Interesting. The article doesn't say why the pilot ejected. If the jet were able to continue flying for hours in autopilot, maybe the pilot ejected a bit prematurely, no? Though it it continued flying I would expect it to be on ADS-B.
When you have to eject anyway, you would probably want to do it in an area where you can get help relatively quickly, due to it being quite a bit dangerous, and not in an area with no infrastructure or over the ocean.
Eject-by-wire, I can envision some proponents for automated ejection in case the pilot is not responding or a machine is able to determine ejection is needed before a pilot realizes and it would be too late.
It's using a tiny subset of C++ and C, designed to prevent errors like that, but I wonder how well that works given the F-35 has several years of empirical data now.
After the development of the F-35, the idea that the US government could fund and develop a new fighter without the public knowing is somehow heartwarming!
Well, the F-117 was developed in complete secrecy. And, I'd like to add, in busget and on time. All that using a bunch of stuff coming from the F-15 and F-16 programs. My pet theory is, that those twonhad a ton of cost overruns regarding spares and such because avionics and engines for the F-117 had to be sourced somehow.
A B-17 once landed at an airfield in Belgium without any crew on board. Just by chance it was pointing in the right direction, with the right amount of lift and drag and thrust.
I think there were experiments with RC B17s. I wonder if this was one and they chose to emergency land it but had to keep it a secret from the Belgian airfield crew.
When my grandpa was navigating B24's in WWII, he saw a B24's wing flying by itself. The Japanese had set the plane on fire from nose to tail, and the body separated from the wings. The B24 has the wings on top of the fuselage, so the wings could stay together. The body, of course, fell into the clouds below, but the wings stayed aloft. And naturally, because they didn't have to carry a fuselage around, they accelerated, and lazily curved out of sight of grandpa, who thought he might have been the only person to ever see something like that (and survive to tell the tale...)
They operate in real time Reapers on the other side of the globe, have constellations of all kinds of satellites, they know from my iphone that my parents have just visited, yet state of the art F-35 "disappeared"?
Sometimes it's hard to just accept reality: even the big, mighty and omnipresent supernatural and all-knowing Government(tm) is just a bunch of non-magical, non-demonic regular folks trying to keep things on the rails. It usually works out OK, but there's a lot of rails and a lot of stuff to keep on them.
"The jet’s transponder, which usually helps locate the aircraft, was not working “for some reason that we haven’t yet determined,” said Jeremy Huggins, a spokesman at Joint Base Charleston. “So that’s why we put out the public request for help.”
Oh, someone sure is going to have to answer some tough questions. If not in purely military airspace, or combat operations, military aircraft have to be airworthy according to civil standards.
That being said, no casualties, loosing a stealth fighter is somewhat funny.
Have they said whether the transponder was active on the jet? They usually have the ADSB beacon live when flying near airports, but if it was turned off it would be a bit trickier to find. Also, if the retroreflector wasn't extended it might be hard for active radar to track it as well. Worst case scenario would be if it was in "full stealth" mode -- that would be the situation where we discover that NORAD air defense systems can't detect our own jets!
They should be able to track gross location on radar. The stealth capabilities are mostly focused on thwarting precise location and missile guidance radars.
The issue here is finding the precise crash site. General location should be known. Trying to find it under the tree canopy could be more challenging depending on how rural it is.
I think they do have the general location, they keep mentioning two lakes near the base. So I suspect it's at the bottom of one of them, although then it's odd they are asking for public help finding them.
"Dagobah" was how I heard the search area described. Or parts of it at least. "The weather was horrible" when the pilot ejected, so if it was pouring rain and slipped nicely into a swamp somewhere - and then the rain doused anything smoking...
It's not too odd to ask for help. Generally they want anyone who heard/saw something to report what they saw. I witnessed a jet crash once. Even though I was a kid and they knew the exact location, they still wanted the information. If it did crash into a lake, it's possible someone heard it while they were fishing or something.
Planes like the F-22 are inherently aerodynamically unstable because it allows then to be highly maneuverable, The stability of the aircraft is handled by the electronics. So back then planes of the that type would be able to just glide down and land but with a F-22 or any modern military jet, it wouldn't.
If the plane is in trim (does the F35 even have manual trim?) and/or on autopilot, I can see a long glide to somewhere with a stable flight path, at least until the loss of thrust due to fuel exhaustion leads to an aerodynamic stall. But in of these circumstances, there would have been no need for the pilot to eject. Strange indeed.
It's the most advanced plane the military has. You would think that an eject would trigger some additional communications or allow remote control of the jet.
There is no remote control of manned tactical aircraft. That was never a requirement.
The jet may have been transmitting it's position via civilian ADS-B or military data link. But those systems could have been switched off, or malfunctioned during the mishap.
I heard a story about an FA-18 where the pilot passed out, suffocated and died, and the jet just flew until it ran out gas and went down in the ocean.
We know the JSF is a giant expensive computer. I wonder what code is in the exception block for when the plane is working but the pilot leaves. Maybe it does just try and gently crash somewhere. It's more surprising it didn't have some sort of phone home, become a drone, style fall back mechanism. I certainly think that'll be on the Jira board next sprint.
> We know the JSF is a giant expensive computer. I wonder what code is in the exception block for when the plane is working but the pilot leaves. Maybe it does just try and gently crash somewhere.
I doubt there's an exception block for that. What if there's a fault and it triggers while the pilot is still in the plane?
> It's more surprising it didn't have some sort of phone home, become a drone, style fall back mechanism. I certainly think that'll be on the Jira board next sprint.
I doubt it. All of those ideas seem to have deal-breaker drawbacks in a military system. What if there's a fault and it "phones home" during a mission, breaking radio silence? What if an adversary figures out how to activate drone-mode, then hijacks and crashes the planes when they need to perform?
> I think the Ukraine war and Russia's poor showing has proved that in some ways the west is overestimating the capabilities of it's enemies.
That attitude is a recipe for overconfidence and failure, and is probably the biggest reason for Russia's poor showing in Ukraine.
Also, from what I've read, electronic warfare is one of the areas where the Russians have shown strong capability. It's a mistake to misinterpret "sucks at some things" as "sucks at all things."
Remember too that significant amounts detailed technical data for the F-35 have been stolen:
> Last week, Der Spiegel published a new tranche of documents provided to the German weekly magazine by the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor, Edward Snowden. The documents are the first public confirmation that Chinese hackers have been able to extrapolate top secret data on the F-35 Lightning II joint strike fighter jet. According to sources, the data breach already took place in 2007 at the prime subcontractor Lockheed Martin. A U.S. government official recently claimed that as of now, “classified F-35 information is protected and remains secure.”
> ...
> The Snowden files outline the scope of Chinese F-35 espionage efforts, which focused on acquiring the radar design (the number and types of modules), detailed engine schematics (methods for cooling gases, leading and trailing edge treatments, and aft deck heating contour maps) among other things. The document claims that many terabytes of data specific to the F-35 joint strike fighter program were stolen.
When designing military aircraft, it makes sense to reduce attack surface and avoid implementing exploitable features to address unusual scenarios.
WRT to Ukraine, it's a mistake to think that competence at EW and incompetence at land warfare balance each other out when the fight is primarily land warfare. And you need to be better at the land warfare to win.
Also, the B21 is reported to be designed for remote control. And that's the sort of thing you put the really big weapons on. I understand the idea behind reducing attack surface. But the JSF is a hub of interconnected technology it's not unreasonable to think they don't have a software package for all sorts of remote options.
> WRT to Ukraine, it's a mistake to think that competence at EW and incompetence at land warfare balance each other out when the fight is primarily land warfare. And you need to be better at the land warfare to win.
That's not what I said or meant.
What I'm saying is: it's stupid to design something for an adversarial situation like war, under the assumption that your adversary will be incompetent and unskilled. You seemed to be inferring that US adversaries would be incompetent at EW, because Russia's competence at land warfare has been far less than was previously assumed, and I don't think that follows at all.
> Also, the B21 is reported to be designed for remote control. And that's the sort of thing you put the really big weapons on. I understand the idea behind reducing attack surface.
If a military jet will not regularly remotely operated, it makes total sense to not implement remote operation features at all. Adding the feature introduces unneeded risk, as well as development cost and weight.
And (IMHO) if you do add a remote operation feature (because you think you'll use it), it should be locked behind a physical shutoff, so it cannot be adversarially-activated when it's not wanted. That would mean it would likely be of little use in a case like this.
> But the JSF is a hub of interconnected technology it's not unreasonable to think they don't have a software package for all sorts of remote options.
I don't see how it as all reasonable to think they've developed such a feature without any kind of evidence. The only hits I get trying to find information were for scale-model RC planes, stuff about F-35 pilots controlling drones, and this speculative article from a likely non-reputable website (https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2023/09/16/american-stealth-f-...) which outlines extensive modifications required and ultimately concludes such a thing would be a bad idea.
> Also, the B21 is reported to be designed for remote control.
AFAIK, that is all misreporting the (also abandoned) idea of an bomber drone companion aircraft and/or speculation about a potential future application of its modular upgradability.
> But the JSF is a hub of interconnected technology it's not unreasonable to think they don't have a software package for all sorts of remote options.
I agree that its not unreasonable to think that they don't have that.
But the West also underestimates, for example, cheap Iranian drones that can be easily mass produced and cost much less than the missiles to shoot them down.
The West does not. Major R&D effort went into laser based SHORAD that is basically free to fire, with units being already deployed. Besides that, good old C-RAM would take those out no problem.
> But the West also underestimates, for example, cheap Iranian drones that can be easily mass produced and cost much less than the missiles to shoot them down.
No, it doesn't. It failed to anticipate the large-scale transfer of Iranian loitering munitions to Russia for use in that role, it didn't underestimate their utility. And once they started showing up, the West started supplying more cost effective countermeasures, like the Gepard, which use autocannons rather than missiles.
I think the Ukraine war and Russia's poor showing has proved that in some ways it is far more catastrophic to underestimate your enemies than to overestimate them.
Fortunately, the fissile nuclear core was stored elsewhere on the aircraft
While I'll admit that is very effective failsafe, did they actually require the crew to do bomb surgery with a demon core during flight if they needed to arm the device?
> This weapon was a capsule bomb, meaning that the nuclear material for the bomb was kept in a special capsule separate from the rest of the device for safety's sake. Just before the bomb was to be dropped from the delivery aircraft the capsule was inserted into the bomb casing and the weapon became armed. It was also the first atomic weapon to offer the delivery aircraft's bombardier the option of changing the detonation altitude while the bomber was in flight to the target.
If 1 in 8 kids experiences food insecurity, then it's likely that there are at least some, maybe 1 in 100, who are starving, however you define it.
Also, there are two kinds of starvation: in one case the quantity of food is insufficient, in the other its quality is. Eating fries with soda in great quantity every day could still starve a growing kid.
I was wondering how 1 in 8 children could be experiencing food insecurity in a nation with a 40% obesity rate, and what food insecurity was exactly, so I poked around in their methodology a little.
Happy to be corrected if I'm misreading this. But if I understand correctly, they go into it on page 8, and there are basically two ways they calculate food insecurity.
The first is a weighted average of variables that are unrelated or indirectly related to food - including income, race and disability rate.
The second is self-reporting (basically asking households if they need more money for food).
Historically wealthy and high status people were "fatter" and had pale skin. It signaled that you had ready access to food and didn't work outside.
Now high status people are thin/muscular and have tanner skin - cheap and quick food is terrible for you and it signals you have the time to workout, pay for a trainer/gym membership, go on vacation to sunny destinations, aren't chained to a desk/working retail, can pay for and have access to high quality and fresh foods, etc.
More and more high quality and healthy food is expensive and/or requires more time to prepare and plan. If you're shuffling between multiple minimum wage jobs you're often eating fast food all day because you either can't afford or don't have time for anything better.
Then start looking at food deserts[0]. Stop at a bodega in a poor neighborhood that serves as the only food source around and prepare to be shocked at the absolute garbage they have available that's still covered by SNAP.
My kids go to a school where the majority of the kids are somewhere around poverty level (easy to be under there in Silicon Valley if you are not an engineer in tech).
I absolutely believe the administrators when they say that the meals some of the kids get in school might be the only ones they get for the day (by far not the majority: those are hard working parents, dedicated to their kids). And watching how much hand-holding is needed for some of the families on the pre-school-year paperwork day (back to school night) I am fully convinced that the worst-off kids are likely to wind up without food if their receiving it depends on their parents filling out forms.
And I want to be clear that the kids I think might be on the edge are not (in most cases) there because of neglect. They are there because living here is more expensive than their parents can afford completely, despite working long hours. That is a condemnation of a society that mis-appropriates the wealth (like on Engineers like me).
Yes, it is a waste of money that my kids (kids of a Silicon Valley Engineer) get their food for free, but looking at the alternative (kids going hungry), is it really that much of a waste?
I support free school lunch programs; no child should go hungry. But in California at least, many of the families with children who struggle with food insecurity entered the country illegally or with dubious claims of refugee status. That is a broader societal issue that can't be addressed through school funding or wealth redistribution.
blanket free lunch is disgustingly wasteful and a terrible solution for needy children. It is like buying a new car whenever you have a flat tire.
I can feed my own kids, I don't need them picking up an extra slice of pizza every day for fun and throwing milk and plates and disposable utensils in the garbage. Ask any lunch worker about the additional garbage and waste it generates.
The correct solution is to remove the barriers stopping children from getting free lunch- stop requiring parents to sign up for it. If a lunch aide feels like a kid needs food, they should be able to sign them up without anyone having to know about it or consent to it. Let the schools give kids in need double lunches if they want them and/or something to take home with them. Double down on the kids in need, don't force it on everyone.
Are there any stats/citations that back up your assertion that kids who bring their own lunches in universal free lunch states are wasting food en masse?
> a terrible solution for needy children
The kids who previously weren't getting fed are now getting fed, aren't they?
I’m often shocked at what my kids are able to choose (as elementary students, much worse for middle school) when buying cafeteria lunch. Admittedly I went to a small parochial school, but when we bought “hot lunch” we were given a pre-determined, food pyramid compliant assortment and are only choice was chocolate or plain milk. And you were done when your tray was empty, or recess was over. There was very little waste from cafeteria meals.
Now my middle schooler will choose two cookies and a juice and the lunch attendant doesn’t bay an eye. Any retroactive punishment is long after he’s enjoyed his food treats or diabetes in early adulthood.
There should never be any judgement regarding a child's financial situation during the school day.
The place where I grew up handled this in the best possible way: Every kid got a lunch if they went through the lunch line, without exception. The school system simply kept track of which students got a meal, and at the end of the month, they'd either mail a bill or it would be covered through the free lunch program.
Under this system, there was no opportunity for students or staff to pass judgement on students for their financial situation.
the issue here is that how is it determined who is eligible for the free lunch program after the fact? The parents are too negligent to sign up, their account goes into arrears and the kid ends up skipping the line out of fear getting punished for it. Parents have to sign up and too many don't give a crap
> and the kid ends up skipping the line out of fear getting punished for it.
No, as I said above, every kid got a lunch without exception. The record keeping was unidirectional. The lunch line tallied the quantity of lunches that were handed out to each student and reported this to the district, but the district did not report back anything about paying bills to anyone at the school. Nobody in the lunch room knew anything about the finances of any student. They were tasked only with handing out lunches.
> Parents have to sign up and too many don't give a crap
This is better to make a problem of the district's finance department, not the individual school. They can solve this by mailing bills to parents and/or information about signing up for lunch programs. This is not a problem to solve by holding a child's lunch hostage.
It's a ploy to get foreign adversaries to clean up pollution.
"We can't find the wreckage ANYWHERE! Maybe if we cleaned up some of this pollution, we would find the plane underneath it? Is there anyone who wants to find F-35 wreckage? Chinaaaaaa?"
Sort of an absurd thing to say. However, it’s repeated all the time, and in every generation in some form.
One really has nothing to do with the other. If we could educate people at a younger age so they understand this, maybe we can make more progress in creating a better society.
Start with the fact that military spending has decreased as a percentage of GDP:
What an odd form of comparison, Military spending is almost entirely a function of tax, not Gross Domestic Product of a country.
But taking just one aspect of that graph – overall military spending - it's true that spending has decreased since we were involved in a full scale occupation of another country, assaulting several others, then whack-a-moling the downstream consequences of those wars. It is also (in my humble opinion) extremely disingenuous to not include the direct financing of another country's war (Ukraine) which at this time is something around 80 billion.
- Also something to note is underneath your gdp<>government-spending graph it states spending in 2022 was 746 billion, predicted to increase to 1.1 trillion next year.
While spending on education was 42.5 billion in 2022.
You are correct in that we need to educate people better, it is not accurate to say we could solve a plethora of societal issues with just a fraction of the financial fuel the military industrial complex requires.
In the US, education spending significantly exceeds defense spending. It is almost entirely allocated under State budgets, the number you are referring to is Federal. The Federal government could stop spending on education entirely and expenditures would still exceed the military. The US spends far more on education per student than almost any other country, per the OECD. It raises the question of why the US still has mediocre outcomes in education given the amount of money spent on it.
The US spends a lot on the military but at least the outcome of that expenditure is an exceptional and unmatched capability. One can argue whether or not that capability is needed, but at least they are getting what they are paying for to some extent.
The federal government provides billions of free or reduced price meals to school children every year. American schools do not let you not eat lunch, if you try to skip lunch you will have a lunch forcibly given to you for free for as long as it takes the school administration to figure out what is going on with your parents. Your parents will be billed for the lunches if they can afford it, and if not you will be signed up for the federal free lunch program. But either way this plays out, they will not allow you to not eat a lunch.
Even if you plead that you ate a huge breakfast and you aren't hungry, they will put a tray of food in front of you anyway.
Sorry, no, I’m just stating an opinion. And even if I had a source, the definition of incompetence varies so widely, that surely this statement would hold no additional weight.
Because of my misbelieve in capitalism and the belief in the corruption of governments. Or as the saying goes: “All power corrupts” and all that. On top of that, I am no believer in meritocracy (that is I don’t believe people advance in position based on merit).
Now lets do some thought statistics. I—as a bayesean—assign the uniform distribution as a prior to competence, that is I assume that competence is equally distributed across occupations and positions independent of responsibility. Now, lets allow some movement between positions and assume correlation between responsibility and salaries (that is people being payed more are responsible for a greater proportion of the system). Now assume there is not a 100% correlation between competence and being moved into a greater position with a greater salary (that is we assume some level of corruption; people moved into greater position because of favors, family ties, wealth, gender, etc. Even misattributed skills of those promoted [i.e. incompetence of those responsible promoting and hiring; i.e. suspect positive feedback of incompetence]).
Finally we acknowledge the fact that being moved into a position with more responsibility and you don’t gain skills as you are moved, your competence will decrease (that is competence is a function of responsibility and skill).
It should be easy to see that your posterior distribution of competence to salaries and the posterior distribution of competence to responsibility should both be skewed towards the right. That is you as you increase responsibility and salaries, you will find relatively fewer people competent at their jobs.
It’s definitely BS. Transponders aside, the US has radar and near real-time satellite imagery of every square inch of American territory. There is a zero percent chance they don’t know where this plane is.
That's simply not true. The US military only has primary radar coverage over a small fraction of the country. (Air traffic control primarily relies on secondary surveillance radar.)
Only the weather satellites in geostationary orbits provide near real-time imagery, and they lack the resolution to spot something the size of an aircraft. High resolution images come from spy satellites in highly inclined low orbits which provide only intermittent coverage of any particular location. And they can't see through clouds.
I was in a stealth fighter squadron. It really depends on the mission profile as to determine if the reflectors will be on the plane during CONUS training. If we're doing BVR 'tag' drills, they won't have them installed. If we're just putting butts in seats to keep certs current or maybe some air to ground training, then the reflectors will be installed.
Caveat, I was in the Air Force and I'm not too familiar with NATOPS which is what I believe the Marines would be operating under to determine SOP. I was not a pilot, but I was in operations and received the same briefings. My training was also from when we first got real stealth fighters and SOP has probably evolved a lot in the last decade.
What's most interesting about this story to me is... What sort of mishap would lead to an ejection with autopilot left functioning? That all seems very peculiar. Weird way to join the Caterpillar Club.
“The Caterpillar Club is an informal association of people who have successfully used a parachute to bail out of a disabled aircraft. After authentication by the parachute maker, applicants receive a membership certificate and a distinctive lapel pin. The nationality of the person whose life was saved by parachute and ownership of the aircraft are not factors in determining qualification for membership; anybody whose life was saved by using a parachute after bailing out of a disabled aircraft is eligible. The requirement that the aircraft is disabled naturally excludes parachuting enthusiasts in the normal course of a recreational jump, or those involved in military training jumps.“
Brought back memories of my dad's "induction" into the Caterpillar Club in 1962. When we cleaned out and sold my folks' house, I took a picture of his framed membership certificate; he often wore the lapel pin on civilian sport-coat lapels.
Dunno but if they dont find the aircraft it will be difficult to determine how it happened. My guess would be weird software. There might be something with the F35b's because there are a few crashes in the headlines.
Worst case scenario someone slaved it to a netowrk and stole it since the f35bs have VTOL.
Outside of combat missions, stealth aircraft have little widgets on them which multiply their radar signature. Stealth aircraft are meant to be stealth only in real combat missions.
It's really hard to track with active radar, which is why the first thing NATO does in a foreign country is bomb all TV and radio stations off the air. With passive methods it's no problem at all.
TV and radio stations can be used for passive radar. Passive radar is when you use existing radio sources as you illumination source and your radar system is listen-only. Stealth aircraft tend to be more visible on passive radar since passive is usually a longer wavelength that the aircraft was not designed for. You can even DIY a passive radar.
You could use a focused receiver to look for TV signals being emitted from an object thousands of feet in the air over (say) the ocean off the coast of California. Since you know there is no TV station antenna floating in the sky out there you know you are getting reflected rf from a plane.
Your receiver is "passive" - it doesn't emit a signal - so the attacking enemy has to find it visually. If the enemy bomb all the TV antennas then you need to emit your own signal to generate the reflection.
The US military absolutely does not have total ground radar across the entire country.
(And even if it did, radar is not magic. If the plane is at the bottom of a murky lake, then no amount of radar or satellite imagery is going to find it.)
>And even if it did, radar is not magic. If the plane is at the bottom of a murky lake, then no amount of radar or satellite imagery is going to find it.
The purpose of the radar would not be to see the plane at the bottom of a lake, but to provide a flight path after the ejection. If they had radar coverage, they should be able to see either where it ejected with an unstable flight path that put it within a fairly small circle of the ejection or on a stable flight path that gives them a more or less straight line to search along.
If you watch YouTube replay simulations[0] with ATC (air traffic control) when pilots violate a TFR (temporary flight restriction) for something like The President it's comical how long it takes for the interception fighters to find the target. It turns out the F-* radar is terrible at these kinds of situations. They almost always end up getting vectored in by air traffic control with their much more powerful ground based radar.
Just one example of how this kind of stuff plays out in the real world.
Which is why the regulations on passenger aircraft got tightened up, it's easier to get rid/impede the attack vector than to overcome the physical limitations of a radar antenna in a fighter jet's nose cone vs a many meters large ground radar antenna.
All of these TFR violations are early/inexperienced Cessna 172 pilots (or similar) who aren't up on TFRs, just lost, etc. They often can't even manage the radio and just go completely silent, blissfully unaware anything is happening until an F-16 shows up next to them hailing them saying things like "US military armed fighter aircraft. Acknowledge this by rocking your wings.", etc. Of course assuming the fighter eventually finds them in the first place...
What's really scary about ATC vectoring the fighters in is a bad actor could just as easily use that open comms to evade the fighter aircraft. Although they're obviously faster and more maneuverable it gets back to the first scenario I mentioned - the fighters can't find a target when they're not actively trying to evade them.
It would be pretty easy and straightforward for a bad actor to get a few hours of lessons, take up a Cessna loaded with improvised explosives of some type, and do a lot of damage. A lot of smaller air strips/fields don't even have a tower so they could get up there before anyone really has a clue.
> All of these TFR violations are early/inexperienced Cessna 172 pilots (or similar) who aren't up on TFRs, just lost, etc.
I'm (as a German) a drone pilot myself and looking to start ultralight next year, and the topic of TFRs/NOTAMs annoys me to no end even when just flying a drone. Tons of junk, hard to parse and keep track of, and hell I get that the primary glass of aircraft is supposed to be certified, but why on earth aren't there smartphone/tablet apps that keep up with TFRs and alert a pilot? Most of GA is low altitude anyway so in reach of cellphone towers.
> the topic of TFRs/NOTAMs annoys me to no end even when just flying a drone. Tons of junk, hard to parse and keep track of
Like many unusual situations there are usually at least two things that need to happen to cause the scenario I described:
1) Ignorance to TFRs/NOTAMS (Notice to Airman for those unfamiliar).
2) Loss of communication with the correct air traffic control.
When air traffic control notices these people violate airspace they always try to reach them via radio. In the event they're reachable it's "we have a phone number for you". When they go silent it's send up some fighters AND "here's a phone number for you".
> Most of GA is low altitude anyway so in reach of cellphone towers.
This is frowned upon. When airlines ask you to turn off your cell phones it is for two real reasons:
1) Pay attention to the safety briefing (no one does anyway, and no one turns their cell phones off).
2) The request of cell carriers. From what I understand cellular devices at altitude with significantly better line of sight are somewhat problematic to the towers as devices are able to attempt connection/association to many more than they usually would. Apparently combined with the faster speed the carriers don't appreciate this. Of course they deal with it with all kinds of means in terms of directional antennas, etc but like I said I've heard it's an issue.
I point out #2 because there's likely little industry support for the approach you describe. Additionally, you add an additional safety issue because users (pilots) will learn to depend on them and the variability of cell connectivity at altitude, weather, speed, geography, etc is uncertain. Aviation doesn't like that.
> Like many unusual situations there are usually at least two things that need to happen to cause the scenario I described:
> 1) Ignorance to TFRs/NOTAMS (Notice to Airman for those unfamiliar).
> 2) Loss of communication with the correct air traffic control.
Yeah, #1 is easy enough to happen because NOTAM (and, while we're ranting, METAR as well, or the fact that aviation still uses feet and knots despite everyone but the US and UK being on metric) is fundamentally broken, a relic of very old times that has never been updated (similar to the clusterfuck that is flight/staff planning and booking) because no one wants to invest money into upgrading all the legacy crap. So all it takes for a serious incident is a simple human error: forgetting to change a comms frequency, overlooking a NOTAM in all the spam, or accidentally using metric units.
> I point out #2 because there's likely little industry support for the approach you describe. Additionally, you add an additional safety issue because users (pilots) will learn to depend on them and the variability of cell connectivity at altitude, weather, speed, geography, etc is uncertain. Aviation doesn't like that.
I wasn't talking about commercial air flights, I was referring to the Cessna and other small-scale GA. They're barely faster than a high-speed train (an 172 manages 300 km/h, a German ICE 350 km/h, and I can use LTE in the latter), so for wide parts of any GA flight a pilot should have LTE access on their phone.
Anyway: yes, people will learn to depend on their phones/tablets to alert them if they enter a TFR zone or that they have to change their radio frequency. But ffs... the status quo leads to so many issues every year [1], because pilots have zero assistance if they're in an older plane with a classic, no-glass setup, or in a plane with a glass cockpit but no assistance. Adding a fallback option is the safer way, it avoids incidents.
And the truly safe way would be to upgrade all the legacy crap, or at least augment it in a backward-compatible way: a digital carrier in radios that can carry cryptographically signed messages for radios that signal new frequency and squawk codes, for example, that the pilot simply has to confirm and be done.
Check out foreflight. It's an app that does exactly what you are talking about. It will definitely show relevant NOTAMs and TFRs and update in flight. I don't know about europe, but its pretty rare for people to fly GA in North America without some sort of phone app running.
There is also FltPlanGo which is free, but it is less full featured than foreflight.
Individual radar tracking on the F-* planes is kind an advantage as they are typically vectored in by airborne radar like AWACs in actual combat. There are advantages to this, with the most obvious is the opponent doesn't know where the attack is coming from since they are only being lit up by the AWACs. They can be vectored in from the most advantageous angle for the attacker in total passive mode.
That's a really good point - I'm certainly familiar with AWACS in concept but I didn't connect the dots here.
Thing is, in these scenarios they're the only armed aircraft around and their targets never have radar or any instrumentation/defense/even detection for it. So they could (and likely do) blast and paint all day and they still can't find bug smashers in dense urban environments like you most often see with TFRs.
I can understand the fighter radar is probably designed assuming assistance from AWACS but it still seems really strange to me.
The fighters can actually receive the radar information from AWACs, so the pilots see the radar image. However, just like not having total CAPs coverage over the US, there's not a lot of AWACs coverage either. I'd be shocked if there's any mechanism for them receiving civilian ATC radar. To that end, how much radar coverage is actually there? Isn't civilian traffic pretty much IDs broadcast from the planes?
Civilian air traffic control relies mainly on secondary surveillance radar including aircraft transponders, plus ADS-B. Primary radar coverage is limited to larger airports plus a few border and military areas. An aircraft can hide pretty effectively in most US airspace by just flying low with transponders switched off.
It isn't - the fighter is not designed on the assumption it can rely on an AWACS, because they're very vulnerable aircraft. For many F-* jets, AWACS datalink was actually added later on.
There are not going to be many situations where you need this advantage, have an AWACS but your opponent doesn't, and your AWACS is able to survive while being close enough to be helpful (both Russia and China have missiles that outrange an AWACS's radar, and the China and the US have stealthy planes and slightly lesser range missiles). It's a real limitation, it's problematic, and it has no upsides.
ATC radar regularly loses small planes on 'primary' radar (primary radar being pure radar), and has to rely on the transponder. There are many areas where you simply don't have primary coverage, especially close to the ground. I've flown through military controlled airspace where they lose radar contact with me in a Cessna less than 10 miles from the base.
> Unofficially, the Defense Atomic Support Agency (now known as the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA)) has detailed hundreds of "Broken Arrow" incidents.
You crash an end-of-life trainer dressed up as an F35 in a carefully chosen site with no natural foot traffic. The FBI then sits in a bush and arrests everyone that turns up.
The F35 is the prime intelligence target for Russia before it gets in Ukrainian hands so they might risk some of their most valuable "illegals" i.e. the long-term embedded agents with flawless identities. For a big target, you gotta go big. Hang out the biggest prize in the most embarrassing way you can. This is a typical type of plot from The Americans TV show.
That or it's testing the adversarial satellite or balloon surveillance tech for how long it takes to find the craft. Maybe it's a test of Open Source Intelligence networks. Maybe it had genuine stealth tech and they are monitoring channels to find out if it was being successfully tracked. A top of the line stealth craft is hell of a honeypot so there are endless things that might get revealed - I imagine all hostile intelligence networks are lit up like christmas trees - it's like a barium meal.
Do I believe any of these? Nah. Reality is more ridiculous than fiction so no doubt it really is the case that they have just lost a prize intelligence asset.
fortunately in the low country.. there really aren't hills just marshes and wetlands, but in all seriousness it would be a pretty cool salvage for someone
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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" .....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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?
> 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)
> 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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
$1.2T to OPERATE the F-35 program, yikes! I would love to see the TCO figures on an F-35 (or not). US Military budget concepts have always blown my mind.
Not to say $1.2T is nothing, but that's over the lifespan of the program. It's like if you paid for your car plus all the fuel, oil changes, spare parts, tires, car wash, toll roads, all up front.
> $1.2 trillion to operate and maintain the fleet over more than 60 years.
F16's 50th anniversary is next year. They're still being flown by many countries around the world, including the US, and will soon be fighting in Ukraine.
> The "Cornfield Bomber" is the nickname given to a Convair F-106 Delta Dart, operated by the 71st Fighter-Interceptor Squadron of the United States Air Force. In 1970, during a training exercise, it made an unpiloted landing in a farmer's field in Montana, suffering only minor damage, after the pilot had ejected from the aircraft. The aircraft, recovered and repaired, was returned to service, and is currently on display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force.
Given it's a military plane (which IIRC, aren't required to have transponders or have them activated) and stealth. it seems understandable that it would be hard to find if it didn't crash immediately.
Most aircraft are designed to be inherently stable so as long as it doesn't hit anything a good percentage of them should be able to manage pretty well w/o a pilot.
The F35 and other modern fighter jets are the exception to the rule: they are inherently unstable because this makes them more maneuverable. They use electronic control systems to keep themselves stable.
692 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 478 ms ] thread> Though it it continued flying I would expect it to be on ADS-B.
This is a military aircraft. Depending on its mission, transponders may or may not be enabled.
What did surprise me: if a 2-plane mission, why didn't the other jet follow the now-empty one? As a opposed to landing right after. Low on fuel?
At least it could have recorded speed & heading.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27602606
If you believe what is written on HN: actually no, not at all.
Indeed they do (or at least did)
https://youtu.be/Aa1Ba_NEobs
He just wanted to be sure. With all those issues F35 had i wouldn't think twice when to eject. /s
Please no jokes about losing a stealth fighter...
> The parachutes were still onboard and no indication of gunfire or blood caused by hostile attacks were seen on the plane.
[1] https://worldwarwings.com/still-unsolved-story-of-b-17-landi...
That the plane landed intact is pretty cool though!
[1] https://www.quora.com/What-happened-to-the-crew-of-the-B-17-...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Belgium_MiG-23_crash
If so, there's a limited edition high end wristwatch in it for the pilot:
https://us.bremont.com/pages/explore-bremont-partnerships-ma...
https://martin-baker.com/products/mk16-ejection-seat-for-f-3...
https://martin-baker.com/ejection-tie-club/
A worthy chronometer to suit a crashed pilot.
"The jet’s transponder, which usually helps locate the aircraft, was not working “for some reason that we haven’t yet determined,” said Jeremy Huggins, a spokesman at Joint Base Charleston. “So that’s why we put out the public request for help.”
That being said, no casualties, loosing a stealth fighter is somewhat funny.
The last place they look
[1] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/f-35-cant-be-found-aft...
The issue here is finding the precise crash site. General location should be known. Trying to find it under the tree canopy could be more challenging depending on how rural it is.
It doesn't take a Mach 1.6 aircraft very long to go 25 miles. That's only about 75 seconds of flight time.
You keep saying that word...I do not think it means what you think it means.
More seriously, military aircraft throughout the US often do not have their ADS-B or transponders turned on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–U.S._RQ-170_incident
No one wants to lose a B-2 or F-22 this way.
The jet may have been transmitting it's position via civilian ADS-B or military data link. But those systems could have been switched off, or malfunctioned during the mishap.
We know the JSF is a giant expensive computer. I wonder what code is in the exception block for when the plane is working but the pilot leaves. Maybe it does just try and gently crash somewhere. It's more surprising it didn't have some sort of phone home, become a drone, style fall back mechanism. I certainly think that'll be on the Jira board next sprint.
I doubt there's an exception block for that. What if there's a fault and it triggers while the pilot is still in the plane?
> It's more surprising it didn't have some sort of phone home, become a drone, style fall back mechanism. I certainly think that'll be on the Jira board next sprint.
I doubt it. All of those ideas seem to have deal-breaker drawbacks in a military system. What if there's a fault and it "phones home" during a mission, breaking radio silence? What if an adversary figures out how to activate drone-mode, then hijacks and crashes the planes when they need to perform?
That attitude is a recipe for overconfidence and failure, and is probably the biggest reason for Russia's poor showing in Ukraine.
Also, from what I've read, electronic warfare is one of the areas where the Russians have shown strong capability. It's a mistake to misinterpret "sucks at some things" as "sucks at all things."
Remember too that significant amounts detailed technical data for the F-35 have been stolen:
https://thediplomat.com/2015/01/new-snowden-documents-reveal...:
> Last week, Der Spiegel published a new tranche of documents provided to the German weekly magazine by the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor, Edward Snowden. The documents are the first public confirmation that Chinese hackers have been able to extrapolate top secret data on the F-35 Lightning II joint strike fighter jet. According to sources, the data breach already took place in 2007 at the prime subcontractor Lockheed Martin. A U.S. government official recently claimed that as of now, “classified F-35 information is protected and remains secure.”
> ...
> The Snowden files outline the scope of Chinese F-35 espionage efforts, which focused on acquiring the radar design (the number and types of modules), detailed engine schematics (methods for cooling gases, leading and trailing edge treatments, and aft deck heating contour maps) among other things. The document claims that many terabytes of data specific to the F-35 joint strike fighter program were stolen.
When designing military aircraft, it makes sense to reduce attack surface and avoid implementing exploitable features to address unusual scenarios.
Also, the B21 is reported to be designed for remote control. And that's the sort of thing you put the really big weapons on. I understand the idea behind reducing attack surface. But the JSF is a hub of interconnected technology it's not unreasonable to think they don't have a software package for all sorts of remote options.
That's not what I said or meant.
What I'm saying is: it's stupid to design something for an adversarial situation like war, under the assumption that your adversary will be incompetent and unskilled. You seemed to be inferring that US adversaries would be incompetent at EW, because Russia's competence at land warfare has been far less than was previously assumed, and I don't think that follows at all.
> Also, the B21 is reported to be designed for remote control. And that's the sort of thing you put the really big weapons on. I understand the idea behind reducing attack surface.
If a military jet will not regularly remotely operated, it makes total sense to not implement remote operation features at all. Adding the feature introduces unneeded risk, as well as development cost and weight.
And (IMHO) if you do add a remote operation feature (because you think you'll use it), it should be locked behind a physical shutoff, so it cannot be adversarially-activated when it's not wanted. That would mean it would likely be of little use in a case like this.
> But the JSF is a hub of interconnected technology it's not unreasonable to think they don't have a software package for all sorts of remote options.
I don't see how it as all reasonable to think they've developed such a feature without any kind of evidence. The only hits I get trying to find information were for scale-model RC planes, stuff about F-35 pilots controlling drones, and this speculative article from a likely non-reputable website (https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2023/09/16/american-stealth-f-...) which outlines extensive modifications required and ultimately concludes such a thing would be a bad idea.
AFAIK, that is all misreporting the (also abandoned) idea of an bomber drone companion aircraft and/or speculation about a potential future application of its modular upgradability.
> But the JSF is a hub of interconnected technology it's not unreasonable to think they don't have a software package for all sorts of remote options.
I agree that its not unreasonable to think that they don't have that.
No, it doesn't. It failed to anticipate the large-scale transfer of Iranian loitering munitions to Russia for use in that role, it didn't underestimate their utility. And once they started showing up, the West started supplying more cost effective countermeasures, like the Gepard, which use autocannons rather than missiles.
It's not the only missing nuke, either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Mars_Bluff_B-47_nuclear_w... is probably the (darkly) funniest one in the list. That one was recovered, but "the Air Force tried to nuke my kids' play house" is a story not many people can tell.
https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/systems/mk6.htm
> This weapon was a capsule bomb, meaning that the nuclear material for the bomb was kept in a special capsule separate from the rest of the device for safety's sake. Just before the bomb was to be dropped from the delivery aircraft the capsule was inserted into the bomb casing and the weapon became armed. It was also the first atomic weapon to offer the delivery aircraft's bombardier the option of changing the detonation altitude while the bomber was in flight to the target.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILgSesWMUEI
I'd be more inclined to believe that it's a gambit to flush out an intelligence leak rather than an inability to find their own $160M plane.
[1]: https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/child-hunge...
EDIT: Downvotes for compassion, HN is rough today!
Also, there are two kinds of starvation: in one case the quantity of food is insufficient, in the other its quality is. Eating fries with soda in great quantity every day could still starve a growing kid.
https://www.feedingamerica.org/sites/default/files/2022-08/M...
Happy to be corrected if I'm misreading this. But if I understand correctly, they go into it on page 8, and there are basically two ways they calculate food insecurity.
The first is a weighted average of variables that are unrelated or indirectly related to food - including income, race and disability rate.
The second is self-reporting (basically asking households if they need more money for food).
Hmm.
Historically wealthy and high status people were "fatter" and had pale skin. It signaled that you had ready access to food and didn't work outside.
Now high status people are thin/muscular and have tanner skin - cheap and quick food is terrible for you and it signals you have the time to workout, pay for a trainer/gym membership, go on vacation to sunny destinations, aren't chained to a desk/working retail, can pay for and have access to high quality and fresh foods, etc.
More and more high quality and healthy food is expensive and/or requires more time to prepare and plan. If you're shuffling between multiple minimum wage jobs you're often eating fast food all day because you either can't afford or don't have time for anything better.
Then start looking at food deserts[0]. Stop at a bodega in a poor neighborhood that serves as the only food source around and prepare to be shocked at the absolute garbage they have available that's still covered by SNAP.
[0] - https://www.aecf.org/blog/exploring-americas-food-deserts
I absolutely believe the administrators when they say that the meals some of the kids get in school might be the only ones they get for the day (by far not the majority: those are hard working parents, dedicated to their kids). And watching how much hand-holding is needed for some of the families on the pre-school-year paperwork day (back to school night) I am fully convinced that the worst-off kids are likely to wind up without food if their receiving it depends on their parents filling out forms.
And I want to be clear that the kids I think might be on the edge are not (in most cases) there because of neglect. They are there because living here is more expensive than their parents can afford completely, despite working long hours. That is a condemnation of a society that mis-appropriates the wealth (like on Engineers like me).
Yes, it is a waste of money that my kids (kids of a Silicon Valley Engineer) get their food for free, but looking at the alternative (kids going hungry), is it really that much of a waste?
I can feed my own kids, I don't need them picking up an extra slice of pizza every day for fun and throwing milk and plates and disposable utensils in the garbage. Ask any lunch worker about the additional garbage and waste it generates.
The correct solution is to remove the barriers stopping children from getting free lunch- stop requiring parents to sign up for it. If a lunch aide feels like a kid needs food, they should be able to sign them up without anyone having to know about it or consent to it. Let the schools give kids in need double lunches if they want them and/or something to take home with them. Double down on the kids in need, don't force it on everyone.
> a terrible solution for needy children
The kids who previously weren't getting fed are now getting fed, aren't they?
Giving random overworked, often bigoted people the power to let a kid eat or not? What could possibly go wrong?!
Now my middle schooler will choose two cookies and a juice and the lunch attendant doesn’t bay an eye. Any retroactive punishment is long after he’s enjoyed his food treats or diabetes in early adulthood.
The place where I grew up handled this in the best possible way: Every kid got a lunch if they went through the lunch line, without exception. The school system simply kept track of which students got a meal, and at the end of the month, they'd either mail a bill or it would be covered through the free lunch program.
Under this system, there was no opportunity for students or staff to pass judgement on students for their financial situation.
No, as I said above, every kid got a lunch without exception. The record keeping was unidirectional. The lunch line tallied the quantity of lunches that were handed out to each student and reported this to the district, but the district did not report back anything about paying bills to anyone at the school. Nobody in the lunch room knew anything about the finances of any student. They were tasked only with handing out lunches.
> Parents have to sign up and too many don't give a crap
This is better to make a problem of the district's finance department, not the individual school. They can solve this by mailing bills to parents and/or information about signing up for lunch programs. This is not a problem to solve by holding a child's lunch hostage.
"We can't find the wreckage ANYWHERE! Maybe if we cleaned up some of this pollution, we would find the plane underneath it? Is there anyone who wants to find F-35 wreckage? Chinaaaaaa?"
One really has nothing to do with the other. If we could educate people at a younger age so they understand this, maybe we can make more progress in creating a better society.
Start with the fact that military spending has decreased as a percentage of GDP:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/217581/outlays-for-defen...
But taking just one aspect of that graph – overall military spending - it's true that spending has decreased since we were involved in a full scale occupation of another country, assaulting several others, then whack-a-moling the downstream consequences of those wars. It is also (in my humble opinion) extremely disingenuous to not include the direct financing of another country's war (Ukraine) which at this time is something around 80 billion.
- Also something to note is underneath your gdp<>government-spending graph it states spending in 2022 was 746 billion, predicted to increase to 1.1 trillion next year.
While spending on education was 42.5 billion in 2022.
You are correct in that we need to educate people better, it is not accurate to say we could solve a plethora of societal issues with just a fraction of the financial fuel the military industrial complex requires.
In case anyone was curious, https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/ reports total spending of $1.76 trillion on education in fiscal year 2022. (It also reports defense spending of $1.11 trillion. The subpage https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/defense_spending includes the number $765.8 billion as part of a breakdown.)
The US spends a lot on the military but at least the outcome of that expenditure is an exceptional and unmatched capability. One can argue whether or not that capability is needed, but at least they are getting what they are paying for to some extent.
Even if you plead that you ate a huge breakfast and you aren't hungry, they will put a tray of food in front of you anyway.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/ch...
It comes as no surprise to me that people responsible for these machines of war are more incompetent than you or me.
And your source for this data is…?
Now lets do some thought statistics. I—as a bayesean—assign the uniform distribution as a prior to competence, that is I assume that competence is equally distributed across occupations and positions independent of responsibility. Now, lets allow some movement between positions and assume correlation between responsibility and salaries (that is people being payed more are responsible for a greater proportion of the system). Now assume there is not a 100% correlation between competence and being moved into a greater position with a greater salary (that is we assume some level of corruption; people moved into greater position because of favors, family ties, wealth, gender, etc. Even misattributed skills of those promoted [i.e. incompetence of those responsible promoting and hiring; i.e. suspect positive feedback of incompetence]).
Finally we acknowledge the fact that being moved into a position with more responsibility and you don’t gain skills as you are moved, your competence will decrease (that is competence is a function of responsibility and skill).
It should be easy to see that your posterior distribution of competence to salaries and the posterior distribution of competence to responsibility should both be skewed towards the right. That is you as you increase responsibility and salaries, you will find relatively fewer people competent at their jobs.
Only the weather satellites in geostationary orbits provide near real-time imagery, and they lack the resolution to spot something the size of an aircraft. High resolution images come from spy satellites in highly inclined low orbits which provide only intermittent coverage of any particular location. And they can't see through clouds.
I believe for “routine” training they’ll keep a radar reflector in them. Very little need to have stealth when bouncing around the US.
Caveat, I was in the Air Force and I'm not too familiar with NATOPS which is what I believe the Marines would be operating under to determine SOP. I was not a pilot, but I was in operations and received the same briefings. My training was also from when we first got real stealth fighters and SOP has probably evolved a lot in the last decade.
What's most interesting about this story to me is... What sort of mishap would lead to an ejection with autopilot left functioning? That all seems very peculiar. Weird way to join the Caterpillar Club.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterpillar_Club
https://www.commondraft.org/Caterpillar-Club-certificate.png
No, I was a little tyke at the time. (The story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33348425)
Worst case scenario someone slaved it to a netowrk and stole it since the f35bs have VTOL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luneburg_lens#Radar_reflector
(caption: "Luneburg reflectors (the marked protrusion) on an F-35")
edit: Also here (with quotes from a US Air Force Avionics Technician):
https://theaviationgeekclub.com/these-devices-make-stealth-a... ("How Luneburg lens radar reflectors are used to make stealth aircraft visible on radar screens")
https://spectrum.ieee.org/passive-radar-with-sdr
Your receiver is "passive" - it doesn't emit a signal - so the attacking enemy has to find it visually. If the enemy bomb all the TV antennas then you need to emit your own signal to generate the reflection.
(And even if it did, radar is not magic. If the plane is at the bottom of a murky lake, then no amount of radar or satellite imagery is going to find it.)
The purpose of the radar would not be to see the plane at the bottom of a lake, but to provide a flight path after the ejection. If they had radar coverage, they should be able to see either where it ejected with an unstable flight path that put it within a fairly small circle of the ejection or on a stable flight path that gives them a more or less straight line to search along.
have you been watching prime-time crime fighting drama TV shows?
the implementation of that system is probably 8x as bad as it sounds, and it sounds too complex to implement in less than two decades.
real-time (or "near" real-time, whatever that means) imagery of every square inch of the continental US? No.
Just one example of how this kind of stuff plays out in the real world.
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Onx46fLyncM
What's really scary about ATC vectoring the fighters in is a bad actor could just as easily use that open comms to evade the fighter aircraft. Although they're obviously faster and more maneuverable it gets back to the first scenario I mentioned - the fighters can't find a target when they're not actively trying to evade them.
It would be pretty easy and straightforward for a bad actor to get a few hours of lessons, take up a Cessna loaded with improvised explosives of some type, and do a lot of damage. A lot of smaller air strips/fields don't even have a tower so they could get up there before anyone really has a clue.
I'm (as a German) a drone pilot myself and looking to start ultralight next year, and the topic of TFRs/NOTAMs annoys me to no end even when just flying a drone. Tons of junk, hard to parse and keep track of, and hell I get that the primary glass of aircraft is supposed to be certified, but why on earth aren't there smartphone/tablet apps that keep up with TFRs and alert a pilot? Most of GA is low altitude anyway so in reach of cellphone towers.
[1] https://fixingnotams.org/the-problem-why-are-pilots-deeply-c...
Like many unusual situations there are usually at least two things that need to happen to cause the scenario I described:
1) Ignorance to TFRs/NOTAMS (Notice to Airman for those unfamiliar).
2) Loss of communication with the correct air traffic control.
When air traffic control notices these people violate airspace they always try to reach them via radio. In the event they're reachable it's "we have a phone number for you". When they go silent it's send up some fighters AND "here's a phone number for you".
> Most of GA is low altitude anyway so in reach of cellphone towers.
This is frowned upon. When airlines ask you to turn off your cell phones it is for two real reasons:
1) Pay attention to the safety briefing (no one does anyway, and no one turns their cell phones off).
2) The request of cell carriers. From what I understand cellular devices at altitude with significantly better line of sight are somewhat problematic to the towers as devices are able to attempt connection/association to many more than they usually would. Apparently combined with the faster speed the carriers don't appreciate this. Of course they deal with it with all kinds of means in terms of directional antennas, etc but like I said I've heard it's an issue.
I point out #2 because there's likely little industry support for the approach you describe. Additionally, you add an additional safety issue because users (pilots) will learn to depend on them and the variability of cell connectivity at altitude, weather, speed, geography, etc is uncertain. Aviation doesn't like that.
> 1) Ignorance to TFRs/NOTAMS (Notice to Airman for those unfamiliar).
> 2) Loss of communication with the correct air traffic control.
Yeah, #1 is easy enough to happen because NOTAM (and, while we're ranting, METAR as well, or the fact that aviation still uses feet and knots despite everyone but the US and UK being on metric) is fundamentally broken, a relic of very old times that has never been updated (similar to the clusterfuck that is flight/staff planning and booking) because no one wants to invest money into upgrading all the legacy crap. So all it takes for a serious incident is a simple human error: forgetting to change a comms frequency, overlooking a NOTAM in all the spam, or accidentally using metric units.
> I point out #2 because there's likely little industry support for the approach you describe. Additionally, you add an additional safety issue because users (pilots) will learn to depend on them and the variability of cell connectivity at altitude, weather, speed, geography, etc is uncertain. Aviation doesn't like that.
I wasn't talking about commercial air flights, I was referring to the Cessna and other small-scale GA. They're barely faster than a high-speed train (an 172 manages 300 km/h, a German ICE 350 km/h, and I can use LTE in the latter), so for wide parts of any GA flight a pilot should have LTE access on their phone.
Anyway: yes, people will learn to depend on their phones/tablets to alert them if they enter a TFR zone or that they have to change their radio frequency. But ffs... the status quo leads to so many issues every year [1], because pilots have zero assistance if they're in an older plane with a classic, no-glass setup, or in a plane with a glass cockpit but no assistance. Adding a fallback option is the safer way, it avoids incidents.
And the truly safe way would be to upgrade all the legacy crap, or at least augment it in a backward-compatible way: a digital carrier in radios that can carry cryptographically signed messages for radios that signal new frequency and squawk codes, for example, that the pilot simply has to confirm and be done.
[1] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/8751/how-often-...
There is also FltPlanGo which is free, but it is less full featured than foreflight.
This reminds me of Barry Seal taking advantage of his slower aircraft with a million dollar door to avoid the faster jets with short legs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODIZKyevVxQ
of course, the majority of that movie turned the creative license knob to an 11
Thing is, in these scenarios they're the only armed aircraft around and their targets never have radar or any instrumentation/defense/even detection for it. So they could (and likely do) blast and paint all day and they still can't find bug smashers in dense urban environments like you most often see with TFRs.
I can understand the fighter radar is probably designed assuming assistance from AWACS but it still seems really strange to me.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash
ATC radar regularly loses small planes on 'primary' radar (primary radar being pure radar), and has to rely on the transponder. There are many areas where you simply don't have primary coverage, especially close to the ground. I've flown through military controlled airspace where they lose radar contact with me in a Cessna less than 10 miles from the base.
If near real-time, you mean a couple of times per day. There aren't enough LEO observation satellites to provide complete coverage.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220804-the-lost-nuclear...
> The US Department of Defense has officially recognized at least 32 "Broken Arrow" incidents from 1950 to 1980.
https://www-tc.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/media/filer_p...
> Unofficially, the Defense Atomic Support Agency (now known as the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA)) has detailed hundreds of "Broken Arrow" incidents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_nuclear... ("Broken Arrow refers to an accidental event that involves nuclear weapons, warheads or components that does not create a risk of nuclear war.")
You crash an end-of-life trainer dressed up as an F35 in a carefully chosen site with no natural foot traffic. The FBI then sits in a bush and arrests everyone that turns up.
The F35 is the prime intelligence target for Russia before it gets in Ukrainian hands so they might risk some of their most valuable "illegals" i.e. the long-term embedded agents with flawless identities. For a big target, you gotta go big. Hang out the biggest prize in the most embarrassing way you can. This is a typical type of plot from The Americans TV show.
That or it's testing the adversarial satellite or balloon surveillance tech for how long it takes to find the craft. Maybe it's a test of Open Source Intelligence networks. Maybe it had genuine stealth tech and they are monitoring channels to find out if it was being successfully tracked. A top of the line stealth craft is hell of a honeypot so there are endless things that might get revealed - I imagine all hostile intelligence networks are lit up like christmas trees - it's like a barium meal.
Do I believe any of these? Nah. Reality is more ridiculous than fiction so no doubt it really is the case that they have just lost a prize intelligence asset.
Meanwhile the loony tune demographic has decided that it flew to China on Biden's orders.
At least do the "prize value" salvage reward they do for ships.
Hills of south carolina are out of its juristiction.
Seriously though, these jets sound terribly overpriced for how unreliable they seem to be.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Gunners
https://ayearinthecountry.co.uk/the-nightmare-man-part-1-col...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's all politics at the end anyway.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
Note that you need to compare with competing programs.
Notably, F35 can be actually seriously produced (unlike say its supposed competition Su-57)
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.
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.
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.
No, because that's in part "let the human pilot make decisions".
> Besides, it's pretty common for AI systems to overtake human capabilities these days...
Not in the realm of "should I shoot that thing?" sort of 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.
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...
What makes you think that AI can't incorporate those into decision making? Pilots do these through instruments anyway.
The fact that state-of-the-art AI already fails at much simpler decisions.
In the case of the Black Sea incident, the potential consequences include global thermonuclear war.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the age of the Strategic Corporal, they absolutely are.
I'm not sure how accurate that is historically.
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".
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.
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.
Maybe, but what do you figure the US military will use?
The smaller drones are not usually autonomous. See the Starlink alleged incident.
Inertial guidance is popular but very expensive to do accurately with laser gyros. I'm surprised there haven't been more "terrain following" systems.
There's probably always going to be a continuum between manned and unmanned platforms, and a discussion about SEAD.
Ukraine says it happened and Musk does too - is ‘alleged’ needed?
What other agenda could be going on here? They are both hiding some Russian capabilities from us?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I highly doubt it. At least I hope so.
Nobody dreams of becoming a drone pilot. At the end of the day it's a cubicle job.
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...
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
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...
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.
'Advancements in AI' have reached a point where they can affect everything from your smartphone to a box of cereal.
"Dogfight Over Ukraine Shows The Air War Is Still Very Much Being Fought" - https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/dogfight-over-ukraine-...
Because F-35 operation manual, chapter 1, "Combat prerequisites":
Lob anti-SAM missiles till the enemy wouldn't have any operational SAM, then you can fly in on your fancy F-35.
/s but only slightly
And the F-15EX Eagle II is an even newer aircraft.
The F-15C/D are still air-to-air fighters.
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.
Naturally, by the time they accomplished that, they had thrown away all their advantages and handed the migs their disadvantages on a silver platter.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
*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?
> 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"
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.
Uh huh. https://media.cheggcdn.com/media/1fe/1fe5f562-7e84-4761-9bce...
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.
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.
One example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdwjcayPuag
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.
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.
QED
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)
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.
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.
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.
The fact remains: the big war you're talking about is being fought with incredibly obsolete weapons.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr7ym1zkda8
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.
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.
The A-10 is great, but you can replace 1 A-10 with 100 loitering drones and get 90% of the capability.
Modern radar can detect and track low flying aircraft just fine.
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.
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].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_losses_during...
[1] https://dpaa-mil.sites.crmforce.mil/dpaaFamWebInKoreanAirBat...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aviation_accidents_and...
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.
Going per oryx's numbers.
Ukraine (https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-docum...).
- 71 Aircraft
- 35 Helicopters
- 25 UAV's
- 166 Recon UAV's.
297 total.
But.
Russia (https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-docum...)
- 90 Aircraft
- 105 Helicopters
- 14 UAV's
- 286 Recon UAV's.
495 total.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
The UK for example currently has a fleet of 32, and Australia has 50.
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.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
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:
* https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/18/justin-trudeau-says-canada-w...
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.
Allies buying American hardware isnt necessarily a sign of quality, also. America puts pressure on them to buy its hardware.
Realistically it was probably the better choice.
The US MIC was probably more cut up about it than Turkey which is probably why this stunt was pulled: https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2020/06/29/us-could-buy...
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.
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.
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.
The F-35's "killer feature" is non other than the US nuclear umbrella.
https://www.navalgazing.net/The-Case-for-the-F-35
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?
PAK FA/T-50/Su-57 is the same Russian fighter.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_Su-57
- 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.
http://madscientistsclub.com/books.html
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.
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-106217
The next generation may be the questionable one.
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.
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.
Just from perusing the stats for other military planes that seems pretty good actually.
It makes maintenance far easier and over the long run results in significantly reduced costs.
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.
The high price may cause them to be unreliable, because they are so expensive to operate they don't get enough flying time to work the bugs out.
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.
This 2020 article is a good read for anyone still listening here: https://siliconangle.com/2020/06/30/us-navys-largest-migrati...
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.
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.
> $1.2 trillion to operate and maintain the fleet over more than 60 years.
Initial design was 1947, still being used as tow planes for gliders in the Navy.
> The "Cornfield Bomber" is the nickname given to a Convair F-106 Delta Dart, operated by the 71st Fighter-Interceptor Squadron of the United States Air Force. In 1970, during a training exercise, it made an unpiloted landing in a farmer's field in Montana, suffering only minor damage, after the pilot had ejected from the aircraft. The aircraft, recovered and repaired, was returned to service, and is currently on display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force.
Given it's a military plane (which IIRC, aren't required to have transponders or have them activated) and stealth. it seems understandable that it would be hard to find if it didn't crash immediately.
> One of the other pilots on the mission was reported to have radioed Foust during his descent by parachute that "you'd better get back in it!"
Seems like you'd want them activated in domestic airspace.