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> to penetrate sophisticated enemy air defenses and find and disable threats—requires what the fifth-generation jet offers: stealth and a stunning array of pass

> to penetrate sophisticated enemy air defenses and find and disable threats—requires what the fifth-generation jet offers: stealth and a stunning array of passive and active sensors > U.S. forces first took these capabilities into combat last September, when Marine F-35Bs struck the Taliban in Afghanistan against disorganized rebel forces less well armed than the average suburban American, with no air force and no surface to air missiles. and the U.S. still can't win that war.

umvi 8y ago
That's because it's like being a doctor trying to eradicate cancer that is spread throughout the patient's body in minute amounts. You can do a precision strike against one small area, but how do you eradicate all the cancer without killing healthy cells (also in this analogy killing any healthy cells makes you a murderer). The only way to win is to convince the patient's immune system (the host country's civilians) to kill its own cancer.
remarkEon 8y ago
Is the F-35 meant to be a true replacement for the A-10?
- kjs3 8y ago
  Regrettably, that's exactly one of the use cases.
- hermitdev 8y ago
  I think that was the hope, but reality has set in and the lifetime of the A-10 has been extended. I mean, why not? There is no current or planned plane as capable or as survivable as the A-10. F-35? Single engine, inline. Take that out and instant eject. Warthog was designed to lose an engine, even let it burn off and make it home. Control surfaces have mechanical backups. Not to mention the titanium tub protecting the pilot. And the cannon? Oh, the cannon. Can an F-35 take out a T-72 or T-80 on cannons alone? Doubtful. A-10 is one of my favorite warplanes. Design was basically: here's this cannon, build a plane around it.
  - pacificmint 8y ago
    The A-10 is amazing. This pilot landed her plane after receiving massive damage, including a giant hole in the wing and loss of all hydraulics. [1] [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Campbell_(pilot) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Campbell_(pilot)
    - dralley 8y ago
      Cool. But it's generally better if your aircraft isn't being hit by AA gun fire in the first place.
  - remarkEon 8y ago
    Sure, and it probably has it's place, but what war are we supposed to be preparing for? I've come around to some of the other comments in this thread that point out that we spent a lot of time preparing for the last war, which got us caught with our pants down in OIF/OEF. It's probably wise to analyze the F-35, warts and all, in that context. A lot of the criticisms I see seem to bake in this assumption that it would do very poorly in a COIN type war. I don't exactly agree, since by the time I left AFG (2013) it was mostly drone, F-16, and B1 support we had. I never saw a single A-10. Lots of little birds, but that's it. So if all we need the F-35 to do is drop some GBUs it seems it'll probably be able to do that at least as good as everything else. If we're actually trying to prepare for a near-peer adversary, I'm much more concerned with the vast suite of electronics on this platform than I am with it's ability to dog fight. What use is dog fighting in a early/mid 21st century war? If you're trying to dog fight I think you've already lost. As the US has dominated the sky (and the sea) for the last half century our near-peers have optimized on that they are good at, and what we are not. The Russians with more and more advanced missile technology, and the Chinese their cyber weapons - neither of which the F-35 has anything to do with countering, at least explicitly, and with the latter seems uniquely vulnerable to. But yes, I agree, "take this huge cannon and weld a cockpit, two engines, and some wings to it" made for a pretty cool aircraft.
  - CapricornNoble 8y ago
    "There is no current or planned plane as capable or as survivable as the A-10." Re:survivability....The A-10 survives being hit. The F-35 avoids being hit in the first place. Modern SAMs like the S-400 will spot and engage the A-10 are farther ranges than they can even detect an F-35. The A-10 can survive ground cannon fire (say from a Pantsir-S1's cannons) better than the F-35...but the F-35 doesn't need to get "low and slow" to deliver ordnance on target in the first place. If F-35s are tasked with doing gun runs on T-80s, then in your AOC (Air Force operations center) or DASC (Marine equivalent, roughly) somebody sucks at either weaponeering, building an Air Tasking Order, or both.
- SteveCoast 8y ago
  Yes and it's insanity. Entire books have been written about this.
jazzyjackson 8y ago
I was trying to find an article I read years ago, about how unsuited the supersonic fighter jets are for air support of ground operations. The main contentions were: 1. Modern jets need long runways (aircraft carrier slingshot notwithstanding) so anytime troops were calling in air support, a supersonic f16 would fly for an hour, have enough fuel for a couple of bombing runs before having to fly back to the closest large airport, compared to what the troops really wanted, a super tucano turboprop, which can take off from the dirt airstrips available anywhere in the country. 2. Modern jets, with their stunning array of passive and active sensors, encourage an eyes-off approach to dropping bombs : pilots can only trust their data, they are not close enough to the ground to recognize who's friendly and who's not. Alluded in my sibling comment, A10 warthogs would have been perfect for these missions -- I don't know where the unwillingness to fund them comes from. Googling now reveals that Super Tucano turboprops are now being delivered to the afghan airfoce, since that's what you actually need to fight small arms battles in the remote regions of the country. Closest thing I found was 2015, detailing why modern technology doesn't win the war, 'low and slow' can be a better game plan: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8qxzyv/low-and-slow https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8qxzyv/low-and-sl...
- radicaldreamer 8y ago
  It’s cause A10’s are cheap and F-35’s are expensive. Same reason why the SR-71 was killed (10 planes to own the sky and any adversary vs an order for hundreds).
  - reneherse 8y ago
    The SR-71 was a recon platform, not a fighter or bomber. It was made obsolete largely by advances in satellite technology.
    - mrep 8y ago
      Also: "On Sept. 3, 2012 an article written by Rakesh Krishman Simha for Indrus.in explains how the Foxhound was able to stop Blackbirds spy missions over Soviet Union on Jun. 3, 1986. That day, no less than six MiG-31s “intercepted” an SR-71 over the Barents Sea by performing a coordinated interception that subjected the Blackbird to a possible all angle air-to-air missiles attack. Apparently, after this interception, no SR-71 flew a reconnaissance missions over the Soviet Union and few years later the Blackbird was retired to be replaced with the satellites." https://theaviationist.com/2013/12/11/sr-71-vs-mig-31/ https://theaviationist.com/2013/12/11/sr-71-vs-mig-31/
mc32 8y ago
That framing isn’t right. The F35 is not sent in to “win.” it has a specific mission. With regard to winning, both the USSR and the US (or China,etc.) could win a war in AF. The question is are they willing to do what it would take? The answer is no. It would cause too many casualties (no one is willing to bear that, even the taliban). So war becomes more a tool to serve a policy rather than a way to vanquish an enemy.
- cirgue 8y ago
  The “continuation of politics by other means”
- plurinshael 8y ago
  War is always a servant of policy. "Vanquishment" thinking is where the United States has gone wrong, for a long time now.
bordercases 8y ago
It's also a deterrent against more conventional opponents or potential opponents like Russia and China.
shereadsthenews 8y ago
That describes most of our weapons: brilliant against barbarians, under certain circumstances, but generally useless and certain to be destroyed in the first minute of a global conflict with another major power.
- steve76 8y ago
  It is more likely the major powers merge. More and more I just see desperate people not in control, mostly driven forward by their own bad people, and police action at the very top just keeping a lid on things.
- adventured 8y ago
  What other major powers? There are only two other major regional military powers: Russia and China. Please provide robust examples to back up your premise. The last large conflict between US weapons and another competitor, resulted in absolute humiliation on the part of Russia/USSR in the Gulf War. Russia can't globally project its military and neither can China. Russia can barely leave its borders and can barely afford to even in a limited fashion. Neither comes close to having the logistics, bases, comprehensive weapons systems and information systems necessary to fight a war outside their borders against the US. They simply can't do it under any circumstances. China will need 30 more years to get to that level at the rate they're going; they still haven't properly modernized their military, much less figured out how to use that modernization effectively. Russia's entire military is rotting top to bottom. Putin has shifted Russia's focus to a narrow selection of propaganda heavy 'super' weapons, because they can no longer afford to maintain their military to keep up with the US broadly. They can't afford the SU-57, it'll never be constructed in meaningful numbers. They can't properly maintain or sustain their one aircraft carrier. Russia is no longer a broad military rival to the US, they're a narrow weapons systems rival (eg the excellent S missile systems). Things are not going to get better for Russia on the military front, they're going to keep getting worse in line with their permanently stagnate economy. They'll have to make a choice on cutting the size of their military (further limiting their capabilities to mostly defense of Russian territory), or allowing the average quality of their forces to continue to erode. A $1.6 trillion economy - smaller than Canada's economy - simply isn't going to enable them to keep up over the coming decades with the US and Chinese economies. China is the sole military rival to the US going forward. As of today, they're still solidly behind the US in nearly every weapon system. Maybe in a couple decades the story will be very different (one assumes), today it's not.
philwelch 8y ago
The average suburban American doesn't have fully automatic weapons or RPG's. The Taliban also at one point did have surface-to-air missiles (specifically MANPADS) but most references to that are old enough that they might have run out by now unless someone's been resupplying them.
- toomanybeersies 8y ago
  I'd take an all-American AR-15 restricted to semi-automatic fire over a rusty old fully-automatic Afghan Kalashnikov. Not a California-spec AR-15 mind you, but a full bore, Screamin Eagle, Texas-spec AR-15, with a high capacity magazine and all the other bells and whistles.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    I'd take a squad of dudes with AKs and full auto fire capability over a squad of dudes with ARs. Your tactical options are so much better when you get that extra tool in the toolbox.
  - philwelch 8y ago
    To be fair, I would fully expect American guerrillas to be able to maintain an insurgency just as effectively as the Afghans, particularly in the Rockies, Appalachians, Alaska, and Cascades. Texas is more flat and wide open, but if you managed to hold the local fuel infrastructure you can do a lot with guys in pickups.
clarkmoody 8y ago
There is no winning move in Afghanistan: the President who pulls out will be blamed when Afghanistan returns to its pre-war state, and political enemies will chalk it up as a "loss." There might be a chance of ending the war during a lame duck presidency, but that President will be thinking of Legacy at that point. Thus the only politically-viable course of action is to keep the war going. As a sibling comment mentioned: war serves more than one purpose. Unless of course the culture of America shifts to an anti-war or non-interventionist stance and sees peace as more important than "winning" or "losing" in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening any time soon.
- steve76 8y ago
  How about we embarrass them even more. We fear what they embrace. Okay smart guy, I'll just keep you alive, and blot out the Sun for good measure while I'm at it. Go back to your cave, and your heroin.
- HenryKissinger 8y ago
  Petraeus said Afghanistan was the kind of conflict we were in our for the rest of our life, and our children's lives. Just my $0.02.
zaphirplane 8y ago
Definitely a tick in the box. f35 can achieve air supremacy against men with ak47 on Toyota pickups
lm28469 8y ago
> less well armed than the average suburban American, with no air force and no surface to air missiles You'd be surprised, they have access to a lot of old and not so old russian tech + captured weapons. Definitely not as effective as modern tech but much better than what a civilian can get anywhere in the world. Afaik talibans shot down multiple military planes and helicopters. Americans are fighting in Afghanistan for 17+ years, clearly they have more than spears and stones.
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
Your average suburban American doesn't have access to proper military hardware (thanks to the NFA).
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

umvi 8y ago

That's because it's like being a doctor trying to eradicate cancer that is spread throughout the patient's body in minute amounts. You can do a precision strike against one small area, but how do you eradicate all the cancer without killing healthy cells (also in this analogy killing any healthy cells makes you a murderer). The only way to win is to convince the patient's immune system (the host country's civilians) to kill its own cancer.

remarkEon 8y ago

Is the F-35 meant to be a true replacement for the A-10?

kjs3 8y ago
Regrettably, that's exactly one of the use cases.
hermitdev 8y ago
I think that was the hope, but reality has set in and the lifetime of the A-10 has been extended. I mean, why not? There is no current or planned plane as capable or as survivable as the A-10. F-35? Single engine, inline. Take that out and instant eject. Warthog was designed to lose an engine, even let it burn off and make it home. Control surfaces have mechanical backups. Not to mention the titanium tub protecting the pilot. And the cannon? Oh, the cannon. Can an F-35 take out a T-72 or T-80 on cannons alone? Doubtful. A-10 is one of my favorite warplanes. Design was basically: here's this cannon, build a plane around it.
- pacificmint 8y ago
  The A-10 is amazing. This pilot landed her plane after receiving massive damage, including a giant hole in the wing and loss of all hydraulics. [1] [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Campbell_(pilot) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Campbell_(pilot)
  - dralley 8y ago
    Cool. But it's generally better if your aircraft isn't being hit by AA gun fire in the first place.
- remarkEon 8y ago
  Sure, and it probably has it's place, but what war are we supposed to be preparing for? I've come around to some of the other comments in this thread that point out that we spent a lot of time preparing for the last war, which got us caught with our pants down in OIF/OEF. It's probably wise to analyze the F-35, warts and all, in that context. A lot of the criticisms I see seem to bake in this assumption that it would do very poorly in a COIN type war. I don't exactly agree, since by the time I left AFG (2013) it was mostly drone, F-16, and B1 support we had. I never saw a single A-10. Lots of little birds, but that's it. So if all we need the F-35 to do is drop some GBUs it seems it'll probably be able to do that at least as good as everything else. If we're actually trying to prepare for a near-peer adversary, I'm much more concerned with the vast suite of electronics on this platform than I am with it's ability to dog fight. What use is dog fighting in a early/mid 21st century war? If you're trying to dog fight I think you've already lost. As the US has dominated the sky (and the sea) for the last half century our near-peers have optimized on that they are good at, and what we are not. The Russians with more and more advanced missile technology, and the Chinese their cyber weapons - neither of which the F-35 has anything to do with countering, at least explicitly, and with the latter seems uniquely vulnerable to. But yes, I agree, "take this huge cannon and weld a cockpit, two engines, and some wings to it" made for a pretty cool aircraft.
- CapricornNoble 8y ago
  "There is no current or planned plane as capable or as survivable as the A-10." Re:survivability....The A-10 survives being hit. The F-35 avoids being hit in the first place. Modern SAMs like the S-400 will spot and engage the A-10 are farther ranges than they can even detect an F-35. The A-10 can survive ground cannon fire (say from a Pantsir-S1's cannons) better than the F-35...but the F-35 doesn't need to get "low and slow" to deliver ordnance on target in the first place. If F-35s are tasked with doing gun runs on T-80s, then in your AOC (Air Force operations center) or DASC (Marine equivalent, roughly) somebody sucks at either weaponeering, building an Air Tasking Order, or both.
SteveCoast 8y ago
Yes and it's insanity. Entire books have been written about this.

jazzyjackson 8y ago

I was trying to find an article I read years ago, about how unsuited the supersonic fighter jets are for air support of ground operations. The main contentions were: 1. Modern jets need long runways (aircraft carrier slingshot notwithstanding) so anytime troops were calling in air support, a supersonic f16 would fly for an hour, have enough fuel for a couple of bombing runs before having to fly back to the closest large airport, compared to what the troops really wanted, a super tucano turboprop, which can take off from the dirt airstrips available anywhere in the country. 2. Modern jets, with their stunning array of passive and active sensors, encourage an eyes-off approach to dropping bombs : pilots can only trust their data, they are not close enough to the ground to recognize who's friendly and who's not. Alluded in my sibling comment, A10 warthogs would have been perfect for these missions -- I don't know where the unwillingness to fund them comes from. Googling now reveals that Super Tucano turboprops are now being delivered to the afghan airfoce, since that's what you actually need to fight small arms battles in the remote regions of the country. Closest thing I found was 2015, detailing why modern technology doesn't win the war, 'low and slow' can be a better game plan: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8qxzyv/low-and-slow https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8qxzyv/low-and-sl...

radicaldreamer 8y ago
It’s cause A10’s are cheap and F-35’s are expensive. Same reason why the SR-71 was killed (10 planes to own the sky and any adversary vs an order for hundreds).
- reneherse 8y ago
  The SR-71 was a recon platform, not a fighter or bomber. It was made obsolete largely by advances in satellite technology.
  - mrep 8y ago
    Also: "On Sept. 3, 2012 an article written by Rakesh Krishman Simha for Indrus.in explains how the Foxhound was able to stop Blackbirds spy missions over Soviet Union on Jun. 3, 1986. That day, no less than six MiG-31s “intercepted” an SR-71 over the Barents Sea by performing a coordinated interception that subjected the Blackbird to a possible all angle air-to-air missiles attack. Apparently, after this interception, no SR-71 flew a reconnaissance missions over the Soviet Union and few years later the Blackbird was retired to be replaced with the satellites." https://theaviationist.com/2013/12/11/sr-71-vs-mig-31/ https://theaviationist.com/2013/12/11/sr-71-vs-mig-31/

mc32 8y ago

That framing isn’t right. The F35 is not sent in to “win.” it has a specific mission. With regard to winning, both the USSR and the US (or China,etc.) could win a war in AF. The question is are they willing to do what it would take? The answer is no. It would cause too many casualties (no one is willing to bear that, even the taliban). So war becomes more a tool to serve a policy rather than a way to vanquish an enemy.

cirgue 8y ago
The “continuation of politics by other means”
plurinshael 8y ago
War is always a servant of policy. "Vanquishment" thinking is where the United States has gone wrong, for a long time now.

bordercases 8y ago

It's also a deterrent against more conventional opponents or potential opponents like Russia and China.

shereadsthenews 8y ago

That describes most of our weapons: brilliant against barbarians, under certain circumstances, but generally useless and certain to be destroyed in the first minute of a global conflict with another major power.

steve76 8y ago
It is more likely the major powers merge. More and more I just see desperate people not in control, mostly driven forward by their own bad people, and police action at the very top just keeping a lid on things.
adventured 8y ago
What other major powers? There are only two other major regional military powers: Russia and China. Please provide robust examples to back up your premise. The last large conflict between US weapons and another competitor, resulted in absolute humiliation on the part of Russia/USSR in the Gulf War. Russia can't globally project its military and neither can China. Russia can barely leave its borders and can barely afford to even in a limited fashion. Neither comes close to having the logistics, bases, comprehensive weapons systems and information systems necessary to fight a war outside their borders against the US. They simply can't do it under any circumstances. China will need 30 more years to get to that level at the rate they're going; they still haven't properly modernized their military, much less figured out how to use that modernization effectively. Russia's entire military is rotting top to bottom. Putin has shifted Russia's focus to a narrow selection of propaganda heavy 'super' weapons, because they can no longer afford to maintain their military to keep up with the US broadly. They can't afford the SU-57, it'll never be constructed in meaningful numbers. They can't properly maintain or sustain their one aircraft carrier. Russia is no longer a broad military rival to the US, they're a narrow weapons systems rival (eg the excellent S missile systems). Things are not going to get better for Russia on the military front, they're going to keep getting worse in line with their permanently stagnate economy. They'll have to make a choice on cutting the size of their military (further limiting their capabilities to mostly defense of Russian territory), or allowing the average quality of their forces to continue to erode. A $1.6 trillion economy - smaller than Canada's economy - simply isn't going to enable them to keep up over the coming decades with the US and Chinese economies. China is the sole military rival to the US going forward. As of today, they're still solidly behind the US in nearly every weapon system. Maybe in a couple decades the story will be very different (one assumes), today it's not.

philwelch 8y ago

The average suburban American doesn't have fully automatic weapons or RPG's. The Taliban also at one point did have surface-to-air missiles (specifically MANPADS) but most references to that are old enough that they might have run out by now unless someone's been resupplying them.

toomanybeersies 8y ago
I'd take an all-American AR-15 restricted to semi-automatic fire over a rusty old fully-automatic Afghan Kalashnikov. Not a California-spec AR-15 mind you, but a full bore, Screamin Eagle, Texas-spec AR-15, with a high capacity magazine and all the other bells and whistles.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  I'd take a squad of dudes with AKs and full auto fire capability over a squad of dudes with ARs. Your tactical options are so much better when you get that extra tool in the toolbox.
- philwelch 8y ago
  To be fair, I would fully expect American guerrillas to be able to maintain an insurgency just as effectively as the Afghans, particularly in the Rockies, Appalachians, Alaska, and Cascades. Texas is more flat and wide open, but if you managed to hold the local fuel infrastructure you can do a lot with guys in pickups.

clarkmoody 8y ago

There is no winning move in Afghanistan: the President who pulls out will be blamed when Afghanistan returns to its pre-war state, and political enemies will chalk it up as a "loss." There might be a chance of ending the war during a lame duck presidency, but that President will be thinking of Legacy at that point. Thus the only politically-viable course of action is to keep the war going. As a sibling comment mentioned: war serves more than one purpose. Unless of course the culture of America shifts to an anti-war or non-interventionist stance and sees peace as more important than "winning" or "losing" in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening any time soon.

steve76 8y ago
How about we embarrass them even more. We fear what they embrace. Okay smart guy, I'll just keep you alive, and blot out the Sun for good measure while I'm at it. Go back to your cave, and your heroin.
HenryKissinger 8y ago
Petraeus said Afghanistan was the kind of conflict we were in our for the rest of our life, and our children's lives. Just my $0.02.

zaphirplane 8y ago

Definitely a tick in the box. f35 can achieve air supremacy against men with ak47 on Toyota pickups

lm28469 8y ago

> less well armed than the average suburban American, with no air force and no surface to air missiles You'd be surprised, they have access to a lot of old and not so old russian tech + captured weapons. Definitely not as effective as modern tech but much better than what a civilian can get anywhere in the world. Afaik talibans shot down multiple military planes and helicopters. Americans are fighting in Afghanistan for 17+ years, clearly they have more than spears and stones.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

Your average suburban American doesn't have access to proper military hardware (thanks to the NFA).

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]