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?
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.
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.
Airborne Observation and control is a job handled by AWACS and JSTARS. While an argument could certainly be made for a stealth JSTARS, that's not what the F35 was intended to be, nor what it is optimized for. JSTARS planes should be long endurance planes, not super maneuverable supersonic VTOL jets. A stealth JSTARS would resemble the B2, not the F22.
The F35 does have an impressive set of sensors and communications abilities, but that's simply a consequence of being a more recently developed aircraft. It's really not too hard to appear impressive when your competition was designed to use core memory. A purpose built drone controller would put it to shame however.
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.
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.
Until we develop the technology to build an AGI, there’s still a need for fighters with human beings on board for autonomy.
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.
This makes me think about naval development before WW2. Everyone had lots of ideas about battleships and how to pack more guns onto a faster ship and all these other things, but lots of people missed how aircraft carriers would change things. I'm sure the next war will be different. The obvious development is drones, but I also think about the plotline of the second Battlestar Galactica series where the protagonists only initially survive because their ship eschews network connections. It seems like we aren't quite sure what future battles will look like and the US is making a guess in the form of a $1.5tn plane project.
That said, there are always new things to try on the battlefield as well and they are. Stealth bombers in Serbia, "three layer" attacks (top B-52, middle F-18, low Tomahawk) or any of the other tactics that appear as "new" in a conflict and then become "Yeah, they always do that." One of my classmates in high school went to West Point and at a reunion we were talking about the difference between engineering school and military school. There is a very deep base of knowledge there. And while it wasn't my destiny to go that path (even though the Marines tried really really hard to recruit me :-)) I recognize that fighting effectively is just as complex and nuanced as making a circuit that has 160 dB of noise margin.
What has been interesting about F-35 project is what was called out in the article, developed during unprecedented visibility into the unvarnished ups and downs. And there are always people who exploit that to paint a narrative of incompetence and gross negligence. The real test though is when they go to war and whether or not they provide the capabilities that overcome the enemy or not right?
The trouble is that by the time you find that out it's too late. Indeed we may never find out.
Drones have already shown their potential in the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict recently. From large swarm based attacks to kamikaze mode, I think drones should overtake frontline fighter planes in capability soon.
This of cause meant that the navy gradually took over the "first strike"/"suppression of air defenses" from the Air Force and the F-35 was born as an attempt to bring that back into the ranks of the Air force as stealth theoretically allows the F-35 to almost compete with submarine launched cruise missiles.
The problem is that the F-35 is way to expensive/fragile for the CAS role and might be so expensive to operate that it begins to make sense to depend entirely on missiles and drones for pre-planned strike missions, making it kind of the modern equivalent of post dreadnought battleships.
I always wonder if the next big military development is actually going to involve more technology, rather than less. America’s main military weakness is that it is very reliant on things like GPS or connections to other devices. What’s to stop a foe from developing jamming tech and counteracting the US’ lead? From what family tells me, the army still teaches people to dig trenches and use old-fashioned maps (among other things) just in case.
However, the skills are not reinforced or even practiced really. It is not as easy to conduct EW against GPS as you would think, at least not military specific capabilities. There are contingencies and capabilities in place for that.
Bigger concern would be the GPS satellites being destroyed altogether.
Which is also why when you hear news reports about China or the US destroying their own satellites using ship launched missiles, the message intended to be conveyed is more than meets the eye.
Those demonstrations are really about telegraphing to adversaries what you can/would do in the event of a conflict.
1. Ship- and ground-based transmitters are ridiculously powerful, and use lots of jamming-resistant tech like spread spectrum.
2. Viewed at the right wavelengths, jammers are like looking at Las Vegas at night. They’re very visible, and attractive targets for RF-seeking munitions.
With the advent of UAVs (ex: from the ordinary to the RQ-170 and beyond), hypersonic capabilities (ex: SCRAMJET), and even action in space (ex: destruction of satellites enabling GPS & remote communication, to severely limit an opponent’s capabilities), I have to agree.
I imagine the “next war” will be one with severe consequences, perhaps through means which the general public is not even aware of, despite those known & listed above.
He also calls it a supersonic fighter, which isn't true. The coatings cannot withstand sustained periods of supersonic flight.
True.
And also, the author is an operator, but not necessarily someone involved in the engineering or acquisition.
Nonetheless (and I say this as someone who was severely soured by my involvement with the program), people get tribal as to whether the JSF (provides an unmatched capability) XOR (is the zenith of acquisition malpractice). It's not either/or; both are simultaneously true.
No one in DoD R&D/acquisition fails to appreciate how expensive these things are and this realization is certainly driving long-term decision-making.
Actually, it does for me:
"Just imagine how the F-16 program would have been covered today when they were crashing an aircraft almost every two weeks during several years in the ’80s and ’90s (the F-35, by comparison, has only crashed 3 times in over a decade of flying)."
I had no idea that an F-16 crashed roughly every two weeks while being debugged. I imagine I'm not the only one.
The difference between the F-18 and the F-35 is that while the F-18 might need extended maintenance after prolonged (read : more than a minute) supersonic flight, the F-35 may suffer catastrophic coating degradation that may be fatal in the same flight.
As for other operational fighters, the Dassault Rafale can supercruise indefinitely the Gripen indefinitely at Mach 1.3, the Eurofighter indefinitely at Mach 1.8, the Sukhoi-35 can if outfitted with the AL-41F-1S (meaning, some operational Su-35s can supercruise indefinitely, but not all). The F-22 is far from the only one.
If you need a fighter to fly 500 km and engage a target, why wait 25 minutes for a super-cruising mach-1 fighter when a Mach-2.3 craft without super cruise can get there in 10 minutes?
Can’t the Eurofighter Typhoon supercruise?
Which is another area where F-35 is lacking: range. Without external fuel tanks it can't fight in the Pacific.
This passage caught my eye:
> The last major reason the F-35 has seen so much criticism is that it was the first jet developed in the social media age. The paradigm shift, cost, and early problems, coupled with concurrency, led to an explosion of negative social media that grew into mainstream media coverage.
Cost buried second in a list of factors contributing to…social media as major factor?
If it weren't for those pesky kids on the Internet!
Without answering that question, how can you say that the F35 costs too much? Personally i have no idea what the true US military budget should be and I'm not even sure how you'd begin to calculate that as a civilian. One of the few things that gets passed in a bi-partisan manner by the US legislature is the military budget (apparently for 59 straight years).
It's easy to look at a big number and say it's bad. But it's also easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. The average FAANG team probably costs their company multiple millions of $ per year in just employee costs. It's easy to parachute in and say that you could do it for less, and you'd probably be right. But that also loses track of bigger picture.
How much is too much to spend on bayonets pre WW1 to face the machine gun?
The F-35 is a 1.5 trillion dollar bet on human dog fighters who cant execute high G maneuvers in a world dominated by fleets of cheap, disposable, AI piloted drones that can. Nagorno-Karabakh and Yemen have already shown a taste of this.
>One of the few things that gets passed in a bi-partisan manner by the US legislature is the military budget
The F35 is curious in this regard because it is so heavily criticized by Congress yet still funded.
This is coz Lockheed distributed F35 jobs across the country on the basis of congressional votes. A vote to kill the F35 is thus a vote to destroy jobs in your district. Lockheed engineered the world's most unkillable military program and then milked it to kingdom come. The shareholders are certainly happy.
This is, sadly, the most impressive form of F35 engineering.
We will look back on many things after the next war and shake our collective heads but I suspect the most glaring and shameful error will be our willingness to indulge corporate profit margins at the expense of the body politic.
With a lifetime cost in the $1.5 trillion range.
When you're talking about trillion dollars to acquire some aircraft, I think the word expensive is justified.
They'd be broke in record time.
This should be all you need to know.
Does the bad press miss the point?
So much that "point" is the cost per aircraft is nutso for what you get. Something that's stealth, dogfight, and close-in air support.
And perhaps the article is right, the stealth is fantastic. Lets you fire without being seen. But after you've fired it, then what? Now everyone knows where you are and a potential dog fight is coming.
It's well known its dog fighting is weak even compared to other older fighters, but maybe it's also fair to say dog fighting is a thing of the past[1].
Being a stealth mobile missile battery... Is a good long range offense a strong defense? These kinds of things can only be tested, so... jury's still out.
My personal criticism comes in the close in air support, what good is all that money that was dumped into stealth doing as it just hovers above in plain view/access? Also, it does a poor job at flying slowly. It's just not specialized in it.
Time will tell if the price tag is even close to being justified, but I'm still a strong skeptic.
[1] https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/f-35-pilot-heres-wha...
That doesn't seem like a role the Air Force is very concerned about. The USAF has been trying to kill off their best low and slow flying close air support aircraft for awhile now. [0] The planes are made to lay down hell [1] and take a beating that would destroy just about any other aircraft [2], and the ground troops love it. [3]
Supposedly the F-35 is going to fill the role of the A-10 in the future but I just don't see how that's possible.
[0] https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a34907462...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Republic_A-10_Thunde...
>It's well known its dog fighting is weak even compared to other older fighters
It's more nimble than a combat loaded F-16. Sure it isn't super maneuverable like a F-22, but it actually is able to do maneuvers which other planes need thrust vectoring to achieve.
>And perhaps the article is right, the stealth is fantastic. Lets you fire without being seen. But after you've fired it, then what? Now everyone knows where you are and a potential dog fight is coming.
You misunderstanding the nature of the F-35's first shot advantage. It is not merely remaining unseen and firing first. Even if a AWAC's or L band ground radar directs you toward a F-35 it will be the first to fire because it can get a firing solution on a 4th gen before it can get one on the F-35.
Furthermore, it's also not a forgone conclusion that an adversary would know where it is after firing. A F-35 pilot could have moved serious distance in that time from whatever heading the missile originated. With stealth the pace of combat is dictated by the pilot who actually has situational awareness.
This is probably a valid criticism, but aren't the current generation of military helicopters simply way better than jets could ever be at this? And they have the advantage that they can land and evacuate people.
There are actually better fighters on a $/hr basis. The A-10 is a bit pricy to maintain. The A-29, propeller plane, holds a promising position[0].
Helicopters tend not to be the platform of choice, but I'm not well versed enough to know why. Many times it comes down to which branch flies helicopters vs fixed winged aircraft. And simply that branch doesn't have the "rights" to fly the right kind of craft given the mission... weird stuff.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Attack/Armed_Reconnaissa...
No it is not. The poster is appears to mistakenly believe that F-35B's would hover for purposes of close air support. It would never do that because the VTOL capabilities of the F-35B are exclusively for short range take off and landing.
The US has around 10 Amphibious Assault Ship which now thanks to the F-35B's are among some of the most capable carriers in the world. Factor in the ability to take off from rapidly constructed airbases throughout the pacific and the F-35B is one of the most dangerous airplanes currently in production. A squadron could sneak up from completely unexpected directions from bases which had not existed in your satellite reconnaissance just a day ago.
That was the idea, but it is also why the program has performed so poorly on cost, timeliness, and capability.
The F-35 was supposed to achieve 80% parts commonality among the three variants. This would have delivered massive cost savings. Instead, the reality is less than 25% parts commonality. Also, the compromises made to accommodate all three requirement sets means the F-35 has worse aerodynamic performance and a worse radar cross section than it otherwise would've had if the Air Force and Navy could've had their own dedicated air frames from the start.
The much lower degree of parts-sharing wouldn't be so bad, except that the JSF program eschewed a lot of real world testing in lieu of computer simulation. And to make matters worse they employed "concurrent development", which meant that production were getting made while the testing phase was still in progress. The result was that as problems were uncovered, expensive retrofits had to be applied to all the airframes that had already been produced.
In a more traditional development strategy, the vast majority of teething issues would've been found before series production began. But concurrent development was used to try to speed up the timeline, but also make it more difficult to cancel the program.
The F-35 has a lot of capabilities but it is fundamentally compromised because of the attempt to make it a jack of all trades. It has had an extremely long gestation period, very high development costs, very high operational costs, and compromised performance on several fronts. Had the DoD at least split off the USMC STOVL requirement it seems like this project would've gone a lot better.
Are these expected to be in any theatre at all in the near future? Any fighters like that seem at least a decade or two in the future, if not three.
War is about winning the economics. Can your economy and industrial output out pace what your enemy destroys, vs your opponents output and what you can destroy.
Even in peace time, this is a major factor. Keeping up with the US on military spending bankrupted the USSR, at the same time as Japanese and German industries where able to leap ahead of both, since they didn't spend on military post WW2.
The US may want to have a good Military to defend against China, but if it spends too much, and not enough on civil industry (and education) China may crush the US economically, without firing a bullet.
You can have the most Nukes of any country, but at some point, you have enough nukes to do anything you want, and after that, any nuke you add is a drain on your economy. Having the "best" or "most" weapons isn't the same as having the right allocation of resources.
If we have enough nukes to do whatever we want (we definitely have more than enough nukes), then it follows that we do not need giant conventional forces, right? We are already invulnerable to invasion/defensive war because of the nukes/geography so what is the point of conventional forces from a defensive standpoint?
This means the F-35 is about offense and conflict escalation - about increasing the reach/power of the American empire. The most cost effective strategy for a nation that is not an empire in this situation would be to drastically downsize conventional forces since we already have a deterrent. Expensive new fighter jets are no longer needed for defense.
So I see the F-35 program not as a counter against the U.S.’s enemies, but as a way to more effectively attack other countries.
The F35 is able to defend US strategic interests in Taiwan (mainly chip making) in a way nukes cant. On the other hand The budget of the F35 could buy TSMC 3 times over, so it may not be the most cost effective way to defend your interests...
[1] https://www.aetc.af.mil/News/Photos/igphoto/2002209050/
[2] says, "Maj. Justin Lee, USAF is an active F-35 Joint Strike Force pilot"
[3] says, "I'm an F-35 fighter pilot for the Air Force."
... both of which seem to suggest that he's still active?
Sounds like the national defense equivalent of rewriting your website from scratch in $LATEST_WEBSHIT_FRAMEWORK. Sure, it's a worse product, but just imagine how great it _could_ be if we halt development of the working version and spend a trillion dollars making the new one work. See? It's better! And the customer is paying hand over fist, so everyone wins.
And eventually the Air Force came to its senses, accepted the "pull request" for upgrades on its big workhorse F-15 "library"....and now we are getting the awesome F-15EX. Something we should have been working on before they even cancelled the F-22.
This is why I like the Russian approach to military R&D: they do a small number of cutting-edge products to keep their engineers employed and their tech as current as possible given their constraints, but the bulk of their actual inventory is continuous refinements of solid legacy systems, tweaked and rolled out at fairly low cost.
Su-27 -> Su-30 -> Su-34 and 35 (honestly even the Su-57 planform is clearly an extension of this airframe if you look at it closely)
T-72 -> T-90 -> latest upgrade packages for both (T-72B3M and T-90M Breakthrough-3)
But, like a lot of things with the JSF program, concurrency made it much more difficult to cancel. Sunk costs and all that.
It IS a very capable war-plane for many of its roles. Much more capable then the harrier and with many capabilities that the F-16 & F-18 lack. It has different solutions to the problems it faces though.
Many of these new approaches to old problems that are arguable. Is a stealthy approach (F-35) more effective then raw manoeuvrability (F-16) in fighter vs fighter combat? Probably if the stealth can be maintained. Is high flying precisions guided weaponry as better then what an A-10 can do in close air support? Maybe? These points will be argued by airchair air marshals until we have another big war to "answer" the question.
But the F-35 has failed at being the cheap general purpose aircraft it was promised to be. It has been earmarked to replace the F-16 in its entirety, as the low end fighter to the F-22 raptor as the high end. This was one of the reasons the F-35 has a single engine. Recent moves are to make the F-35 the new high end fighter w/ a new lightweight fighter the low end that can be cheap enough to fulfil this need.
It's well worth the hour if you're an aviation geek.
The actual point is that we are absolutely stuck with the F-35, so had better make it good--or at least take up thinking it's good, where we can't.
It is not correct to compare it to an F-16. It needs to be compared to a whole fleet of aircraft, because it costs as much as much as a fleet. Could it take on 8 F-16s at once?
It is not correct to compare it to an F-16 because you can afford to fly your plentiful F-16s in harm's way, but have to keep your paltry few F-35s a hundred miles back, out of any possibility of danger.
The reason we are stuck with the F-35, despite its still suffering over 600 class-A design flaws (each risks loss of airframe), is that it is built in 48 states. To kill it you would need to get senators from 24 of those states, and the other two besides, to vote against it. It could explode every time the gear doors shut, and we would still be stuck with it, and they know. Be glad it can take off and land.
I imagine that a Chinese fighter probably costs a lot less to get into the air than an F-35 does. The airframe and engines might not have a higher MTBF than F-35 (or maybe they do) but they are certainly cheaper and easier to replace, regardless.
There's an obvious economic and industrial capability question to all of this. A player with cheap planes can erode the benefits of the technologically superior one by simply encouraging them to be used more, or forcing the decision to not use them for fear of stretching supply lines... Thus reducing the required response time when it's decided to actually deploy the expensive weapon.
[1] https://www.stripes.com/news/pacific/japan-denies-report-tha...
Whether the F-35 will be successful or not does not matter whether there are armchair journalists or mainstream reporters covering the project, but in this case we can enjoy the increased accountability. This should be seen as a positive effect of social media, if anything.
This had me wondering how many mistakes in previous projects were smoothed over by clever marketing, and how many are being exposed now. Does social media make it easier or harder for the general public to get accurate information on this sort of thing?
