all about fighter planes (and reading the comments, I know more than many here). I don't know if dog-fighting is relevant; maybe it's gone the way of broadsides in combat between warships (and better dog-fighters are like Henry Ford's 'faster horses'). I don't know if the problems described by the test pilot are bugs of a test system (that's why we test!). Think about the state of your systems 1.5 years before production -- they may not look so great.
I do know that propaganda like the OP reduces public knowledge; it doesn't increase it.
EDIT: Edited to be a little less obnoxious.
It's definitely frustrating that we can't seem to get a straight story about what's going on. I mean, it's gotten to the point where USAF generals thought they could get away with literally telling airmen that speaking to Congress positively about the A-10 is treasonous (this being related because the USAF wants to kill the A-10 to divert the funds to the F-35).
http://www.airforcetimes.com/story/military/2015/04/10/fired...
The story about suppressing other opinions is bad, but I think that's typical in any workplace: Undermining your boss' and your co-workers' careers will get you in trouble anywhere.
http://breakingdefense.com/2015/06/5b-and-700-high-tech-jobs...
I also couldn't help but note that there's a Raytheon sponsorship banner at the top of the page and a conspicuous amount of positive Raytheon coverage when I was looking for articles.
They may be a totally credible source, but on the surface it doesn't feel like I'd get a straight story there either.
>The article represents the analysis, abridged and without context, of one tester in one test of a system
If what you're waiting for is some kind of controlled comprehensive experiment and lots of data, that's something you'll never get. It's something that the pentagon may even not get until many years of operation, and something that neither they nor Lockheed will ever share with the public. You'll have to make your decisions about the issue with imperfect information.
>I don't know if dog-fighting is relevant;
If it isn't, why build a fighter?
Re: The propaganda. It exists on all sides of this F-35 debate. The author makes no secret of the fact that he is not a fan of the program. I also don't see much in the way of inflammatory language in the article that the author is supposedly trying to use to elicit anger or emotion. So, I am not sure what you're on about in that respect.
The F-16 was designed expressly to win dog fights, but today most F-16 combat missions are air-to-ground. So when designing the plane to replace the F-16, it might make sense to take that balance of missions into account.
If you stop (successfully) designing aircraft to win air-to-air engagements, an opponent can focus on winning air-to-air engagements, and pretty soon it'll be their aircraft that are being used in ground attack roles ;)
Propaganda works. The F-22 and F-35's success is scaring a lot of autocratic nations hoping to catch up to US air power. Meanwhile, Russia and China's stealth attempts are laughably terrible, yet we never hear about those. They're not at the top of reddit and HN. I think sites like HN and reddit encourage a groupthink because of the upvote mechanic at play. Certain narratives win out. Typically what a white suburban college-aged male thinks how the world works. Hence, long diatribes about how awful the US is how wonderful China, Iran, and Russia are. Its concentrated angst, not intellectual discourse. College age identity politics wins out, per usual on the internet. That includes a strong anti-military aspect and a bizarre pro-autocracy/anti-democratic aspect as well, usually sold under the threat of political correctness. Of course Iran, China, and Russia are just as good as the EU/US in terms of human rights, economies, public policy, etc. Anything else would be racist.
Pretty much any voting based forum will become a lowest common denominator crapfest. Some topics are just more hot button than others and someone is going out of his way to make sure the F-35 is one of those topics.
I can't imagine how many lives the F-35 would have to save (or combatants to kill, not sure how these equations are calculated) for the money to be "a good deal". You can't put a price on human life. If we could, how much would the average life that was lost on september 11th be valued? In the billions?
Interestly, anyone engineering human safety, and anyone dealing with its consequences, including the courts and insurance industry, all have to. For example, designing a car, you can always make it safer and more expensive, but where do you draw the line? What are the ethical and legal requirements? What will customers pay for? There is a number out there for the value of a life and also one for serious injury (major loss of function), but I don't remember what they are.
More importantly, there is far more than the pilot's life at stake. There are the other soldiers, sailors and pilots who die because they are now unprotected. There are the civilians who suffer because the mission fails. And there is the security and safety of the entire nation and its allies -- if Western air forces don't have effective fighter planes, it increases the threat to democracy and liberty around the world. It sounds dramatic, but those are the real stakes.
This is generally context sensitive and inaccurate. Engineers are attempting to limit liability, courts are attempting to compensate, and the insurance industry is attempting to limit compensation. These are not honest evaluations of human value, but rather honest evaluations of the market value of a human. The F-35 had better save millions of lives.
The average was $3.1M per civilian victim and $4.2M per emergency responder, totalling $10.6 billion in compensation.
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http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/the-f-35-cant-beat-the-plan...
The highlight for me is the last line:
The fact that the F-35 is maybe not really a good fighter
at all is reminiscent of the question that we’ve been
asking for years — if you don’t really need competitive
maneuverability, than why do we need a fighter at all?
Here's what a Eurofighter test pilot had to say about the F-35 kinematics claims:
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-f-35-will-never-beat-the-...
Isn't this the entire problem with this program? The weapons avionics still don't work. The HMDS still doesn't work. The DAS still doesn't work. The reports I've seen recently all suggest that we're still years away from all the high-tech wizbangery we've been promised actually working and being usable in combat.
This airframe will have been in development for over 20 years before it's fully combat capable. Think about that: an entire generation of pilots will conceivably have served and retired in the time it's taken to get this aircraft working. That's unprecedented.
Making strong assumptions like stealth always working (it doesn't), as well as longer range sensors being able to always compensate for the f35's sluggishness is foolhardy. Besides couldn't you retrofit most of the new sensors on previous gen planes? It's been done before. What if the f35 faces an opponent that's as agile as the previous gen with the same sensor range?
imo The F35s aren't truly multi-role. They're improved stealth bombers and not fighters.
my only question is why was the f22 cancelled? EDIT: apparently it was more expensive than the f35.
The best deal is probably the Silent Eagle. It's an F15 with a bit of stealth (fixed the terrible inlets, tail, etc.) and some other very reasonable upgrades. The SuperHornet isn't bad either, even for non-carrier use.
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We have clearly shot past the point where anyone would dare risk employing the F-35 in any combat role.
It'll be more like 500, and they'll kill the purchases in N years and move on to the next program. A higher volume mimic of the F22 outcome. The defense contractors will make 1/5th as many as planned in 2010, at 1/2 the cost.
A trillion f ing dollars!! For that amount, you could fund 1000 startup companies a million dollars each to develop their best fighter, and stage a knockout tournament until you have whittled it down to the 15 best designs and you'd still have $993 billion to spread among the surviving designs.
Oh, your war drones have humans strapped to them...how quaint. --Some future general
You can't wipe out much of the total global poverty (2 billion people in that category) for a trillion dollars. And the small impact you would make would be only temporarily unless you build up systems that drive income and self-sustaining economies.
To put it another way, you could give the 2 billion people living in poverty around the world, $500 each. It wouldn't even remotely dent the problem.
$500 each (2.5k for a family of 5) for the world's poorest people is a decent sum. If you could actually get it into their hands, that'd make a dent.
They'll probably stick with it until it sort of works, then pray that the only wars they'll fight will require the planes getting from point A to point B and firing some missiles :-)
A billion dollars, you mean.
The F-35A is expected to match the F-16 in maneuverability and instantaneous and sustained high-g performance, and outperform it in stealth, payload, range on internal fuel, avionics, operational effectiveness, supportability, and survivability. It is expected to match an F-16 that is carrying the usual external fuel tank in acceleration performance.
The A variant is primarily intended to replace the USAF's F-16 Fighting Falcon.
Why not let the Army decide what ground support planes it gets and leave the Air Force to gain air superiority and strategic bombing.
All this winds up translating really, really well to a modern (asymmetrical) conflict these capabilities let it somewhat overlap roles with attack helicopters. It has better loitering and payload capabilities, while being much harder to hit with an RPG. Even if it takes a direct hit there's a pretty good chance it won't go down. Another perk is that bullets are cheap compared to bombs and you can swiss-cheese someone without the explosion caving in the roof of the elementary school two streets over. The F35 is not a close air support aircraft so even if it's employed in that role, it won't fit it as well. You can drive a nail with a pipe wrench, but that doesn't mean it's a direct replacement for a hammer.
TL;DR: The A-10 can fulfil most of the role of an attach helicopter without nearly as much risk. A10:F35 = grapefruit:tangerine
But on the other hand, they just despise CAS and see it as a 'less noble' kind of mission for the Air Force.
Because then we end up paying for 4 complete militaries. Everyone loves having their own set of toys, and can make the case for why a particular role makes sense for them.
And the great thing of the A-10 is that it can give close air support. It doesn't have to stay out of reach, it can get right up close so the pilot can see what's going on and shoot the right thing and not the other thing right next to it. The F-35 will have to stay out of reach and pepper the battlefield with long range weaponry.
I'm confused. This is exactly what the F-35 was designed for was it not ?
The claim that “The helmet was too large for the space inside the canopy to adequately see behind the aircraft" is quite strange. Despite developmental issues, the F-35 Head-Mounted Display has been completed and displays imagery in a complete sphere (4pi steradian) from the aircraft's Distributed Aperture System. Additionally, the F-35 has a somewhat roomier cockpit than the F-16, though rear visibility is more obstructed.
The control systems are still being tuned to some extent as well. The F-35 is fully fly-by-wire, and it tries to make sure the aircraft can't be overstressed or stall, but these limits can be too conservative. I'm not claiming that maneuverability will drastically improve, but this is one of the many objectives of testing.
I can almost understand why the new jet is having a hard time replacing the previous one. I say almost because at a trillion dollars... Lol
F-35 = 148 - 251 million depending on model
It actually looks reasonably decent value when you look at it is this way.
The only possible way an F-35 could take out 5 F-18s is if its advanced electronics warfare package could remotely hack the avionics of the F-18s, or deploy some EMP weapon (then they all bail out!)
There's an infamous RAND study involving a conflict over the Strait of Taiwan:
http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/rgs_dissertations/...
The tl;dr of it is that even assuming F-22s could score a perfect 1:1 missiles fired to kill ratio while perfectly evading all enemy missiles, the simple fact of the matter is that they'd get overwhelmed by the sheer number of enemy aircraft and run out of munitions.
And then the airfields get destroyed and it doesn't matter how good your air superiority fighters are if they don't have anywhere to operate out of.
But we'll see what comes out in the end of that, the 1st country which will get the F-35 as early as late 2015/early 2016 is supposed to be Israel, they are getting their own version which will include a different engine and their own avionic package. And the IAF doesn't care about BVR despite having what is arguably the best A2A BVR/WVR missile currently in service the Python-5, their doctrine is go for the gun kill and that anything else doesn't count.
That said you can find similar reservations in pilots going from Gen 2 jet fighters to Gen 3/3.5 fights like from the Mirage 3 likes to an F-16 losing quite a bit of agility in the process.
The F-16 at the time was the 1st negative stability FBW Jet and quite a few pilots took it to town complaining that it's too unresponsive too sluggish and you don't fly it but rather the computer flies you.
That same issue would've probably been sensationalized just as much as the F-35 if it would've happen today, well the Aircraft will get better and pilots will learn how to use it's flight characteristics, so how much of an improvement needs to be done to the F-35 is yet to be seen.
While it's true that fighters can't cross the ocean, Russia doesn't need to cross any ocean to get to the western seaboard. Open a map, look at Russia, then look how far Alaska is, the distance between the landmasses is less than 100KM apart in some areas, they can reach Alaska and Washington, and with air refueling most of the eastern sea board.
The F-22 is currently deployed 4 AFB's, Langley(Virginia, basically covering DC) , Elmendorf(Alaska), Hickam(Hawaii) and Holloman(New Mexico).
They move some of them some times to allied bases mainly in Japan and the Gulf to show some muscle to reassure their local allies.
But for all intents and purposes the US don't have any deployment plans for the F-22 in an active war zone as an offensive fighter. The US Air force for the most part is not used for offensive roles it hasn't been done so for a long long time basically pretty much since it was split from the Army int the 1st place.
It did play a small role in Korea and in the early days of the Vietnam war because the navy back then wasn't really catching up with the AF and getting into the jet age properly.
With the exception of some hey look we found a use for 2bln dollar air planes the US Airforce hasn't done much for the past 20-30 years. They only run support missions since the navy doesn't run it's own tankers and well NKAWTG...
The brunt of air missions conducted by US armed forces are done for the navy, USAF as stated only does support missions whether it's running tankers or CAS with it's A-10's, once in a while they'll take their B2 or B-52's for a spin :)
>the Air Force organized specifically to test out the F-35’s prowess as a close-range dogfighter
They fail to mention that dogfighting is as antiquated as Snoopy and the Red Baron. Talking about this test without the context is plain irresponsible.
Modern air superiority strategy is about delaying detection with stealth combined with advanced electronic warfare and coordination intelligence suites to destroy the enemy before he even sees you, or at least when it's much to late to have any meaningful response. It isn't 'perfect' stealth, but it doesn't need to be. Just need to get close enough that your missiles get to where the need to go opening up the theater for other assets to do their thing.
"Too close for missiles, switching to guns" is ancient history.
The F-35 is no good at dogfighting because it wasn't designed to be, the test was just something you do to test your outer limits. "Failing" isn't failure.
So they said during Vietnam too.
It just hasn't happened in awhile because world powers have been taking on weaker countries.
The biggest shift which will happen over the next 15 years is when generals start being minted who were drone flight controllers or managed those operations. They'll have a very different perspective on where they want development funds.
- Lockheed, subcontractors, their equity stakeholders, their employees, and people living in towns supported by the project have an obvious economic interest in the continuation of this project. Lockheed cleverly subcontracted this project out to numerous states to amplify this effect.
- Ranking officials in the military have a vested interest as backlash from cancelling this program will potentially negatively impact their ability to suggest high cost projects in the future (please correct me if I am wrong here). Admitting failure with this project also makes our military look weak and incompetent.
- Many congressmen voted for this project and they will be exposed politically for having authorized it if it is a failure.
- Our president is exposed by not cancelling the project earlier / potentially voting for it as a senator.
- Leadership of allied nations would look foolish for placing orders for this plane sight unseen.
Meanwhile, most Americans could care less about military expenditures, so almost all the political pressure is directed against killing the program.
Pierre Sprey F16 and A10 co-designer speaks about F35 and specifically about dog fight 04:00 in the video. Stealth capabilities 06:00 in the video. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x203cgj_pierre-sprey-co-des...
In air-to-air conflict that means getting the jump on the other guy and getting off a shot before he knows you're there.
In strike missions that means reducing the range at which you can be detected, making it easier to employ decoys effectively, and forcing your enemy to rely on the fanciest, most expensive, most powerful, and most up to date radars. When your enemy only has a handful of the types of radars he needs that's an extra point of vulnerability.
Stealth isn't the proverbial "I win" technology, but it's a huge advantage.
And that Sprey video comes up every single time the F-35 is mentioned. He's still living in a world that doesn't exist any more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid...
God, I love bureaucrat-talk. It's a pig. A trillion-dollar pig. But that doesn't mean we can't put lipstick on it!
Last time this came up on HN, somebody recommended reading about the life of John Boyd. For those of you interested in how large systems of people operate, how the Pentagon ends up with bad airplanes, principles of organization change, and the philosophy of strategic planning? Go read as much as you can. Boyd was no Sun Tzu, but he significantly advanced the state-of-the art in a bunch of seemingly unrelated fields. I have a feeling we'll be parsing some of his stuff over the next few decades.
Aside from providing promotions to large sections of the officer core and gainful employment to many large defense contractors in various districts of various politicians, I'm not sure what the F-35 is actually for. It's like the space shuttle: it's supposed to do so many contradictory things at the same time that it doesn't seem to do any of them well.
In fairness, the Osprey tilt-rotor had a lot of the same type of procurement and delivery problems. Anybody remember ring vortex state? But the Osprey at least had somewhere it was going: take a squad of marines or special operators far inland as fast as an airplane without using runways at either end. It looks like the Osprey is turning the corner and can finally deliver the goods.
Not so much with the F-35.
I'm not sure what to do with the program now. My instinct says keep the close air support and air superiority fighters we have and concentrate on the F-35's stealth capabilities. But strategically, once somebody figures out how to use passive radiation to paint and plot airborne targets? The stealth game is up. Required computing power may be a decade or two away, but it's well within the expected lifetime of the airframe. I think maybe you just bail out on the whole thing and go back to strategy school.
But yes, very appropriate.
Its incredible how well propaganda works. We have one opinion from one test here and suddenly everyone is convinced that the F-35 can't rule the skies. It will dominate many roles trivially and that's something China, Russia, and Iran don't like to hear. Anything they can do to make Americans hate their military and our fighting men is great for them, because their citizens are all in lockstep about defeating us and imposing autocratic dictatorships on their neighbors.
This is not the first negative information regarding the F-35, just the latest piece in a litany.
> Anything they can do to make Americans hate their military and our fighting men
Distrust of a particular piece of hardware is not hating the military or the "fighting men" in the military. Heck, often, that's a position that is shared with the military, or at least the "fighting men", who often are not enamored of the equipment that the politicians decide to purchase for them.
This is exactly the kind of hubris that got us into this mess.
The F35 is not designed for dogfights but long range missle fights and stealth.
[1] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/31/new-u-s-ste...
1 Trillion dollars for a shit plane...but we can't afford to take care of the veterans and retirees.
Plus, the F-18 SuperHornet will never be accused of not being able to dogfight.
http://cironline.org/sites/default/files/legacy/files/June20...
According to the linked article, Iraq and Afghanistan cost over $1T (and this was as of 2011 and does not include things like health care, replacing degraded equipment, etc.) and the Vietnam war cost $738B.
It may be the first time a weapon system would qualify as a folly by itself (per The March of Folly, by Barbara Tuchman):
* Perceived as counter-productive in its own time (not just hindsight)
* Has clear alternatives
* Decision made by a group, not a single individual
It's generally worth noting that Tuchman's follies, and more recent cases that clearly fit her criteria (Iraq and the F35) seem to be follies in a fractal sense: you can just drill down and down and see more stupid as you go -- e.g. given you are fixated on going into Iraq, perhaps you include the State Department in the planning? Nope. Listen to your most experienced military leaders? Nope. At least make use of comprehensive existing plans for invasion? Nope. And on and on. With the JSF there are so many bad decisions bundled into the thing that it's hard to know where to start.
Given the design freedom with multiple airframes, I would think it quite hard to outdo such divergent airplanes as the F-16 and A-10. Unless the spare-part situation is crippling, conservative design would be to tailor to individual roles. Call it a Unix approach to air combat?
Cost, conflicting interests, technical challenges and secrecy requirements in the worst possible package.
http://www.amazon.com/Boyd-The-Fighter-Pilot-Changed/dp/0316...
But then the F-35 is supposed to be stealthy so might be able to attack from a distance with relative impunity.
you can't see behind the F35 - even if you turn your head. there's a rear view camera because of that. The central fan is in the way.
That's odd a pilot says he can't turn his head and see well.
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http://www.af.mil/AboutUs/FactSheets/Display/tabid/224/Artic...
I think the close combat air support / tactical role should be given back to the Army (changing Johnson-McConnell agreement of 1966[4] and Key West Agreement[5]) and the Air Force can deal with strategic bombing and air dominance.
The Air Force has been trying to get rid of the A-10 with various excuses, but the GAO recently said their budget reason were bunk[6]. They just don't want the job and their loiter time of their replacements is pathetic.
1) http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/09/23/syria-a...
2) http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/air-space/strike/20... http://www.dodbuzz.com/2015/01/08/pentagon-f-35-gun-will-fir...
3) http://defensetech.org/2015/01/02/a-tale-of-two-gatling-guns...
4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson-McConnell_agreement_of...
5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_West_Agreement
6) http://www.airforcetimes.com/story/military/2015/06/25/gao-r...
But they are brilliant against barbarians, which seem to be our main enemy these days.
While there is some romanticism still attached to fighter pilots the truth is in this day and age their relevance is dropping like a rock and there is little need to put pilots into danger when a drone can do the same.
plus drones can be created to do all sorts of maneuvers human pilots could never do... let alone reduce the size of the craft to make it less visible
I'd rather see a swarm of drones one tenth the size and one twentieth the price fight our dog fights.
It seems like he's pretending that we have, or will have, no other fighter jets remaining.
Yes. It was created to be a multirole fighter - including air superiority.
Or maybe even a motivational picture of McNamara, with satirical captions.
when you think about the current situation in Irak, one might argue that it would not necessarily be a bad thing.
EDIT: this, for instance, seems much more interesting: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/02/22/us-navy-to-...
But it's hard to see how dogfighting prowess would be any help against long-range radar systems that can detect it before being in range.
It is a genuine question.
(the probably exception for missiles is IR missiles - as long as you can get behind the enemy plane it would probably be able to lock onto it, even on the stealth one, and trying to get behind each other means pretty much dogfight again. Or similarly, say regular missile can lock onto a stealth plane only from much closer distance - from behind would be much more preferable position as stealth planes are less stealthier from that direction and at close distance the target plane has much less chances to shake off the incoming from behind missile)