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Isn't this sort of thing expected through the process of developing cutting edge hardware and software? I can't imagine there are many airframes that are pushi

by scanny 7y ago

Isn't this sort of thing expected through the process of developing cutting edge hardware and software? I can't imagine there are many airframes that are pushing the technological boundaries as the F-35, aren't bleeding edge products prone to difficult development? I don't see how this wont be worth it in the long run in terms of getting ahead in an arms race as a superpower. It seems as though this is probably the hardest thing to get industry insight into given the secret nature of it all.

JshWright 7y ago
The F-35 isn't that "bleeding edge" though. Most of the "innovation" comes from trying to accomplish a bunch of different roles with a single aircraft (shockingly, this has resulted in a plane that excels at none of them).
- Klathmon 7y ago
  But would the alternative of designing and manufacturing many different aircraft be cheaper? And would it be as effective? For it's faults, the F-35 is a weapon that can be configured and deployed at the drop of a hat for just about anything. That's a very powerful capability to have as a defensive and offensive weapon.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - cryptonector 7y ago
    It might not be cheaper, though I suspect it would be just because white elephants will white elephant. And besides, what's the likelihood that three separate projects will fail? But the likelihood that a jack of all trades will be a master of none, and thus perhaps ineffective, is pretty high. > at the drop of a hat Ha! There are still multiple variants, and you cannot reconfigure instances of one variant to be instances of another, and certainly not at the drop of a hat.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - colechristensen 7y ago
    >But would the alternative of designing and manufacturing many different aircraft be cheaper? Ultimately yes. You can be much more agile when you aren't trying to satisfy a large collection of armed services, nations, and mission roles many of whom are mostly interested in putting their mark on something instead of making it better. >And would it be as effective? Not if your definition of effective is ability of one aircraft to do everything. If your definition of effective is forces ability to achieve goals, then yes a set of aircraft specialists can be better than one generalist.
  - randcraw 7y ago
    But if single purpose aircraft are more capable at that purpose, the F-35 still loses when it goes into battle. The fact that it doesn't suck at anything in particular only counts on a spreadsheet. No F-35 is going to be used for different purposes by the same pilot or military service. The best tool for the job — that's something the F-35 is not now and never can be. When on a bombing run radar stealth and bomb load matters, but acrobatic agility and VTOL / STOL doesn't. On a carrier, durability matters every time you slap the deck and VTOL /STOL might be very handy, but stealth or high altitude capability, not as much. Designing a fighter/bomber to please every service is like training every soldier, sailor, airman, and marine to have the same fighting skills. It's going to get them all killed.
  - GVIrish 7y ago
    > But would the alternative of designing and manufacturing many different aircraft be cheaper? And would it be as effective? Yes. The military has tried the multi service aircraft idea in the past, wasted a lot of money, and failed completely to develop one of the desired variants. That was the F-111, which was supposed to have a Navy and Air Force version. The F-35 was supposed to feature 80% parts commonality between the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps versions. Instead, it ended up being 20%. With that little parts commonality, the different services should've just developed their own planes. All three services would've ended up with a more capable aircraft for their requirements that wasn't so heavily compromised. And it in all likelihood would have been cheaper. > For it's faults, the F-35 is a weapon that can be configured and deployed at the drop of a hat for just about anything. That's a very powerful capability to have as a defensive and offensive weapon It can fly a multitude of roles but it is not as good at many of them as a more focused aircraft would be. Considering the massive costs it was a bad trade off.
    - jdietrich 7y ago
      See also the disastrous development process of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Fighting_Vehicle#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Fighting_Vehicle#Histo...
    - scottlocklin 7y ago
      The F-111 is the right comparison class. It was supposed to do everything; got relegated to the role every failed airframe does: attack aircraft. Basically a shitty expensive bomber. Just as the F35 is. Dipshit Generals who are bribed with Lockheed jobs afterwords will try to convince you that's really what they wanted; it ain't. It is an egregiously failed weapons system, though an excellent piece of modern political corruption. Yay we have a plane that costs $300 a troy ounce which can be used to blow up cavemen in Afghanistan. Something a cloth winged Sopwith Camel biplane from WW-1 would probably actually be better at; certainly more cost effective. Nerds who are touting this turkey because "woo woo cool half million dollar vidya game helmet" ... y'awl make me want to renounce my citizenship. This turd can be defeated by a Russian tractor mechanic detuning his radar slightly.
  - p_l 7y ago
    Just basic post-flight download of data takes more than the flight. The reconfiguration happens only in two or three places in the world and can take weeks if not months and then you need to have high-speed Internet access to get it. Quick turnaround is something yiu get from Soviets/Russians or Swedes, where the doctrines involved make it priority feature.
- jjoonathan 7y ago
  So VR helmets, EW antennas embedded in stealth skin, and crazy combat networking are all trivial features that we should expect a gaggle of government contractors to get right on the first pass? I'm not sure I buy that argument. The plane looks plenty fancy to me, at least in the context of its alternatives ("first lol" tech demonstrators don't count).
  - wahern 7y ago
    Both the B-2 and F-22 have embedded antennas. JshWright's point seems to make sense: the complexity comes from system's integration and software, compounded by the aircraft having to be too many things to too many people. Basically, software, of which there's a ton to say regarding F-35 development. All the features required and component integration required them to adopt an agile methodology, moving away from the Ada-style development processes and, arguably hacking things together until they kinda worked. The predictable result is a long-tail of bugs that may never be fully eradicated.
    - supermanfan 7y ago
      What's with the "embedded antennas" references? Microstrips have been used in planes for decades.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        I think the point is "embedded in stealth skin".
  - darkpuma 7y ago
    > "VR helmets," AR, not VR, right? Pretty sure they were doing that in helicopters years ago. Doesn't the Apache have a 30mm autocannon slaved to the pilot's helmet display, such that it shoots where the pilot looks? I'm no helmet geek, but I think that stuff came out in the 80s. I suppose the F-35's implementation is cooler, on account of being newer, but it doesn't seem earth shattering to me.
    - deleted 7y ago
- scanny 7y ago
  I mean having a look around at some of the technical innovation in this space seems to show that there are many firsts happening with the airframe. https://www.wired.com/2016/06/course-f-35-comes-400000-augmented-reality-helmet/ https://www.wired.com/2016/06/course-f-35-comes-400000-augme... They may not be firsts overall, but it seems like a pretty complicated environment to perform testing and development in. I have to wonder what getting a software build out for a fighter jet must be like, and getting someone up in the air in different environments to test it must make the testing process daunting.
- cheschire 7y ago
  I suspect most of the innovation is actually in the acquisitions side of the house. They could burn money for decades on this project and still come out ahead compared to running half a dozen acquisitions projects for multiple planes.
  - pas 7y ago
    Could you explain this argument in a bit more detail please. Why and how is this way better, what's the comparison, what are the main cost drivers/differences?
    - cheschire 7y ago
      Sure, take this chart[0] and multiply it times the number of air frames one would anticipate needing to accomplish various missions. Not only are the bureaucratic meetings amplified, but the O&M long tail starts to kill you with the logistics of moving and storing parts, training specialists on each aircraft, administering the additional specialists... it keeps going and going. As an aside, I didn't say it was "way better", I just said they would come out ahead even burning money for decades. 0: https://www.dau.mil/tools/t/Department-of-Defense-Acquisition-Life-Cycle-Chart https://www.dau.mil/tools/t/Department-of-Defense-Acquisitio...
ekianjo 7y ago
This kind of planes are not what is needed to be a superpower nowadays. The landscape of military confrontation has completely changed.
- jjoonathan 7y ago
  Easy to say, impossible to act on. While we're in a speculative mood, just what kind of planes do you think are needed to be a superpower nowadays? Seems to me that a plausible answer is drones, lots of drones, and missiles, with a EW / networking / stealth focused plane to forward-position a human to coordinate them. The F-35 seems to fit that role like a glove. ICBMs are another potential answer but I have a hard time being angry at war toys that provide intermediate options between "peace" and "destroy the world."
  - cryptonector 7y ago
    I believe that a mix of 5th-gen airplanes and many UAVs, both with AI and with remote pilots hosted on stand-off AWACS-style planes, is the right answer. I believe the same would be true for tanks. Lots of small and nimble tanklets remotely operated from stand-off mobile c&c centers.
    - jjoonathan 7y ago
      Yeah, I think the big question is which style of C&C is better. A single pilot in a F-35 closer to the action, or a bunch of pilots further away in a sitting duck with a big antenna. The answer might even change as AI develops. If I had a budget the size of the US military, I'd want both.
      - qaq 7y ago
        Once all the LEO satellite communication projects are up and running you could be pretty far and still get decent performance.
        7y ago
mysterydip 7y ago
The defense acquisition process is supposed to allow for production of bleeding edge development efforts while minimizing risk and meeting requirements, on budget and on schedule. In theory, anyway. The main problem to me is the F-35 is three airframes with three different sets of (competing) requirements, trying to save cost by keeping as much similar between them as possible. I don't know in the end if we would have just been better off with three purpose-built aircraft.
- icelancer 7y ago
  >> I don't know in the end if we would have just been better off with three purpose-built aircraft. We've tried this in the past and failed to control costs spectacularly. The JSF/F-35 project is an insane boondoggle but it seems unlikely that the alternative of splitting them out would have been better. We all know what should have been done by this point, which is... not the JSF. But we're pretty far down this road and we do need to modernize the current air superiority weapons we have, so... eh. It looks like we're stuck.
  - mysterydip 7y ago
    Agreed. As much as I thought it looked like a pregnant fish from the side, I wonder if Boeing's design would have been better later in the development lifecycle.
    - apta 7y ago
      Based on what out of curiosity?
      - mysterydip 7y ago
        The X-32 used a direct-lift thrust vectoring system for its STOVL variant, while the X-35 used a lift fan. Late design change ramifications and logistic footprints for the two options would have been different.
  - wbl 7y ago
jandrewrogers 7y ago
The F-35 really isn't cutting edge. It is in many regards a nerf-ed export-ready version of the F-22 tech, which everyone wants but no one gets, and designed to be a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none type platform. There is definitely a "targeting the down market" aspect to the productization.
jdietrich 7y ago
>Isn't this sort of thing expected through the process of developing cutting edge hardware and software? To a great extent, that's the fundamental problem with the F-35 program - it's a technological showcase first and a useful weapons system second. It has been designed and commissioned by people who believe that "most advanced" necessarily means "best" and who are indifferent to the actual tactical and strategic requirements. The Army and Marines have been crying out for years for a suitable replacement for the ageing A-10. It's the finest close support aircraft ever made, it has a legendary reputation among infantrymen who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the USAF are still planning on retiring it in favour of the F-35, an aircraft that is simply incapable of performing the same role. Even if the F-35 were inarguably an excellent aircraft, it's the wrong aircraft for a vitally important job. The F-35 helmet is a $400,000 showcase of AR technology, capable of providing unprecedented levels of data to a pilot. It's also really bad at being a helmet - it's so heavy that it could literally break the neck of smaller pilots during ejection and so bulky that it limits visibility. Test pilots have mixed views on the usefulness of the AR cameras, but they all want the ability to look over their shoulder. It's maybe possibly better at doing a thing that nobody asked for, but it's demonstrably worse at being a helmet. Servicemen don't want cutting-edge innovation - they want weapons systems that work reliably in the field and provide useful combat capabilities. That's what you need to keep in mind when you hear the DoD hype the F-35. We know it's a hell of a lot less reliable than existing US aircraft and competing foreign aircraft. We know that the one-airframe-to-rule-them-all model is deeply flawed and leaves serious gaps in the combat capability of the US military. What does the F-35 actually offer in the field that couldn't be provided by a cheaper, simpler, more reliable weapons system? I've yet to hear a good answer to that question.
- joering2 7y ago
  > It's also really bad at being a helmet A buddy of mine is actually flying the jet. He said helmet is cool to wear first time but quickly wears out in real flies and is even worse in combat. A lieutenant that first flew it many years ago called it "karate mirror"; he explained it must have been designed by someone who never fought a fight, but somewhat was stubborn enough to assume when you fight karate you would love to have a back mirror to see whats happening behind. They military argues with contractors atm to actually come back to a regular helmet, because there is really no added value in flying Mach 1 and engage in fight in front of you and having ability to see behind or even under, when you have all sort of warning systems that monitors your surrounding and allows you enough time to alter your direction before you get hit.
simongr3dal 7y ago
> I don't see how this wont be worth it in the long run So your long term view of the world is one that rewards building more and more advanced killing-machines?
- on_and_off 7y ago
  'merica ! No budget for health care, education, or hey, facing that climate crisie that endangers us all, but boys, are our weapons shiny !
- ekianjo 7y ago
  Point is, once you are certain of your superiority you dont even need to act on it. The mere threat is sufficient. That is why nukes are so powerful in preventing global conflicts.
  - pinkfoot 7y ago
    >The mere threat is sufficient. And of course completely illegal under the 1977 Gevena Convention.
    - simongr3dal 7y ago
      As far as I can read the 1977 Protocol which among other things forbids the use of nuclear weapons is not rattified by the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions#Contents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions#Contents
      - pinkfoot 7y ago
        If you don't like that one, here are some more: Declaration of St. Petersburg, 1868 Hague Convention, 1907 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 Geneva Conventions, 1949 The Protocols Additional to the Geneva Conventions, 1977, See https://cnduk.org/legality-of-nuclear-weapons/ https://cnduk.org/legality-of-nuclear-weapons/ An of course, UN Security Council resolution 255 (1968) including the 1977 clarification is still supported by USA, UK, Russia which 'positive assurance' against the use of weapons against NNWS. (Which as an aside makes Trump's recent tweet to end Iran illegal under US law and probably a war crime). But of course, its precisely the posession of these weapons that makes all these niceties irrelevant. Law of the jungle.
projectileboy 7y ago
If you were to try to write an allegory of a superpower in decline, you could hardly do better than tell the story of the F-35. The most expensive weapons program in the history of the world, a decade overdue, still plagued with showstopping problems, loaded with features no one asked for, packaged in a compromised design that makes it not quite what any of the service branches actually need, with specs that do not favorably match up to the F-4. At best, we could say it was a jobs program that taught us how not to design and manufacture military aircraft in the future. The price we’ll pay for that knowledge is $1.5 trillion, along with two or three decades of air inferiority.
- wazoox 7y ago
  The billions poured into useless military projects is unfortunately the US way to do social spending...
- alkonaut 7y ago
  > If you were to try to write an allegory of a superpower in decline, you could hardly do better than tell the story of the F-35. The Russian Su-57 is plagued with the same kind of issues, made much worse by the fact that Russia is no longer the superpower it was. The difference between the US and a superpower in actual decline is that the US can throw almost unlimited funds at the F-35 program and Russia can't. The real mark of a superpower isn't that it makes clever things but that it can afford making stupid things.
  - CapricornNoble 7y ago
    I understand your argument, that frivolous spending and basically throwing money at technical problems until they go away are the exclusive purview of superpowers. But I think calling Russia a "superpower in decline" is slightly off-mark. I would call them a "Great Power that understands its limits". I would argue the decline has stabilized from lows of the 1990s. Now they are in a kind-of stagnation caused by demographics, sanctions, and a failure to diversify away from a kleptocratic resource-export economy. The Russian approach to their defense industry is pretty rational IMO: they do small batches of extremely high-tech stuff mostly to keep their engineers active and to improve their institutional knowledge. Then they spin off iterative improvements and upgrades to the bulk of their legacy military hardware. Perfect examples are the T-72B3M and the Su-35. Hell, the Su-57 itself, if you look carefully, is basically a heavily-stealthed Su-27 planform.[1] And they can do this because their MISSILE tech is absolutely first-rate. Russia understood the "payloads over platforms" mentality long before the US did. And their national defense posture is basically "We have nukes to deter anyone who is an existential threat, and everyone else can be beaten by our leftover Soviet stuff." [1]https://migflug.com/jetflights/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2014/06/PAK-FA-vs-Su35.jpg https://migflug.com/jetflights/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/20...
cm2187 7y ago
That would make sense at the prototype and testing phase but I understand they delivered something like 400 aircrafts already.
- GVIrish 7y ago
  That is the result of the brilliant idea of "concurrent development", where they start producing aircraft for delivery before the testing and validation phase is done. The idea was that computer modeling would obviate the need for extensive real world testing and that the time and cost savings would justify the approach. And of course, another facet of it is that it makes the whole program more difficult to cancel. The result has been expensive retrofits to the fleet as more and more defects have been found.
varjag 7y ago
You can tell how good F-35 just by amount of effort Sputnik News dedicates to report anything negative about it.
nabla9 7y ago
F-35 development started in 1992. First flight of X-35 was 19 years ago. First flight of F-35 was 13 years ago. It's still fighting with problems and not ready. Meantime military technology and requirements evolve constantly. They don't wait for F-35 to be ready.

by scanny 7y ago

JshWright 7y ago

The F-35 isn't that "bleeding edge" though. Most of the "innovation" comes from trying to accomplish a bunch of different roles with a single aircraft (shockingly, this has resulted in a plane that excels at none of them).

Klathmon 7y ago
But would the alternative of designing and manufacturing many different aircraft be cheaper? And would it be as effective? For it's faults, the F-35 is a weapon that can be configured and deployed at the drop of a hat for just about anything. That's a very powerful capability to have as a defensive and offensive weapon.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- cryptonector 7y ago
  It might not be cheaper, though I suspect it would be just because white elephants will white elephant. And besides, what's the likelihood that three separate projects will fail? But the likelihood that a jack of all trades will be a master of none, and thus perhaps ineffective, is pretty high. > at the drop of a hat Ha! There are still multiple variants, and you cannot reconfigure instances of one variant to be instances of another, and certainly not at the drop of a hat.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- colechristensen 7y ago
  >But would the alternative of designing and manufacturing many different aircraft be cheaper? Ultimately yes. You can be much more agile when you aren't trying to satisfy a large collection of armed services, nations, and mission roles many of whom are mostly interested in putting their mark on something instead of making it better. >And would it be as effective? Not if your definition of effective is ability of one aircraft to do everything. If your definition of effective is forces ability to achieve goals, then yes a set of aircraft specialists can be better than one generalist.
- randcraw 7y ago
  But if single purpose aircraft are more capable at that purpose, the F-35 still loses when it goes into battle. The fact that it doesn't suck at anything in particular only counts on a spreadsheet. No F-35 is going to be used for different purposes by the same pilot or military service. The best tool for the job — that's something the F-35 is not now and never can be. When on a bombing run radar stealth and bomb load matters, but acrobatic agility and VTOL / STOL doesn't. On a carrier, durability matters every time you slap the deck and VTOL /STOL might be very handy, but stealth or high altitude capability, not as much. Designing a fighter/bomber to please every service is like training every soldier, sailor, airman, and marine to have the same fighting skills. It's going to get them all killed.
- GVIrish 7y ago
  > But would the alternative of designing and manufacturing many different aircraft be cheaper? And would it be as effective? Yes. The military has tried the multi service aircraft idea in the past, wasted a lot of money, and failed completely to develop one of the desired variants. That was the F-111, which was supposed to have a Navy and Air Force version. The F-35 was supposed to feature 80% parts commonality between the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps versions. Instead, it ended up being 20%. With that little parts commonality, the different services should've just developed their own planes. All three services would've ended up with a more capable aircraft for their requirements that wasn't so heavily compromised. And it in all likelihood would have been cheaper. > For it's faults, the F-35 is a weapon that can be configured and deployed at the drop of a hat for just about anything. That's a very powerful capability to have as a defensive and offensive weapon It can fly a multitude of roles but it is not as good at many of them as a more focused aircraft would be. Considering the massive costs it was a bad trade off.
  - jdietrich 7y ago
    See also the disastrous development process of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Fighting_Vehicle#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Fighting_Vehicle#Histo...
  - scottlocklin 7y ago
    The F-111 is the right comparison class. It was supposed to do everything; got relegated to the role every failed airframe does: attack aircraft. Basically a shitty expensive bomber. Just as the F35 is. Dipshit Generals who are bribed with Lockheed jobs afterwords will try to convince you that's really what they wanted; it ain't. It is an egregiously failed weapons system, though an excellent piece of modern political corruption. Yay we have a plane that costs $300 a troy ounce which can be used to blow up cavemen in Afghanistan. Something a cloth winged Sopwith Camel biplane from WW-1 would probably actually be better at; certainly more cost effective. Nerds who are touting this turkey because "woo woo cool half million dollar vidya game helmet" ... y'awl make me want to renounce my citizenship. This turd can be defeated by a Russian tractor mechanic detuning his radar slightly.
- p_l 7y ago
  Just basic post-flight download of data takes more than the flight. The reconfiguration happens only in two or three places in the world and can take weeks if not months and then you need to have high-speed Internet access to get it. Quick turnaround is something yiu get from Soviets/Russians or Swedes, where the doctrines involved make it priority feature.
jjoonathan 7y ago
So VR helmets, EW antennas embedded in stealth skin, and crazy combat networking are all trivial features that we should expect a gaggle of government contractors to get right on the first pass? I'm not sure I buy that argument. The plane looks plenty fancy to me, at least in the context of its alternatives ("first lol" tech demonstrators don't count).
- wahern 7y ago
  Both the B-2 and F-22 have embedded antennas. JshWright's point seems to make sense: the complexity comes from system's integration and software, compounded by the aircraft having to be too many things to too many people. Basically, software, of which there's a ton to say regarding F-35 development. All the features required and component integration required them to adopt an agile methodology, moving away from the Ada-style development processes and, arguably hacking things together until they kinda worked. The predictable result is a long-tail of bugs that may never be fully eradicated.
  - supermanfan 7y ago
    What's with the "embedded antennas" references? Microstrips have been used in planes for decades.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      I think the point is "embedded in stealth skin".
- darkpuma 7y ago
  > "VR helmets," AR, not VR, right? Pretty sure they were doing that in helicopters years ago. Doesn't the Apache have a 30mm autocannon slaved to the pilot's helmet display, such that it shoots where the pilot looks? I'm no helmet geek, but I think that stuff came out in the 80s. I suppose the F-35's implementation is cooler, on account of being newer, but it doesn't seem earth shattering to me.
  - deleted 7y ago
scanny 7y ago
I mean having a look around at some of the technical innovation in this space seems to show that there are many firsts happening with the airframe. https://www.wired.com/2016/06/course-f-35-comes-400000-augmented-reality-helmet/ https://www.wired.com/2016/06/course-f-35-comes-400000-augme... They may not be firsts overall, but it seems like a pretty complicated environment to perform testing and development in. I have to wonder what getting a software build out for a fighter jet must be like, and getting someone up in the air in different environments to test it must make the testing process daunting.
cheschire 7y ago
I suspect most of the innovation is actually in the acquisitions side of the house. They could burn money for decades on this project and still come out ahead compared to running half a dozen acquisitions projects for multiple planes.
- pas 7y ago
  Could you explain this argument in a bit more detail please. Why and how is this way better, what's the comparison, what are the main cost drivers/differences?
  - cheschire 7y ago
    Sure, take this chart[0] and multiply it times the number of air frames one would anticipate needing to accomplish various missions. Not only are the bureaucratic meetings amplified, but the O&M long tail starts to kill you with the logistics of moving and storing parts, training specialists on each aircraft, administering the additional specialists... it keeps going and going. As an aside, I didn't say it was "way better", I just said they would come out ahead even burning money for decades. 0: https://www.dau.mil/tools/t/Department-of-Defense-Acquisition-Life-Cycle-Chart https://www.dau.mil/tools/t/Department-of-Defense-Acquisitio...

ekianjo 7y ago

This kind of planes are not what is needed to be a superpower nowadays. The landscape of military confrontation has completely changed.

jjoonathan 7y ago
Easy to say, impossible to act on. While we're in a speculative mood, just what kind of planes do you think are needed to be a superpower nowadays? Seems to me that a plausible answer is drones, lots of drones, and missiles, with a EW / networking / stealth focused plane to forward-position a human to coordinate them. The F-35 seems to fit that role like a glove. ICBMs are another potential answer but I have a hard time being angry at war toys that provide intermediate options between "peace" and "destroy the world."
- cryptonector 7y ago
  I believe that a mix of 5th-gen airplanes and many UAVs, both with AI and with remote pilots hosted on stand-off AWACS-style planes, is the right answer. I believe the same would be true for tanks. Lots of small and nimble tanklets remotely operated from stand-off mobile c&c centers.
  - jjoonathan 7y ago
    Yeah, I think the big question is which style of C&C is better. A single pilot in a F-35 closer to the action, or a bunch of pilots further away in a sitting duck with a big antenna. The answer might even change as AI develops. If I had a budget the size of the US military, I'd want both.
    - qaq 7y ago
      Once all the LEO satellite communication projects are up and running you could be pretty far and still get decent performance.
      - 7y ago

mysterydip 7y ago

The defense acquisition process is supposed to allow for production of bleeding edge development efforts while minimizing risk and meeting requirements, on budget and on schedule. In theory, anyway. The main problem to me is the F-35 is three airframes with three different sets of (competing) requirements, trying to save cost by keeping as much similar between them as possible. I don't know in the end if we would have just been better off with three purpose-built aircraft.

icelancer 7y ago
>> I don't know in the end if we would have just been better off with three purpose-built aircraft. We've tried this in the past and failed to control costs spectacularly. The JSF/F-35 project is an insane boondoggle but it seems unlikely that the alternative of splitting them out would have been better. We all know what should have been done by this point, which is... not the JSF. But we're pretty far down this road and we do need to modernize the current air superiority weapons we have, so... eh. It looks like we're stuck.
- mysterydip 7y ago
  Agreed. As much as I thought it looked like a pregnant fish from the side, I wonder if Boeing's design would have been better later in the development lifecycle.
  - apta 7y ago
    Based on what out of curiosity?
    - mysterydip 7y ago
      The X-32 used a direct-lift thrust vectoring system for its STOVL variant, while the X-35 used a lift fan. Late design change ramifications and logistic footprints for the two options would have been different.
- wbl 7y ago

jandrewrogers 7y ago

The F-35 really isn't cutting edge. It is in many regards a nerf-ed export-ready version of the F-22 tech, which everyone wants but no one gets, and designed to be a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none type platform. There is definitely a "targeting the down market" aspect to the productization.

jdietrich 7y ago

>Isn't this sort of thing expected through the process of developing cutting edge hardware and software? To a great extent, that's the fundamental problem with the F-35 program - it's a technological showcase first and a useful weapons system second. It has been designed and commissioned by people who believe that "most advanced" necessarily means "best" and who are indifferent to the actual tactical and strategic requirements. The Army and Marines have been crying out for years for a suitable replacement for the ageing A-10. It's the finest close support aircraft ever made, it has a legendary reputation among infantrymen who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the USAF are still planning on retiring it in favour of the F-35, an aircraft that is simply incapable of performing the same role. Even if the F-35 were inarguably an excellent aircraft, it's the wrong aircraft for a vitally important job. The F-35 helmet is a $400,000 showcase of AR technology, capable of providing unprecedented levels of data to a pilot. It's also really bad at being a helmet - it's so heavy that it could literally break the neck of smaller pilots during ejection and so bulky that it limits visibility. Test pilots have mixed views on the usefulness of the AR cameras, but they all want the ability to look over their shoulder. It's maybe possibly better at doing a thing that nobody asked for, but it's demonstrably worse at being a helmet. Servicemen don't want cutting-edge innovation - they want weapons systems that work reliably in the field and provide useful combat capabilities. That's what you need to keep in mind when you hear the DoD hype the F-35. We know it's a hell of a lot less reliable than existing US aircraft and competing foreign aircraft. We know that the one-airframe-to-rule-them-all model is deeply flawed and leaves serious gaps in the combat capability of the US military. What does the F-35 actually offer in the field that couldn't be provided by a cheaper, simpler, more reliable weapons system? I've yet to hear a good answer to that question.

joering2 7y ago
> It's also really bad at being a helmet A buddy of mine is actually flying the jet. He said helmet is cool to wear first time but quickly wears out in real flies and is even worse in combat. A lieutenant that first flew it many years ago called it "karate mirror"; he explained it must have been designed by someone who never fought a fight, but somewhat was stubborn enough to assume when you fight karate you would love to have a back mirror to see whats happening behind. They military argues with contractors atm to actually come back to a regular helmet, because there is really no added value in flying Mach 1 and engage in fight in front of you and having ability to see behind or even under, when you have all sort of warning systems that monitors your surrounding and allows you enough time to alter your direction before you get hit.

simongr3dal 7y ago

> I don't see how this wont be worth it in the long run So your long term view of the world is one that rewards building more and more advanced killing-machines?

on_and_off 7y ago
'merica ! No budget for health care, education, or hey, facing that climate crisie that endangers us all, but boys, are our weapons shiny !
ekianjo 7y ago
Point is, once you are certain of your superiority you dont even need to act on it. The mere threat is sufficient. That is why nukes are so powerful in preventing global conflicts.
- pinkfoot 7y ago
  >The mere threat is sufficient. And of course completely illegal under the 1977 Gevena Convention.
  - simongr3dal 7y ago
    As far as I can read the 1977 Protocol which among other things forbids the use of nuclear weapons is not rattified by the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions#Contents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions#Contents
    - pinkfoot 7y ago
      If you don't like that one, here are some more: Declaration of St. Petersburg, 1868 Hague Convention, 1907 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 Geneva Conventions, 1949 The Protocols Additional to the Geneva Conventions, 1977, See https://cnduk.org/legality-of-nuclear-weapons/ https://cnduk.org/legality-of-nuclear-weapons/ An of course, UN Security Council resolution 255 (1968) including the 1977 clarification is still supported by USA, UK, Russia which 'positive assurance' against the use of weapons against NNWS. (Which as an aside makes Trump's recent tweet to end Iran illegal under US law and probably a war crime). But of course, its precisely the posession of these weapons that makes all these niceties irrelevant. Law of the jungle.

projectileboy 7y ago

If you were to try to write an allegory of a superpower in decline, you could hardly do better than tell the story of the F-35. The most expensive weapons program in the history of the world, a decade overdue, still plagued with showstopping problems, loaded with features no one asked for, packaged in a compromised design that makes it not quite what any of the service branches actually need, with specs that do not favorably match up to the F-4. At best, we could say it was a jobs program that taught us how not to design and manufacture military aircraft in the future. The price we’ll pay for that knowledge is $1.5 trillion, along with two or three decades of air inferiority.

wazoox 7y ago
The billions poured into useless military projects is unfortunately the US way to do social spending...
alkonaut 7y ago
> If you were to try to write an allegory of a superpower in decline, you could hardly do better than tell the story of the F-35. The Russian Su-57 is plagued with the same kind of issues, made much worse by the fact that Russia is no longer the superpower it was. The difference between the US and a superpower in actual decline is that the US can throw almost unlimited funds at the F-35 program and Russia can't. The real mark of a superpower isn't that it makes clever things but that it can afford making stupid things.
- CapricornNoble 7y ago
  I understand your argument, that frivolous spending and basically throwing money at technical problems until they go away are the exclusive purview of superpowers. But I think calling Russia a "superpower in decline" is slightly off-mark. I would call them a "Great Power that understands its limits". I would argue the decline has stabilized from lows of the 1990s. Now they are in a kind-of stagnation caused by demographics, sanctions, and a failure to diversify away from a kleptocratic resource-export economy. The Russian approach to their defense industry is pretty rational IMO: they do small batches of extremely high-tech stuff mostly to keep their engineers active and to improve their institutional knowledge. Then they spin off iterative improvements and upgrades to the bulk of their legacy military hardware. Perfect examples are the T-72B3M and the Su-35. Hell, the Su-57 itself, if you look carefully, is basically a heavily-stealthed Su-27 planform.[1] And they can do this because their MISSILE tech is absolutely first-rate. Russia understood the "payloads over platforms" mentality long before the US did. And their national defense posture is basically "We have nukes to deter anyone who is an existential threat, and everyone else can be beaten by our leftover Soviet stuff." [1]https://migflug.com/jetflights/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2014/06/PAK-FA-vs-Su35.jpg https://migflug.com/jetflights/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/20...

cm2187 7y ago

That would make sense at the prototype and testing phase but I understand they delivered something like 400 aircrafts already.

GVIrish 7y ago
That is the result of the brilliant idea of "concurrent development", where they start producing aircraft for delivery before the testing and validation phase is done. The idea was that computer modeling would obviate the need for extensive real world testing and that the time and cost savings would justify the approach. And of course, another facet of it is that it makes the whole program more difficult to cancel. The result has been expensive retrofits to the fleet as more and more defects have been found.

varjag 7y ago

You can tell how good F-35 just by amount of effort Sputnik News dedicates to report anything negative about it.

nabla9 7y ago

F-35 development started in 1992. First flight of X-35 was 19 years ago. First flight of F-35 was 13 years ago. It's still fighting with problems and not ready. Meantime military technology and requirements evolve constantly. They don't wait for F-35 to be ready.