The capabilities described sound useful. And some of what we learn from it can be applied in the future to new planes. So is it a good idea to simply back off from the advanced software, and build a dumber plane just to save money? The f16 is 40 years old.. we're going to have these new planes around for a long time.
It's a recipe for every ambitious, failed research idea to look like a clusterfuck boondoggle.
But sacred cow programs that are too big to cut are good for all the people that make the decisions.
The question there is the impact. If you just risk some thing and money it lowers the barrier for going into action, as the risk of having to handing a flag to a pilot's family goes away.
However a such plane also has other roles. On domestic protection a key task of alarm squadrons is to take visual contact to pilots of civilian planes who lost radio contact. Also for surveillance/intelligence roles a human on board can have a better overview and decide where to go.
Same thing goes for surveillance. Have a supersonic carrier drone fly over the target area, release thousands of small drones to photograph the shit out of it in every spectrum and then relay that back to command.
Let's say an hostile space alien invasion happen in 10 years : would it not be better to not sacrifice human at all in the fight?
> Also for surveillance/intelligence roles a human on board can have a better overview and decide where to go.
With technology, we can create an arbitrary numbers of new sensing capabilities into the machine. A human will be surpassed by a machine before our generation passes away.
In addition, air superiority fighters - the kind that emphasize high-G, stealth, and speed are somewhat outmoded in the current environment. The last decade of fighting has been against an irregular enemy without much more than pickup trucks, hiding in mountain villages. Emphasis has been moved to close air support aircraft such as the F-15E, AC-130, and the A-10. These aircraft loiter and talk with forward air controllers to direct fire into specific locations, such as a certain building or a ridgetop. How would we communicate this information to an autonomous high speed aircraft from the middle of a firefight? People haven't even been able field autonomous cars in silicon valley.
0: http://www.afmc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/803666/g...
The problem of unmanned maneuvers is a lot simpler in a 3D space without any obstacles than on a road with many more uncertainties and information to process. See SpaceX achievement.
It would not be cheap (if even possible currently) to write the software to handle all the unique cases that a human can deal with. To make matters worse, if the enemy breaks into your military drones, they can flip your entire fleet of drones right back against you.
That scenario reminds me of the start of Battlestar Galactica where the cylons destroy pretty much all of humanity because everything was so network connected they were able to hack into everything and the only ship that really survives the first strike is an old one that relies on humans to do most things.
What would a human pilot be able to do if all the fighter instruments are jammed? At best the human pilot may be able to escape the battlefield I guess.
We can scarcely build an autonomous car that doesn't crash into static road barriers. Call me skeptical.
What is left unspoken is that while the JSF is behind schedule and over budget, it has design specs that are currently unavailable to the "enemy" forces. So when the US builds and fields a new fighter (like the F-22 before it) it forces opposing forces to build a counter to it or some way to defeat it. In a "cold war" situation where nobody is actually shooting at each other and are just running simulations to see who would win if they did start shooting, it allows a larger economic nation to defeat the weaker economic nation by driving their economy into dirt. It also means that as long as a country is far enough ahead in that calculus it can make threats (implied or overt) that people who don't want to lose power will respect.
The first F-35 squadron has reached operational status[1] and that means that war planners have to include the F-35's capabilities in their simulations. And if in those plans they find their own aircraft are now obsolete[2] then they will have to back down rather than "poke the bear" as the vernacular goes in order to avoid a conflict that would see them removed.
The F-35 is an expensive weapons program. People want to "kill it" for different reasons. That is has encountered issues during its development are not good reasons, nor were they good reasons when they were used against the F-22 either. But the F-35 is not a 'disaster'.
[1] https://www.f35.com/news/detail/first-operational-f-35a-squa...
[2] Obsolete means that in a fight all or most of their aircraft would be defeated when faced with an aircraft with the F-35's design capabilities.
There's no scenario where the US builds an advanced manned fighter or bomber of any type where it doesn't cost ~$75 million plus per unit (Russia's MiG-35 will cost them at least $80-$100m in total lifetime costs per unit for example; the Chinese Chengdu J-20 is going to be $150-$200m lifetime total cost per unit or more). And then throw in the lifetime maintenance costs. Now build two thousand of them or more, and there you go, right back at a $1 trillion program. That seemingly crazy figure will go up perpetually with inflation over decades. The next big program that involves thousands of planes will be $2 trillion, and so on.
Spending $400 billion to acquire 2,000+ planes isn't the real problem, although the click-bait headlines pretend that it is. That cost would exist no matter what, we're not building & maintaining manned planes for decades for $25m each, period. The problem is the F35 isn't really great at any specific thing.
I'm no fan of the F-35 but it is what we've got for the next 50 years so let's stop sniping and start fixing.
Yes, the $1.4 Trillion is an all-in capitalized cost for the cost of the program, but the click-baity article gets to the heart of the issue pretty quickly: that building a product for 3 different users / businesses that each have their own unique needs and requirements is a failure of a product development strategy. You can either throw money at the problem and attempt to fix the product, or come to the conclusion that it's unfixable, admit that you were wrong, come up with a better product strategy and roadmap, and start all over again.
I don't agree. The Su-27, which is regarded as a genuine threat to 5th generation planes has been in service since the late 1970s. Modern F-16s have little in common with the first ones that saw service. Boeing has been putting money into F-15s and F/A-18s with stealth capability. Fourth generation aircraft are still survivable and they're still being developed on the field.
There's even a school of thought that suggests that when your enemy is a bunch of dudes with death wishes and pick up trucks, lower tech is an advantage. In this kind of combat, the F-35 is at a particular disadvantage. Its cannon may not be able to achieve the accuracy needed for close air support, the helmets' signal clutter is such that an F-35 is actually a danger, and even more fun, not one model of the F-35 can carry more than 220 rounds of ammunition. In comparison, the A-10 carries about 1,100 rounds. In practice, this means that whereas an A-10 could make 10-20 attack passes, an F-35 will top out at 2-4...
Point being, it might not be a very good remaining option and fourth gen aircraft are better in important ways. With some luck, the testing process will solve all of these problems, though some seem incurable.
Arguably, that's the case for manned combat aircraft generally, at least, in terms of cost-effective survivability. A point which a number of experts have been making since before the F-35s massive cost overruns and other issues.
A full third of the article is about how the F-35 is inferior to the A-10 for the specific application of close air support. The last part of the article is about how the F-35C is poorly designed for maintenance on aircraft carriers.
I don't see how either situation can be resolved with new software.
The A-10 is defenseless against modern air defense systems; it wouldn't get within 100 miles of the battlefield against a sophisticated enemy; it would be merely a flying coffin for the pilot.
Against unsophisticated enemies, such as ISIL, a drone could do the job, based on what I understand. The F-35 could too, though it's an expensive option.
When I think of military aircraft now, I tend to imagine them taking off from a carrier, bombing a military target (or equally likely, a house, school, hospital, wedding etc), then flying back.
This isn't software. Lifecycles are measured in decades.
You realize this is how combat jet design works?
The F-14, F-15, and F-16 all had first flights within two years of each other. F-18 flew four years after the F-16.
For domestic use, the F-35B STOVL jet used by the Marines is a dramatic improvement in range and capabilities over the Harrier.
The F-35A/C are less of an improvement, but I would by no means call them a failure. It's easy to criticize a program due to cost overruns and mismanagement, but that doesn't mean the end result is bad. At the very least it's a sunk cost now, so we'll just have to deal with it.
No one has made a clear case that the US is in any sort of danger if we don't upgrade our planes.
Imagine if that 1.4 trillion went towards fighting global warming, cancer, or lack of health care. It's sick.
The most obvious and likely right now would be the PLA if the United States were to vacate that role tomorrow. Or more likely, it would go unfilled for almost a decade before the PLA takes it.
Personally speaking, I would rather the US continue to fill the role it currently has than see it vacated and filled by a group like the PLA, and in order to do that, the United States has to maintain technological and military superiority over its competition which means continuing to research, develop and procure new fighters, carriers, destroyers, submarines, and maintain the US nuclear arsenal. Or to put this another way, the world isn't standing still, so why would America?
There is also the much more important measure of total lifetime cost. Flight hours are expensive for the F-35 compared to many 4th gen fighters.
I find it difficult to see why a plane designed to work stealthily in contested airspace would be very attractive for the role European air forces like Denmark or Norway have.
*Some giant number
It would have been great if some harmless or even beneficial industry had developed in this way, but that is not the case unfortunately. The US also has a burgeoning prison-industrial complex which also, unfortunately, results in bad consequences for innocent people.
You can see these self-perpetuating systems all over the place in modern civilization. The mechanism by which they grow is the same one which causes management in large corporations to grow exponentially. The bureaucracy will grow to fill the resources available. In the case of these self-perpetuating systems, they can grow in lobbying power and influence and increase their available resources, which allows them to expand and gain even more lobbying power and influence, and so on. The core business could be military, or making fake vomit, it doesnt matter.
ps. 'self-perpetuating system' is just a term I use to talk about these things. Maybe theres a widely accepted term I dont know. Also all this is just a product of my own reading and ruminations.
The fact you even know the F-35 exists should tell you it's a meme plane we're bullying our allies into buying to fund our own R&D. Devilish
The F35 will cost $20-$25 billion per year averaged.
Several of the most liberal states in the US - including California, New York and Vermont - have all looked at doing universal healthcare. They all run away immediately when the cost estimates come back.
Also, you still have the blatant consolidation of the medical industry into a gigantic monolithic hybrid of pharma, hospital, insurer, and artificially scarce doctor.
The solution is not to pump more doctors into a system geared to extract multiple industries worth of profit. Instead, it should be investing in increasing the capability of individuals to provide and manage their own medical care.
This means more accessible diagnostics tools, fewer barriers to entry in getting access to good medical literature. Investing in teaching people how to do research, and make medically relevant observations, or to at least be able to tell when "First Aid" stops, and more advanced facilities are needed. When "First Aid" can encompass using a small, affordable X-ray device cheap and easy enough to safely use in a residential home, THEN you start seeing healthcare costs plummet.
Same goes with Pharma. We have an exceedingly low capability to create environments conducive to productive research per capita. The brain power that can crank on these types of things are artificially limited by the inability of many who may have the interest and time to get access to facilities to make meaningful observations and potential discoveries.
Come up with acceptable test analogs. Document, enumerate, and simulate as much as possible so someone can pick up a protein, shove it into a tissue and see what interactions may happen.
Make the information accessible, and start working on boiling it down into learnable paths where a person can get the 80%, but still drill down into the more specialized.
Cheaper, more prolific research and education is the key. NOT letting the market sit on top the misery of the hurt and dying and demanding the toll be paid. Empower first. Optimize last.
I don't think the F-35 is a bad plane and does what it was designed to do very well, but it isn't the best tool for all the roles it is expected to fill.
The total acquisition cost over 40 years is set at $406 billion for 2,456 F35s as of the latest estimate. $345 billion is the cost of just the planes. $162m per plane.
You'll routinely see the media get just about every financial fact about the F35 wrong that they possibly can. For example, you'll see claims that they've already spent $400 billion on the program (with links to the GAO figures), when in fact the $400b is the planned total acquisition cost across its lifetime.
We'll be at war with them soon enough so hopefully these will perform when the time comes.
Actual real live shooting war between China and USA is going to be a nuclear war so the performance of the planes in that scenario will be kinda useless.
China has ballistic missiles with the range to hit any location of their choosing on main land USA and the tech to fit nuclear war heads onto those missiles.
Ehh? War with China won't happen in this day and age. In bizzaro universe where you think it will, it's not going to be fought with F-35s...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17479508
I was genuinely shocked when I read some of these points. I still have hard time believing things like survivability after the ejection and the need to repaint after every flight.
Using paint that needs to be reapplied all the time probably isn't a good idea, but it can also just be a choice to pay to hit the bleeding edge of capability (say a stickier paint gives the plane a higher signature).
I'd also probably take that article with some salt. There's nothing preposterous about deciding to manage fuel temperature, something that article misconstrues a bit (I think by not understanding what they are doing).
I really hope they can overcome the issues because overall it should help with logistics and cost over the long term.
That ship has already sailed. According to the program manager for the F-35, there is only 20-25% commonality between the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps variants. The F-35 has all of the downsides of a compromise design, but with almost none of the benefit.
http://www.airforcemag.com/DRArchive/Pages/2016/March%202016...
Not to say that there are a myriad of assumptions that go into making an stealth aircraft, as was demonstrated when apparently an F-117 was downed by a modified SAM site.
This is truly an unfathomable amount of money that I feel it's hard to understate.
Edit: I'll admit the helmet cam seemed pretty cool but 600k feels like a lot.
I know this isn't a popular sentiment around here but consider the difference in outcome between the 1990 invasion of Kuwait vs the 2013 invasion of Crimea: only in the one where we had absolute military superiority did the US - or "the UN" if you prefer - actually get a say in how it turned out.
Who does this entail today? The big two are clearly North Korea and Iran. Stretching it, I'd add Taiwan, Ukraine and the Eastern bloc, India on the China border, Philippines, and Venezuela becoming some type of Cuba situation. Then there are proxy wars between major powers like Syria, which will likely continue to occur in the middle east and Africa for several decades. Even if we don't enter these fights, we'll be able to give our allies this plane. (Or maybe they'll turn down the most advanced plane ever built because the pilot helmet has issues in high humidity situations /sarc.)
This isn't going to neutralize the other two main powers, it will continue to be an imperfect - maybe even useless - weapon against their anti-ship and surface-to-air capabilities. It can't defeat the 3rd world and it can't defeat a superpower. The question is: is the price worth what it can do (which is defeat 2nd tier powers / proxy adversaries for the next ~25 years)? Or is there something which can do that better?
I'm also reminded by the amazing technology in the US carriers. They're floating disaster response bases. Again, find ways to funnel military money into repurposable technologies. It's palatable and it has value beyond killing power.
Can we get a refund?
Historically, you did need good weapons and vehicles/horses/planes but there has always been a balancing effect caused by how much of them you have, how many troops can operate them and how well defended they are.
Aircraft carriers are a good example,they compliment existing capability by acting as floating military bases that can take the battle to the enemy's homeland. But that's the thing,they compliment,they don't replace.
Even if the F35 delivered as promised,is it better to have 10 F35 , 50 F18 or even better -- 1000+ armed drones?
They're making Navy boats smarter and more powerful as well,requiring fewer sailors. I am not against smarter technology and advanced capabilities. But it just doesn't seem wise to replace man count and existing capabilities when the new tech hasn't been battle tested against a worthy adversary.
I wouldn't want to rely on a few powerful counter measures,but rather a large number of "good enough" defensive and offensive technology.
But that's why I called it "the elephant in the room",this could work and actually counter-act other future super powers. Or history would repeat itself and the opponents will win with sheer troop count and "good enough" weaponry.
The US spends 20% of gdp on the military,yet it is quite obvious the greatest threat is internal strife and divisions typically exasperated by economical divisions. Not to mention, severe lack of physhical fitness for military-age men and women. Military leaders already consider this a national security threat. I have a feeling this might be one of the reasons they're relying on technology so much. They don't think they can mobilize and train enough soldiers in the event of yet another world war. It would be much easier to have them operate drones and wear head gear with HUD (just like in the games) that costs a fortune. They might just be playing to the nation's strength. But still,maybe if they spent 10% instead of 20% in defense (even russia and china don't spend close to 10%) ,and use that 10% for internal socio-economic stability and just maybe enact mandatory military service,that might be wiser than relying fully on technology that hasn't been battle tested against the intended scenario and adversary.
Will economic strength and advanced weaponry be enough? Maybe,but many empires with all that and more have fallen for various reasons. Economy aside,the cancerous defense-contractor industry that is the cause behind why so much of the GDP goes into defense is one of chief internal security threats. The whole industry is structured around politics so that politicians in specific districts approve spending in exchange for jobs+economy in their district. Many articles and blogs on that specific issue(e.g.: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-tra...)
