This probably needs a [2015], I don’t know about everything in the article but there are a few mentions of costs which will at least be out of date now that F35 is more widely produced
The F-35 Joint Program Office said that maintenance man hours per flight hour (MMH/FH) were 4.79 for the F-35A, 7.48 for the U.S. Marine Corps’ F-35B, and 7.55 for the U.S. Navy F-35C
Yeah. There isn't a technical reason why a plane can't be in flight every moment it is not on the ground in maintenance. And US is kinda expert at long range, endurance missions with air to air refuelling.
The only limitation is on how large budget you have to run your planes (and possibly availability of pilots for some type of aircraft) but this is only for peace time.
That section of the article has serious arithmetic issues.
> Rafale can fly 2,7 hours every day. Direct operating cost is 16.500 USD per hour (cca, 17.000 USD when corrected for inflation). F-35 can fly one hour every two days, and has direct operating cost of 30.000 USD per hour.
> direct operating costs per hour of flight will be 1.336.500 USD per month for Rafale and 450.000 USD per month for F-35.
Best to describe what those assumptions are (otherwise it looks like another blurry assumption). Not that anyone here is in the market for a jet fighter…
many of us are, actually, indirectly as taxpayers. the MIC is really good at unaccountable taxpayer spending. So while reviews of military tech might just appease our inner child they're also useful from a civics perspective!
I think some of the really challenging aspects of this piece is there's a lot of comparisons that really hinge on details that are both fixable (ie, not baked into the F-35 vs Rafale airframe selection per-se), or are details that -really- the greater community couldn't possibility -really- have insight into.
Examples:
* When discussing situational awareness, the article grants similar raw data gathering capabilities to both platforms, but then grants the overall win to Rafale because of better data presentation, claiming that the F-35 just dumps piles of raw numerical data at the pilot. Now, given the age of this article, I can connect to problems that Lockheed Martin had in delivering working sensor fusion software around that timeframe. To be fair to the article, that was actually a problem. But as a software problem, it's much more fixable. I can't find any recent discussion on broken sensor fusion or F-35 information overload.
* I automatically red flag high precision/confidence discussion about RCS, radar set and IR search/track performance. Like... it's for sure some of the most sensitive parts of fighter platform performance. I would take the entire section with a grain of salt as well.
* The entire engagement scenario chosen heavily boils down to missile choice/availability. There's no argument that AIM-120D has significant limitations in range compared to some of its peers, but this is also a solvable problem (AIM-260 in development). Weapons availability/compatibility is definitely a valid consideration when choosing between platforms, but should be weighed appropriately.
* The engagement scenario is also a bit weird. It doesn't consider for example a pair of Rafales vs pair of F-35 (which would be much more likely scenario... wingmen exist for a reason). It removes AWACS (while AWACS is obviously very vulnerable, it's unclear to me that they would be fully neutralized in a peer conflict). It doesn't consider that data-links might actually be hard to jam. Because it doesn't consider cooperation, it doesn't consider that perhaps F-35s could work together, with one using its radar and feeding it's data to the other. Basically, the engagement scenario removes the F-35's greatest structural advantage (it's radar stealth). Now, I think it's completely fair to consider that scenario, but to be honest you'd need to consider it against other engagement scenarios and then weigh the relatively likelihood/importance of the different scenarios.
The F-35 project started in 1993. It entered service in 2015. In that time frame, a lot of requirements changed, as technology advanced. So any talk about "changed rhetorics" is disingenuous without a lot of additional context to relate statements decades apart to each other properly.¹
The pilot skill section mentions the availability rate: In 2015², the F-35 hadn't even officially entered service and was a prototype, of course it's going to have a lower availability! Rafale had been in service for 20 years at that point, with most production airframes 10-15 years old. It's the sweet spot where the system is mature enough to not have many bugs left, but not so old yet that the hardware starts failing. It's not a fair comparison.
In addition to that, pilots can use cheaper training aircraft and simulators to keep up proficiency. The article mentions that the USAF massively improved pilot training during the later stages of Vietnam, but conveniently leaves out the how: Lots and lots of theoretical lessons, and comparative flight training involving T-38 jet trainers, all of which the author conveniently leaves out.
The situational awareness section talks a lot about systems whose true capabilities are classified. Both Dassault and Lockheed Martin are not at liberty to disclose the actual numbers to the public, and would prefer to be underestimated by potential adversaries. But the systems in the F-35 are 20 years newer, and are backed up by significantly more powerful computers to analyze their data better, including jamming resistance.
I also have no idea where the claims come from that the F-35 overloads the operator. Again, it has the most advanced avionics suite on the planet, to better fuse sensor data, and from all accounts it's working really well. This not only includes on-board sensors, but also data linked information streams from other F-35, from drones, and from AWACS aircraft. Even if the F-35's onboard sensors are somehow worse (doubtful, again), it can more than make up for any blind spots and weaknesses by merging data from multiple airplanes.
The stealth section just gives me headaches. The specifications of the systems involved are fundamentally unknowable, as the true capabilities of both Rafale and F-35 active and passive sensor and fire control suites are classified. Since the author has not been put in jail, I'll have to assume he doesn't have them either.
And all these calculations don't really make much sense. The optical sensors that magically double or triple the Rafale's detection range to make it "better" than the F-35 are by their very nature heavily weather dependent – cameras can't see through clouds, or at night, or directly into the sun, or behind the horizon, etc., and nothing forces the F-35 to remain subsonic and fly in a nice straight line, as the author insists it must.
The IR signature section is again nonsensical. The F-35 engine was by design optimized to minimize heat production (engine efficiency matters and is completely ignored by the author) from the start, which is better than retro-fitting it after the fact. And the author again fails at basic math: Two 70cm diameter exhaust plumes have less surface area than one 110cm diameter exhaust plume (square cube law, anyone?)
I'm not even going to bother with the rest of the text. This is giving me a lot of headaches, and fully debunking this nonsense is going to take days.
_______
¹: Arguably a project management failure in itself, but one that's hard to avoid when you want to leapfrog the competition by an entire generation. The Chinese and Russian approach of just stealing advanced designs to catch up quickly only works if someone else puts in all the hard work to make those designs in the first place. (And neither Russia nor China are all that successful with it. You cannot easily steal the entire supply chain behind a proj...
I don't know anything about fighter jets but this reads like a very biased write up. I assume there's a reason that the F-35 has outsold the Rafele more than 3:1 - perhaps there's more to picking a fighter jet than playing top trumps on the spec?
There is a joke in the France Defense sector that goes like "France has very good engineer and very bad salesman".
When it come to pure "on paper" spec, Dassault (planes), Naval Group (submarines & boats) and Nexter (tanks) can often challenge their U.S and Russian competitor. But in the world of Defense, politics is often more important than pure spec.
Buying from Uncle Sam is one way to be closer to the most (atm) powerful country in the world. Also, due to the fact that the U.S Defense budget is ludicrous, you can bet that whatever you buy will be produced in larger quantities, for a long time and will have plenty of spare parts and such.
A good exemple is the fiasco of the Australian submarines contract with Naval Group. On paper, the contract was amazing for the Aussies: Not only would they have subs that would fit their specs, but the subs were planned to be built for the most part in Australia and to have a full transfer of technology. So they were buying the subs and the means and knowledge to make them themselves in the future. It would also have created a lot of jobs in Australia.
But then the U.S came around and used their diplomacy to make the contract fail even though their proposition was on paper inferior. It is funny because the French, if they had been given the opportunity, could have proposed something similar to the U.S proposition (especially since France is one of the only country willing to export their nuclear subs technology), but the aussies didn't even give them the chance, clearly showing that it was not a business or a specs issue, but a diplomatic one.
Dassault is no longer really competitive¹. The gap between 4th/4.5th generation jets and 5th generation jets is massive, no matter how many military bloggers use creative accounting to explain it away, and Dassault is really only competing in markets that would also be fine with an American F-16 if the price is right, and that's a 1970s design.
¹: Their engineers might still be, but their products are not, and France cannot fund the development of any.
It really wouldn't surprise me. I don't know much about aviation but I worked in the naval defense industry in France and the gap in budget and production volume with the U.S was just ludicrous.
When the U.S Navy wants a new shinny nuclear aircraft carrier, they spend billions and the manufacturer has the insurance that it will produce a few. In France, large project like aircraft carrier or nuclear subs are produced usually at a single digit volume. So they have to work hard and blow a lot of budget on R&D for years just to produce one ship. It cannot be profitable if it was not bankrolled by the state.
So yeah. Also the new F-35B looks like it is the most advanced fighter plane at the moment, so I don't think anyone can compete. The U.S defense industry is just so well funded.
> In France, large project like aircraft carrier or nuclear subs are produced usually at a single digit volume.
"Single digit" is extremely generous, 4 submarines over the course of a decade is the high point of French naval construction. With aircraft carriers it's closer to "one every thirty years", while the US tries to have two under construction at all times. At that point you're not even maintaining any institutional knowledge, engineers will retire before they see a second aircraft carrier being constructed.
It's not as bad with aircraft: France would never export a nuclear submarine or carrier, nor would anyone be able to afford them (even the planned Australian contract wasn't nuclear, iirc). Aircraft are a lot cheaper, a lot less of a political minefield, and so sell easier.
But, at the same time, the US poured $74 billions into the F-22, and $400 billions into the F-35. Just developing the F-35 would require 20% of France's GDP. Not military budget, not government budget, GDP.
And while a competing design starting today would save a moderate amount of money on things like engines (France was just about able to keep up, R&D wise) and avionics (just due to general semiconductor advances in the private sector), a lot of the secret sauce of the F-35 is in its stealth technology (which is not just effective, but also easy to maintain, a very tricky balance that needs decades of experience – which the US collected with the F-117 and B-2, which collectively cost another $60+ billion) and its software stack (and the less said about the sad state of EU software dev, the better, we've been bleeding talent to the US for generations and it shows).
> At that point you're not even maintaining any institutional knowledge, engineers will retire before they see a second aircraft carrier being constructed.
This was a huge talking point when I was working there. "Maintien des compétences" is a huge issue that also plague the civil nuclear industry.
> France would never export a nuclear submarine
Naval Group doesn't sell nuclear subs made for the French marine but they do sell the technology transfer to help a country develop their own. The Brazilian contracts was also a mess (good engineer, bad sells man :D) but we were well on track to help them make their first nuclear sub.
> (even the planned Australian contract wasn't nuclear, iirc)
At their explicit demand I might add. It was always stated that the subs were supposed to be conventional. I remember that it was actually kind of an issue for the engineer because they wanted specs that were way above what most conventional subs were able to handle (in term of range and time submerged), and the main design was supposed to be more or less a retrofit of the Barracuda class.
If the specs would be the predominant factor to the success of a military jet, the Avro Arrow would have been a massive export success, and the SR-71 would still be flying.
Reality is pretty different and the arcane of politics dominate military contracts.
Even if the US came with an half-baked scooter branded as a fighter jet (Hello Lockheed Star-fighter [1]), it would still encounter some export success:
- Countries in NATO are informally required to buy US material politically speaking
- Many countries are US Nuke and their territory and needs US jets to operate them. Belgium and Germany are in this situation with the B61 [2].
- Large military industrial companies have a long history of corruption in procurements processes. USA have some of the largest one world wide
These sorts of comparisons end up being shark vs bear discussions - until engagements happen, the information you need isn’t available. When I was a kid in the late 80s I was an aviation nut, and the over the top analyst takes on the MiG 29 were totally off.
Air Force and Navy comparisons always depend on the ecosystem around the systems. The US system around operating these things on deployments is the magic.
The other thing is as a dude on a message board without context, the cynicism re the F35 almost too much. I always question whether that’s misinformation.
24 comments
[ 6.6 ms ] story [ 72.9 ms ] threadThis is wrong.
The F-35 Joint Program Office said that maintenance man hours per flight hour (MMH/FH) were 4.79 for the F-35A, 7.48 for the U.S. Marine Corps’ F-35B, and 7.55 for the U.S. Navy F-35C
https://www.aviationtoday.com/2022/09/02/lockheed-martin-not...
The only limitation is on how large budget you have to run your planes (and possibly availability of pilots for some type of aircraft) but this is only for peace time.
> Rafale can fly 2,7 hours every day. Direct operating cost is 16.500 USD per hour (cca, 17.000 USD when corrected for inflation). F-35 can fly one hour every two days, and has direct operating cost of 30.000 USD per hour.
> direct operating costs per hour of flight will be 1.336.500 USD per month for Rafale and 450.000 USD per month for F-35.
If you're in the market for a multi-role fighter I suggest you review additional resources before you splurge.
Examples:
* When discussing situational awareness, the article grants similar raw data gathering capabilities to both platforms, but then grants the overall win to Rafale because of better data presentation, claiming that the F-35 just dumps piles of raw numerical data at the pilot. Now, given the age of this article, I can connect to problems that Lockheed Martin had in delivering working sensor fusion software around that timeframe. To be fair to the article, that was actually a problem. But as a software problem, it's much more fixable. I can't find any recent discussion on broken sensor fusion or F-35 information overload.
* I automatically red flag high precision/confidence discussion about RCS, radar set and IR search/track performance. Like... it's for sure some of the most sensitive parts of fighter platform performance. I would take the entire section with a grain of salt as well.
* The entire engagement scenario chosen heavily boils down to missile choice/availability. There's no argument that AIM-120D has significant limitations in range compared to some of its peers, but this is also a solvable problem (AIM-260 in development). Weapons availability/compatibility is definitely a valid consideration when choosing between platforms, but should be weighed appropriately.
* The engagement scenario is also a bit weird. It doesn't consider for example a pair of Rafales vs pair of F-35 (which would be much more likely scenario... wingmen exist for a reason). It removes AWACS (while AWACS is obviously very vulnerable, it's unclear to me that they would be fully neutralized in a peer conflict). It doesn't consider that data-links might actually be hard to jam. Because it doesn't consider cooperation, it doesn't consider that perhaps F-35s could work together, with one using its radar and feeding it's data to the other. Basically, the engagement scenario removes the F-35's greatest structural advantage (it's radar stealth). Now, I think it's completely fair to consider that scenario, but to be honest you'd need to consider it against other engagement scenarios and then weigh the relatively likelihood/importance of the different scenarios.
The F-35 project started in 1993. It entered service in 2015. In that time frame, a lot of requirements changed, as technology advanced. So any talk about "changed rhetorics" is disingenuous without a lot of additional context to relate statements decades apart to each other properly.¹
The pilot skill section mentions the availability rate: In 2015², the F-35 hadn't even officially entered service and was a prototype, of course it's going to have a lower availability! Rafale had been in service for 20 years at that point, with most production airframes 10-15 years old. It's the sweet spot where the system is mature enough to not have many bugs left, but not so old yet that the hardware starts failing. It's not a fair comparison.
In addition to that, pilots can use cheaper training aircraft and simulators to keep up proficiency. The article mentions that the USAF massively improved pilot training during the later stages of Vietnam, but conveniently leaves out the how: Lots and lots of theoretical lessons, and comparative flight training involving T-38 jet trainers, all of which the author conveniently leaves out.
The situational awareness section talks a lot about systems whose true capabilities are classified. Both Dassault and Lockheed Martin are not at liberty to disclose the actual numbers to the public, and would prefer to be underestimated by potential adversaries. But the systems in the F-35 are 20 years newer, and are backed up by significantly more powerful computers to analyze their data better, including jamming resistance.
I also have no idea where the claims come from that the F-35 overloads the operator. Again, it has the most advanced avionics suite on the planet, to better fuse sensor data, and from all accounts it's working really well. This not only includes on-board sensors, but also data linked information streams from other F-35, from drones, and from AWACS aircraft. Even if the F-35's onboard sensors are somehow worse (doubtful, again), it can more than make up for any blind spots and weaknesses by merging data from multiple airplanes.
The stealth section just gives me headaches. The specifications of the systems involved are fundamentally unknowable, as the true capabilities of both Rafale and F-35 active and passive sensor and fire control suites are classified. Since the author has not been put in jail, I'll have to assume he doesn't have them either.
And all these calculations don't really make much sense. The optical sensors that magically double or triple the Rafale's detection range to make it "better" than the F-35 are by their very nature heavily weather dependent – cameras can't see through clouds, or at night, or directly into the sun, or behind the horizon, etc., and nothing forces the F-35 to remain subsonic and fly in a nice straight line, as the author insists it must.
The IR signature section is again nonsensical. The F-35 engine was by design optimized to minimize heat production (engine efficiency matters and is completely ignored by the author) from the start, which is better than retro-fitting it after the fact. And the author again fails at basic math: Two 70cm diameter exhaust plumes have less surface area than one 110cm diameter exhaust plume (square cube law, anyone?)
I'm not even going to bother with the rest of the text. This is giving me a lot of headaches, and fully debunking this nonsense is going to take days.
_______
¹: Arguably a project management failure in itself, but one that's hard to avoid when you want to leapfrog the competition by an entire generation. The Chinese and Russian approach of just stealing advanced designs to catch up quickly only works if someone else puts in all the hard work to make those designs in the first place. (And neither Russia nor China are all that successful with it. You cannot easily steal the entire supply chain behind a proj...
When it come to pure "on paper" spec, Dassault (planes), Naval Group (submarines & boats) and Nexter (tanks) can often challenge their U.S and Russian competitor. But in the world of Defense, politics is often more important than pure spec. Buying from Uncle Sam is one way to be closer to the most (atm) powerful country in the world. Also, due to the fact that the U.S Defense budget is ludicrous, you can bet that whatever you buy will be produced in larger quantities, for a long time and will have plenty of spare parts and such.
A good exemple is the fiasco of the Australian submarines contract with Naval Group. On paper, the contract was amazing for the Aussies: Not only would they have subs that would fit their specs, but the subs were planned to be built for the most part in Australia and to have a full transfer of technology. So they were buying the subs and the means and knowledge to make them themselves in the future. It would also have created a lot of jobs in Australia.
But then the U.S came around and used their diplomacy to make the contract fail even though their proposition was on paper inferior. It is funny because the French, if they had been given the opportunity, could have proposed something similar to the U.S proposition (especially since France is one of the only country willing to export their nuclear subs technology), but the aussies didn't even give them the chance, clearly showing that it was not a business or a specs issue, but a diplomatic one.
¹: Their engineers might still be, but their products are not, and France cannot fund the development of any.
When the U.S Navy wants a new shinny nuclear aircraft carrier, they spend billions and the manufacturer has the insurance that it will produce a few. In France, large project like aircraft carrier or nuclear subs are produced usually at a single digit volume. So they have to work hard and blow a lot of budget on R&D for years just to produce one ship. It cannot be profitable if it was not bankrolled by the state.
So yeah. Also the new F-35B looks like it is the most advanced fighter plane at the moment, so I don't think anyone can compete. The U.S defense industry is just so well funded.
"Single digit" is extremely generous, 4 submarines over the course of a decade is the high point of French naval construction. With aircraft carriers it's closer to "one every thirty years", while the US tries to have two under construction at all times. At that point you're not even maintaining any institutional knowledge, engineers will retire before they see a second aircraft carrier being constructed.
It's not as bad with aircraft: France would never export a nuclear submarine or carrier, nor would anyone be able to afford them (even the planned Australian contract wasn't nuclear, iirc). Aircraft are a lot cheaper, a lot less of a political minefield, and so sell easier.
But, at the same time, the US poured $74 billions into the F-22, and $400 billions into the F-35. Just developing the F-35 would require 20% of France's GDP. Not military budget, not government budget, GDP.
And while a competing design starting today would save a moderate amount of money on things like engines (France was just about able to keep up, R&D wise) and avionics (just due to general semiconductor advances in the private sector), a lot of the secret sauce of the F-35 is in its stealth technology (which is not just effective, but also easy to maintain, a very tricky balance that needs decades of experience – which the US collected with the F-117 and B-2, which collectively cost another $60+ billion) and its software stack (and the less said about the sad state of EU software dev, the better, we've been bleeding talent to the US for generations and it shows).
This was a huge talking point when I was working there. "Maintien des compétences" is a huge issue that also plague the civil nuclear industry.
> France would never export a nuclear submarine
Naval Group doesn't sell nuclear subs made for the French marine but they do sell the technology transfer to help a country develop their own. The Brazilian contracts was also a mess (good engineer, bad sells man :D) but we were well on track to help them make their first nuclear sub.
> (even the planned Australian contract wasn't nuclear, iirc)
At their explicit demand I might add. It was always stated that the subs were supposed to be conventional. I remember that it was actually kind of an issue for the engineer because they wanted specs that were way above what most conventional subs were able to handle (in term of range and time submerged), and the main design was supposed to be more or less a retrofit of the Barracuda class.
Reality is pretty different and the arcane of politics dominate military contracts.
Even if the US came with an half-baked scooter branded as a fighter jet (Hello Lockheed Star-fighter [1]), it would still encounter some export success:
- Countries in NATO are informally required to buy US material politically speaking
- Many countries are US Nuke and their territory and needs US jets to operate them. Belgium and Germany are in this situation with the B61 [2].
- Large military industrial companies have a long history of corruption in procurements processes. USA have some of the largest one world wide
[1]: https://militarymachine.com/f-104-starfighter-flawed-midcent...
[2]: https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2022/03/14/germany...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_bribery_scandals
> Both aircraft have similar, almost identical purposes
Plainly false. What is the point of this article?
Air Force and Navy comparisons always depend on the ecosystem around the systems. The US system around operating these things on deployments is the magic.
The other thing is as a dude on a message board without context, the cynicism re the F35 almost too much. I always question whether that’s misinformation.