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After seeing what happened in Armenia & Azerbaijan, I'm wondering if the US's customers are pushing for these cheaper drone options instead of the F35. The F35
by waiseristy 6y ago
After seeing what happened in Armenia & Azerbaijan, I'm wondering if the US's customers are pushing for these cheaper drone options instead of the F35. The F35 has been in development so long, that it's seeing its own combat role supplanted
- mkr-hn 6y agoThe F-35 is the Capacitance Electronic Disc (CED) player of war machines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnpX8d8zRIA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnpX8d8zRIA Perfect for the era development started in, but useless for the era when it was finally shippable.
- mhh__ 6y ago> Perfect for the era development started in, but useless for the era when it was finally shippable. Are you any good at lottery numbers? Traditional fighters will probably lull in use in between the proliferation of drones, and the proliferation of countermeasures to those drones.
- pas 6y agoWe've seen this argument many times, but is this true? Where's the data? Etc. I'm not saying it's a bad argument, but since the hypothesis space is vast (what kind of future conflicts the US/NATO will engage in, what intensity, what kind of economics, what kind of arms race will those bring, etc), and data is sparse, it seems like HN/pundits are not great at really reducing the uncertainty. Sure, it's still a fuckload of money, and probably it could be better spent on providing new skill training to unemployed/at-risk-workers in those states where the F35 money goes right now, but that's a hard sell, and doesn't really move the needle with regards to air-force capacity.
- syshum 6y agoThe F-35 was never about actual combat I do not believe for a second the F-35 was ever designed to be an actual combat jet, I think is was all just a giant smoke screen to serve several political goals on both the domestic and Foreign fronts. It is simultaneously a prime example of a Jet designed by committee, a 1 Trillion + dollar program that will never serve the purpose it was sold to the taxpayers for...
- k_sze 6y agoWas it really sold to the taxpayers? Were taxpayers ever really asked whether they want it?
- syshum 6y agoWell it was certainly sold to the tax payer representatives via the appropriations process as a Joint Strike Fighter that would replace all other Fighter jets....
- euler_angles 6y ago...And yet it has served in actual combat with the US, UK, and Israel. Do you really think that an aircraft not meant to do something would be fielded by those nations and used to do that very thing? And of course the program has political goals, every defense acquisition program does, to pretend otherwise would be silly.
- saltyshake 6y agodid it engage in dog fights, or only bombing missions?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- syshum 6y agoNo where in my comment did I say it was not capable of combat at all, but it certainly has not lived up to the billed goal of the program nor will be be effective in its billed role of "Fighter jet to replace all Fighter Jets" It is mediocre in all roles for which was designed to replace. It is not as good at dog-fighting as its counter parts, it is not as good at close air support as its counter parts, it does not have as good of stealth has it counter parts. It is a 1 Trillion+ Dollar "ok" fighter jet, which is not what we were sold
- 6y ago
- ardit33 6y agoBingo. The F-35 as a bomb delivery platform might be already obsolete, as drones are far cheaper. You still need air defense/air superiority fighter though.
- sandworm101 6y agoAnd the f-35 is neither. It is the complement to the f-22, not its replacement. There are more effective air superiority fighters out there for far less money.
- 0xCMP 6y agoExcept we stopped F-22 production to focus on replacing it with the F-35
- Diesel555 6y agoNot true. This topic is more complex then simply replacing the F-22 with F-35 as most government decisions on multi-million dollar projects with state interests in mind are. The F-22 was cancelled because the military thought that they didn't needed to spend the money on air superiority fighters and wanted to use the money elsewhere (drones and bombers). I don't think the F-35 was in the discussion that much... they fired the top leaders of the Air Force at this time. Robert Gates killed the F-22 and fired the chief of staff of the Air Force Moseley and secretary Wynne. Since then we knew it was a mistake and tried to restart the F-22 line. It didn't make sense for cost. Gates has his own book Duty which references this quite a bit and is a great political read https://www.amazon.com/Duty-Memoirs-Secretary-at-War/dp/030794963X https://www.amazon.com/Duty-Memoirs-Secretary-at-War/dp/0307... And there is another book that argues it was a bad idea. https://www.amazon.com/Air-Power-Abandoned-Betrayal-Americas/dp/0986320013 https://www.amazon.com/Air-Power-Abandoned-Betrayal-Americas... Also: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20472/retired-general-says-f-22-production-was-killed-so-that-a-new-bomber-could-live https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20472/retired-general-... https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/05/10/former-air-force-chief-of-staff-talks-rpas-budget-cuts-and-his-regrets-about-shrinking-the-force/ https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/05/10... This one is funny because they talk about the increased costs of the B-2 due to cutting it early..... as they cut the F-22. https://www.airforcemag.com/schwartz-in-memoir-says-f-22-was-traded-for-b-21-bomber/ https://www.airforcemag.com/schwartz-in-memoir-says-f-22-was...
- nitwit005 6y agoThere were always far cheaper options than what they chose to build. They didn't seem to care. They seem to care more about delays and possible unreliability than squandering billions of dollars.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoThe F35's competition isn't a comparable enemy aircraft or a drone swarm. It's political corruption and hostile Facebook/Twitter troll farms.
- mrtksn 6y agoDrones should be inherently better anyway since they don’t have to carry 80KG of meat that needs to be kept alive.
- ReptileMan 6y agoActually around 30% of the aircraft weight is for keeping the wetware alive. And a lot of the flight envelope limitations are just to not squish it too hard.
- sandworm101 6y agoNot exactly. There are penty of aerodynamic limitations outside of the pilot. Aircraft might be able to pull a few more gs in some very contrived circumstances, but a pilotless fighter would not be an aerodynamic superman. for instance: Stall/flow separation speeds at paticular wing loadings are often well below the pilot's physical G limitations.
- landryraccoon 6y agoHow much of that is because engineers designed with those limitations in mind? Nobody has attempted to push what is possible with material science and aerodynamics because there is no point if the pilot wouldn't be able to handle the forces involved. With automation, those limitations no longer apply. For an example of what I'm thinking of, look at air to air missiles. Sidewinder air-to-air missiles achieve an acceleration of 20g, far more than a human pilot can withstand. Drones in the air superiority role could likewise be designed more like larger, more advanced missiles than traditional aircraft. I suspect that if engineers design combat aircraft to be pilotless, you'll soon see them executing maneuvers that would be far too punishing if the craft had to support a human pilot.
- sandworm101 6y agoI mean to say that such limits exist without regard to the pilot, that there is no way around them. Pulling 9+ Gs, trying to sustain that for more than a second or two, isnt really possible in the vast majority of situations. The air is only so thick at a given altitude. The wings can only be so big before structural issues dominate. And remember too that the whole dogfighting concept, the getting behind the other guy for a tail shot, means less and less in a world of all-aspect missiles that can fire in almost any direction.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tpmx 6y ago> After seeing what happened in Armenia & Azerbaijan I don't think I was the only one to miss how that conflict related to the F35. Do tell?
- waiseristy 6y agoI think the rest of the sentence answers that > I'm wondering if the US's customers are pushing for these cheaper drone options
- tpmx 6y agoRight, but I kinda wanted a bit more.
- waiseristy 6y agoLol, I don't know what to tell you. Drones are cheap, F-35's are expensive. QED
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- skissane 6y ago> I don't think I was the only one to miss how that conflict related to the F35. Do tell? Turkey had a lot of success in its Syria incursion using lots of relatively inexpensive drones. Syria's Russian-equipped air defence systems struggled to stop them. And then Turkey-equipped Azerbaijan used the same drones to great success in the recent war against Armenia. The message is that the future of warfare is drones that cost $5 million each not fighter jets that cost $100 million each (which is the ballpark the F-35 is in). You can buy 20 of the former for the cost of one of the later. And the question is, what military benefit does that one fighter jet give you compared to the twenty drones you could spend the same money on?
- jariel 6y ago
- nickff 6y agoAs a close follower of F-35 development, and of the A&A conflict, I am not exactly sure what you mean. The F-35 would have been very useful to either side willing to use it for the SEAD/wild weasel role.
- waiseristy 6y agoIn a land of infinite wealth I would want an army of 10,000 F-35's. In a poor backwater just outside of Turkey, I would want an army of 10,000 suicide drones
- sn_master 6y agoIran had only a few dozen F-14s and it shifted the balance of power significantly in the Iran-Iraq war, even in the presence of the powerful Iraqi air defense, which the F-35 being stealthy doesn't need to worry about. Don't underestimate what a powerful modern fighter can do.
- sudosysgen 6y agoEh, if we're honest in that conflict it's airstrip would have been bombed instantly and persistently.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sn_master 6y agoNeither party had modern fighter jets. If Armenia had a dozen F-35s with a good stock of LGBs, I am sure they would have gotten the edge on azerbaijan regardless of how many drones the other party uses.
- baybal2 6y agoThey had! They were just terribly afraid to lose them when the battlefield was so tiny, air was full of near disposable targets, and capable air defence had a field day.
- sn_master 6y agoOne of the main points of the F-35 is not having to worry about air defense because of its Stealth capabilities, and the LGBs it can carry. Do you have an idea what kind of air force either party had? Was there anything post 1980s non-upgraded Soviet era jets in Armenia? Wikipedia is showing only four Su-30SMs and 13 Su-25Ks (both are the older non-modernized variants). That's their entire fighter force according to Wikipedia!
- baybal2 6y agoBoth sides had post nineties upgrades for Su 30, and Mig 29, and they could've risked using them, but chose not to. Both sides didn't even bomb each other's airfields for real. Most drones were launched, and operated in the field.
- credit_guy 6y agoWhoever claims that drones are better than F35 forgets that the US military has the most and best drones, and more are coming. The US military is investing in both manned and unmanned aircraft, not in one at the expense of the other.
- pm90 6y agoIf the US military itself concedes that drones are superior, then other countries would presumably want to purchase drones which are likely far cheaper and easier to operate than expensive F-35s.
- jariel 6y agoThey are used for different things, by different countries that have different needs, situations, budgets, different support capabilities.