The VTOL version of the F-35 is insanely complicated.[1] Here's a Harrier doing the same thing.[2] VTOL runs the cost way up, and VTOL with stealth is even more expensive. (Can't do both at the same time, not with all that stuff sticking out.)
The justification, though, is not unreasonable. If you want to project air power, and don't have VTOL, you need a full sized air base or carrier within range. With VTOL, you can operate from a smaller firebase or a small carrier.
The US's small carriers are the USMC's amphibious assault ships, the Wasp and America classes. The US currently has 9 of these, and is building more of the America class. Each is a self contained package of military power - about 1700 Marines and their gear, helicopters, VTOL fighters, Osprey VTOLs, landing craft, and missiles. Everything you need for a small war. That's where the F-35 was supposed to be useful.
Marine aviation is very small, and they are naval aviators, so Marine squadrons do carrier duty. But they are small and mobile, and want to be able to operate from remove patches of dirt. Helicopters in general, and the F35B and V22 in particular are principle enablers of CAP. And Marines generally do not want Air Force over them as they tend to prefer Army and Naval aviator brand of CAP.
The Army is not allowed jets per the same post WWII regulations that separated the Army Air Corps to form the Air Force service branch.
The massively shorter range of VTOL aircraft completely negates any advantage of being stationed closer to the front that small patches of dirt give you.
Note that both the Harrier and the F-35B are generally STOVL, not VTOL. Dry weight of the B is 32,000lbs, and globalsecurity says the lift fan can only produce 39,700lbs of thrust. A single JDAM weighs 2,000lbs. Doesn't leave much room for fuel. V-22 is the same way.
Full-sized carriers have theirr own issues, though. Maybe you don't want to use a small city with its own protective navy and full-sized air force for every expeditionary mission. Smaller cruiser-sized platforms could fill a more flexible role while being abpe to be in many more places at once.
Like, if you play EVE, would you really rather have a more widely-available Thanatos if it meant giving up Ishtars?
The Marines do, which is one of their strengths. The USMC has ground-pounders, tanks, rotary and fixed wing air, and landing craft. Doctrine is to use them together under one commander. "All operations are combined operations." The package is intended to win small and medium sized battles without needing other resources for 2-4 weeks. That's enough to deal with many crises. For the big jobs, it gives the Big Army time to position its heavy resources. Right now, there are four US Navy amphibious assault ships at sea, loaded up with Marines, weapons, and aircraft, spread around the world just in case they're needed in a hurry.
The U.S. Army, when not in combat, is a resource pool. Deployment involves pulling together various units and equipment from different locations and sending them somewhere. The mix of units depends on the task. "Moving Mountains", by Gen. Gus Patronis, describes how this was done for the Gulf War.
Agree. Each service branch is a different culture. The different branches' cultures are reflective per their mission and the resultant qualifications and standards for the 'type' of person that would be able to pass the training requirements respective of the mission. Air Force and USMC are the most profoundly dissimilar, where a more appropriate analogy might be a comparison of Google to IH.
Combat veteran here (Afghanistan, 2012). You have no idea what you're talking about. War is very hard on morale. You're away from your family killing people who are trying kill you, hoping to live through it, and most of all hoping that in the right moments you'll be able to summon all your strength and courage to fight bravely and honorably. In spite of all your hopes and fears you see death in the most inglorious circumstances. I had a friend of mine who was killed while taking a dump. Try that for a morale booster.
To answer your question directly, I hope you care because you vote, and because regardless of what you think we fight and die for you because we believe your life and liberty are precious. Mistakes and inefficient equipment and organizational structures cost lives (maybe mine, certainly others). And if a "better" organized military only results in us being a little happier day-to-day, is that really so much to ask?
To be clear I was working under the (unjustified, hypothetical) assumption that while tradition gives us the separate branches, a different organization would be more effective in the long run.
Obviously moral is very important, I don't mean to dispute that. I was saying I don't care for the branches' cultural continuity prima faciae. A temporary drop in moral is bad, but if the new organization really is better the drop should only be temporary and moral should recover long term.
The second part of my argument is a mere whip that if we got ourselves into a "big moral/self-evidentally important war", that would bost moral more than the reorg would hurt it.
A good concrete example of this principle is integrating women into all combat rolls. In the short-term I imagine this absolutely will distablize the culture and probably hurt moral in certain quarters. In the long term, I hope the culture(s) will change and moral will recover.
> But as a civilian, I'm not sure why I'd give a shit.
I hope you give a shit about the effectiveness of theprotection others are delivering you. The sort of person who works well in the Air Force is not the same sort of person who works well in the Army is not the same sort of person who works well in the Navy is not the same sort of person who works well in the Marine Corps. The jobs of the services are fundamentally different, as are the mindsets & aptitudes of those in them.
The Air Force is a mid-century corporation: it has metrics and deliverables (literal deliverables), and is oriented towards long-term sustainment of whatever it is asked to do. It's very, very good at building an organisation to do the same thing for years, with good morale for its people because they are never tasked too hard, and excellent safety results because that's important when operation a mid-century concern. On the downside, most of it is not really all that flexible, and its culture is not, in the main, oriented towards enduring long-term suffering (there are exceptions). If you have something you want done, you ask the Air Force. If you ask an Air Force officer to secure a building, he'll buy it.
The Army is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. It's all about mass, directed according to very strict orders. If you need to pave 1,000 miles of road, the Army Corps of Engineers will do it, according to its plans. If you need to garrison a town, the Army will do it, all nicely and neatly and according to plan. If you have a problem someone's faced before, you want the Army. There's a field manual for everything: a field manual for improvised munitions (because of course there's a manual for improvisation), a field manual for executions, a field manual for skiing. If you ask an Army officer to secure a building, he'll surround it and not let anyone in or out without authorisation.
The Navy is a floating, violent industrial plant. It never does the same thing twice; it's always going to one new port or another. It's not as laid-back as the Air Force, nor as regulation-bound as the Army. It speaks an entirely different dialect of the English language, for no particularly obvious reason. If you have a problem that no-one has ever seen before, you ask the Navy for a solution. If you ask a Naval officer to secure a building, he'll make sure a sailor sweeps & swabs the decks, and puts out the lights.
The Marines are a cult. They worship at the shrines of Chesty Puller, Dan Daly, Smedley Butler & John Basilone. They think that war is a racket, but they don't particularly care: they enjoy the racket. If you absolutely, positively need it dead or destroyed within 24 hours or less, you call the Marine Corps. If you ask a Marine to secure a building, he will take it by force, killing or capturing everyone inside. If he does a particularly good job of it, he'll be deified and join the pantheon along Puller &c.
If you put someone well-suited to the Marine Corps in the Air Force, he'll be fired for getting into a little trouble on the weekends. If you put someone well-suited to the Navy in the Army, he'll go out of his mind from boredom. If you put someone well-suited to the Air Force in the Army, he'll be miserable and quit. If you put someone well-suited to the Army in the Navy, he'll just be generally appalled.
The different services have different roles, different strengths and different weaknesses. Those differences are why they are well-prepared for a major conflict.
See my comments on the first response. I don't mean to dispute that the branches have different cultures today or moral is affected by cultural continuity.
It's not so much morale (although that is important) as it is about effectiveness: someone effective at Marine combat won't be effective at Air Force combat, and vice versa, and similarly for the Navy and the Army. They're different jobs, and different people do well in them.
Certainly different jobs require different skills, but do the jobs inherently sort themselves into a few branches which ought to operate with some independence? I don't know the answer, but it doesn't strike me as an obvious yes.
I don't think being unmanned will change much in terms of basing requirements. You still want to deliver the same weapons to the same targets with the same warheads, and that will take an aircraft of roughly the same size, weight, and fuel capacity to carry. You may not need pilots, at least in the aircraft, but you still need a big groundcrew to service engines, mechanical components, control computers, weapons and fueling, radar, etc. And you'll still need a big collection of spare parts, plus fuel and weapons.
What you get is the ability to stay aloft for longer, since no pilot needs a break, but you're still limited by fuel, albeit with ariel refueling, and weapons, if you're actually going to carry out attacks. You also get increased maneuverability from not having to keep a pilot alive and healthy, not sure how much that will help anything though. Maybe they'll be able to dodge missiles a little better? Probably the biggest change is that it's much less politically provocative to shoot down a drone, and much less politically risky to lose one, so they may be deployed more readily and in larger numbers.
Cheaper missiles, lighter planes, more minimal crewing requirements, it all adds up.
A large portion of the carrier space is dedicated to serving the enormous number of people that are needed to operate it. If you had only 20 people it could be a much smaller vessel.
They still need to take off from somewhere and land for refueling, though I expect they can have a much shorter take off and landing than a manned fighter even if they are not true VTOL.
We have almost as many carriers (19) as the rest of the world combined (21). We have nine 100,000 ton carriers, the biggest carrier on the "rest of world fleet" is 55,000 tons. Our small carriers are bigger than the majority of carriers in the ROWF.
But if course we need more carriers because we aren't at war and no one risks attacking us for fear of nuclear annilation.
Doesn't look like the F-35 is going to be able to VIFF then!
Popular culture has it that this was a key capability of the Harrier in the Falklands War, where they were up against the much faster Mirage, but VIFFing allowed the harrier to unpredictably move out of a pursuing Mirage's flight envelope.
F-35 is actually STOVL. Short-takeoff, vertical landing. Which allows it all of the flexiblity you mentioned above, but in combat the F-35 does not take off vertically.
My understanding is that vertical liftoff is mostly for show. Operationally it tends to be more STOL, the V is only there for when the mission parameters demand it, at the expense of the heinous fuel cost of (particularly) take off
It's more like it can't lift off vertically with a full load of weapons and fuel, so you need to skimp on one of those two things to do the straight vertical takeoff.
>Israel is the only country that has been allowed to make significant modifications to the F-35: its variant, nicknamed the Adir (‘the mighty one’), includes a few extra computer systems of Israel’s own devising.
What might these be?
Edit: Hey, maybe the submitter knows. Zero comments and the username "adir-one".
Israel developed a plugin framework on top of plane's main OS so they can hook up their own legacy systems[1]. Supposedly Lockheed Matrin reluctantly offered a SDK to Israelis.
It's hard to know, without a major conflict answer these questions in the field (or sky).
Air forces played huge role in WW2. Fighters were important for establishing air control and that determined outcomes. There have been few examples since. The 1967 war between Israel & the Syrian-Egyptian alliance and follow up in 1973 were influential conflicts between modern (at the time) air forces.
In 1967, Israel won the air-war early. This basically won the war and fighters played a primary role. In 1973, Egypt successfully established a forward front using ground forces. Their missile air-defence made this possible, missiles made fighters ineffective in a limited area. If modern missile defence can do this for a 100x larger area, fighters might be confined to a much smaller role.
That was 45 years ago. Who knows where we are now, what's redundant and what's crucial. When WW2 broke out, there was a long process of figuring out what worked in a modern war. It's hard to know in advance. Big gun ships were thought to be very important, but aircraft carriers and smaller battle ships ended up being more important.
The US, Russia etc haven't fought a modern enemy in 2 generations. That's like building factories for 40 years which may one day need to produce goods. There's a high likelihood you are building the wrong thing entirely.
It's a good point. Terrorizing an urban population with $200 drones doesn't seem like an unrealistic scenario. How would a tool like the F-35 be used to combat this situation? I think it would be fairly useless.
Yes, we aren't going to risk $150M+ planes at low altitude trying to shoot $200 drones with a gun that only carries a few seconds of ammo, or try destroying them with million dollar air to air missiles.
The F35 is entirely unsuited for low altitude operations, or dog fighting with other fighter planes. It's only good for hiding miles away at higher altitudes and firing missiles.
He said a $200 drone, which would be something similar to the tiny, low-flying commercial offerings. You couldn't take that out with an F-35 without destroying an entire city block along with it.
We still fly nukes on 58 in service B-52s -- so fighters this advanced are good to protect those massive bombers and make quick surgical strikes such as the syrian one mentioned.
Again Drones should be far more cost effective at taking out SAM sites, as well as safer.
We don't have drones big enough to carry the weapons load of a B52, and those capabilities are pretty far off. Buts it's still hard to imagine a scenario where you need a F-35 to protect a B-52, there simply isn't an effective air threat to us outside of China/USSR and those wars would be nuclear.
A scenario like war with Iran makes more sense, but it's likely that very quickly their fighters are swept from the sky (Iraqs lasted days). At that point the air defense is all SAM sure and the F-35 is not the best tool for that. And F-22s are probably close to as effective as F-35 in air to air combat. So why do we need 2,400 F-35s?
1. There are not any UCAVs (unmanned combat aerial vehicle) currently deployed that have capabilities close to those of current-generation fighter aircraft. That is being worked on, though not at the level I would like to see.
Current generation drones are (as far as I am aware) designed to be piloted remotely, and aren't really designed to shoot down other aircraft.
2. With missiles that can strike an enemy from beyond visual range [1], it is often argued that dogfighting is no longer important. Current generation missiles are supposed to be pretty good.
3. There are degrees of stealth, and improvements to detection systems also continue. As far as missiles go, people have generally had a hard time shooting down stealth aircraft, though it is possible.
4. Combat against other aircraft, and close air support (CAS), where the fighter is attacking ground targets. Modern jet fighters don't do a great job at CAS, with the exception of the A-10, because of operational cost (too high), speed (too high), and loiter time (too low). There have been proposals to deploy propeller-powered aircraft such as the Super Tucano for CAS, because enemy aircraft haven't been a problem in recent conflicts.
5. Probably yesterday... if you count flying patrols.
"1. There are not any UCAVs (unmanned combat aerial vehicle) currently deployed that have capabilities close to those of current-generation fighter aircraft. That is being worked on, though not at the level I would like to see.
Current generation drones are (as far as I am aware) designed to be piloted remotely, and aren't really designed to shoot down other aircraft."
Right. There has been discussion of a drone version of the F-35. I couldn't find much recent discussion, which probably means it's now behind the veil of classification. One thing to remember is that as you need more speed, range, and payload that will be directly reflected in the size of the aircraft. Small drones can't carry a lot of weapons, fly particularly fast, or very far.
I read an interesting article fairly recently where Russian ideas for unmanned fighter aircraft were discussed - the approach there looks to be manned "leader" aircraft directing larger numbers of unmanned drones. This is probably how the West will go as well, since it's important to have local C&C in case communication systems are compromised. It also at least gives the appearance of "human in the loop" rather than fully autonomous lethal operations.
"2. With missiles that can strike an enemy from beyond visual range [1], it is often argued that dogfighting is no longer important. Current generation missiles are supposed to be pretty good."
While this is all highly classified, it's unlikely that any adversary's long-range radar guided missiles will work against the F-22 or F-35 (or B-2 for that matter) at anything like their maximum range. A guess would be that if the missile had a max range of 100 miles against a Gen4 target, it would have an effective range of 10 miles or less against a Gen5 target.
The Achilles heel of stealth aircraft is IR detection. There is no getting around the laws of thermodynamics and waste heat. There are some mitigations that help, such as rectangular cross section engine exhausts, but LWIR missiles detect the thermal radiation from the rigid body (hardbody) of the aircraft and home in on that.
Note the mention of the "backup" IR sensor (BTW the described system is quite interesting in other ways):
It is worth noting that having a high-quality IR sensor on a hypersonic missile is a very tough problem due to heating.
"3. There are degrees of stealth, and improvements to detection systems also continue. As far as missiles go, people have generally had a hard time shooting down stealth aircraft, though it is possible."
If you're able to locate the stealth aircraft in time, IR missiles can be effective. The problem is that it's likely the first realization you'll have a stealth aircraft is around is when it launches a missile at you. One virtue of sensor fusion and networked aircraft is that aircraft further back (including AWACS) can use radar, then deliver targeting information to aircraft closer to the enemy. The F-35 can also cue weapons from other platforms - recently there was a successful test where an F-35 successfully guided a Navy SM-6 SAM against an air target. The SM-6 has over a 200 mile range...
> The problem is that it's likely the first realization you'll have a stealth aircraft is around is when it launches a missile at you.
Stealth aircraft still reflect radiowaves, they just don't reflect them back at the source. This can be effectively countered by separating radar transmitter and receiver in space.
It is also possible to use existing transmitters (e.g., FM radio, cell towers) to build passive radar that does not emit anything itself.
"Stealth aircraft still reflect radiowaves, they just don't reflect them back at the source. This can be effectively countered by separating radar transmitter and receiver in space."
There are also radar absorbing materials and coatings involved, though to be sure they don't absorb everything. The modern curved stealth airframes also diffuse the return, weakening it considerably.
"It is also possible to use existing transmitters (e.g., FM radio, cell towers) to build passive radar that does not emit anything itself."
Sure, although stealth aircraft are most vulnerable to long wavelength radar, which lack precise positional detection.
Also, if you're using cell/FM etc. transmitters, those are easily shut down by strikes on power stations, or EMP.
An interesting, revolutionary approach is quantum radar, which uses entanglement to detect photon interaction with the target. It's pretty far from prime time though.
Diffusing the return is actually good for the radar. If all return goes in one direction and there happens to be no radar receivers in that direction, radar won't detect anything. With diffused return at least some of it is reaching the receivers.
Cell tower signals have higher frequency than VHF, which makes position estimation easier. Cell towers will work for a few days even if power grid goes down. There are too many of them to take out individually. Nuclear blast has EMP powerful enough to burn them, but by that time you probably no longer need stealth.
With access to baseband code in modern cell phones it might be possible to build distributed passive radar surreptitiously. There is enough processing power, exact time and location from GPS, and communication over LTE.
>How important are top-gun style "dogfights" in modern warfare?
Modern medium-range air-to air missile (AMRAAM AIM-120D) has optimal launch distance (best probability of kill) roughly 100 km. (max range 160+ km).
Short range IR-guided missiles have range 20-30 km. Optimal range closer to 20 km.
While modern missiles can be launched from almost any position, good Pk (probability of kill) from long range is not realistic unless the fighter is flying high speed, at high altitude towards the target. Medium and long range missiles spend energy accelerating to maximum speed and climbing up to thinner atmosphere for their mid-course flight. Flying fast and high towards the enemy increases the range of the missile.
After launching medium-range air-to air missile (AMRAAM) within 100 km it takes only 20 seconds before fighter meet at the close range where IR-quided missiles are used. F-35 have sustained rate of turn between 5-20 degrees per second (depending on altitude, speed, loading).
Flying high speed at maximum altitude leaves little or no room to turn and keep standoff distance.
If the enemies keeps coming there will be almost certain dogfight.
The advantage of stealthy F-35 against conventional 4 generation fighter is that it can get radar lock from long range, and the missile can maintain that lock from longer distance. Being first in position to launch is huge advantage and it forces enemy to start evasive maneuvers.
Enemy will adapt it's strategy against F-35 of course. IR-sensors help to negate some of the radar stealth advantage and the technology is advancing fast. Carrying more decoys, chaff helps also.
Using drones in air combat will change many things.
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>If everyone has stealth aircraft, how do they even find eachother to fight? How do missiles work?
IR-sensors are added into medium and long range missiles. This has not happened yet, but it's almost certain development.
Air superiority keeps your enemy from dropping ordinance on you when you're advancing along the highway towards the capital. It also lets you drop ordinance on enemy armor and artillery, two of the biggest impediments to advancing ground forces. As a former infantryman, fighters are one of those things that you really want on your side. They are really a powerful psychological weapon, too. I have a friend who is a fighter pilot and "dogfighting" in the Top Gun sense has gone the way of the Dodo bird. Fire and forget missiles are the way of the future -- and more specifically, fire and forget missiles from drone fighters. If the American military could take the men out of the fight and replace them with autonomous robots and drones, they wouldn't hesitate. Of course, it's not possible now, but it's just a matter of technology advancing to that point.
The air force is run by fighter jocks, that's why they are already hesitating to use drones which will be as effective as the F35 for a tenth the cost.
> If everyone has stealth aircraft, how do they even find eachother to fight? How do missiles work?
Stealth isn't like a Star Trek cloaking device - they're still detectable, just not as much. Lets them get closer to targets before being detected, but if you fly a B-2 right over a radar site it's likely to get picked up.
Missiles can be guided by a more powerful ground radar or an AWACS aircraft, and some are capable of optical and heat-seeking operation.
>How important are top-gun style "dogfights" in modern warfare?
>If everyone has stealth aircraft, how do they even find eachother to fight?
There are two major tasks when trying to shoot down an airplane: detecting it and bringing a missile to it. Detecting a stealth fighter is possible with a long wavelength radar[1]. The problem is that the precision of location it provides is not sufficient for targeting the airplane, because an air-to-air missile needs to be very close to target in order to shoot it down (think <10 meters). Short wavelength radars are typically used for targeting airplanes as they provide very precise location. But such radars can "see" stealth fighters only at very short distances, when it's too late to counteract.
So the idea of fighting one stealth fighter with another would be a) bring our fighter into the approximate area where the hostile fighter is, and b) let the pilot figure out the enemy's exact location using an on-board short wavelength radar and/or FLIR [2].
Since (b) can happen at rather large distances (think 40-50kms) it is believed that a dogfight is very unlikely nowadays, because modern air-to-air missiles allow shooting down reliably the adversary long before two planes become close enough for a dogfight.
There are two ways how missiles target airplanes. The problem with missiles is that they are too small to have a powerful radar sufficient for long-range targeting. Therefore one way is to "highlight" the target by a powerful radar (typically ground-based) so missiles can use the "reflected" signal for navigation. That's how long-range surface-to-air missiles typically work.
Air-to-air missiles operate at shorter ranges and typically use infra-red detectors for navigation. Stealth fighters emit only slightly less heat radiation than regular fighter jets and therefore very vulnerable to IR targeting.
I believe there are various combinations of both approaches, but that's another story.
Overall this is a pretty good article that avoids most of the misinformation that tends to be propagated whenever the F-35 comes up.
However, calling the F-35 the "most expensive weapon ever built" is extremely misleading. This video explains it better than I ever could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyHlp7tJrxY&feature=youtu.be... ("F-35 Lightning II: Busting Myths - Episode 2").
The entire video series is well worth a watch if you have any interest at all in the subject.
The $1.1 trillion cost is for research, production, maintenance, fuel, and weapons for 2500 planes from the time they first started flying in 2006 until they retire in 2065. When you do the math, this plane is actually cheaper than some other planes. The main reason for the huge dollar number is that it's the first plane to be fully accounted for over the lifetime of the entire program.
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Again, the above is just paraphrasing the claims in the video. They are not my claims.
> Is there any indication whether backdoors are added to sophisticated weapons systems like this sold to other countries?
Yes, and they've been inadvertently revealed at least once. On mobile so I can't find a source atm but it was concerning some french equipment.
It's not as big an issue as you might imagine, largely because nations tend to only sell military equipment to other nations that have aligned interests.
Do you have a reference for that - the UK did a lot to try and stop Argentina getting more Exocets during the Falklands War (which is presumably what you are referring to) but I don't recall any references to the UK exploiting any explicit backdoors that the French had put in the missiles.
The claim of Excocet backdoor rest on the thin reed that somehow the French supplied the codes but U.K. Leaders didn't use them, willingly risking the lives of hundreds of their sailers, for "strategic reasons", while the U.K. Was already in danger of quitting the war had they lost more key ships such as carriers or transports.
And Exocets were "fire and forget" missiles with 3 mins to target flight time. They had no need for a remote control system once launched. They flew only a couple meters above the sea, and didn't turn on radar until half way into flight, making them extremely hard to detect until the last seconds.
What's the cost of getting caught? If think getting caught has financial repercussions on the business whilst not adding a backdoor has potential terminal repercussions to your life.
"The Navy awarded a construction contract for CVN 78 in September 2008 when 5 of the ship's 13 critical technologies were mature and with only 65 percent of the ship's three-dimensional model complete. Since then, the lead ship's procurement costs have grown by almost 23 percent from $10.5 billion to $12.9 billion—the limit of the ship's current legislated cost cap—with four technologies still immature. The ship's critical technologies continue to experience developmental challenges, which poses risks to the ship's testing and delivery schedule. CVN 79 is also subject to a cost cap of $11.5 billion and its program office has adopted a new two-phased approach to construction to manage its costs. While this strategy may enable the Navy to meet the cost cap, it will also transfer some ship construction to the phase following delivery."
The F-35 pilot who flew during the F-35s overwhelming defeat by an F-16 in dogfight testing (yes it lost to a 40 year old design that had its performance degraded by keeping wing tanks on) reported the helmet was too large for the confined cockpit and made turning his head to see the enemy difficult.
It's also been reported that the helmet is a safety risk because of its weight.
The scenario the article starts with is almost certainly untrue. Defense experts are very skeptical Israel would send their F-35s into action only a month after receiving them and before finishing testing.
After telling the story and including an "unquestionable" source, then he says "it’s worth bearing in mind that no one with any knowledge of how air forces operate thinks it’s remotely likely". This is an example of why I read the similar NYR but did not renew the LRB for a second year...
I really don't understand this article's high tendency to slip in tangents that have little to do - long sentences enclosed by brackets, or worse, hyphens which made side stories hard to distinguish from main story. Those things have so little to do with the actual subject of review and serve little purpose. Perhaps they're there to show off the author's knowledge on the subject matter?
Perhaps I'm too used to engineering style writing which just cuts to the chase. Is it common for book reviews to include those bloats?
Makes for an interesting question. It would certainly be unusual to use a brand-new untested weapon sent on a combat mission so soon. On the other hand, the IAF has been known for sometimes doing bold, risky, and unusual things, and hitting the Syrians with brand-new F-35s would have a lot of value in reminding the Assad regime not to mess with them.
On the other hand, how many people can tell the difference between a F-35 and a F-16 streaking by at 500mph, dropping a bunch of bombs with no warning whatsoever? It also wouldn't be too surprising to see some unfortunate Syrian soldiers tell their superiors that they were hit by F-35s when they actually have no idea what hit them. Makes them look less bad that they failed to stop an attack by a super-high-tech jet, and probably good for surviving it. It would even fit for the Israelis to subtly encourage any such rumors, if they could.
Israel plans on conducting (and is actively conducting) a flight test program with their F-35s. This program is just beginning! They are eager to use their new aircraft, but does anyone really believe that the first part of that flight test program was an actual combat mission? I highly doubt it.
If you just count development costs, Wikipedia has the cost of the Manhattan project as $27 billion (adjusted dollars).
Wikipedia has the F-35 research, development, testing, and evaluation cost at $55.1 billion so far (and this doesn't include procurement, operation, etc.).
Which comparison is more meaningful? According to "Dark Sun", in 1945 the Manhattan Project was "approaching the US automobile industry in number of employees and capital investment." That comparison is utterly astounding; the fact that the F35 is more expensive but (I am guessing?) employs fewer people and has a seemingly smaller social impact is interesting.
Perhaps this is a sign of the increasing centralization of capital in the US?
Physics means it will never win a dog fight against any front line fighter of the last 50 years. It's weight/aerodynamics/control surfaces are all compromised for better stealth and cross service requirements (VTOL).
It's role is to be a standoff weapon that can shoot opposing fighters out of the sky at long range before their sensors can detect it. The problem with that is at 1,200 MPH closing speed they go from long range to dog-fight in less than 5 mins, and closing speeds can easily be twice that.
The other problem is it has limited other roles. It's too fragile and lacks the ammo capacity for ground attack. It can be effective at taking out ground targets from a distance, but that's not what ground forces need, they need a tough plane with lots of ammo to fly slow and low with great loiter time.
Stand-off is useful for SAM sites, but that's a damn expensive plane for a role far cheaper drones are perfect for.
> Last September, Obama and Netanyahu signed a new Memorandum of Understanding, according to which Israel is promised $38 billion of military aid over the next decade.
Wow, that is crazy. Sometimes weapons industry gives me chills. I am glad that i don't live in one of the war zones and feel pity for those who have to suffer.
Yes. In addition to the fact that it's an astonishing waste of _American_ taxpayers money, it rather makes me wonder whether he's planning to return his Nobel Peace Prize.
Because it _doesn't even_ serve in the defense of the people paying the taxes for it. Billions of dollars wasted on 'defense' is bad enough; billions of dollars wasted on the 'defense' of other countries is even worse.
But no, Israeli aid wouldn't be top of the list of things to cancel if I had the power. I'd start with actual enemies, like Saudi Arabia and Palestine.
It's more taxpayer money used to kill more people. The Israelis are our frenemies. Plenty of examples of them not acting in our interests. Funds the suppression of the Palestinians. There's a lot not to like about how that is used. Yes we get a partner in the Middle East that helps us fight more wars. Is that really a good thing?
An interesting article but I was left guessing why either the US or Israel would attack a military airport near Damascus and why doesn't anyone bat an eyelid. I wasn't aware either of these countries was at war with Syria.
Last I read, they were trying to destroy missiles they had reason to believe were heading to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Can't say for sure, but it's perfectly plausible. Nobody needs to be formally at war for it to happen.
The Israelis have an interest in stopping advanced weapons going to Hezbollah, but have no interest in fighting a war against the Assad regime.
The Assad regime doesn't have anything to gain by complaining about it either. They look weak if they talk about it and don't respond, and the last thing they need right now is to either look weak, or pick a fight with one of the most powerful militaries in the area. They've got enough on their plate trying to exercise physical control over their country and retain some semblance of legitimacy in the eyes of the rest of the world.
Who else is going to complain? Russia would rather keep it quiet - an attack against their ally means they have to either respond, or look like they're abandoning them. Russia doesn't want to be seen as abandoning their allies, or to pick a fight with a strong American ally, possibly drawing American into the fight. America doesn't have anything to gain either - they don't want to castigate a close ally over a relatively low-impact mission to suppress terrorist activity, and they sure don't want Israel going to war against the Syrian regime.
It is totally inhuman and not acceptable to spend such an enormous amount of money for these primitive war technologies.
We have many people on this planet still suffering from problems that could be solved with a fraction of that money.
Please do not support these destructive projects with your work. You can make a change!
From my own experience I can tell you that you will have a much better life avoiding to work for these neanderthal-minded war prophets.
Many people working in war industries are getting very, very ill, physically and psychically, because it is against your human desire for harmony to make yourself part of a giant killing machine.
It is 1.5 trillions over 80 years of lifetime of F-35, including research, production and maintenance of around 3k jets. 18 billions per year is not big price for backbone of national security.
If one of the first outing (disputed according to the article) is bombing in the Middle East, is this really giving security. Seems more like continuing a failed strategy that ensures a significant population wishes harm on the US and its allies.
Middle East is messy, and I am not going to judge this.. I am just saying that 1.5 trillions over 80 years is not large amount of money and would not solve any of global problems.
The problem is it's closer to $100B a year the first decade, acquisition costs are are going to be the big part of it and hey are frontloaded. $800-$900 Billion over a decade is a stupendous amount of money.
Secondly, how can an un-necessary plane be a "backbone"? The nuclear triad is our backbone. The F-22 is more capable than the F-35 in most measures. The F-35 can't dogfight, can't ground support, and is too expensive to be a good fighter bomber.
The reality is it's going to cost less than $1.5T, because it's going to get canceled after three or four hundred planes, and our cost per unit is going to be extraordinary.
Nuclear triad is defense against 3 countries in the world who can realistically hit USA (Russia, China, somebody else). F-35 will project power to the rest 193 countries and hostile organizations. There is a little way nuclear weapon could help USA to fight ISIS or Al Kaida. F-22 is very niche product. Less than 200 jets is too little to support USA's global ambitions, and they can't be air-carrier stationed, and project power across the globe. It is not clear if dogfight is the thing in the modern world. Also F-35 may be good for ground support, future will show.
Did you just say we need a $1.5 trillion dollar fighter to fight goat herders? ISIS doesn't have an air force.
We literally have zero need to protect power across the globe. Our presence in the middle east is extremely costly and counterproductive to our security. And without the F-35 we project power great with a navy bigger than the entire rest of world combined. We have 12 carriers, mostly 100k tons, and Russia/China combined have two 50,000 ton carriers.
And the F-35 is guaranteed to be terrible at close air support. No F-35 pilot is going to slowly loiter their supersonic within visual range of their targets and without doing that they can't see exactly what they are shooting. Their gun only has 4 seconds of ammunition, the A-10 can fire much more powerful rounds for nearly 30 seconds. The F-35s gun won't even be operational for another 2-3 years.
If we need to fire miesiles from stand off distances drones already do it much cheaper. The F-35 is like the he german navy trying to load up on battleships instead of carriers before WW2, an expensive and easily avoided mistake.
> Did you just say we need a $1.5 trillion dollar fighter to fight goat herders? ISIS doesn't have an air force.
ISIS potentially can have/get manpads, and MANPADS can have big advancements in foreseeable future.
Also US can face contested environment in operations similar to Kosovo war, operations in Libya, Iraq, Panama, where local army had more advanced SAMs in possession with needs to suppress them.
> We literally have zero need to protect power across the globe. Our presence in the middle east is extremely costly and counterproductive to our security.
This is question of policy, and is a mess for me. I am not going to speculate about this.
> And the F-35 is guaranteed to be terrible at close air support. No F-35 pilot is going to slowly loiter their supersonic within visual range of their targets and without doing that they can't see exactly what they are shooting.
The main weapon for ground support planned to be SDB2. Also optics/targeting system is presumably much more advanced on F-35 comparing to A-10.
The SDB2 costs quarter million a pop, and the F-35 is still 5 years away from being able to field one. If used in standoff mode the F-35 is a poor choice, not only can drones deliver the SBD2, B1 can carry more than 20x more of them and loiter far longer. If used in the other modes the A-10 could be adapted to carry twice as many, deliver them just as effectively and with its huge big gun and ability to safely loiter close offers a much better follow up punch.
Suppose we stop throwing trillions at war machinery. Am not certain that any particular technology, or even social expenditures, would ever enable "love and peace".
Probably just 10% of the annual DoD budget bent towards education of girls and women and for free global birth control would stop our insane population growth. Slow growth is the only hope for the planet. Do not see how not funding weapons without the global education of females will fix anything. The root cause is not too many weapons systems, it is too many people.
You seem to be very confused and your cynical words offer an insight into a state of mind I would call 'disturbed' at least.
It might be interesting for you to learn that the biggest problems we have today on this planet are produced by countries that are not "over-populated".
Also it seems logical that people believing in that "too-many-people"-ideology (that is actively spread by many military neanderthalers btw) should use their freedom to give a good example of how to solve that problem by killing themselves, not others.
It really is excellent - and as someone who usually prefers digital, try the paper one. Visitors often take a stack after spotting an article, there is something for everyone in there.
On dogfighting being obsolete - I thought in a stealth vs stealth situation dogfighting is a real possibility as stealthed beyond visual range standoffs aren't conducive to turn on a targeting radar. It's like two men in the dark, each with a gun and a torch - whoever turns on their torch first loses. Hence needing to rely on visuals, hence dogfighting.
If one can emit just enough light to detect their adversary but not be detected, that could work. Or drop a flare somewhere that illuminates everyone equally then it becomes a quick-draw situation.
The F35 sound like a great plane but what happens if you jam the radar(is it even possible, I don't know much about radars) and communications ?
I'm saying this because the article state that the F35 is slower than other fighters so if it's possible to jam communications and radar, this plane may have a disadvantage in this kind of situation.
Radar is only one sensor among several and is usually switched off anyway in order to avoid detection. An F-35 could potentially fly an entire strike mission without ever using radar.
Jamming doesn't make radar useless. The jammer has to be close or put out a tremendous amount of power to be effective. And the F-35 can counteract jamming to an extent through frequency hopping and signal processing.
I think it's reasonable to question the supposed invincibility of this thing, so not sure why you have been downvoted. These planes generally rely on a cumbersome sea borne platform which is a pretty juicy target for a hypersonic missile, and advances in radar systems are challenging stealth. If this type of weapons system is made obsolete by advances in technology or strategy that's a lot of eggs in one basket. However I don't doubt DARPA etc are coming up with weird and wonderful new concepts also. But the ingenuity and motivation of the Russians, Chinese etc. should not be underestimated. In certain areas their capabilities are superior.
To jam an active radar signal you must overwhelm the returns from the jamming targets active radar with your own transmissions. There are weapons systems that are designed to home in on these emissions and use them for targeting e.g. HARM. With the advent of networked multispectral frequency hopping radars you would have to have a tremendous power source to jam radar in any geographically significant area and then those power sources become large juicy targets. So it is not usually a long term solution to jam modern radar but you can gain a temporary tactical advantage.
Nothing, unless you think that more money will lead to faster-than-light travel. However, that 1.5 trillion could probably eradicate poverty or homelessness.
Could we just kill everyone in the world not like us? Would not just be how AI would work? Then ZERO worries? What do you think, makes logical sense right? /s
I think you mean 30 billion. The entire GDP of the US is only 16.77 trillion and the entire revenue of the US government is only a fraction of that. Both the Apollo project and Manhattan project were around .4% of the GDP. A lot for a single project, but not what I would consider a "significant part". Social Security is an order of magnitude greater.
Your first link puts the total cost at about $30 billion in modern money. The F-35 easily surpasses that, even if you don't count the cost of building the individual planes.
If you count the cost of production, not just R&D, then the atomic bomb wasn't even the most expensive weapon of WWII. That honor goes to the B-29.
Agreed. There's a lot of hyperventilating in this article that, gosh, a wealthy country might want to spend a bit of money to build some weapons to defend itself. And then, incredibly, sell them to other rich countries.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
Come on, Eisenhower was provably wrong. Countless times throughout history people have suffered the worst horrors imaginable because their side was militarily weaker. So much unjust loss as someone wanted more power and took it just because they could.
The truth is that military spending, benevolent and power checked leaders, and government at least capable enough to not collapse in on itself are all essential.
The hard question is only how to attain these and in the right balance. Too much military spending surely will cause unnecessary suffering, too little has been proven just as capable as ending in ruin.
Hi
I think the peace dividend showed that Eisenhower's theory had basis in reality.
No one reasonable is in favor of abolishing the militaries of powerful nations entirely but disarmament is something that we (as humans) should work towards. Not just for the money it would save, but because it brings nations together. See: START
How soon people forget that peace among nations is not the norm. If you think that the indigent are forgotten now, consider what their plight would be if the clouds of war were gathering.
"Si vis pacem, para bellum" ("If you desire peace, be prepared for war.") is just as true today as it was in Vegetius' time.
From that article: "Over the lifetime of the project the US is expected to have spent $1.5 trillion designing, building and maintaining 2500 planes for its own use: enough to forgive the entire nation’s student debts, or pay for the healthcare of every low-income American family for the next three years, or build a border wall that encircles the Earth four times."
The justification, though, is not unreasonable. If you want to project air power, and don't have VTOL, you need a full sized air base or carrier within range. With VTOL, you can operate from a smaller firebase or a small carrier.
The US's small carriers are the USMC's amphibious assault ships, the Wasp and America classes. The US currently has 9 of these, and is building more of the America class. Each is a self contained package of military power - about 1700 Marines and their gear, helicopters, VTOL fighters, Osprey VTOLs, landing craft, and missiles. Everything you need for a small war. That's where the F-35 was supposed to be useful.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW28Mb1YvwY [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pweY5y5eRI