An 80's movie dream is playing out for some rural kids, where they stumble upon a smouldering high-tech wreckage and as they explore it, men in suits pour out of black SUVs and talk to them in taciturn ways.
Seriously though, these jets sound terribly overpriced for how unreliable they seem to be.
I'm no expert on aircraft procurement or government contracts (I'm an engineer who used to work on fighter jets) - that being said, it's my understanding that the F-35 is actually a very successful project, and a very affordable one at that. I haven't got any citations or evidence to present, I could be wrong about all of this, it's a topic I've got only casual knowledge about.
A broad overview of my understanding of the situation: Most critics are making unfair comparisons (e.g. criticizing the F-35 for its inability to dogfight, or comparing its cost to 4th generation fighters, rather than its 5th generation peers)
This argument is further complicated by (as I understand it) a general lack of knowledge in the west concerning the true cost of Russian and Chinese 5th generation fighters (PAK FA and Su-57)
All of that being said, I think this is a heavily politicized topic, and I can never discount the possibility that I've been hoodwinked when it comes to such matters.
Specific figures will differ depending on how exactly one calculates acquisition costs. These numbers differ depending on the acquiring country, the block numbers, etc. But as rule of thumb the F-35 cost is roughly 10 million USD cheaper than the much less capable Gripen. This is notable as the Gripen is being marketed as the cheaper alternative. The F-35 has much higher operational costs (mostly due to the costs of maintaining stealth coating), but here's the opinion of the Finish and Swiss governments on full life-cycle costs from the article:
> However, both the Swiss and Finnish authorities argued that the F-35 was the best cost/benefit investment, if its full life-cycle economics were taken into account.
From the article the cost per flight hour is around $8,000 for Gripen and $33,300 for the F35A.
The Finish and Swiss most likely have no clue what the final full life-cycle costs will be. No-one knows this cost. The US who sold it knows a bit more than the Finns and the Swiss, but not even they know. Time will tell.
The F35 program has overrun it's costs over and over. The purchase price of the F35A (the conventional version) is being artificially low as a lot of the costs have been pushed onto the F35B and F35C models so they can offer an attractive price for their exports.
Probably made out of special radar absorbing shit and requires specialized to make sure it is uniform (or not) in its application.
I used a really thin ceramic based paint coating and it was really difficult to apply in a uniform manner. I can’t imagine how hard getting stealth coating onto a fighter jet is.
All that might turn out to be irrelevant as the drones prove detrimental in a warfare.
With the advancements in AI in recent years, it will probably get harder and harder to justify carrying a biological being and all the support systems onboard. At some point, a warplane capabilities might become irrelevant and the only important aspect would the the implications of carrying a solder onboard and making the downing of the device much more politically significant than downing a drone.
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.
The F-35 was designed with the capability to be later converted to remote operation, turning it into a drone (they call it a remotely piloted aircraft).
Of course whether the F-35 platform makes sense for that role is a different question. There are probably great niches for a drone F-35 (e.g. targeting anti-air installations), but Ukraine shows that having lots of $1000-$100,000 drones might be more valuable on the battlefield than one $75,000,000 drone.
The cheap drones work well in Ukraine where the adversaries are locked into attrition fights with largely static positions at short ranges. But those drones lack the range, speed, and sensors necessary to be effective in a potential conflict with China around the first island chain. The US military is currently pivoting to focus on that scenario.
If you're trying to defend the beaches of Taiwan or the Philippines, cheap drones sound like a great asset. If you're trying to project power into Chinese mainland less so.
A big reason why the US will continue to prefer drones measured in tons instead of grams is that cheap drones are most useful when you have boots on the ground, which the US likes to avoid. But with the budgets available it's not like they have to choose between F-35 sized drones and Dji Mini sized drones, they can just get both.
The Loyal Wingman concept seems to lend itself to small squadrons of f35 and f15ex command planes managing much larger groups of drones that are actively running radars and using AESA arrays for command and control.
Those drones seem to look more like cheaper loitering weapons platforms than F35s but who knows what happens when the other side isn't so stupid.
The big "advancements in AI" in recent years have all been around LLMs, and there's really no way I want one of those driving a jet.
And even aside from that, self-driving cars still regularly are observed to make stupid mistakes. When warplanes start making stupid mistakes, the consequences are going to be a lot more dire.
They've been in transformer models... which we've seen bring SOTA image segmentation that would have taken millions of dollars and armies of researchers to match become widely available https://segment-anything.com/
'Advancements in AI' have reached a point where they can affect everything from your smartphone to a box of cereal.
Drones operating in the fighter plane envelope are going to be basically the same plane.
Which the US is wholly aware of given the "Loyal Wingman" program, which the F-35 is designed to work with: commanding unmanned fighters/aircraft as support or missile trucks if what have you
This is one of the things I never understood. "Cheap drones" is a code word for Chinese made quadrocopter toys. Military drones will be fixed wing and have combustion engines. Suddenly things start getting expensive and you can no longer have a million plastic toys for the price of one F35, you'll get 3 reapers or maybe a dozen "Wingmen".
The closest analog would be converting cessnas. Half a million dollars plus drone kit = 1 million dollar bomber => 75 bombers or one F-35.
At that price point one might start thinking about sending the bombers first (to deplete air defenses), then the F-35s...
Maybe they view it a a job with a lot of the upside but none of the safety downsides of rocketing around the earth at 1000 miles an hour half a world away from home...
If F-35 is such a failure, how come many countries have chosen to buy it? Consulting this next page, I count 8 countries besides the US that have taken delivery of F-35s, plus many that have ordered it, but not yet taken delivery:
I'm not taking a side on this particular issue, but there are many reasons a person or a country might buy something that wasn't very good, even if they knew it wasn't. Maintaining a relationship with the vendor (aka a foreign nation with whom you maintain diplomatic/economic relations) is a big one.
It's both until its not. If only 1 or 2 countries signed up, it'd be an expensive failure. If everyone signs up, cost go down and economies of scale make it a wild success.
> If F-35 is such a failure, how come many countries have chosen to buy it?
What's the alternative? How many other models can be purchased at all?
Canada went through a bunch of drama to find a replacement for the legacy F/A-18s, and the main options were: Eurofighter Typhoon, Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, F-35, and the Saab Gripen.
Gripen wasn't in the same league, so we basically have the Typhoon and SuperHornet as other options, and both were at least a decade older with regards to their 'base' design (though there have been further upgrades).
So if you're going to be stuck with a plane for 20+ years, you might as well pick the newest model year.
Personally I'd be happy with the Super Hornets (and thrown in some Growlers) for Canada given "6G" fighters are starting to be designed—basically skipping the "5G" F-35—but Boeing were a bunch of dumbasses when the decision was being made:
HN weighing in on military stuff is always comedy to those of us who've been in the military. It's nobody's fault – this stuff can be baroque in its complexity – but it does make for some entertaining reading!
> There's a lot of armchair quarterbacking in these comments, this one taking the cake.
If one's government is going to spend billions and billions of your money, having some level of public satisfaction for its use isn't a bad thing to have. Or at least having a decision making program that people have confidence in.
The F-35 is a decent enough result, especially in comparison to what's going on with Canada's naval procurement program.
There's a bit of a problem because even if it's a (partial) failure as far as project management goes, competition is so low that if you're a US-aligned state and want a 5th generation fighter, the F-35 is still the only reasonable option.
In general, even if something is awful as product and its development was a disaster, if it's monopoly on something important it is still going to sell.
Even if it was come to a war situation where they had to trade off 10 s-400’s for a single f-35, they’d still be significantly ahead financially from what I remember.
I think that's a skill issue. Ukrainians are operating similar equipment with better success. Much like how India and China seem to have no problems operating the sister ships of the kuznetsov
Air defence was a weak point for Ukraine until Western countries provided some. As for the S-400, it's a post-Soviet design, and if the T-14 is vaporware and the Su-57 overhyped at best, perhaps one should not take claims on the S-400's capabilities at face value, especially given that there is visually confirmed evidence for two of them having been destroyed.
Not really. Ukraine had perhaps the most comprehensive ground based air defense network in Europe apart from Russia by virtue of the sheer quantity of S300 batteries.
The problem they faced last winter was that they were finally starting to run low on missiles and that using S300 on $20,000 drones was incredibly wasteful.
The only capability they were really missing as opposed to just running short on was the anti ballistic missile capabilities.
A window or two in Moscow needed repairs I suppose.
Like the storm shadows I'm still waiting for my invitation to the much vaunted Crimea beach party, but it seems air defenses may have canceled the scheduled bridge explosion.
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.
>a very successful project, and a very affordable one...
I've read several articles today that called it the 'most expensive weapon', that the program is '10 years behind', that each costs $80M, and '$9M/year to maintain', that over 1000 have been built etc. For decades it has been a troubled project, many experienced insiders have called it a failure, from the day the first one rolled out ... long ago. 'Very successful' in what way?
There has been a great deal of honing to the jet and its production processes over time. The prototypes were overpriced and underperforming but with scale all that was overcome.
First, there are very few aircraft that could beat an F-16 in a rate fight, but the likelihood that 2 aircraft enter a merge are extremely low, and even if everything went wrong and two aircraft entered the merge the ability for modern missiles to fire absurd off-bore shots kind of negates the requirement to get nose on.
You might point to the early days of the Ukrainian War as a sign that BCM is not dead but that wouldn't track these days. Russia is sitting with MiG-31's flying over Belarus and Western Russia firing extremely long rage missiles. The enviroment is simply not permissive enough for the type of aggressive CAP that might result in BCM.
F-4 Phantom was a great fighter serving US Navy, Marine and Air Force. It equipped with missiles to kill enemies in the beyond visual range, didn't equip internal guns in the first generation because "it shouldn't get into close combat" .....
The issue with the F4 wasn't the lack of a gun alone, and focusing on that aspect 50 years after the Vietnam war clouds the current state of things. The issue was that missile technology was in it's infancy and unreliable, coupled with US fighter pilot training focusing on interception of long-range Soviet nuclear bombers. The US never really envisioned a conventional war being possible in a post-nuclear world. Note that despite this, what the US deemed "inadequate" air dominance was still a roughly 4-1 air-to-air kill-ratio in their favour during the beginning-middle of the Vietnam War.
Once pilot training changed to focus on fighters, the kill-ratio shot up to 15-1 for the last half-year or so of the war. The number of these kills made by F4s with guns was small compared to F4s with missiles (even given the unreliable state of the technology at the time), as you can see for yourself:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_aerial...
(Note that this is the case even in the later years of the war, when F4 mounted gun-pods were more common)
The narrative of the Vietnam War that gun > long-range missile wasn't even true then. And certainly isn't so now that missile technology has matured. A quick glance over to modern air campaigns is proof. Beyond visual range missiles and long-range radar systems are king. There's nothing wrong with having a back-up close-range weapon (same reason why soldiers carry knives), but the use-case is niche, and we shouldn't be designing our fighters around this combat situation. The equivalent would be arguing that soldiers should carry broadswords, and using the handful of knife engagements as evidence to why edge-weapons are superior to guns.
An additional problem F4 pilots had early in the war was the horrible Rules of Engagement they had to follow in hostile airspace. They were forced to get close to migs for ID and observe hostile behavior.
Naturally, by the time they accomplished that, they had thrown away all their advantages and handed the migs their disadvantages on a silver platter.
The F-15E Strike Eagle is a different, significantly heavier and higher payload was produced by a separate, later project abd competition from the original air-to-air F-15 (its competitor was thr F-16XL, which would have been the F-16E/F if selected.)
And the F-15EX Eagle II is an even newer aircraft.
Same with the F-16, which started life as a skunkworks project that prioritized dogfighting but is today heavily used for close air support and bombing.
While the skunkworks project and even the initial government Lightweight Fighter project had an air-to-air dogfighting focus, the program under which the F-16 development was conpleted and it was eventually purchased was for a multirole fighter, that wasn't a post-purchase usage evolution.
That dogfight is newsworthy because it's exceptional, and even still it's not a turning duel by any stretch of the imagination. The real takeaway from the Ukrainian war is that stealth and engagement range are paramount.
…plus SEAD/DEAD are incredibly important and (AFAIK) there is only one air force on the planet that systematically develops and deploys tech and trains for it.
Just because the F-35 was designed to be a strike aircraft more than a dogfighter doesn't mean that it won't be put in those situations. We've been using butter knives as screwdrivers for as long as we've had a butter knife but no screwdriver.
If you actually talk to pilots who have been in dogfights with F35s, they will tell you the radar-assisted guns basically could not properly target the F35 even at dogfighting range. It doesn't do a lot of good that, in order to fight the F35 you have to remember how aviation gunnery worked in 1944, before you had a computer doing most of the ballistics for you.
what in the world is that proving? it's 2 separate videos taken at totally different times. I'm not saying that the F35 is better than the F16 at turn radius, but this video is worthless as evidence of anything other than people are bad at tracking jets with a video camera.
I gather that everyone who actually knows their stuff consider the F35 very capable for its price, but still the number of reports of it crashing seems quite odd to my civilian ear, is this much crashing just normal for military equipment? As a comparison I searched for data on a civilian plane of roughly the same age:
- The F35, with ~965+ units made since 2006, had 12 incidents with 9 or 10 hull-losses
- The Boeing 787, with ~1,077 units made since 2007, had 7 incidents with 0 hull-losses
I know that military does more dangerous stuff that civilians (e.g. one of the F35 crashes was during aerial refueling, other one while landing in a carrier), but still a ~1% hull loss (without enemy fire) is surprising for me.
To determine that this crash is evidence of unreliability would require you to have detailed knowledge of the operational and training volume and tempo they’re flying with - in comparison to other aircraft and their comparative failure rate.
I'd love to have a civilian version of the F-35 for joyride operators, but I guess half of the point of a military aircraft is that your enemies can't buy one.
There's a private company that has bought F-16s now. They do work with the military, but they're still a private company. If someone were able to get an F-16 and sell rides, I'd be willing to fork over a fairly absurd amount of money.
The Musk v Zuckerberg cage fight would’ve been much better as a dog fight between their private F-35s. I mean, why should mega billionaires fight the same way any two broke guys from Jersey would anyway?
There's a lot of very low volume niche Chinese phones for reasonable prices. So it doesn't need to be so expensive.
You could argue that an iPhone would cost over a billion because you need to develop iOS. But why would you do that instead of modding android for 1/100th of the cost, if you're only gonna make 40?
The hardware for the niche Chinese phones can only be so cheap, because an ecosystem exists around the mass production that is built around the mainstream iPhone and Android devices.
If not for the insane scale of phones being developed, the components that go into those cheap Chinese phones would be far far far more expensive than they are today.
This assumes the aircraft analogy uses all one-off parts, no? It would be interesting to see if there's any data available on this. I would expect big ticket items like the engines to be bespoke, but even they would likely use some common parts. I'd imagine it's not likely every seal or bolt would be unique to that airframe.
Cheap Chinese phones get to take the mass production benefits of the iPhone and Android markets and then *relax* most of the requirements to get cheaper parts.
The military tends to *tighten* the requirements when it’s procuring parts, so more things end up as custom development.
I have no idea what ratio something like an F-35 is for COTS vs custom hardware, though.
You could, but usually that causes lower performance. When building an airframe, a gram not needed is a gram wasted. In fighters it's far less stringent than spacecraft - for those, even a screw one turn longer than needed is something to avoid.
(FWIW, when I'm saying 'aerospace' I'm using it to jointly refer to "space" and "aeronautics," just in case I gave the impression I was only talking about spaceflight.)
Those are technical specs, not quality specs. The quality specs would deal with things like machining tolerances, manufacturer traceability, etc.
Point being, if Pratt & Whitney took a seal design from another aircraft to apply to the F-35, it's not like they aren't already tracking the tolerances, material compatibility, etc. When I worked in aerospace, it was very rare that we went to the machine shop to ask for them to make a bespoke component.
Fighter jets in general are a constant maintenance marathon. They are pushing the edge of engineering and performance. That means that they are less reliable and more expensive to maintain than a 777 by a wide margin. However, the F-35 is significantly more reliable than it's predecessor the F-16.
The F-35 represents the result of a changing model for warfare. Less dogfights and missile duels, more managing a fleet of strike drones, loitering ordinance, ECM, and acting as an observability platform. With the advent of extreme long range, datalink guided, air breathing, air to air missiles, BVR is transitioning to over the horizon combat. I see you, I kill you. F-35 is a reaction to that.
F35 has a lower mission capability rate than the F-16, and it's not even close (< 50% vs 73%). They're complicated (overly) machines...The DOD industry has come a long ways from Edwards Demming.
According to the GAO, the F-35 has a much better MCR than the F-16. However, the UH-1N Huey has a higher mission capability rate than ALL of these aircraft. Be careful which metric you optimize for or you will be attempting to fight artillery with trebuchets.
We got to move away from fighter jets for the most part. It’s the age of slaughterbots baby, bring on the tens of thousands of highly intelligent drones.
The AI just isn't there yet if we would even want it to reach that point. You have to have someone in communications range to make kill decisions, confirm target designations, and keep the expensive parts of your swarm intact. Drones are pretty awesome as front line aircraft, but they haven't replaced humanity yet.
Then tens of thousands of people directly controlling those drones. We have the manpower and the ability to build these drones. Azerbaijan and Ukraine basically kicked ass with essentially DJIs and grenades.
You are correct. However, the people need to be close to such drones. DJIs cannot be controlled from very far away. Similar to non-improvised drone munitions like Switchblades. For supersonic aircraft you need something a bit different.
The real question IMO is whether the 6th generation fighters (Next Generation Air Dominance program in the USA) are making the right design trade offs. They are projected to be bigger, more expensive, and ordered in fewer numbers than even the F-22. Are we better off with fewer but more advanced super weapons, or with many more cheaper weapons? In the era of UA/RU war where few-thousand-dollar drones are spanking multi-million dollar EW and AA systems, this may not be the right trade off.
The Air Force and Navy NGAD programs are separate and different. The Air Force is building a fighter larger than the F-22 cause they want the range to fly across the Pacific. They are also working on wingman drones and already gave order.
The Navy NGAD is more of a replacement for the F/A-18E/F. It will probably be the same size because of constraints of carrier. Another difference is that the Air Force is working fast while Navy NGAD won't be ready until 2030.
Unfortunately there is no alternative. In order to be relevant in a potential conflict with China around the first island chain, NGAD must have a size and fuel fraction similar to the F-111. It will probably also need a second crew position to manage the workload including controlling "loyal wingman" type disposable drones. There's just no way to do that on the cheap.
Small, cheap drones have been effective in Ukraine because the ranges are so short. The battle space in the South China Sea is completely different.
Criticism of the F-35 has been coming from a vocal selection of loons who's most common media appearances tended to be on Russia Today, and who's qualifications have been to lie about their qualifications, and misrepresent actual events which happened.
Here's the thing: you don't know anything about the F-35. Because the project is secret. The capabilities are secret. And in a US political system that's incredibly fractious, civilian oversight has been satisfied with the project for multiple administrations. But it's still secret.
I was an early armchair skeptic, and I've always had a not-so-secret love of the F-16. But after watching an F-35 demo at a recent airshow, I'm a convert. Anyone who says this plane can't out-dogfight an F-16 is delusional.
I wouldn't blame the F-35 for the entirety of the DoD budget.
As far as the plane itself is concerned, however, the F-35 is actually a good deal. That's why we're able to sell it to other countries -- it's cheaper than than comparable Gen 4.5/5 fighters. And more reliable, too, than most everything else in our inventory.
It's had downstream benefits in the hardware, IoT, cybersecurity, devops, missle research, and aerospace segments just off the top of my head. I don't want to dox myself but a lot of GovCloud can be attributed to the F35 development cycle.
Interesting, I haven't looked into GovCloud before. While it seems weird that the US government would entrust their data with AWS, it's probably a lot better than their antiquated systems.
Something to keep in mind that I do not believe anyone else has mentioned is that the F-35 was built in several variations to serve different branches of the military in roughly similar configurations. The Navy and Air Force can both successfully operate and maintain the aircraft as older planes are decommissioned, and eliminates the need for other aircraft to be developed to serve the specific use cases of the various branches of the U.S. military.
It makes maintenance far easier and over the long run results in significantly reduced costs.
The F-35 has a comparable or better safety record than most other American Fighters. You just don't see articles written about a single aircraft incident for the F-18 anymore.
I've seen some analysis that, per hour of flight time, these tend towards the most trouble-free end of the spectrum. Someone will need to run those numbers again, of course, but I wouldn't be surprised if, even with this incident, that was still the case.
> these jets sound terribly overpriced for how unreliable they seem to be
I'm in no way suggesting your comment is an example of this, but, if I was a hostile foreign power I'd do everything possible to amplify messaging that my enemy's wonder-jet was an expensive boondoggle to try and hurt political support for it.
>Seriously though, these jets sound terribly overpriced for how unreliable they seem to be.
There are a number of possibilities you are not considering. Having our adversaries believe that the F35 is unreliable, for example, would be exceptionally useful. Other possibilities include intentionally attempting out-of-spec maneuvers or experimental hardware.
Seriously though, these jets sound terribly overpriced for how unreliable they seem to be.