
F-35 Delays Mean US Marines Are Pulling Old F-18s Out of Desert Storage - RachelF
https://warisboring.com/the-u-s-marines-are-pulling-old-f-a-18s-out-of-desert-storage-a9b2febe3d64#.c8y3y4k1v
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semi-extrinsic
"poses significant affordability risks" \- this is my new favorite euphemism
for "bloody expensive".

~~~
Gibbon1
It's potentially a real issue, if the F-35 consumes too much of the Marines
budget they won't have money for the stuff they do need. Think NASA with the
space shuttle.

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sevenless
The 21st century belongs to whichever country first ditches the mentality of
preparing to refight WW2, and builds a robotic air and submarine force.

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UnoriginalGuy
I agree entirely.

Drone swarms are the future. And a lot of the existing thinking about solving
communications blockage is backwards, swarms in the future will be self
reliant, only receiving "big picture" orders from command and allowed to carry
those out.

The F-35 may be the last major manned aircraft to take to the skies. With
drone swarms, it will be outnumbered, and won't have enough munitions aboard
to take out a dozen or more drones.

This is tech already in active development at the normal research institutions
and other major nations seem to have similar development programs.

The US might get a full life out of the F-35, but I doubt they'll build its
successor.

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alkonaut
> swarms in the future will be self reliant

I think the biggest issue is the size and power requirements of modern radars.
You can't make tiny drones if none of them has a radar, so you need at least
some of them to be big. If it's big and has a power hungry radar, then it also
needs a big powerplant. The big powerplant drinks a lot of fuel to get any
range etc. etc. If a small craft could be self reliant, then we would already
be building homing missiles that provide their own radar. We don't because it
makes them too big, slow, heavy and expensive! A BVR missile like the AIM-120
relies on the Radar of the firing aircraft for finding the target.

So the drones will have to be launched from carrying aircraft. We'll
definitely see groups of planes very soon where some are manned, and they may
be simpler and cheaper than the manned equivalent, and another category of
drone that is actually launched _from_ the carrying aircraft to rely on its
range. This will limit the number of big expensive planes needed, but in
reality what they did then was replace cruise missiles and standoff bombs with
drones, not the launching planes.

> The US might get a full life out of the F-35, but I doubt they'll build its
> successor.

I also doubt they will ever make a "joint" effort again. We'll continue to see
large and expensive planes though, so long as radars are massively powerful
and we haven't invented backpack size Megawatt-hour batteries or tiny fusion
reactors.

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sevenless
> If a small craft could be self reliant, then we would already be building
> homing missiles that provide their own radar. We don't because it makes them
> too big, slow, heavy and expensive!

I don't see this comparison is valid. Drones with radar already exist
([http://www.intelligent-aerospace.com/articles/2015/06/ias-
re...](http://www.intelligent-aerospace.com/articles/2015/06/ias-reaper-
radar.html)). They are worth it because they're cheaper than manned aircraft,
with better loiter times, and potentially better maneuverability in unmanned
fighter drones. That they're substantially more expensive or slower than a
use-once missile doesn't matter, because the comparison is to a manned
aircraft.

And with small-drone radar, if they're in a swarm, what's ruling out aperture
synthesis approaches? They don't need a single big radar if they can
collectively act as one...

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alkonaut
> Drones with radar already exist

The MQ-9 is 11x20m and has a flyaway cost comparable to some previous gen
fighters, so while it's certainly a "drone" (I hate that term), it goes all
the way there and all the way home, and is much too expensive to be an
expendable target or part of a "swarm". You can't make a drone that you can
field dozens of to provide "security in numbers", and afford to lose a couple
of. If "swarm radar" (see my last paragraph) is a possibility that lets small
aircraft with small radars cooperate like a large aircraft with a large radar,
then it's certainly a possibility that we can se "swarms" of <$2m aircraft
used without help from the launching crafts radar. They still need to be
carried to the area of operation though because of small range.

> That they're substantially more expensive or slower than a use-once cruise
> missile doesn't matter, because the comparison is to a manned aircraft.

Whether their speed matters depends on what you want to do with them. It
wouldn't be money well spent to use loiter-type surveillance craft as
fighters. You could build unmanned craft that are fast enough to attack
fighters, but it's a numbers game - once they get big enough to have speed and
range, they are already very expensive and then you may need them to have high
survivability which adds even more cost etc. If you make a "fighter drone" it
will likely end up looking like an unmanned fighter plane (Unless: advances in
radar tech or power generation). You might save some money because it's
unmanned so it doesn't need cockpit, oxygen system, and is slightly more
expendable, but you still can't afford to lose a lot of them.

I obviously have no idea apart from what I read on gossip sites, but I believe
there will also be be common with a "companion" type unmanned aircraft that
are built for forward reconnaissance and attack together with "big" fighters
and bombers. They must be fast and stealthy and able to operate within heavily
contested airspace. They will simply take over where the expensive large plane
(manned or not) can't go any longer. When you think about it, the MBDA meteor
and other air-breathing long range missiles are already a kind of fast
autonomous planes that are launched from other planes. The line between
"missile" and "plane" will blur even more.

Quoting the US Air Forces chief scientist Mica Endsley:

"We see unmanned vehicles being used for a much wider variety of missions.
Today they are primarily used for ISR, long duration missions where we want to
collect information. In the future, they will be moving cargo and more manned-
unmanned teaming where they are acting as extensions of a manned aircraft."

> what's ruling out aperture synthesis approaches? They don't need a single
> big radar if they can collectively act as one...

That's a good point, I don't know what the state of the art is in "swarm
radar". How much better does a pair of current fighters compare to one current
fighter?

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x5n1
So what. It's not as if the US government is fighting anyone with any real air
capability. You could use Vietnam aircraft and still win against the threat.

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tomjen3
Right, but the better planes are needed for deterrent.

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kristopolous
If the money was used instead in financial vehicles for the adversarial
countries in question, the created economic codependence would very likely be
more effective than this plane

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rat87
Peace is nice but I wouldn't count on a large amount of trade to end all wars.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion)

> The Great Illusion is a book by Norman Angell, first published in the United
> Kingdom in 1909

> Angell argued that war between industrial countries was futile because
> conquest did not pay. J.D.B. Miller writes: "The 'Great Illusion' was that
> nations gained by armed confrontation, militarism, war, or conquest."[3] The
> economic interdependence between industrial countries meant that war would
> be economically harmful to all the countries involved. Moreover, if a
> conquering power confiscated property in the territory it seized, "the
> incentive to produce [of the local population] would be sapped and the
> conquered area be rendered worthless. Thus, the conquering power had to
> leave property in the hands of the local population while incurring the
> costs of conquest and occupation."[3]

...

He was partially right though

> Angell said that arms build-up, for example the naval race that was
> happening as he wrote the book in the early 1910s, was not going to secure
> peace. Instead, it would lead to increased insecurity and thus increase the
> likelihood of war.

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kristopolous
That's a pretty old framework. The idea of peace through codependency is AFAIK
a bit newer. The biggest problem is that it looks like it could lead to
sovereign insolvency which can backfire if it leads to economic calamity and
the rise of a political group with an eye on conquest (see Europe 1930s)

As an interesting aside, I'm no fan of wealth inequality. However, if it looks
like it's the primary mechanism that is prolonging relative global peace (as
in no biological or nuclear weapons being used), I may accept the tradeoff.

There's a balance, to be a bit vulgar, between "alright we need to pay this"
and "fuck this debt, we're storming the castle"

