In practice, the US has already demonstrated that its primary airpower projection is via unmanned systems, the manned combat aircraft is the mounted cavalry c. 1920.
1. The US hasn't had to overcome a first-rate Integrated Air Defense System since the 1970s. UAVs, while hard to detect due to their small RCS, have extremely poor overall survivability. It's part of what makes them so cheap.
2. The US is rarely flying drones against an adversary with robust Electronic Attack capabilities. They're pretty useless if their datalinks to their Ground Control Station are jammed and you don't have HARMs on-hand to suppress/neutralize/destroy the jamming source.
3. The future of air power is likely to be a mix of manned fighters with UAVs as wingmen or forward-deployed scouts/sensor platforms, and then further in the rear big (manned) "bombers" with deep magazines throwing missiles into the fight from far away, handing off target tracking to the manned fighter. Even something like an F-15 Strike Eagle or a Su-34 could fulfill that latter role with the right electronics suite and ordnance upgrades...
GPS jamming can be made vastly more difficult by special antenna configurations, and additionally I'd hope that military drones have precise IMUs and star trackers to serve as fallback.
I've always had a suspicion that the generous piles of cash thrown at the F-35 program was really going to two programs:
1) A well-publicised cover (F-35)
2) A secret Skunk Works project like F-117, SR-71
But a corporate welfare program as you suggest is more likely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Aurora#U.S._sighting_c...
(Evidence of something moving around Mach 5 at high altitude, rattling the rocks, captured by seismic equipment since the 90ies. Overton Window has now been open long enough for Lockheed Martin to tentatively present https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_SR-72 as something new.)
If the US is clever (NSA: this is your queue) it would find a way to use the current difficult political climate to focus on what they are supposed to do (I guess preventing war maybe) and in a relevant way for the times. The Russians basically did this with internet trolls. They took something simple (and amusing at times) and weaponised it.
I guess one would hope enough people that are both clever and uhm, ethical, work for the three-letter organisations.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9QXjBVC233s
The Afghanistan Papers - which dropped off the mainstream media's radar almost instantly - is further evidence it's alive and well.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/...
I'm unconvinced by this assessment, for one they haven't had symmetrical warfare in a long time and a pilot is way harder to jam. for another long range laser ciws systems are getting more and more effective and if you armor cheap unmanned system they stop being cheap. but ultimately they have limited payload option and you can always pack more countermeasures than the enemy pack missiles so it's yet unclear what the best option is in a defended/contested airspace
But now I wonder: if this is just so much smoke, mirrors and rose-tinted narratives of potentiality... when will the bubble pop? And what might cause that? And what might the pop (or maybe explosion) look like?
My curiosity is mostly just idle/morbid musing - this seems much like watching a moth encounter a candle.
And for the engineering tasks I was doing, there were no good ways to categorize the task, so I eventually gave up and called all the data loads I was doing "LUBRICATION/OTHER". Hey, making the data flow better is a kind of lubrication, right?
I would say "maybe it's gotten better since I used it years ago" but from this article it looks like the answer is a solid "No".
It covers things like tracking wear&tear of components so that you know when to replace parts, and more importantly, know when to schedule repairs - it's crucial that you have well-planned maintenance that ensures maximum availability of aircraft, so you need to stagger them - which is non-trivial to do. That's probably the "MVP" level, which to be practical might involve tons of other stuff.
On a predecessor to ALIS for a different plane, even planning a mission went through it - you had someone come to you with requirements, and you'd arrange which plane, which pilots, which technicians to prepare it for flight, where are the tools they need for it, generate a fueling chart, everything based on the availability and qualifications.
Once the plane returned from mission, you'd enter various flight data, including stuff like "how many rounds the autocannon fired" so that the underlying MRP system could calculate maintenance dates and the like.
The ultimate goal is that you have a squadron that has maximum possible availability so it can fulfill its job in the air, without surprise maintenance (or worse - stuff breaking down) foiling your mission plans, and where your stores contain enough of all materiel necessary.
ALIS covered, AFAIK, all elements of logistics for F-35, a giant integrated system. Great on paper as the top level idea, everything got worse the more you got into implementation of the goals. I heard of rebasing where the bringup of local ALIS node took longer than the whole rebased mission. Downloading flight records post-flight would take longer than the flight. Planes that won't fly unless connection with "cloud" part of ALIS (all hosted centrally in USA) was done at least once a month. Gigantic amounts of data you had to transfer between "cloud" and local instance, making it more than problematic to run on ships equipped with F-35B and F-35C.
And of course the fact that data packages describing the operation theater can be generated only by one or two labs in USA (good luck, export customers!)... which is part of the ALIS cloud (and now ODIN cloud), which also is hosted by Lockheed Martin in USA.
Now that I think of it, ALIS explains significant portion of the money USAF puts into Starlink as its only customer...
The failure rate of large scale IT projects is the huge. For large, complex projects the statistics is
2% success
42% challenged
56% failed
The new system has probably similar 50% change for success. I think giving the new project to the same contractor may improve the changes. Hhey have hopefully learned something.
Which involves as stellar things as delivering a not-working (but "valid under contract" so we couldn't sue them) system for logistics management (everything from ensuring parts are on the shelves to assigning jobs to technicians and pilots for a mission) that we later found was rebranded broken car logistics support software, something that was found 3 years post original delivery date by new employee of a team working on fixing it - which meant we had to rework a crucial module.
Said software had gems like JS copied from geocities in 1998 handling drop down menus (which were broken unless very specific browser versions were used) - in 2012. (original delivery date was 2009~2010).
The "redo" contract is going to the same guys who just did the failure, and I've seen no mention of removal of one of the bigger pain points, which was use of cloud.
heart warming to see us draw ever closer to the cyberpunk dystopia of my childhood dreams.
https://thenewstack.io/how-the-u-s-air-force-deployed-kubern...
"“One point for the team was to demonstrate that it could be done,” Chaillan said. He challenged the Air Force and its partners to get Kubernetes up and running on a jet in 45 days, and while that was as difficult as it sounds, the team met the goal and F-16s are now running three concurrent Kubernetes clusters, he said."
ODIN being in the cloud is nothing new - a big pain point with ALIS is the fact that it's cloud based.
That's more than a few EMP's...
Of course if they deploy it on a single Digital Ocean droplet then it's a bit more vulnerable.
https://pando.com/2015/09/24/war-nerd-why-f-35-albanian-mush...
Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month (1975)