The F-35 deserves the bad press. Development has been a mess because it is trying to fill every niche for every branch of the military. We could have developed several specialized planes at a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time that it took for this one plane to come into production.
While I don't doubt that it is better to fly than the F-16, so would every other plane we would have developed instead of this nightmare. I also am worried that it will be obsoleted with the development of advanced military drones. Why risk a human life when you can just send a robot to the battlefield instead?
> Why risk a human life when you can just send a robot to the battlefield instead?
That's literally the point of the F35: to stealthily penetrate enemy airspace and act as a command and control combat platform for drones. It observes the battlefield with it's amazing "eye of god" sensory field, drones are sent into the battle space automatically where they are then taken control of by the pilot.
I was once told many years ago that the reason fighter aircraft have pilots is as backup insurance to bring the multi million dollar aircraft home if the computers stop working. It was meant as a joke at the time (or maybe not?) but it may be truer today (as long as the fly-by-wire is still working). On the other hand todays fighters are not stable without computer control, so maybe it is no longer true at all, and if the computers die the aircraft can't be flown?
Drones are certainly cheaper and more capable without having a pilot to protect and whose presence limits the max acceleration. However telemetry links and autonomous decision making have limitations also. When drones start taking down F-35's is probably when pilots and F-35's become obsolete.
"Survivability and lethality in a contested environment now have more to do with stealth, sensors, data fusion, and the ability to network, than just pure turn performance. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to quantify these capabilities in an unclassified environment."
This makes me think about naval development before WW2. Everyone had lots of ideas about battleships and how to pack more guns onto a faster ship and all these other things, but lots of people missed how aircraft carriers would change things. I'm sure the next war will be different. The obvious development is drones, but I also think about the plotline of the second Battlestar Galactica series where the protagonists only initially survive because their ship eschews network connections. It seems like we aren't quite sure what future battles will look like and the US is making a guess in the form of a $1.5tn plane project.
Its a well known proverb, "Generals always fight the last war" going back to at least 1934 as a criticism of military doctrine. And while it is true, it is also inevitable because nobody wants to lose knowing that the enemy did X in the last war and they didn't bother to develop a countermeasure Y to defend against that.
That said, there are always new things to try on the battlefield as well and they are. Stealth bombers in Serbia, "three layer" attacks (top B-52, middle F-18, low Tomahawk) or any of the other tactics that appear as "new" in a conflict and then become "Yeah, they always do that." One of my classmates in high school went to West Point and at a reunion we were talking about the difference between engineering school and military school. There is a very deep base of knowledge there. And while it wasn't my destiny to go that path (even though the Marines tried really really hard to recruit me :-)) I recognize that fighting effectively is just as complex and nuanced as making a circuit that has 160 dB of noise margin.
What has been interesting about F-35 project is what was called out in the article, developed during unprecedented visibility into the unvarnished ups and downs. And there are always people who exploit that to paint a narrative of incompetence and gross negligence. The real test though is when they go to war and whether or not they provide the capabilities that overcome the enemy or not right?
I think it will be a combination of drones and cyber/electronic warfare capabilities.
Drones have already shown their potential in the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict recently. From large swarm based attacks to kamikaze mode, I think drones should overtake frontline fighter planes in capability soon.
> the protagonists only initially survive because their ship eschews network connections.
I always wonder if the next big military development is actually going to involve more technology, rather than less. America’s main military weakness is that it is very reliant on things like GPS or connections to other devices. What’s to stop a foe from developing jamming tech and counteracting the US’ lead? From what family tells me, the army still teaches people to dig trenches and use old-fashioned maps (among other things) just in case.
With the advent of UAVs (ex: from the ordinary to the RQ-170 and beyond), hypersonic capabilities (ex: SCRAMJET), and even action in space (ex: destruction of satellites enabling GPS & remote communication, to severely limit an opponent’s capabilities), I have to agree.
I imagine the “next war” will be one with severe consequences, perhaps through means which the general public is not even aware of, despite those known & listed above.
> The last major reason the F-35 has seen so much criticism is that it was the first jet developed in the social media age. The paradigm shift, cost, and early problems, coupled with concurrency, led to an explosion of negative social media that grew into mainstream media coverage.
Cost buried second in a list of factors contributing to…social media as major factor?
If it weren't for those pesky kids on the Internet!
This is like saying it got a lot of bad press because everyone noticed how bad it was. We never got to complain about top secret projects because we didn't know what they cost.
Assuming you think the USA should have the "most powerful military" (whether this should be the aim or not is a separate question); how much money is required to achieve that goal and what are your justifications for that amount?
Without answering that question, how can you say that the F35 costs too much? Personally i have no idea what the true US military budget should be and I'm not even sure how you'd begin to calculate that as a civilian. One of the few things that gets passed in a bi-partisan manner by the US legislature is the military budget (apparently for 59 straight years).
It's easy to look at a big number and say it's bad. But it's also easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. The average FAANG team probably costs their company multiple millions of $ per year in just employee costs. It's easy to parachute in and say that you could do it for less, and you'd probably be right. But that also loses track of bigger picture.
F35 is good, but the cost of an adversaries old planes times the number of air-to-air a 35f can carry is significantly less then the cost of an F35, it may not be the most cost efficient way to go about fighting your enemy.
War is about winning the economics. Can your economy and industrial output out pace what your enemy destroys, vs your opponents output and what you can destroy.
Even in peace time, this is a major factor. Keeping up with the US on military spending bankrupted the USSR, at the same time as Japanese and German industries where able to leap ahead of both, since they didn't spend on military post WW2.
The US may want to have a good Military to defend against China, but if it spends too much, and not enough on civil industry (and education) China may crush the US economically, without firing a bullet.
You can have the most Nukes of any country, but at some point, you have enough nukes to do anything you want, and after that, any nuke you add is a drain on your economy. Having the "best" or "most" weapons isn't the same as having the right allocation of resources.
> You can have the most Nukes of any country, but at some point, you have enough nukes to do anything you want, and after that, any nuke you add is a drain on your economy.
If we have enough nukes to do whatever we want (we definitely have more than enough nukes), then it follows that we do not need giant conventional forces, right? We are already invulnerable to invasion/defensive war because of the nukes/geography so what is the point of conventional forces from a defensive standpoint?
This means the F-35 is about offense and conflict escalation - about increasing the reach/power of the American empire. The most cost effective strategy for a nation that is not an empire in this situation would be to drastically downsize conventional forces since we already have a deterrent. Expensive new fighter jets are no longer needed for defense.
So I see the F-35 program not as a counter against the U.S.’s enemies, but as a way to more effectively attack other countries.
I worry the author suffers from confirmation bias.
Does the bad press miss the point?
So much that "point" is the cost per aircraft is nutso for what you get. Something that's stealth, dogfight, and close-in air support.
And perhaps the article is right, the stealth is fantastic. Lets you fire without being seen. But after you've fired it, then what? Now everyone knows where you are and a potential dog fight is coming.
It's well known its dog fighting is weak even compared to other older fighters, but maybe it's also fair to say dog fighting is a thing of the past[1].
Being a stealth mobile missile battery... Is a good long range offense a strong defense? These kinds of things can only be tested, so... jury's still out.
My personal criticism comes in the close in air support, what good is all that money that was dumped into stealth doing as it just hovers above in plain view/access? Also, it does a poor job at flying slowly. It's just not specialized in it.
Time will tell if the price tag is even close to being justified, but I'm still a strong skeptic.
> Also, it does a poor job at flying slowly. It's just not specialized in it.
That doesn't seem like a role the Air Force is very concerned about. The USAF has been trying to kill off their best low and slow flying close air support aircraft for awhile now. [0] The planes are made to lay down hell [1] and take a beating that would destroy just about any other aircraft [2], and the ground troops love it. [3]
Supposedly the F-35 is going to fill the role of the A-10 in the future but I just don't see how that's possible.
The price point argument holds little merit considering that the A variants are cheaper than modernized F-16's. At best you can claim the flight hour costs are much worse, and that's a good point but unfortunately that is the cost of stealth.
>It's well known its dog fighting is weak even compared to other older fighters
It's more nimble than a combat loaded F-16. Sure it isn't super maneuverable like a F-22, but it actually is able to do maneuvers which other planes need thrust vectoring to achieve.
>And perhaps the article is right, the stealth is fantastic. Lets you fire without being seen. But after you've fired it, then what? Now everyone knows where you are and a potential dog fight is coming.
You misunderstanding the nature of the F-35's first shot advantage. It is not merely remaining unseen and firing first. Even if a AWAC's or L band ground radar directs you toward a F-35 it will be the first to fire because it can get a firing solution on a 4th gen before it can get one on the F-35.
Furthermore, it's also not a forgone conclusion that an adversary would know where it is after firing. A F-35 pilot could have moved serious distance in that time from whatever heading the missile originated. With stealth the pace of combat is dictated by the pilot who actually has situational awareness.
> My personal criticism comes in the close in air support, what good is all that money that was dumped into stealth doing as it just hovers above in plain view/access? Also, it does a poor job at flying slowly. It's just not specialized in it.
This is probably a valid criticism, but aren't the current generation of military helicopters simply way better than jets could ever be at this? And they have the advantage that they can land and evacuate people.
This article contains no new information, and could be accurately summarized "guy whose boss spent $1 trillion on the F-35 says the F-35 is a good idea."
He also calls it a supersonic fighter, which isn't true. The coatings cannot withstand sustained periods of supersonic flight.
And also, the author is an operator, but not necessarily someone involved in the engineering or acquisition.
Nonetheless (and I say this as someone who was severely soured by my involvement with the program), people get tribal as to whether the JSF (provides an unmatched capability) XOR (is the zenith of acquisition malpractice). It's not either/or; both are simultaneously true.
No one in DoD R&D/acquisition fails to appreciate how expensive these things are and this realization is certainly driving long-term decision-making.
"Just imagine how the F-16 program would have been covered today when they were crashing an aircraft almost every two weeks during several years in the ’80s and ’90s (the F-35, by comparison, has only crashed 3 times in over a decade of flying)."
I had no idea that an F-16 crashed roughly every two weeks while being debugged. I imagine I'm not the only one.
Most supersonic fighters can only do so for very short amounts of time. The F-22 is the only operational fighter with real sustained supersonic capabilities.
It IS a very capable war-plane for many of its roles. Much more capable then the harrier and with many capabilities that the F-16 & F-18 lack. It has different solutions to the problems it faces though.
Many of these new approaches to old problems that are arguable. Is a stealthy approach (F-35) more effective then raw manoeuvrability (F-16) in fighter vs fighter combat? Probably if the stealth can be maintained. Is high flying precisions guided weaponry as better then what an A-10 can do in close air support? Maybe? These points will be argued by airchair air marshals until we have another big war to "answer" the question.
But the F-35 has failed at being the cheap general purpose aircraft it was promised to be. It has been earmarked to replace the F-16 in its entirety, as the low end fighter to the F-22 raptor as the high end. This was one of the reasons the F-35 has a single engine. Recent moves are to make the F-35 the new high end fighter w/ a new lightweight fighter the low end that can be cheap enough to fulfil this need.
This reads like marketing. A pilot should be able to speak to problems with more nuance than that. This is just too awkward and too general to be taken seriously.
Slightly related, but there's a great hour-long lecture [1] by Colonel Randy Gordon, who's a test pilot, discussing the flight control systems for the F-22, contrasting it (a bit) to other jets, and even to a Cessna. He talks about the tradeoffs between human factors, mechanical engineering, software engineering, and shows how the software systems help the pilot.
It's well worth the hour if you're an aviation geek.
I think the point of the F-35 is it's one jet that can do it all. Maybe it isn't as stealthy or fast as an SR-71, and maybe it's VTOL isn't as good as a Huey, and maybe it's sensors aren't as good as a high-latitude balloon or satellite, but that's the point. It's versatile, so you can use it as the bread and butter and deploy various more specialized equipment if needed. The bad press about the jet is stuck in a 1980s mindset - no, not even that, they're stuck in a 1960s futurist vision of the 1980s that never came to pass (you can count on one hand how many "dogfights" there were in the 1980s, and they were pretty meager examples of such).
> I think the point of the F-35 is it's one jet that can do it all.
That was the idea, but it is also why the program has performed so poorly on cost, timeliness, and capability.
The F-35 was supposed to achieve 80% parts commonality among the three variants. This would have delivered massive cost savings. Instead, the reality is less than 25% parts commonality. Also, the compromises made to accommodate all three requirement sets means the F-35 has worse aerodynamic performance and a worse radar cross section than it otherwise would've had if the Air Force and Navy could've had their own dedicated air frames from the start.
The much lower degree of parts-sharing wouldn't be so bad, except that the JSF program eschewed a lot of real world testing in lieu of computer simulation.
And to make matters worse they employed "concurrent development", which meant that production were getting made while the testing phase was still in progress. The result was that as problems were uncovered, expensive retrofits had to be applied to all the airframes that had already been produced.
In a more traditional development strategy, the vast majority of teething issues would've been found before series production began. But concurrent development was used to try to speed up the timeline, but also make it more difficult to cancel the program.
The F-35 has a lot of capabilities but it is fundamentally compromised because of the attempt to make it a jack of all trades. It has had an extremely long gestation period, very high development costs, very high operational costs, and compromised performance on several fronts. Had the DoD at least split off the USMC STOVL requirement it seems like this project would've gone a lot better.
That is how it was sold, for sure. Unfortunately now it has become 3 jets, that can't do it all (at this point). There was supposed to be > 70% commonality, but currently less than 25%. It can't do interdiction, doesn't have loiter time & is ordnance poor wrt. current platforms, is not a great interceptor (no supercruise launch). It is a significant advancement in sensor technology and integration, for sure. The reduction in type number, and the suggestion of the NGAD (both Air Force and Navy, which suggests that they think that joint acquisition is not the way to go next time) makes me think of the classic procurement death cycle. Very happy to be proven wrong on all of this.
The argument is that the result of that is a plane that isn't good enough for any of those roles, but is more expensive than dedicated alternatives. It will lose a fight against a true 5th generation air-superiority stealth fighter (an F-22 or equivalent). It can't support ground troops as well as an A-10. It is a more capable replacement for the Harrier (though many are sceptical that the USMC doctrine around that has ever made sense), and maybe it's good enough to replace the F-16, but it's supposed to replace all four of these (and will cost more to boot).
Everything he says could be true, but still miss the point.
The actual point is that we are absolutely stuck with the F-35, so had better make it good--or at least take up thinking it's good, where we can't.
It is not correct to compare it to an F-16. It needs to be compared to a whole fleet of aircraft, because it costs as much as much as a fleet. Could it take on 8 F-16s at once?
It is not correct to compare it to an F-16 because you can afford to fly your plentiful F-16s in harm's way, but have to keep your paltry few F-35s a hundred miles back, out of any possibility of danger.
The reason we are stuck with the F-35, despite its still suffering over 600 class-A design flaws (each risks loss of airframe), is that it is built in 48 states. To kill it you would need to get senators from 24 of those states, and the other two besides, to vote against it. It could explode every time the gear doors shut, and we would still be stuck with it, and they know. Be glad it can take off and land.
> When the F-35 debuted, it was inferior to the F-16 and other 4th generation aircraft. However, its potential has been steadily unlocked by the engineers, and several years ago, it surpassed the F-16’s capability.
Sounds like the national defense equivalent of rewriting your website from scratch in $LATEST_WEBSHIT_FRAMEWORK. Sure, it's a worse product, but just imagine how great it _could_ be if we halt development of the working version and spend a trillion dollars making the new one work. See? It's better! And the customer is paying hand over fist, so everyone wins.
>>>Sounds like the national defense equivalent of rewriting your website from scratch in $LATEST_WEBSHIT_FRAMEWORK. Sure, it's a worse product, but just imagine how great it _could_ be if we halt development of the working version and spend a trillion dollars making the new one work.
And eventually the Air Force came to its senses, accepted the "pull request" for upgrades on its big workhorse F-15 "library"....and now we are getting the awesome F-15EX. Something we should have been working on before they even cancelled the F-22.
This is why I like the Russian approach to military R&D: they do a small number of cutting-edge products to keep their engineers employed and their tech as current as possible given their constraints, but the bulk of their actual inventory is continuous refinements of solid legacy systems, tweaked and rolled out at fairly low cost.
Su-27 -> Su-30 -> Su-34 and 35 (honestly even the Su-57 planform is clearly an extension of this airframe if you look at it closely)
T-72 -> T-90 -> latest upgrade packages for both (T-72B3M and T-90M Breakthrough-3)
Japan is denying that they have tightened the requirements for scrambling fighters against Chinese planes on course to enter Japanese airspace since they deployed F-35[1].
I imagine that a Chinese fighter probably costs a lot less to get into the air than an F-35 does. The airframe and engines might not have a higher MTBF than F-35 (or maybe they do) but they are certainly cheaper and easier to replace, regardless.
There's an obvious economic and industrial capability question to all of this. A player with cheap planes can erode the benefits of the technologically superior one by simply encouraging them to be used more, or forcing the decision to not use them for fear of stretching supply lines... Thus reducing the required response time when it's decided to actually deploy the expensive weapon.
> The last major reason the F-35 has seen so much criticism is that it was the first jet developed in the social media age. The paradigm shift, cost, and early problems, coupled with concurrency, led to an explosion of negative social media that grew into mainstream media coverage.
Whether the F-35 will be successful or not does not matter whether there are armchair journalists or mainstream reporters covering the project, but in this case we can enjoy the increased accountability. This should be seen as a positive effect of social media, if anything.
This had me wondering how many mistakes in previous projects were smoothed over by clever marketing, and how many are being exposed now. Does social media make it easier or harder for the general public to get accurate information on this sort of thing?
The author mentions the comms and sensors being the new killer feature, putting beside stealth can better sensing and interconnect not be retrofitted to existing aircraft? Why do you need to design a new airframe around better optics?
Good question! A few reasons. Weight and balance is super important so anything you add means something else needs to be added or balanced. Power requirements are also a problem. More electronics means more power maybe means new engines. Maybe that all means more weight, so you need to reinforce the structure. Which means you're heavier and need a better engine. Etc. Sensors can't just be installed, if you need to drill holes and break pressure bulkheads.
Stealth technology aside, there is the question of why the new avionics technology wasn't retrofitted to existing airframes first to limit development risks and control costs.
The concurrency is a major reason for massive cost overruns. If you're building production aircraft before the testing and evaluation phase is done with prototypes, every time you find a major issue you have to retrofit dozens or even hundreds of planes.
But, like a lot of things with the JSF program, concurrency made it much more difficult to cancel. Sunk costs and all that.
[+] [-] pg_bot|4 years ago|reply
While I don't doubt that it is better to fly than the F-16, so would every other plane we would have developed instead of this nightmare. I also am worried that it will be obsoleted with the development of advanced military drones. Why risk a human life when you can just send a robot to the battlefield instead?
[+] [-] irateswami|4 years ago|reply
That's literally the point of the F35: to stealthily penetrate enemy airspace and act as a command and control combat platform for drones. It observes the battlefield with it's amazing "eye of god" sensory field, drones are sent into the battle space automatically where they are then taken control of by the pilot.
[+] [-] hajile|4 years ago|reply
They all shipped incomplete and have been continually pulled back to be upgraded piece at a time at a huge cost.
Insult to injury is that they wound up with 3 variants that aren't super compatible anyway.
[+] [-] tjohns|4 years ago|reply
Until we develop the technology to build an AGI, there’s still a need for fighters with human beings on board for autonomy.
[+] [-] rapjr9|4 years ago|reply
Drones are certainly cheaper and more capable without having a pilot to protect and whose presence limits the max acceleration. However telemetry links and autonomous decision making have limitations also. When drones start taking down F-35's is probably when pilots and F-35's become obsolete.
[+] [-] m3kw9|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] munificent|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aeturnum|4 years ago|reply
This makes me think about naval development before WW2. Everyone had lots of ideas about battleships and how to pack more guns onto a faster ship and all these other things, but lots of people missed how aircraft carriers would change things. I'm sure the next war will be different. The obvious development is drones, but I also think about the plotline of the second Battlestar Galactica series where the protagonists only initially survive because their ship eschews network connections. It seems like we aren't quite sure what future battles will look like and the US is making a guess in the form of a $1.5tn plane project.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|4 years ago|reply
That said, there are always new things to try on the battlefield as well and they are. Stealth bombers in Serbia, "three layer" attacks (top B-52, middle F-18, low Tomahawk) or any of the other tactics that appear as "new" in a conflict and then become "Yeah, they always do that." One of my classmates in high school went to West Point and at a reunion we were talking about the difference between engineering school and military school. There is a very deep base of knowledge there. And while it wasn't my destiny to go that path (even though the Marines tried really really hard to recruit me :-)) I recognize that fighting effectively is just as complex and nuanced as making a circuit that has 160 dB of noise margin.
What has been interesting about F-35 project is what was called out in the article, developed during unprecedented visibility into the unvarnished ups and downs. And there are always people who exploit that to paint a narrative of incompetence and gross negligence. The real test though is when they go to war and whether or not they provide the capabilities that overcome the enemy or not right?
[+] [-] actuator|4 years ago|reply
Drones have already shown their potential in the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict recently. From large swarm based attacks to kamikaze mode, I think drones should overtake frontline fighter planes in capability soon.
[+] [-] HDMI_Cable|4 years ago|reply
I always wonder if the next big military development is actually going to involve more technology, rather than less. America’s main military weakness is that it is very reliant on things like GPS or connections to other devices. What’s to stop a foe from developing jamming tech and counteracting the US’ lead? From what family tells me, the army still teaches people to dig trenches and use old-fashioned maps (among other things) just in case.
[+] [-] throwaway481048|4 years ago|reply
With the advent of UAVs (ex: from the ordinary to the RQ-170 and beyond), hypersonic capabilities (ex: SCRAMJET), and even action in space (ex: destruction of satellites enabling GPS & remote communication, to severely limit an opponent’s capabilities), I have to agree.
I imagine the “next war” will be one with severe consequences, perhaps through means which the general public is not even aware of, despite those known & listed above.
[+] [-] kiba|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kemitchell|4 years ago|reply
This passage caught my eye:
> The last major reason the F-35 has seen so much criticism is that it was the first jet developed in the social media age. The paradigm shift, cost, and early problems, coupled with concurrency, led to an explosion of negative social media that grew into mainstream media coverage.
Cost buried second in a list of factors contributing to…social media as major factor?
If it weren't for those pesky kids on the Internet!
[+] [-] tootie|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw_nbvc1234|4 years ago|reply
Without answering that question, how can you say that the F35 costs too much? Personally i have no idea what the true US military budget should be and I'm not even sure how you'd begin to calculate that as a civilian. One of the few things that gets passed in a bi-partisan manner by the US legislature is the military budget (apparently for 59 straight years).
It's easy to look at a big number and say it's bad. But it's also easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. The average FAANG team probably costs their company multiple millions of $ per year in just employee costs. It's easy to parachute in and say that you could do it for less, and you'd probably be right. But that also loses track of bigger picture.
[+] [-] quelsolaar|4 years ago|reply
War is about winning the economics. Can your economy and industrial output out pace what your enemy destroys, vs your opponents output and what you can destroy.
Even in peace time, this is a major factor. Keeping up with the US on military spending bankrupted the USSR, at the same time as Japanese and German industries where able to leap ahead of both, since they didn't spend on military post WW2.
The US may want to have a good Military to defend against China, but if it spends too much, and not enough on civil industry (and education) China may crush the US economically, without firing a bullet.
You can have the most Nukes of any country, but at some point, you have enough nukes to do anything you want, and after that, any nuke you add is a drain on your economy. Having the "best" or "most" weapons isn't the same as having the right allocation of resources.
[+] [-] csb6|4 years ago|reply
If we have enough nukes to do whatever we want (we definitely have more than enough nukes), then it follows that we do not need giant conventional forces, right? We are already invulnerable to invasion/defensive war because of the nukes/geography so what is the point of conventional forces from a defensive standpoint?
This means the F-35 is about offense and conflict escalation - about increasing the reach/power of the American empire. The most cost effective strategy for a nation that is not an empire in this situation would be to drastically downsize conventional forces since we already have a deterrent. Expensive new fighter jets are no longer needed for defense.
So I see the F-35 program not as a counter against the U.S.’s enemies, but as a way to more effectively attack other countries.
[+] [-] irjustin|4 years ago|reply
Does the bad press miss the point?
So much that "point" is the cost per aircraft is nutso for what you get. Something that's stealth, dogfight, and close-in air support.
And perhaps the article is right, the stealth is fantastic. Lets you fire without being seen. But after you've fired it, then what? Now everyone knows where you are and a potential dog fight is coming.
It's well known its dog fighting is weak even compared to other older fighters, but maybe it's also fair to say dog fighting is a thing of the past[1].
Being a stealth mobile missile battery... Is a good long range offense a strong defense? These kinds of things can only be tested, so... jury's still out.
My personal criticism comes in the close in air support, what good is all that money that was dumped into stealth doing as it just hovers above in plain view/access? Also, it does a poor job at flying slowly. It's just not specialized in it.
Time will tell if the price tag is even close to being justified, but I'm still a strong skeptic.
[1] https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/f-35-pilot-heres-wha...
[+] [-] rascul|4 years ago|reply
That doesn't seem like a role the Air Force is very concerned about. The USAF has been trying to kill off their best low and slow flying close air support aircraft for awhile now. [0] The planes are made to lay down hell [1] and take a beating that would destroy just about any other aircraft [2], and the ground troops love it. [3]
Supposedly the F-35 is going to fill the role of the A-10 in the future but I just don't see how that's possible.
[0] https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a34907462...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Republic_A-10_Thunde...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nUhDvcGXgs
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hKgloWQHd8
[+] [-] onepointsixC|4 years ago|reply
>It's well known its dog fighting is weak even compared to other older fighters
It's more nimble than a combat loaded F-16. Sure it isn't super maneuverable like a F-22, but it actually is able to do maneuvers which other planes need thrust vectoring to achieve.
>And perhaps the article is right, the stealth is fantastic. Lets you fire without being seen. But after you've fired it, then what? Now everyone knows where you are and a potential dog fight is coming.
You misunderstanding the nature of the F-35's first shot advantage. It is not merely remaining unseen and firing first. Even if a AWAC's or L band ground radar directs you toward a F-35 it will be the first to fire because it can get a firing solution on a 4th gen before it can get one on the F-35.
Furthermore, it's also not a forgone conclusion that an adversary would know where it is after firing. A F-35 pilot could have moved serious distance in that time from whatever heading the missile originated. With stealth the pace of combat is dictated by the pilot who actually has situational awareness.
[+] [-] bsder|4 years ago|reply
This is probably a valid criticism, but aren't the current generation of military helicopters simply way better than jets could ever be at this? And they have the advantage that they can land and evacuate people.
[+] [-] pton-throw|4 years ago|reply
He also calls it a supersonic fighter, which isn't true. The coatings cannot withstand sustained periods of supersonic flight.
[+] [-] V_Terranova_Jr|4 years ago|reply
True.
And also, the author is an operator, but not necessarily someone involved in the engineering or acquisition.
Nonetheless (and I say this as someone who was severely soured by my involvement with the program), people get tribal as to whether the JSF (provides an unmatched capability) XOR (is the zenith of acquisition malpractice). It's not either/or; both are simultaneously true.
No one in DoD R&D/acquisition fails to appreciate how expensive these things are and this realization is certainly driving long-term decision-making.
[+] [-] bsder|4 years ago|reply
Actually, it does for me:
"Just imagine how the F-16 program would have been covered today when they were crashing an aircraft almost every two weeks during several years in the ’80s and ’90s (the F-35, by comparison, has only crashed 3 times in over a decade of flying)."
I had no idea that an F-16 crashed roughly every two weeks while being debugged. I imagine I'm not the only one.
[+] [-] nickff|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.aetc.af.mil/News/Photos/igphoto/2002209050/
[2] https://thedealerplaybook.com/justin-lee/
[3] https://www.professionalsplaybook.com/listen
[+] [-] packetslave|4 years ago|reply
Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/CJ4C_ClB01e/
[+] [-] tekacs|4 years ago|reply
[2] says, "Maj. Justin Lee, USAF is an active F-35 Joint Strike Force pilot"
[3] says, "I'm an F-35 fighter pilot for the Air Force."
... both of which seem to suggest that he's still active?
[+] [-] jlawer|4 years ago|reply
It IS a very capable war-plane for many of its roles. Much more capable then the harrier and with many capabilities that the F-16 & F-18 lack. It has different solutions to the problems it faces though.
Many of these new approaches to old problems that are arguable. Is a stealthy approach (F-35) more effective then raw manoeuvrability (F-16) in fighter vs fighter combat? Probably if the stealth can be maintained. Is high flying precisions guided weaponry as better then what an A-10 can do in close air support? Maybe? These points will be argued by airchair air marshals until we have another big war to "answer" the question.
But the F-35 has failed at being the cheap general purpose aircraft it was promised to be. It has been earmarked to replace the F-16 in its entirety, as the low end fighter to the F-22 raptor as the high end. This was one of the reasons the F-35 has a single engine. Recent moves are to make the F-35 the new high end fighter w/ a new lightweight fighter the low end that can be cheap enough to fulfil this need.
[+] [-] johnklos|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikehollinger|4 years ago|reply
It's well worth the hour if you're an aviation geek.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n068fel-W9I
[+] [-] phendrenad2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GVIrish|4 years ago|reply
That was the idea, but it is also why the program has performed so poorly on cost, timeliness, and capability.
The F-35 was supposed to achieve 80% parts commonality among the three variants. This would have delivered massive cost savings. Instead, the reality is less than 25% parts commonality. Also, the compromises made to accommodate all three requirement sets means the F-35 has worse aerodynamic performance and a worse radar cross section than it otherwise would've had if the Air Force and Navy could've had their own dedicated air frames from the start.
The much lower degree of parts-sharing wouldn't be so bad, except that the JSF program eschewed a lot of real world testing in lieu of computer simulation. And to make matters worse they employed "concurrent development", which meant that production were getting made while the testing phase was still in progress. The result was that as problems were uncovered, expensive retrofits had to be applied to all the airframes that had already been produced.
In a more traditional development strategy, the vast majority of teething issues would've been found before series production began. But concurrent development was used to try to speed up the timeline, but also make it more difficult to cancel the program.
The F-35 has a lot of capabilities but it is fundamentally compromised because of the attempt to make it a jack of all trades. It has had an extremely long gestation period, very high development costs, very high operational costs, and compromised performance on several fronts. Had the DoD at least split off the USMC STOVL requirement it seems like this project would've gone a lot better.
[+] [-] iab|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ncmncm|4 years ago|reply
The actual point is that we are absolutely stuck with the F-35, so had better make it good--or at least take up thinking it's good, where we can't.
It is not correct to compare it to an F-16. It needs to be compared to a whole fleet of aircraft, because it costs as much as much as a fleet. Could it take on 8 F-16s at once?
It is not correct to compare it to an F-16 because you can afford to fly your plentiful F-16s in harm's way, but have to keep your paltry few F-35s a hundred miles back, out of any possibility of danger.
The reason we are stuck with the F-35, despite its still suffering over 600 class-A design flaws (each risks loss of airframe), is that it is built in 48 states. To kill it you would need to get senators from 24 of those states, and the other two besides, to vote against it. It could explode every time the gear doors shut, and we would still be stuck with it, and they know. Be glad it can take off and land.
[+] [-] ldh|4 years ago|reply
Sounds like the national defense equivalent of rewriting your website from scratch in $LATEST_WEBSHIT_FRAMEWORK. Sure, it's a worse product, but just imagine how great it _could_ be if we halt development of the working version and spend a trillion dollars making the new one work. See? It's better! And the customer is paying hand over fist, so everyone wins.
[+] [-] CapricornNoble|4 years ago|reply
And eventually the Air Force came to its senses, accepted the "pull request" for upgrades on its big workhorse F-15 "library"....and now we are getting the awesome F-15EX. Something we should have been working on before they even cancelled the F-22.
This is why I like the Russian approach to military R&D: they do a small number of cutting-edge products to keep their engineers employed and their tech as current as possible given their constraints, but the bulk of their actual inventory is continuous refinements of solid legacy systems, tweaked and rolled out at fairly low cost.
Su-27 -> Su-30 -> Su-34 and 35 (honestly even the Su-57 planform is clearly an extension of this airframe if you look at it closely)
T-72 -> T-90 -> latest upgrade packages for both (T-72B3M and T-90M Breakthrough-3)
[+] [-] rjvs|4 years ago|reply
I imagine that a Chinese fighter probably costs a lot less to get into the air than an F-35 does. The airframe and engines might not have a higher MTBF than F-35 (or maybe they do) but they are certainly cheaper and easier to replace, regardless.
There's an obvious economic and industrial capability question to all of this. A player with cheap planes can erode the benefits of the technologically superior one by simply encouraging them to be used more, or forcing the decision to not use them for fear of stretching supply lines... Thus reducing the required response time when it's decided to actually deploy the expensive weapon.
[1] https://www.stripes.com/news/pacific/japan-denies-report-tha...
[+] [-] thelucky41|4 years ago|reply
Whether the F-35 will be successful or not does not matter whether there are armchair journalists or mainstream reporters covering the project, but in this case we can enjoy the increased accountability. This should be seen as a positive effect of social media, if anything.
This had me wondering how many mistakes in previous projects were smoothed over by clever marketing, and how many are being exposed now. Does social media make it easier or harder for the general public to get accurate information on this sort of thing?
[+] [-] ioseph|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pasorrijer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ummonk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emmelaich|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GVIrish|4 years ago|reply
But, like a lot of things with the JSF program, concurrency made it much more difficult to cancel. Sunk costs and all that.
[+] [-] Sophistifunk|4 years ago|reply