A difficulty now is that we have morality police on both sides who believe strongly that they are right. And each side believes they are purveyors of uncomfortable truths for the other side. Both sides also believe in censoring their opponents. And both sides believe that they are the true defenders of American values. Fundamentally, America is divided into two sides who both believe they are fighting a Holy War against the infidels on the other side.
And both things are true. Both parties do various bad things, and their supporters hide behind the "well the other guy is bad too!" argument. The best candidate is the one who has the lowest expected badness; and yes, their chosen party membership is a valid and at least somewhat-informative prior on badness, depending on your personal badness disutility function.
One side: "This material is obscene and shouldn't be included in public school carriculums."
The other side: "We have determined this information is false and dangerous, and should be banned from all public discussion."
When you add in that the "false and dangerous" has proven time and again to be "true and embarrassing", and the attempt at censorship is more about protecting power than morals, this really is an area where bothsides-ism is a non-starter.
I expect this won't be a popular comment, but it is accurate. You can't change that.
Aside from the unnecessary inflammatory injection of firearms, I'd like to clarify and say "only one side thinks only they have the guns". Not that this should matter in a civilized country.
I didn't mean for it to be inflammatory, but it's certainly not unnecessary to the conversation. We can both-sides it all day, but the fact is that one side has a militia proudly ready to use force. Like other commenters have suggested, this isn't necessarily a concern with a functioning civil society. But if we descend into populist mob violence, the side that has eschewed firearms will be at a distinct disadvantage. I hope it doesn't come to that, but it's not so improbable as to be irrelevant here.
I assure you that both sides have firearms in sufficient quantities (I looked up the statistics before I posted) such that if one side attempted armed conflict, it would end poorly and with smaller families at the end.
Individual self-defense against organized crime syndicates is not terribly effective. You shoot one guy, the capo shows up with 10 men to shoot you.
A broad organized militia may be able to monopolize enough force to keep organized crime in check... and congratulations, you've just reinvented policing from first principles.
In a civilized country, civil society and the rule of law don't depend on the ever-present threat of populist violence to begin with. The US is not a civilized country, and one side definitely not only has most of the guns, but has proven itself more eager to use those guns in the service of their ideological goals than the other.
If you work with them long enough it becomes second nature to read them, and then it is easier to manipulate and compose them. The rest of the context is the background knowledge to understand the pithy core equations. Papers are for explaining concepts, equations are for symbolic manipulation. Meaningful variable names would be middle ground and not good at either, except to help someone not familiar with the subject to understand the equation, but a lot of the symbols are so abstract that they really need to be explained in more detail elsewhere or would be arbitrarily named.
If you're in an abstract/general mathematical function, then sure: single letters. If you're doing more business logic kind of stuff (iterating through a list of db/orm objects or processing a request body) then the names should be longer
Having on and no both be Boolean literals, but of opposite values sounds like a horrible decision, a typo doesn't result in a syntax error, but instead in a completely wrong semantic misconfiguration.
I had this crazy idea to write an MMO server using Seastar with ScyllaDB and try to fit a huge isometric RPG shard in one server. It seems that modern servers could handle that load and have some interesting possibilities with a unified server. Kind of makes you wonder what the possibilities with text MUds would be if you dedicate more server time to player experience and game systems. Things people would have liked to do back in the day with open worlds might be more possible now.
It's nice, has most of Jira features that were important for my org. Philosophy is bit different in some parts (eg. backlog management), so there was some complaining, but overall it's ok.
Only one major complaint: For main license, you can buy and own license for selfhosted version. However for helpdesk addon it's subscription only, which sucks a lot. For Spaces they have only subscription-based pricing, even when self-hosted. I hope they don't go Atlassian way.
Can anyone speak about YouTrack/Space's warts? The marketing blurbs makes Space + YouTrack look like a decent replacement for Jira + Confluence + Bitbucket, but I don't recall ever hearing a developer talk about it.
YouTrack is pretty great. So is TeamCity and they integrate well. The JetBrains instance is open so you can just sign up for an account there and play with it. Also you can run them both on-prem and they're pretty easy to admin if you do.
Space I haven't used. It seems like an attempt to reinvent both products in a GitLab style product which is a pity because the JetBrains tools are very mature and I don't think they needed a new product.
A decade ago when we used JIRA team-wide and not org-wide, some teams internally preferred YouTrack so they used that (until the whole org moved to JIRA). What bothered me personally was that fields were basically "unschema'd" and everything suggested every value -- everything was effectively a label field -- including typos, which are more common in a company where English is second language.
But that was a decade ago, and it could've been a misconfiguration on that team's part. It was also back when JIRA was more of a structured database with real issue types and not stories atop stories for all eternity.
For me, they've been easier to administer and more reliable. I've had some running for years with minimal maintenance and they just keep chugging along with no security issues and all of the utilities I need out of the box.
For servers I'm exclusively using Debian for 20 years and there was literally never a problem while upgrading from one release to another. Of course there were hickups with packages but not with the core system.
I expect something similar for BSDs...
I've read some analyses of the F35 vs A10 which don't favour the F35 for CAS operations much. The main thing I saw was that F35 requires more maintenance and longer runways than the A10 and is more fragile. It depends on what kind of a war that is being fought, but in a major great power war, you couldn't always guarantee having nice high quality air bases, runways, and support teams near the front. Sometimes it is preferable to have a low tech; that fancy new wifi connected oven can be great, until your wifi goes out for a few days and you find out that it won't turn on, and you have to get a special maintenance guy.
The F-35 has a much faster response time than the A-10--and, more importantly, survivability.
In a contested environment, "suboptimal" CAS from an F-35 dropping precision munitions is much better than non at all (A-10 would get shot out of the sky by any near-peer before it could approach the theater).
The A-10 also has high maintenance costs and a relatively low loiter time. For fighting terrorists in flipflops, something like a super-tucano does its job for a tenth of the operating cost.
Fundamentally, the A-10 was not built for CAS. It was built as a last-ditch, suicide strafer of Soviet convoys during a land war in Europe. Very few were projected to survive past the first week.
This is an… unorthodox take from the ground commander/fires perspective or conversely the orthodox take from the USAF perspective.
Hard lessons from the GWOT have firmly put the A10 as the most capable CAS platform, and it’s taught as such in all joint fires classes to forward observers and also via unit history/anecdotes fires units (“A10 saved my butt in ‘12”). A10 pilots and units also have a much better rep for CAS than F16 etc units (w/e the USAF name is?).
As in, from the ground units perspective, the unit actually needing and coordinating the CAS, everything you’ve argued is against the grain.
However, the USAF has been running the exact argument you’re using for years.
What matters more - IRL combat experience and successes with the A10 platform, or the 10 year PR campaign to get rid of it for no good reason from the combat perspective.
The most capable CAS platform, and one of the most widely used, was the B-1 bomber. Flying in circles for hours and dropping scores of guided bombs.
The best CAS in GWOT would have been the Super Tucano if the program hadn't taken so long. It would have done the same job as A-10 but much cheaper.
The CAS mission is obsolete outside of counterinsurgency. MANPADs mean that going low and slow is a death trap. Getting low and slow was needed in the past to identify targets and make dumb weapons accurate. Now fighters fly at medium altitude for safety and drop guided weapons. Ukraine shows that medium altitude is dangerous with near-peer conflict without air supremacy.
The F-35 is required to gain air supremacy. If you have them, might as well use them for ground support. I think drones will change things with CAS. On one end, can have small attack helicopter drones for direct support. On the other, can have large drone that loiters for long time dropping bombs. The F-35 will be used for things it is good at.
In neer peer conflict air supremacy is probably pipe dream because of combination of ground based anti aircraft systems and inability to take out airports for more than 1-2 hours without using tactical nukes. Tor/S300/S400 and western/Chinese alternatives are highly effective, mobile and hard to detect - you can never take out all of them. AWACS are big, expensive and slow targets so they will have limited utility in a conflict - so limited visibility on what's in the air.
Go low - you will get MANPAD. Go medium - Pantsir will get you. High - S300. Not everytime but often enough that all sorties will have to be very quick with no loitering and unpredictable flight paths (so no CAS).
Drone loitering seems to work really well. We call army units on boats marines. What do we call army units that provide their own air cover? Aerials?
The combat footage out of Ukraine is very enlightening. Communication, drone surveillance, full stomachs and no booze is apparently how you win a land war in Asia.
Yeah good luck getting any long lasting air superiority if you have S400s less than 100-200 miles around. And there are newer models in the pipeline with better reach, although they may be as useful in this decade as Armata.
Is the GWOT relevant though? It seems like one of the biggest issues the us military is facing a shift back towards "conventional" military matters, aka potential future faceoff's with China or Russia. These opponents field a significantly different set of weapons than we saw in GWOT.
The mil has accounted for “Near-peer” training scenarios at the training centers (literal war prep, “enemy force” with their own tanks etc) since mid 2010’s. A10 still features in them.
> Hard lessons from the GWOT
which must be unlearned for an neer-peer engagement.
and again, a turboprop light attack aircraft armed with smart bombs can play a similar role as an A10 for CAS but significantly cheaper and with a longer loiter-time to boot.
> a turboprop light attack aircraft armed with smart bombs can play a similar role as an A10 for CAS but significantly cheaper and with a longer loiter-time to boot.
Well, if you ignore how much quicker it will be shot down (in any environment where at least one of the two would be usable at all against combat forces), sure.
OTOH, the set of environments in which even the A-10 is usable is only going to shrink over time.
The point is if you're in an environment the A10 survives in, so would the prop aircraft. If you aren't, neither works anyway. The A10 exists in a middle ground where it is much more expensive but not really any less vulnerable regardless.
As long as the Air Farce runs CAS, instead of the army, they will continue to attempt to kill any mission that doesn't involve winning wars through the holy doctrine of Air Power (ie incinerating as many civilians as possible).
Not really, but I think the A-10 drama is an example of what can happen when an organization that doesn't share your own goals is able to take over a task critical to you. Perhaps like outsourcing your engineering offshore. It may be more efficient to find cheap labor overseas, and push a button from 30,000 ft while going mach 2, but efficiency only makes a few people happy.
You have to remember the GWOT was fought against ill equipped combatants, unarmored vehicles, and cinderblock structures. The US is generally not worried about those types of threats in planning for future conflicts. There is a reason why Ukraine is getting F16s and not A10s: The Russians brought more than just AKs and Toyota Hiluxes across the border. The A10 is a good aircraft but times have changed and we have much better platforms now.
And the A-10 was built before the MANPAD threat become serious. Sneak in at treetop level against gunners in turrets and you very well might be able to get in and get out in reasonable safety. Now, you'll be getting out with a missile (or maybe even more--the response will not be coordinated, those who have a launcher and a shot will take it) on your tail--it can't be evaded, you have to decoy it or blind it.
Isn't the A-10 the cheapest-to-operate combat jet the U.S. uses?
I mean, maybe you could argue that you get more capability per dollar for some other platform, but A-10s aren't expensive. (Or at least, historically they aren't. Maybe they've been getting more expensive because the airframes are so old.)
F35 is the multirole fighter. You build it because you don't know if you are doing a stealth mission, a dogfight, CAS or wild weasel.
F35 can do it all, but as a jack of all trades master of none.
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Consider the A10 in the current Ukrainian war: CAS is impossible because both sides have too much antiair. You need wild weasel (aka: anti-air defense) fighters right now.
Eventually, one sides air defense will be destroyed to the point where CAS is needed. A multirole fighter can perform both jobs.
While a specialized wild weasel (ex: stealth bombers) would be kinda useless after air defenses are down. While A10 is useless before air defenses are down.
I think MANPADs somewhat negate traditional Wild Weasel tactics.
Wild Weasel worked because you could use a jet as bait to find the position of a SAM site. That worked fine when a SAM site was multiple trailers, and took a day to move.
With MANPADs, you don't have a fixed base, and if you discover where one is (because it shot at you), that information isn't useful, because by the time you know where it is, it isn't a SAM site anymore.
I suspect that when fighting wars against people that aren't insurgents, we end up being much better off with remote piloting, and relatively cheap guided munitions for air support. I.E. its a strategic win to get your $3k drones shot down by $50k MANPADs.
MANPADs can't even shoot at a jet because they're flying too high. There's only so much rocket propellant you can put onto a shoulder-mounted device that humans have to carry around.
If you're only guarded by MANPADs, then a traditional bomber will blast your position repeatedly. The MANPADs are really there to deal with low-flying aircraft (A10 and Helicopters).
EDIT: I guess the AC-130 cruises at high speeds, but since its gun-based it has to drop relatively low... 7000 ft or less, which might open it up to MANPADs.
But the lower your aircraft, the more at risk vs MANPADs. Helicopters and A10 are probably the worst off since they're far lower to the ground than even an AC-130.
Furthermore, the AC-130 has the AN/AAR-44 Missile Approach Warning Systems, and a _TON_ of flares to misdirect missiles like a MANPAD. The A10 doesn't have nearly as many flares and is therefore far more vulnerable.
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Anyway, CAS are vulnerable to MANPADs (be it A10 or AC-130) because of their mission type.
But jet fighters and fighter-bombers, like the F35 or F16 (or at least, fighters that can play the fighter-bomber role) fly too high and too fast to ever be hit by a MANPAD. They're only worried about the bigger missiles who have enough propulsion to actually reach 10,000+ feet.
> Because its large profile and low operating altitudes around 7,000 feet (2,100 m) make it an easy target, its close air support missions are usually flown at night.[7]
AC-130 is only effective against a flipflop army... which doesn't have a friend which would supply tons of MANPADs to the gallant people of your country.
Welcome to the CAS role. You fly low and shoot cheap bullets (lots and lots of cheap bullets), but you're also vulnerable to ground fire.
At least the AC-130 has a ton of flares to misdirect enemy missiles automatically. A10 basically has no form of defense. In any case, a CAS aircraft is in a position of higher risk than most other aircraft since it needs to travel low enough (and long-enough) on the front-lines.
That doesn't mean that CAS is useless. It just means you need a _LOT_ of support before CAS is helpful. That's why an aircraft like F35 (which can perform SEAD / Wild Weasel, as well as CAS later in the war when the air-defenses go down) is better.
Not to mention, F35 has stealth capabilities, so I'm not even sure if MANPADs can lock onto an F35 reliably. Stealth is more than just invisibility, its also one of the best layers of armor since missiles need a RADAR signature to hit airplanes these days.
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But you're right. In the current Ukrainian war, there's almost no need for AC-130 or A10. Neither side has air superiority and both sides have incredible amounts of anti-air defenses. If anything, this is the war that shows why the F35 would be such an incredible aircraft.
So the window where you are vulnerable to MANPAD operator is less than of that AC-130.
> Welcome to the CAS role. You ....
Ah, yes, sorry, sir, looks like I need to take my Hazelnut Bianco Venti Latte and get out of your lawn, sir?
> AC-130 has a ton of flares to misdirect enemy missiles automatically
There is no ejection seats on AC-130. It would be never be operated where MANPADs are the norm.
> A10 basically has no form of defense
Oh ffs, A-10 is armoured with 15-40mm titanium plates, while AC-130 armoured with hopes and prayers.
> so I'm not even sure if MANPADs can lock onto an F35 reliably
If F-35 is at the MANPAD altitude then somebody (pilot) fucked greatly. F-35 in CAS role would never drop to MANPAD altitude and Shilka doesn't care about the plane stealthiness.
> If F-35 is at the MANPAD altitude then somebody (pilot) fucked greatly. F-35 in CAS role would never drop to MANPAD altitude and Shilka doesn't care about the plane stealthiness.
*Multi-role* fighter. F35 has gun-pods and absolutely is expected to play some CAS role.
Its not a dedicated CAS aircraft, no. Its not as good as other aircraft at the job (AC-130 has more loiter time, bigger guns, etc. etc.), but in a war you use what you can get your hands on.
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And suddenly talking about different weapons now that MANPADs are (probably) useless vs a Stealth Aircraft is the case-in-point of a multi-role fighter with multiple advanced capabilities.
No weapon is immune to all weapons or defenses. But F35 is immune to most missiles due to the nature of stealth. Stealth is the modern armor: if you can't be seen or can't be tracked, you can't be hit. I wouldn't say that F35 is ideal for gatling-gun strafe runs of enemies, but the fact remains that it _CAN_ do the job if forced (thanks to those configurable gunpods).
IMO, the war on the ground being fought right now? A system that can kill enemy Helicopters, perform SEAD, stealth capabilities and even do CAS (albeit a crappy job at it but "can do the job") is so obviously useful to the Ukrainian war that its hard to take any counter-argument seriously.
> If F-35 is at the MANPAD altitude then somebody (pilot) fucked greatly. F-35 in CAS role would never drop to MANPAD altitude and Shilka doesn't care about the plane stealthiness.
What's the Shilka's RADAR-guided gun supposed to do against an airplane it can't even see? Are the operators expected to aim and shoot purely on optics?
> Stealth is the modern armor: if you can't be seen or can't be tracked, you can't be hit.
Next gen weapons are going to make F-35 stealth irrelevant in a handful of years.
F-35 is visible on low-frequency radar for hundreds of miles along with general heading and speed.
Most missiles are using 30+ year old technology. Since then, the cellphone economies of scale in both R&D and manufacturing have made CMOS cameras both incredibly good and incredibly cheap. Meanwhile, modern AI technology seems like a match made in heaven for interceptor missiles because you get all of the accuracy, but there's not much to cause the edge case interference we get with something like a self-driving car.
A missile with a $80 cell-phone chip would have enough processing power to run cameras to visually spot the fast-flying plane in multiple light spectrum ranges, lock in, and dynamically adjust to any changes the plane might take all while being mostly immune to modern chaff interference.
In our theoretical interception, low-frequency radars triangulate a stealth plane within a 50-100km cube (30-65 miles). Verify that you don't already have air assets that can take on the threat. If not, SAM sites shoot fire and forget missiles into that general area without even needing to turn on radar. The missiles fly into the given area and attack any fast-moving plane(s) they see. It is even possible to send back telemetry and add that to the training models making the missiles even better the next time.
> Next gen weapons are going to make F-35 stealth irrelevant in a handful of years.
The Ukrainian war is being fought with T-55 tanks, originally produced in 1948. I think you're overestimating the speed of progress in practice. New weapons take time to mass, decades to gain relevance.
F35 making earlier weapons obsolete is a big enough deal on its own. All weapons discussed in this thread so far are basically irrelevant. Of course new weapons will come eventually, but its generally better to negate the current stockpile of weapons around the world (and force our enemies to research/build new weapons) rather than sending 40 year old A10s out there and pretending that we don't have any better tech ourselves.
Tanks simply peaked in the couple decades after WW2. We increased armor and cannon size a bit, but there's just not much to improve on an armored box. Even the most advanced tanks can be disabled by a mine (not much changed since WW2) then taken out by artillery (as seen with the Challenger 2 recently destroyed).
WW2 saw the creation of HEAT and the 1970s saw the perfection of HEAT with stuff like the TOW ensuring that any near-peer conflict turned any tank into a necessary, but risky infantry support platform. Modern drones and fire/forget ATGMs have made this even more true.
> New weapons take time to mass, decades to gain relevance.
This is primarily a function of how governments and government contractors work. When you eliminate barriers, you can get something like the famous P-51 which went from design to working prototype in a mere 102 days.
We are seeing something similar with the Lancet drone where a complete redesign has been completed and shipped in a few months and has radically shifted the game in Ukraine. We saw something similar with the FPV drones employed by the Ukrainians.
> rather than sending 40 year old A10s out there and pretending that we don't have any better tech ourselves.
A-10 would be more survivable in the current Ukraine war than the F-35 (which probably couldn't get off the ground most of the time due to the runway conditions).
In the SU-25, targeting the engine means blowing up right next to the cockpit, wings, and munitions resulting in an extremely high loss rate when hit.
In the A-10, the engine is away from the wing and pilot with the wing standing between the engine and munitions. The upward position of the engine also makes it harder to target in the first place. This is why there are quite a few images of them returning with damage to one engine and little else.
T-54/55 can shoot while moving, but the accuracy is bad. The real question is whether that matter.
If the T-54/55 is going against tanks, it has already losing because those should have been taken out with ATGMs and HEAT drones. If it's going up against trenches, inaccurate fire while moving doesn't matter because the tank will be getting super-close anyway. If it's firing at APCs, then stopping really doesn't put it in any danger and they're in for a very bad day.
Until we can work out the point defense issue vs drones, cheaper "disposable" tanks aren't a terrible idea. That new tank design could probably outperform the T-54/55, but the tank you already have that is good enough to support infantry assaults is better than having to make another and leave it to rot.
Cheap bullets firing airburst rounds effectively negate drones in a close range. The issue with MACE is that it remains vulnerable to helicopters and other more advanced weapons. Etc. etc.
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But that's... fine. Its war. Each weapon has a cheap-and-effective counter. If you know what the opponent is bringing to the frontlines, you can kill them easily.
Your argument style is fundamentally flawed. You're arguing about counter-weapons as if they're the main threat. You should instead be discussing the capability the tank brings to the frontlines.
* Immunity to all small arms fire.
* Immunity to anti-personel mines (and I've seen plenty of Leopards clearing up anti-personel mines by just rolling over them, providing highways for infantry to travel through later).
* High-power gun that kills a vehicle every 6 seconds
* Advanced therman and night-vision sensors enabling accurate 3mile or 5km shots.
* Resistance to artillery: infantry die to shells that are within 100m of them. Tanks require a more-direct hit, closer to ~5m instead. This forces inaccurate enemy artillery to expend far more shells to kill a tank rather than a group of infantry.
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Tanks have always been vulnerable to airplanes, helicopters, and now drones. That's never changed in their 100+ years of use and history. Taking to the skies is the tank's greatest weakness. But against any ground thread (including against lesser tanks), the tank reigns as the supreme anti-ground unit in the world.
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Just because tanks negate AK-47 or other small arms fire doesn't mean that the AK-47 is useless. It just means that you've complicated the frontlines and have forced the enemy to bring multiple weapons to the frontlines to combat effectively. The more weapons you force the enemy to carry, the better. IE: Combined Arms combat.
You bring soldiers (who lose to snipers / AK-47s). You bring light-armor, that defeats those. You bring medium vehicles (like IFVs) to defeat the lighter-vehicles. You bring tanks to defeat the medium vehicles. You bring air-assets (helicopters) to defeat tanks. You bring jets to defeat the helicopters. You bring artillery to defeat different bits. Etc. etc. etc.
> F35 has gun-pods and absolutely is expected to play some CAS role
> in a war you use what you can get your hands on
In a war you don't use a multi-billion toy for it's marketing qualities. Because this is the way lose your multi-billion toy.
> MANPADs are (probably) useless
Beam riders (eg Starstreak). And as soon as you are -lt 2km then you are in IR/UV/Image recognition danger zone too, because: low, fast, precise - choose two.
> albeit a crappy job at
*sigh*
No. It can't do CAS with it's guns. It can do precision drops for CAS (which were done by F-16 against fortified and non-moving targets quite effectively) but it never would be deployed in A-10 style, because that would be the one step before the embarrassment of losing a modern stealth fighter to some MANPAD.
> an airplane it can't even see
At 5-7km? Are you sure it can't be seen at all at that distance? It's a radar absorbing and a radar dispersing materials, not an invisibility cloak from Harry Potter. And yes, you can point it and spray-n-pray. With AAA rate of fire you can do this.
> Are the operators expected to aim and shoot purely on optics?
"but in a war you use what you can get your hands on"
> In a war you don't use a multi-billion toy for it's marketing qualities. Because this is the way lose your multi-billion toy.
The most recent batch of F35A unit cost was $110 Million.
I think you've got some severe misunderstandings about the nature of the F35 project. Its a multi-billion $$ *research* project, but each airplane is much cheaper than that.
> The F-35’s price per unit, including ancillary costs like depot maintenance, ground support equipment, and spare parts is $110.3 million per F-35A, $135.8 million per F-35B, and $117.3 million per F-35C.
This airplane is designed to be mass produced well. The mass production / upfront engineering costs are massive, but the airplane itself is... ya know... an airplane.
> No. It can't do CAS with it's guns.
That's why the F35 has gun-*pods*. It can equip the pods and turn into a CAS fighter.
The F35's ability to equip gunpods and perform a CAS role is well known. Its not very good at it and has all kinds of restrictions, but it is in fact a use-case that had some level of design thought go into.
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> At 5-7km? Are you sure it can't be seen at all at that distance? It's a radar absorbing and a radar dispersing materials, not an invisibility cloak from Harry Potter. And yes, you can point it and spray-n-pray. With AAA rate of fire you can do this.
You know that bullets drop different heights given the distance to target, right? You can't just spray-and-pray at these distances, the difference between 5km and 5.5km is a lot of space that the "bullet drops".
Ask _any_ hunter or marksman. They'll have tac-marks on their rifle for how high to aim even at 100m vs 300m shots. When you start dealing with much further out targets things get even worse, especially if you're "aiming up" and the ballistic trajectory of bullets starts to grow very complex.
Doubly so when these aircraft are moving at 500mph+, so you need RADAR to calculate how far to lead the bullets. At 5km, an AA gun will take as long as 5 to 10 seconds before it reaches the target, so you need significant amounts of calculation on the Jet's direction-of-travel (and leading your shot) before you even have hopes of hitting it.
Now yes, RADAR + Computers do the job well... against an A10 or otherwise aircraft devoid of stealth. If you blind the RADAR system and none of these computers work anymore, you pretty much have free reign and are nearly immune to bullets. You can't be tracked, you can't be calculated, you can't be hit.
Hitting a 3D target maneuvering in the air is very difficult. That's why we built aimbot / Anti-air gun systems to calculate these things.
All of those computers cease to function the minute the aircraft is stealth. If the computer doesn't know the distance, bearing, or velocity, it cannot compute and will not be able to hit the target.
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But that doesn't change the fact that you're playing "Batman utility belt" with these weapon systems. We started with MANPADs and now we're talking AA guns, but in either case the stealth-capability of F35 defeats both so it doesn't matter. Are you gonna pull any other weapon out of your bag of arguments? We're like 3 or 4 arguments through weapon systems that would have made the A10 fully irrelevant and you're still struggling to make a coherent case on what weapon would reliably hit an F35.
There are some automated AA guns (Oerlikon or Rheinmetall IIRC) who lock with combination of radar and visual, or just one of those. No locking missiles, just good old ammunition and 21st century computing power. Well not precisely, every round is primed to detonate at exact altitude/flight duration.
Put a hundred rounds in few seconds (so 5-10k projectiles) on the sky where the plane will be in 3 seconds, they will create basically impenetrable cloud and yes you can quite easily shoot down F35 flying during day flying low enough just by visual lock.
You aren't going to get valid distance from a single platform like that.
If you had a large scale integrated sensor network, then yes you can triangulate an F35 and track it.
Except the F35 would switch to Wild Weasel mode and start shooting down your sensors (aka, SEAD missions) until it was safe to approach closely.
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That's the thing, if the F35 is already in your face to take direct gunfire like that,bits because the commanders are already sure that all advanced radar sensors are destroyed by HARM missiles.
That's the power of a stealth CAS fighter. It's got way less ammo and runtime than an A10 but stealth more than makes up for it.
> Except the F35 would switch to Wild Weasel mode and start shooting down your sensors
Ie not performing CAS. As stated near the start of the thread, nor AC-130 nor F-35 would perform CAS against anything more dangerous than a flipflop army with a complete lack of AA capabilities.
F35 can perform both Wild Weasel and CAS missions. F35 is also cheaper than the AC-130 and responds faster due to much higher speeds (proper supersonic Jet vs Turbine).
Even in a CAS scenario, some scenarios will prefer an F35 over the AC-130 is the enemy is lightly armed and response time is a priority (traveling at 1200mph or faster vs 299mph means the F35 responds 4x faster)
From what I understand both sides have plenty of Buks but Russian ELINT and ECM has been remarkably inflexible outside of counter battery roles (besides some broad spectrum jamming earlier in the conflict)
But you have to fly low to avoid the area SAM defense. Stuff like the Patriot doesn't stop enemy aircraft, it forces them down low where MANPADs and even guns are useful.
Wild Weasel literally is baiting SAM to shoot at them. That's the point of Wild Weasel, you bait the RADAR then kill the air defense before they lock in on you. Any RADAR works by emitting radio waves, and those radio waves can be tracked with a homing missile.
Just looking at the wild weasel causes the RADAR system to possibly be bombed. SAM installations vs Wild Weasel tactics are very complex.
In any case...if your SAM is too scared to engage with the wild weasel, they just bomb you from 12,000 feet altitudes.
Winning at 12,000 feet altitudes 50 miles away is the point of the US Air Force. Their goal is to never even engage at lower altitudes until they know they have won in the standoff, long range game.
Using drones to bait them like in Baghdad in 1991 would work too.
How would something like that help Ukraine? Does Russia even need HARM when they have so much artillery they can just turn the surroundings of the radar site into the surface of the moon? My understanding is Ukraine preserved its air defenses by moving them right before 2/24 and is betting on Russian cruise missile avionics and military intelligence sucking.
Drones won't work for stealth because you need the radio-wave link.
F35 is better because the pilot can turn off all communications when doing the SAED mission, forcing the enemy RADAR to increase their power to even try to see the F35. I don't think drones are in a position (yet) to go radio-silent and accomplish their mission.
> "Consider the A10 in the current Ukrainian war: CAS is impossible because both sides have too much antiair."
Not really. It's true that anti-air has prevented aircraft from dominating the battlefield, but both sides still use jets and helicopters to come in at low altitude, fire off a bunch of rockets, do a quick U-turn (releasing a bunch of flares) and run away.
Both sides use MI-8s and SU-25s. Not sure if Ukraine has MI-28s, but Russia does. Both sides use glide bombs to hit fortified defense lines.
The Russian KA-52s in particular have been very effective lately because they have guided missiles and night vision equipment, and don't even have to be very close to the front.
If MI-8s, MI-28s, SU-25s, and KA-52s are all being actively used in this war and aren't immediately shot down, I don't see why an A-10 would fare any worse in that situation. Might not be a game-changer, but not useless either.
It is unnecessary to have a manned CAS fighter doing strafing runs. A cheap Drone in the 1-5MM range could do the job better. Or rely on high altitude/stealth precision bombing.
The A-10 was built for a war in Europe that never came. You can see how well the equivalent SU-25 Frogfoot fairs against Manpads in Ukraine today.
The F-35 is for deleting (or helping others delete) air defenses and other fighter aircraft. Once those are gone you can use whatever you want for CAS. I can't imagine troops being so far forward that the air above is still contested.
Genuinely interested in how modern radar would get around the line of sight issues? Doesn't line of sight mean that yes, you absolutely can still fly under radar?
LoS is different to the original concept of "flying below radar". The original concept was based on the problem of ground scatter - below a certain altitude the radar beam is hitting the ground and producing spurious returns which mean they swamp out any interesting signals.
But modern radar is much more sensitive, and the noise-handling algorithms better - basically it's much more able to distinguish "I hit some trees with my beam" versus "metal". Combine that with modern transmitters which can also produce tighter beams and all the other electronic goodness, and the net effect is that you can scan just as low as you can see in all directions and filter out everything which is boring (i.e. the ground doesn't actually move very much, so really it's a fixed background on your radio image).
The other element of this, is AWACS: AWACS radars are higher, and look down. So not only do they go much further, but there is no "below radar" with them - they can be operated from much further away, and have all the same advantages (i.e. much better signal return discrimination). An AWACS will see you on radar long before you're in weapons range (hence the body of them orbiting near the Ukraine border these days).
The final element is that "flying below radar" was also just plain never that effective. You can test this by asking how often it's actually been done, if it's so effective. If it worked all the time, then that's what military's would train to do. Instead the only real advantage it provides is it reduces light of sight, and that's not uniformly applicable - i.e. a radar on elevated terrain would be able to spot aircraft making low approaches around it because it can just look down and pick out the airplane-like returns and ignore the ground scatter - and said radar can be far behind the lines.
The A-10 would be shot out of the sky at impressive rates with today's proliferation of MANPADs, the same way the ukrainians are shooting down russion KA-52s in ukraine whenever they get too close to the line of contact. The F-35 could require 100x more maintenance than the A-10 but it will accomplish the mission and come home afterwards. The A-10 is useful for shooting someone who can't shoot missiles back at your planes.
Look at actual kills of SU-25 and KA-52 vs the damage they have done. I've seen a single KA-52 mission take down around a half-dozen vehicles and completely halt an advance. That helicopter more than paid for itself in just that one interaction.
There have been no doubt thousands to tens of thousands of missions flown over the past year and a half by Russia, but only around 28 SU-25 losses and 36 KA-52 losses[0]. At 19 months into the war, that's 1-2 per month which would be more than acceptable losses. Even looking at total aircraft losses per side per month, the worst case is Ukraine with 307 losses over 19 months or 16.2 per month.
Perspective is important. We lost 2,714 planes in the Korean War[1] over 37 months. That is 73.4 aircraft per month or a little more than 4.5x as many each month and it was considered acceptable losses.
I don't care to add up all the things, but even in far less heated wars with basically zero anti-air capability, there are still a ton of aircraft losses[2].
> Even looking at total aircraft losses per side per month, the worst case is Ukraine with 307 losses over 19 months or 16.2 per month.
Unless this includes UAV's (which would be a bit strange) I don't see how this is even possible Ukraines airforce doesn't even have 300 combat aircraft.
Looking at most sources I cannot find where this number could have come from.
How do drones get around the issue of communications jamming? I suppose they have some way (autonomous would be one way), but it seems to me that if communications are cut off, having a pilot with human judgement to respond to changing conditions will almost always have some advantage. Although, you could get a pretty advanced autonomous system that responded to changes from a pre-programmed attack plan.
> How do drones get around the issue of communications jamming?
AESA derivatives as bidirectional communication devices seem like they will render jamming a lot less effective. Simply by virtue of being able to pump radar levels of power into communication.
And current trends seem to be converging on flocks of drones, of which one or two can be specialized with uplink. Or simply babysat by stealthy HALE platforms like the RQ-180.
You'll have to blanket an area with ungodly amounts of energy to fully jam point-to-point, highly directional links, especially for close range hops.
The book talks about how they serve multiple purposes. They can be used to hinder enemy operations, mask one's own activities, or isolate units to force them into pre-defined roles. Increasing reliance on digital and wireless communications in warfare can thus be viewed as a double-edged sword, offering advantages but also creating new vulnerabilities.
> How do drones get around the issue of communications jamming?
For one, by making it harder to jam in the first place. Starlink with its extremely directional antennas is a good example - an opponent would need an equally massive fleet of satellites or high-altitude ECM planes to jam it, and the latter ones can easily be targeted by anti-radar rockets.
This is why the US government has been pushing insane amounts of money into SpaceX... Starlink is the future of interconnected wars.
Big big big big difference between "they usually do what we ask" and "we have operational authority over this system, and can court martial anyone that impedes its operation"
Wow. Is there any concrete info about the build-out? Or do you think they will just provision X% of existing sats / bandwidth to military use? I recall learning years ago that modern "long lines" (telco) were all pure data lines, where a certain portion was reserved for guaranteed bandwidth required for (voice) telephone calls.
Assuming that the US ever enters any war directly, guess what their first action will be: take Musk out of the picture, deal with the legalities later on.
A near peer adversary will attempt to degrade Starlink (and other military satellite constellations) as their first step in any major conflict. China is making huge investments into EW, cyber, and ASAT. The US military has to plan to fight with little or no satellite support.
Depends on your definition of expensive. In comparison with other military hardware, inertial navigation systems aren't that expensive. They're also used in large numbers in civil aviation.
Hold my beer, and volunteer to pay the power bill.
You say that as if it isn't incredibly easy to do to the point we have entire enforcement orgs built around trying to keep people from unintentiinally doing just that.
> How do drones get around the issue of communications jamming
The same way the F-35 does I guess. Besides, it's pretty common for AI systems to overtake human capabilities these days, so when jammed they can just carry on.
Sure, they do mistakes but humans do these too and the advantage of not carrying 80kg of fragile human and all the life support systems onboard is quite significant.
It makes the thing much cheaper, it removes the need to come back thus doubles the range, it makes the thing smaller thus harder to detect and destroy, it doesn't have to limit its manoeuvres to human levels this makes the thing much more agile.
Canada's first losses in a combat zone since Korean War.
> "Let's just make sure that it's, that it's not friendlies, is all"
> Twenty-two seconds later, he reported a direct hit. Ten seconds later, the controller ordered the pilots to disengage, saying the forces on the ground were "friendlies Kandahar".
The argument is not "humans never make a mistake".
There's little evidence autonomous combat fighter AIs are better than humans at tough calls of this nature. They may be someday, but given the state of the art in self-driving, that day probably hasn't arrived.
let the human pilot make decisions == let the machine make decisions
It's not like pilots are making political decisions. They pilot and shoot predefined targets, avoid hostile actions. AI is capable of doing this.
> Not in the realm of "should I shoot that thing?" sort of decisions.
On the contrary, AI is very capable of making that decision. There are no philosophical dilemmas or children in the skies and even if there were we are at the point where we can tell the device not shoot children. There will be mistakes but human pilots makes mistakes too.
Military pilots absolutely make all sorts of decisions, like "that looks like a civilian target, maybe I have incorrect info" or "a little kid just ran into the target area" or "the controller says I just shot at friendlies".
I would not currently trust an AI to handle those very well.
What would an AI have done in this situation? What should it have done? "Russian pilot deliberately fired missiles at a Royal Air Force surveillance plane in international airspace over the Black Sea last year": https://apnews.com/article/uk-russia-fighter-jet-missile-bla...
AI can absolutely say "that looks like a civilian target, maybe I have incorrect info" or "a little kid just ran into the target area" or "the controller says I just shot at friendlies".
What makes you think that AI can't incorporate those into decision making? Pilots do these through instruments anyway.
Wrong. Flying from point to point is easy. Following complex ROEs, using combined arms tactics, dealing with system failures, identifying valid targets, and employing weapons are all much harder problems than self-driving cars.
It's always hilarious to see the confidently incorrect comments by a bunch of ignorant software developers. The Dunning–Kruger effect is on full display here.
LOL, OK. You've listed a lot of problems that have been largely solved already, and are trying to convince us that they are harder than a problem that has eluded the brightest people in the tech industry, armed with computational tools that the aerospace community never dreamed of and backed by more-or-less infinite capital.
Nothing is harder than self-driving cars. Nothing. We'll colonize Mars before we have a solid solution to that problem. Why? Self-driving cars have to coexist with human drivers and human infrastructure.
Nobody in aviation has that problem. If they did, they'd run screaming for the hills.
No, it's just that every time I drive somewhere, I try to maintain a low-priority thread in my head to work on the problem, "How would I write code to do what I just did?" Frequently the answer is, "I have no idea, and wow, I'm glad it's not my job."
That simply doesn't happen when I fly my quads. "How would I write code to dodge an attacking drone? How would I modify my drone to drop a grenade or a Molotov cocktail, or otherwise cause a large amount of grief to people below? How would I build a SLAM model that allows the drone to do this without intervention from the ground?" None of these engineering problems bug me the way driving a car would. They are all addressable with multiple degrees of freedom, both literally and figuratively.
Meanwhile, on the road:
"Hmm, the light at this intersection is out. There's a cop with an angry look on his face, flapping his arms at me like a dying chicken. What does he want me to do, exactly?"
"Huh, here I am in Seattle, and it looks like they have chosen to mark the stripes on the road with some sort of paint whose complex impedance at optical frequencies is identical to that of rainwater. I'm sure glad I'm driving, and not my lane-keep assistant, which I had to turn off because it tried to steer me into the median the last time it snowed."
"Whoa, where'd that ambulance come from. The law says I have to move right, but the only way I can get out of his way is to move left, and in any case, that's what the car ahead of me is doing. What to do, what to do."
In most of the airborne scenarios you mention, doing nothing is a fail-safe answer when confronted with a situation the hardware or software can't handle. If we approach driving that way, a few miscreants can brick an entire city, intentionally or otherwise.
I'm not surprised Karpathy tapped out at Tesla, let's put it that way. My guess is, I've thought about this a lot more than you have, and a lot less than he has.
Nonsense. AI can work well enough for striking certain known targets. But it is simply not capable of following complex rules of engagement or adapting to highly dynamic situations in real time. We are at least decades away from that capability in a general sense. What you see in movies is not reality.
Sixth-generation tactical aircraft (the successors to the F-35) are likely to be optionally manned. They will be able to operate with remote pilots and/or autonomous control for high risk strike missions but most of the time will still have human crews on board.
Apparently you haven't been paying attention and don't understand the basics of AI technology. It is terrible at handling novel situations, especially in something as complex as tactical aviation.
Really the board needs to go as well; someone pointed out that the founder of Iron Source is now on the board of Unity. The CEO has been in place since 2014, but recent changes were probably motivated by recent board members joining. I'd say the board all need to be replaced for trust to be regained.
The board can only be fired by stockholders, right? Apparently, stockholders don't think this announcement is too big a deal, since the stock hasn't moved much (in a way that's distinguishable from noise).
A better comparison would be the median of both (not average); especially in the context of a young person deciding what their odds of improving their circumstances are by going to college. A quick search looks like median for bachelor's degree is significantly higher. But with declining real wages, there could be a perception that going to 4 years of debt could be a bad idea in the long run.
That would seem to indicate that the raw statistics aren't the reason Gen Z isn't going to college, but is either perception of earnings vs debt / time / effort, segmentation by the colleges the rich go to vs the middle class, or the reasoning is something completely unrelated to finances such as social perception of it.
