That’s always been my thing. We had the plane already, we didn’t need to drop over a trillion dollars for another one.
The chief limitation of the F22 is that it can’t be launched from a carrier. Most of our air power comes from carriers.
If only it wasn’t for jamming seems to me it would make more sense to crank out a thousand five-million-dollar drones for the price of a single F-35 group.
And even considering the possibility of jamming, might as well have a few hundred of them you use in preference anyway considering practically no one we strike has the electronic warfare capability to do anything about it.
I bet it would have been much cheaper to come up with a carrier-based F-22 variant (or even to design a non-POS conventional carrier stealth plane from scratch with none of this vectored thrust nonsense) than to develop the F-35, which I bet is the most expensive project in all of human history.
Timex how does your theoretical air to air engagement actually work? To detect an enemy non stealth aircraft you need to turn your radar on, which makes you visible, more visible and from much further away, than the aircraft with its radar turned off. Semi serious question.
Who exactly do you envision as a realistic enemy that the USA couldn’t totally dominate with F-15s?
I think a small fleet of f22 makes sense, but a large fleet of F35, not so sure.
While true, we could have easily developed a carrier-based plane that actually worked for a lot less. Instead we’re trying to make a magical fighter that literally does everything for all branches. It’s a colossal waste of money for something that still doesn’t actually work worth a shit.
We’ve spent the GDP of Australia on a plane that barely works. $1.5 trillion dollars is insane. We could have gone to Mars several times. We could have Newt’s moon base. We could have cured cancer. Instead we have a barely working plane that will likely never really be used before it’s inevitably replaced by the next generation.
I’m not one who is remotely opposed to most military spending either, but when the cost of a plane starts to approach the cost of the carrier it’s stationed on, something has gone horrifically fucking wrong. The Navy version is like $330 million per plane. The fucking carriers cost like $4 billion. That’s pure madness and corruption.
Edit: I mean the F-22 a comparable plane in many ways cost $62 billion for the project. We’re paying roughly 25 times that.
Are you really that up on the state of such capabilities?
Only one aircraft has ever been refitted after design for carrier deployment, the YF-17 which became the FA-18. It essentially ended up involving a complete redesign of the aircraft. Being able to launch and land on a carrier involves extremely specific requirements that go well beyond bolting a hook on the bottom.
In BVR combat, the launching aircraft isn’t illuminating the target at launch time. There are a lot of various things that can play into the system, but the notion you presented there, where the shooter needs to turn on his radar to fire isn’t actually how it works.
Like i said, I’m not going to defend the acquisition program for the F35, I’m just pointing out that some of the critiques regarding the actual hardware and usage doesn’t really mesh with reality.
The real problem for the Naval angle is that the F-22 is a air superiority fighter, so it’s ability to drop bombs was basically nothing, which doesn’t really work for the Navy. Though they also don’t need VTOL for carriers either, we aren’t the Brits we have full size ships.
True, but for over a trillion dollars we could have easily developed a carrier-based solution that worked for the Navy. Instead we have a plane that doesn’t really work for anyone and has useless features. VTOL for a carrier-based plane? Why? We needed a modern replacement for the F-18, but this wasn’t it. It has useless features and reliability issues that stem from said features while costing roughly 4-5 times as much as the entire space program.
Yeah but South Carolina has 150 jobs. And whateverthefuck parent companies have $300m in revenues they can shift overseas to not pay taxes on. Win/win!
I totally agree with the assessment that the f35 suffered from feature creep. I think a lot of it is that Lockheed just smelled blood in the water and saw it as a chance to grow the project and thus get more money.
I agree that the VTOL capability always struck me as weird.
I also agree that really what we need is a stealth replacement for the f18. But hey, the f35 is gonna be that. It was more expensive than it should have been, but at this point it’s done.
I kind of suspect that at the end of the day, it’s gonna be the dominant aircraft for decades, possibly the last manned fighter. It’ll have been expensive, and function as an indictment of the appropriations process, but the aircraft itself will probably eventually do the job.
The Russians and maybe the Chinese have that kind of EW capability, that we know about. (Others may, too: Israel and Sweden are high on my list, given how the Israelis are big on avionics, and the Swedes are known to have super-solid EW in the Gripen, but I’m a little less certain on them.) At this point, they probably aren’t sharing.
As far as stealth goes, it’s not a panacea. IRST systems have advanced immeasurably since the 1990s. A good IRST on a low-observability-but-not-true-stealth fighter isn’t giving up much in detection/engagement range to a LPI radar on a true-stealth fighter. Planes are hot. There’s no way around that. Not to mention that low-frequency radar is a hard counter to shape-based stealth on all but the largest planes. If you have a low-frequency radar to tell you where to look, you can have your high-frequency AESA push out its entire power output in that direction, and you run up against the other hard counter to stealth: raw power.
That’s almost certainly going to prove correct.
Oooooooohhhh, tell me more.
I have citations and sources on Sweden/Gripen, but I don’t have them handy right now, so I’ll try to remember to dig them up. I seem to recall a UK Typhoon pilot talking about exercises against the Swedes, and telling a story about how the Gripen isn’t true stealth, but may as well be. Its jamming, off-board targeting, and sensor fusion fit is good enough that the Gripen pilots repeatedly surprised the Typhoons. I’ll see if I can find the article.
As far as Israel goes, that’s just my gut, but they’re watching the same trends (increasing drones) and the same news (eyebrow-raisingly-good Russian radio jamming in the Donbas war) we are, and have neighbors who are a lot closer to armed forces parity. I’m sure Israeli generals salivate at the idea of being able to turn off all the Arab drones next time there’s a war.
It doesn’t seem like jamming drones would demand a very high tech system if you have a reasonable amount of power for your antenna. I expect a smart EE undergrad from the WWII era could do it with period amplifiers and antennas. Presumably it’s easy enough to scan frequencies to determine what channel the control system is using and then to blast noise from a directional antenna at the drones you’ve detected on radar or even visually. If the control system switches channels, then you just switch after it, or better yet blanket a whole range. Of course your antenna may become a target for HARMs, but omelettes, eggs, etc, and antennas are cheaper than drones; cheaper than HARMs, too, for that matter. You could even wire a few dozen of them up to the same amplifier in advance for not much cost and switch whenever the latest gets blown up…
But perhaps I am mistaken, because so far as I know no insurrectionists, terrorists, guerillas, or other low-tech group have ever made any attempt to do this. For that matter, has anyone ever done this with SAM battery radar? I mean deploy a dozen radar antennas over a kilometer or so, some distance away from the actual missile launcher and just switch antennas when a HARM blows up the last one? Seems like it would make the launcher crew a lot happier about turning on their radar, anyway…
That’s the dilemma the US faces, though; we are generally now and in the near future going to be using aircraft against thugs like Daesh/ISIS or Somali pirates or whatever, but we have to also be able to take on the North Koreans, the Chinese, the Russians, and who knows who else. We’re also subject to a lot more scrutiny and arm-chair generally than anyone else, so fleets of drones, which already have questionable optics diplomatically, have their own drawbacks. Manned aircraft imply a higher level of control and feed the myth of the surgical strike better than “masses of robot planes raining indiscriminate death on civilians,” as I’m sure the reports would read.
There are real reasons though to doubt the future of manned strike aviation. I’m less convinced that air to air stuff will be automated or “droneified” in the near future, but strike missions seem to be inexorably moving towards a much greater level of automation. While I suspect manned aircraft will continue to do these things in most countries, and even at the high end for some missions, it’s pretty clear the delta is towards increased robotics and semi or fully autonomous operations. This might help the Navy, really, because if you limited manned aircraft on carriers to interceptors/fleet defense,and based the bulk of your strike packages around a fleet of much smaller drones, with fewer logistic requirements, you could probably turn a CVN into a much more effective platform. Politics, not technology, will probably be the biggest obstacle there; those Tailhook parties don’t throw themselves!
The F-35 is just one more in a long series of bloated programs that will probably, in the end, result in a (very expensive and very delayed) solid weapon system. The USA has a good record of making silk purses out of sows’ ears. The opportunity costs, though, in terms of time and money spent and lost, can’t really be recovered, and if we end up needing these things before they are ready–or needing more than we have because they were too expensive–that won’t be fun.
Technically, A-10 wasn’t ‘overkill’ or anything like that. His role was of a tank killer, and you needed that gun to bust a main battle tank. Hell, that was on the Cold War, from what I know it isn’t capable anymore of destroying modern MBTs, which are better armored.
But of course, his present use is as CAS for soft targets, like houses with insurgents, infantry positions, technicals, etc int won’t have a problem busing those.
Russian SAMs (and that’s almost universally what might be faced with the prospect of eating a HARM) have only recently (recent Buks, S-300, Tor, etc.) become networked enough to do that, and the radar is just as expensive as the launchers/missiles, so they aren’t exactly expendable. I think modern Russian doctrine involves separating the radars and the launchers where that’s possible (most of the Russian short- and medium-range systems now are integrated into a single vehicle), and switching radars when someone shoots at one.
Speaking of making prescient design choices, I previously made a Guardians of the Galaxy skit about the space defence fighter in that flick… the features they deployed against the final baddie seemed to me impossibly tailored to the threat, considering it was an unforeseen conflict by a bad guy they didn’t know. I thought it tied pretty well into the F-35 narrative! Anyway, I digress.
I love these discussions though.
Thanks for the reminder to watch your movies, Spiffy. I love your stuff.
Aren’t drone aircraft going to upend everything though? I figure that drones will pretty much eat F-35s for breakfast in a dogfight scenario. Stealth coatings are only good till detection methodologies catch up and then it’s just another expensive target.