3 ms·

That's a "fighter mafia" opinion that's not really grounded in reality (the language of "specific designs for specific roles" is from them). The JSF on a per u

• ramesh31 3y ago
  >and the idea that it does things "poorly" is not supported by reality. That remains to be seen. Ukraine has completely upended military doctrine of the last 30 years. Dog fights are happening regularly, and air defense has proven to be far more effective than we could have imagined. The F-35 has never been proven in combat, and it's an open question as to whether its' known weaknesses will matter in a high intensity near-peer conflict.
  • phkahler 3y ago
    So let's ship some to Ukraine and get them battle tested!
    • 7thaccount 3y ago
      They're too expensive to hand out I would guess (also Russia might start threatening nuclear war again) and it would be a disaster to have one get blown up easily. They're probably also still not fully combat ready.
  • ranger207 3y ago
    Dogfights are not happening regularly in Ukraine. They might have been a few in the first ~month, but not at all since then. Air defense being more effective is even more support for stealth, which directly reduces air defense's effectiveness.
    • ramesh31 3y ago
      >Dogfights are not happening regularly in Ukraine. They are happening far more regularly than US Air Force doctrine calls for, which is never. Posessing total air superiority is baked into nearly every decision.
• nostrademons 3y ago
  "Specific designs for specific roles" is a general engineering thing. Any engineer knows that it's easier to get good performance (in whatever dimension you're measuring performance) if you're designing for only one use case than if you're trying to be everything to everyone. Designs that try to do everything end up being overconstrained and then having to make (often irrational from the POV of any one user) compromises to fit reality. Software monopolies face this on a daily basis. Much of what we see as "enshittification" from a consumer standpoint comes from single products that need to serve the needs of 3B consumers. The idea of "unbundling" that was en vogue in startup circles from ~2013-2016 is just that startups which serve one use case for one customer base are able to eek out efficiencies that consumer tech giants cannot. I'm not in aerospace or military so I can't comment on whether the JSF itself performs poorly. How would that even be defined, though? It doesn't have a whole lot of competition to measure against. (Seems like a common thread in these discussions...)
  • 7thaccount 3y ago
    Yeah that was basically my thought that perhaps they need a dogfighter, a long range bomber, some kind of thing like an A-10 or C-130 gunship. Not sure if Ukraine is showing us that some of those are now useless or not. It must be difficult to design something like the JSF that has to have a vertical takeoff version and all this other junk to make 4 branches of the military happy. Part of me thinks that having two different planes would have made more sense and lifted a lot of design constraints.