8 ms·
Even if there isn't a literal kill switch, there might as well be. Without a constant stream of maintenence and operations support from the USA there things are
by 7jjjjjjj 1y ago
Even if there isn't a literal kill switch, there might as well be. Without a constant stream of maintenence and operations support from the USA there things are no good.
- scott_w 1y agoYep, I think people arguing “there is no kill switch” miss this point. There doesn’t need to be if the lack of updates makes an F-35 an expensive, inferior version of a jet they could buy elsewhere!
- antonymoose 1y agoSure, but in any case the nations buying the F-35 are so tied at the hip to the United States it would be fantasy to expect them to break off in any meaningful timeframe relative to the lifespan of the plane. Beyond that, is there a viable competitor available for an US allied nation to purchase?
- spwa4 1y agoMilitary procurement is not about what is the best system, it is about who gets the money. Plus every other party has far inferior fighters to "the West" anyway. And then you calculate ... you are not going to successfully defend against the F-35 in a war with the US. Not going to happen. Against Russia/China or anyone else ... every fighter jet will do fine, so take the cheapest. The US got guaranteed this business because of international treaties ... which Trump has abandoned. But no worries, I'm sure he'll just make a "deal" and fix things again, right? Meanwhile I suggest you invest in EU weapons manufacturers, who are a lot cheaper than the US ones.
- slaw 1y agoNone of European jet fighters can stand against Chinese, but China is far away.
- cm2187 1y agoWell, technically Pakistan shot a Indian Rafale with a Chinese made missile a few months ago, which created some consternation in France. I heard the French explaining it away, as India trying to bomb some Pakistani territory without hitting the Pakistani military, hence putting their jet fighters in unecessary harm's way. I am not qualified to draw my own conclusions on the quality of Chinese weapons but it seems to imply they can certainly do significant damage.
- slaw 1y agoRafale was shot down by J-10 plane using PL-15 missile. Rafale, Eurofighter and J-10 are old 20+ years designs. Europe has nothing equivalent to Chinese J-35 or even previous generation J-20. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_J-35 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_J-35
- actionfromafar 1y agoTo be fair, China doesn't have anything like the J-35 either, it's a prototype.
- mcphage 1y ago> Europe has nothing equivalent to Chinese J-35 or even previous generation J-20. How many J-35s does China have?
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- qwytw 1y ago> Against Russia/China or anyone else ... every fighter jet will do fine Will it though? Underestimating your (potential) enemies might not be the smartest idea. Of course as the war in Ukraine has shown jet fighters might not even be that relevant anymore if you can't take our your opponents air defenses.
- Tadpole9181 1y ago> jet fighters might not even be that relevant anymore if you can't take our your opponents air defenses One of the design variants of the F-35 is designed to penetrate air support, no?
- spwa4 1y agoOne thing I've been wondering about: a jet powered cruise missile is less than $50000. A propeller powered cruise missile can be built for under $10000. Both have ranges over 1000km. The US has, grand total, about something like 40000 interceptors. That means enough propellor powered cruise missiles to guarantee US air defense penetration is (a lot) cheaper than ONE F-35 (and they can still go ~500km/h), jet-powered ones cheaper than 2, maybe 3 and that's not counting equipping the F-35 with something to shoot, and of course there's the suspicions that F-35s have kill switches that Trump half-confirmed (yet another brilliant move there, Mr. Orange President). How many of those interceptor rockets are available to be loaded into actual equipment in less than the 6 hours it takes jet powered cruise missiles to reach the US? I don't know, but let's go with 10%. In other words: the defense that Israel mounted against Iran is pretty much same effective defense the US would have if Russia started ... The US wouldn't be able to shoot down more of those, even if Russia had 100x more rockets than Iran. Oh you want to shoot them down using bullets? Ok, halfway we have those cruise missiles switch to a ballistic trajectory. At that point it will be difficult to shoot them down, but that's not really the point. They're ballistic, and the problem with ballistic rockets is that they're like an (explosive) rock. You can shoot it ... but that only causes momentum exchange ... it doesn't actually give the rocket a different trajectory. In other words: it'll still hit it's target, just with less accuracy (and if the guidance remains intact, not even that). You have to hit it hard enough to get it to break up, which means rockets, which the US doesn't have enough of. Which nobody has enough of. (this is a theme that will come up often once hamas or hezbollah start firing rockets at Israel again. The new laser interceptors have to hit the rockets BEFORE they're ballistic, in other words, what they do is make hamas fired rockets hit Gaza or South Lebanon ... Guess who will be blamed for intercepted rockets hitting houses, hospitals and kindergartens in Gaza and Lebanon?)
- xdennis 1y ago> Beyond that, is there a viable competitor available for an US allied nation to purchase? Rafale, Typhoon, Gripen. None are as good as the F35, but all are better alternatives to a bricked airplane. Trump already demonstrated how even older models (F16 given by Europeans) can be bricked in Ukraine simply by not providing support.
- actionfromafar 1y agoThere is also the metric "sorties per day", which is severly underlooked and very useful in any prolonged conflict. The F35 is not a clear winner there and might not be the best fit if you are a smaller nation.
- cm2187 1y agoI don't think the concern is that they would turn hostile to the US, but rather that they would need to strike a country that for one reason or another, the US doesn't want them to strike (though of course you also have to weight the risk of a coup and of a hostile regime coming to power into a formerly friendly country). Fictitious scenarios: let's say the US sells F35 to Taiwan. China tries to invade Taiwan. Taiwan wants to use the F35 to fight Chinese forces. China makes a deal with the US to limit the economic impact on the US of the invasion of Taiwan, and the US president of the time thinks maintaining a good trade relationship with China is more important than Taiwan remaining an independent democracy, and will therefore curb Taiwan's ability to use those F35. Not completely far fetched. Doesn't mean Taiwan has gone rogue. The US tries to keep good relationship with Pakistan, while at the same time considering selling some weapons to India. You can imagine why India would prefer the older French Rafale (the French are much less demanding about what you do with their weapons, though there is the precedent of helping the UK with the Exocet it sold to Argentina during the Falklands war). The middle east is also full of those complex relationships.
- maksimur 1y ago> Beyond that, is there a viable competitor available for an US allied nation to purchase? Not available yet, but Korean KF-21 and Turkish Kaan/TF-X (which Spain is thinking about buying/co-producing IIRC), though they're both considered 4.5th gen fighter jets rather than 5th like the F-35.
- mongol 1y ago> Beyond that, is there a viable competitor available for an US allied nation to purchase? US allied is a concept that is quickly losing its meaning. As the current administration no longer treats allies as allies, most European fighters are more viable
- scott_w 1y ago> Beyond that, is there a viable competitor available for an US allied nation to purchase? As I and others point out: the problem is if you do something Trump doesn’t like and he cuts off the extra features that make the F-35 better than anything else you can get. At that point you just paid millions for an expensive paperweight.
- ElectronCharge 1y agoThe F-35 isn't inferior to many other aircraft as far as raw capability goes. Really only the F-22. Nor is it expensive, at least the F-35A (I'm speaking of the initial cost, not sustainment which may or may not be a bargain). The F-35 is the only genuinely stealthy aircraft any country outside the USA has access to (other than China, and the efficacy of its stealth technology isn't known). F-35 stealth is a game changer, as seen in every exercise in which they're involved.
- scott_w 1y agoAt full capability, yes, it is. However if you don’t have the updated targeting data then my understanding is that it loses a lot of those advantages. And even if it didn’t, it may still be a case that it’s more cost effective to buy higher quantities of slightly inferior aircraft. It’s hard to know for sure, though. The only true information we’ll get is when it’s used in a hot war and hints if or when countries reduce orders.
- cpursley 1y agoAnd the F-35 is very very high maintenance. Requires much more ground maintenance time that it's predecessors or competitors. That's a real problem in an active combat situation because it means less plans in the sky.
- spwa4 1y agoApparently one aspect has to do with the inevitable result of a what a stealth fighter is: it can deploy weapons far further than it can see. So without comlinks with intelligence from a specific satellite system, it loses half its features. Second for the on-board radars to evade detection they need to be reprogrammed with the latest updates regularly. Not so much because the programming has a kill switch but because otherwise "adversaries" could still turn out to have rockets that can home in on an F-35. And even in the case of the US, you don't have to shoot down that many F-35s to get them all.
- fooblaster 1y agoIt actually requires substantially less maintenance time if you look at the equivalent force it replaces, for example the associated awacs capability needed for a sortie for previous gen fighters. Honestly, it's just absurd to think that any jet fighter is somehow low maintenance. The issue here isn't the f35, it's the host country becoming a unreliable/hostile partner.
- bigyabai 1y ago> if you look at the equivalent force it replaces And what if you look at the equivalent force it's competing with on the market? It's a bit pricey once you factor in CAS and supersonic interceptors to fill the gaps. > The issue here isn't the f35, it's the host country becoming a unreliable/hostile partner. Here? The issue is the F-35. What happened to Pakistan's F-16s when America became an unreliable/hostile partner to them? They kept flying them for decades, that's what happened. Same with Ukraine's Su-27s, Iran's F-14s, North Korea's MiG-29s... plenty of countries keep other nation's keepsakes in the air. The jet abides. The F-35 has to be bought as a subscription package, you can't "own" features like sensor fusion without the US' consent. All but one nation has been denied the right to modify the airframe, everyone else is basically just renting the jet with permission to go eat an R-77T when the time comes.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoExactly. I doubt there are literal kill switches but if the US stops supporting you there doesn't need to be.