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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

by pg_bot 5y ago

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?

tjohns 5y ago
Drones are great for many missions... until you send them to an enemy that can jam the RF link used for remote control. Until we develop the technology to build an AGI, there’s still a need for fighters with human beings on board for autonomy.
- kbenson 5y ago
  I would think that would be more justification for the F-35 as a drone coordinator or controller. It might allow for alternative control mediums (direct or relayed laser, for example), even if maybe eventually only used to update the general mission parameters of the drone if it's controlling itself (i.e. abort, change target, etc).
- fpoling 5y ago
  I thought that frequency hopping made jamming RF links impractical and the main problem is jamming of GPS.
irateswami 5y ago
> 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.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  The ability to "stealthily penetrate enemy airspace" is only temporary. As VHF radars improve and dual guidance missiles proliferate the F-35 will only be barely more stealthy than what came before it. As it is right now Russian VHF radars can already guide dual-guidance missiles onto an F-35 close enough for them to detect the F-35 with their radars. The Chinese and Russians have set up VHF radars in Syria and use them to observe Israeli F-35s every day too, so the fog of war in their favour. The fact that stealth is only a temporary advantage has been known for a long time. It's part of the reason why the USSR decided not to pursue stealth aircraft development despite their lead on stealth design technology relative to the US - until the Soviet bureaucracy in it's classical ineptitude decided to declassify the algorithms they developed which Lockheed Martin happily adopted.
  - Green_man 5y ago
    Is your argument that military technology could be described as an "arms race"?
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      The F-35 was developed to be used until 2070. It was done so at a time where it was clear that stealth could not be relied on past 2025 at the most. Many compromises were made in the pursuit of an advantage known to become greatly diminished 10 years into a 50 year lifespan. I don't think this can be written off by the arms race argument.
      - Green_man 5y ago
        Sorry, my previous comment was probably overly dismissive. I'd argue that developers and users of the F-35 already understand that stealth gains are not permanent. Countries and military organizations that purchased the F-35 definitely hope that the stealth advances last longer than 2025, but they will pay for improvements, new planes, and new tech long before 2070. It seems comically naïve for them to take claims of "2070" at face value without verifying, but that's just conjecture on my part.
munificent 5y ago
So you're saying the F-35 is C++ to the F-16's C?
- sien 5y ago
  Or perhaps Ada.
hajile 5y ago
F-35 is what happens when you try to apply the agile method to planes. 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.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  The iterative & incremental or evolutionary model has been applied to aircraft for a few decades now. It can work, it lets you build a solid plan (but not necessarily full plan), build a working but incomplete system, and validate and verify your work as you progress. F-35 was not agile in any sense, it was one of those. The agile work on the software side has been SAFe which is dogmatic, inflexible garbage. However even that was not originally the case, SAFe came much later after the more traditional (and closer to Waterfall) approach led to a clusterfuck of 24-hour a day development and testing to get the thing airborne.
m3kw9 5y ago
Bad press is fine, a good plane at the end is good
rapjr9 5y ago
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.

by pg_bot 5y ago

tjohns 5y ago

Drones are great for many missions... until you send them to an enemy that can jam the RF link used for remote control. Until we develop the technology to build an AGI, there’s still a need for fighters with human beings on board for autonomy.

kbenson 5y ago
I would think that would be more justification for the F-35 as a drone coordinator or controller. It might allow for alternative control mediums (direct or relayed laser, for example), even if maybe eventually only used to update the general mission parameters of the drone if it's controlling itself (i.e. abort, change target, etc).
fpoling 5y ago
I thought that frequency hopping made jamming RF links impractical and the main problem is jamming of GPS.

irateswami 5y ago

> 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.

sudosysgen 5y ago
The ability to "stealthily penetrate enemy airspace" is only temporary. As VHF radars improve and dual guidance missiles proliferate the F-35 will only be barely more stealthy than what came before it. As it is right now Russian VHF radars can already guide dual-guidance missiles onto an F-35 close enough for them to detect the F-35 with their radars. The Chinese and Russians have set up VHF radars in Syria and use them to observe Israeli F-35s every day too, so the fog of war in their favour. The fact that stealth is only a temporary advantage has been known for a long time. It's part of the reason why the USSR decided not to pursue stealth aircraft development despite their lead on stealth design technology relative to the US - until the Soviet bureaucracy in it's classical ineptitude decided to declassify the algorithms they developed which Lockheed Martin happily adopted.
- Green_man 5y ago
  Is your argument that military technology could be described as an "arms race"?
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    The F-35 was developed to be used until 2070. It was done so at a time where it was clear that stealth could not be relied on past 2025 at the most. Many compromises were made in the pursuit of an advantage known to become greatly diminished 10 years into a 50 year lifespan. I don't think this can be written off by the arms race argument.
    - Green_man 5y ago
      Sorry, my previous comment was probably overly dismissive. I'd argue that developers and users of the F-35 already understand that stealth gains are not permanent. Countries and military organizations that purchased the F-35 definitely hope that the stealth advances last longer than 2025, but they will pay for improvements, new planes, and new tech long before 2070. It seems comically naïve for them to take claims of "2070" at face value without verifying, but that's just conjecture on my part.

munificent 5y ago

So you're saying the F-35 is C++ to the F-16's C?

sien 5y ago
Or perhaps Ada.

hajile 5y ago

F-35 is what happens when you try to apply the agile method to planes. 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.

Jtsummers 5y ago
The iterative & incremental or evolutionary model has been applied to aircraft for a few decades now. It can work, it lets you build a solid plan (but not necessarily full plan), build a working but incomplete system, and validate and verify your work as you progress. F-35 was not agile in any sense, it was one of those. The agile work on the software side has been SAFe which is dogmatic, inflexible garbage. However even that was not originally the case, SAFe came much later after the more traditional (and closer to Waterfall) approach led to a clusterfuck of 24-hour a day development and testing to get the thing airborne.

m3kw9 5y ago

Bad press is fine, a good plane at the end is good

rapjr9 5y ago

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.