The F-35 is a terrible aircraft, and the procurement is deeply suspect. The South Korean acquisition process leaked some surprising information about the acquisition process and the F-35 failed the relatively modest criteria the Koreans had set and an older aircraft (F-15) to be purchased. At the time there was loads of news about the F-35 failing the acquisition and it even made it into Aviation week. Doing a google search now, it looks like it was a smooth process from RFP to acquisition and I can't find many of the older articles [1]
The rumor is that Lockheed bribed the hell out of the Korean National Assembly and "won" the initial round of acquisition, but the agency in Korea responsible for the acquisition (DAPA) saw right through it and awarded the final contract to Boeing.
The National Assembly got upset, Lockheed got upset and probably some U.S. congressmen got upset and the entire acquisition was tossed out "recompeted" and of course the F-35 won the second time. It's a sad joke and I can't even begin to guess at the acquisition shenanigans that happened in the U.S.
1 - http://www.defensenews.com/article/20130928/DEFREG/309280008...
edit a great movie about this is the movie "Pentagon Wars" which includes this great scene.
The US doesn't want it's allies to get the best equipment for their usage - they want their allies to send them money. With allies like that, who needs enemies?
Even if an ally can be trusted with modern aircraft, often their pilots cannot be. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Cold_War_pilot_defectio...
Also, the F-35 was sold as being worthwhile because it was cheaper and easier. In reality it has been vastly more expensive and vastly less capable than alternatives, with far more maintenance per hour spent flying than most other aircraft.
If there was a hint of sanity in the USAF they'd shit-can the F-35 program and start a new round of competitive procurement for separate fighters for each role. It's worth remembering that some of the best aircraft in history have come about as responses to failed development programs. The F-14 grew out of the failed F-111B program, for example.
And yet each design is to some extent compromised by the needs of the other two. I totally understand that VTOL is cool, but why does a VTOL fighter have to have anything at all in common with two non-VTOL planes? Make it a separate program.
It would be interesting to hear the thoughts of the engineer in the video on the F/A-18. From what I've read about the Joint Strike Fighter project, from which the F-35 was borne, it seems like they were trying to recreate and expand upon the success and versatility of the F/A-18. I've always heard that the F/A-18 is one of the most useful planes in our arsenal, but it isn't highly specialized to one specific purpose.
As far as the F-35 goes, it seems like its yet another example where America is perfectly capable of building something better* than the rest of the world has, if it weren't for all of the corrupt politicians that are willing to trade real progress for personal gain.
*not that we are inherently better than everyone, its just that we poured an enormous amount of resources into this project
At the end of the day, I generally recognized that the F-15C pilot was going to be better at air-to-air, the A-10 or F-15E pilots better at air-to-ground. The F-16 pilots more jack-of-all-trade types (excluding CJs) with a slightly better aircraft that can't land on the boat. And the F-14 pilots better at drinking in the bar.
I also think the general consensus when I left a couple years back was that the F35 is a turd. Probably a better turd then anything else out there (excluding maybe the F-22), but not worth the price, and riddled with flaws. General's and Admiral's, however, put pressure on anyone who even thought of speaking negatively about the program.
If the saying goes: "Arm-chair generals study tactics, real generals study logistics," then our current crop of General's and Admiral's forgot the part about only "morons putting all their eggs in one basket." This is exactly what the JSF is: a basketful of eggs ready to break.
Unfortunately, the defense industry has gotten so totally out of control that we can't afford anything it provides. Pretty soon we will have 1 super tank, plane, submarine weapon thingy. The exit from senior military positions into the defense industry has created an awful supplier of tools to the troops. Our own leaders are so self-interested that they can't even recognize a problem: http://www.boston.com/news/politics/articles/2010/12/26/defe...
But the problem of this implicit corruption extends way beyond defense, just look at the banks and the treasury. We need some sort of '5 year hiatus', where after serving in a senior position of government, individuals can't join a corporation that does over X revenue with the branch of government that person just left for 5 years. No more hiring for the roledex or as payback for deeds done while in government. Serve in government to serve, not for the payday afterwards
That said, it's hard to measure the effectiveness of most US aircraft because they've never been operated in truly competitive conditions (the best measure is of aircraft which the israeli's use, since israel has often fought russian proxies such as Syria with late model aircraft and "advisors". By that measure, the F15 and F16 are unparalelled. The israelis don't use the F18 iirc, which says something.
The original design came from the same competition that gave us the F-16. High manuverability, high thrust aircraft are fundamentally versatile, especially when you put advanced avionics in them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAM-87_Skybolt
Edit: Even more like the fantastic idea to cancel the wonderful TSR-2 in favour of the F-111 - a decision which was then cancelled later on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_TSR-2
""All modern aircraft have four dimensions: span, length, height and politics. TSR-2 simply got the first three right."
(Not a weapons expert by any means. So please correct me if I'm wrong)
Having seen it, is there still any reason to see the movie? Or is that the gist of it? Because from looking at Wikipedia, that looks like the gist of it.
Edit: The clip is really more of a flashback -- the rest of the film deals with the young officer trying to ensure the vehicle receives a live fire test.
Also you'll miss the fact that everyone except the guy that said what would happen got promoted and he retired prematurely.
However, he loses a lot of respectability when he says that stealth is a scam. All you have to do is ask the multitude of the F117 pilots who flew over Baghdad during the invasion, if stealth technology helped them avoid Iraqi radar.
Just because SOME radars cannot detect stealth aircraft it does not immediately follow that NO radars can detect stealth aircraft.
http://aviationweek.com/defense/commentary-do-russian-radar-...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_aircraft#Limitations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bistatic_radar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_radar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multistatic_radar
Provided that you're willing to invest a minute or so (I spent 5 min finding links) you can discover that in fact he does know what he's talking about. This is established science and not at all contentious.
Afghanistan had no serious air defence network anyway. The Iraqi air defence network was heavily outdated and under sanctions for over 10 years in 2003. The Libyan air defences hadn't been updated since the 80s when the US managed to bomb Libya with the loss of one aircraft.
The Israelis managed time and time again to overcome the Syrian air defence network. Which is, although not build to its full capacity due to Russia holding back the S300 and now heavily impacted by the civil war, more modern and better designed than anything the US encountered in her recent conflicts. And the Israelis have no stealth aircraft and used their F-15.
Stealth isn't a scam, but it's very much oversold, especially with regard to the F35. Ultimately the stealth of the F35 is not enough of an advantage to make up for the downsides of the aircraft. In any force on force engadgment the F35 will run out of missiles and run low on fuel before the enemies, and then it will be forced to run away. A condition where the vehicle is less stealthy and also where it's slower speed is a huge disadvantage, so it'll just get shot out of the sky. This has been the consistent result of many simulations and wargames with the F35 against contemporary fighter aircraft.
And if this tech isn't dated already, the Pentagon plans to still be using these jets in 2065. (http://online.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-looks-to-lower-costs...)
I don't see a strong reason the Air Force should be investing so much in fighter jets and not focusing on drone technology.
He mentions dogfights, do those even happen anymore? Why participate in a manned dogfight when you can simply send drones -- and if they are shot down, send one more, or one hundred more.
The U.S. military is always fighting the last war. In this case, they aren't even fighting the last several wars, but are still locked into Cold War, pre-drone thinking.
Probably not for quite awhile. Issues of lethality aside, the electronics aren't there yet. In Afghanistan, there were long waits to get downlink bandwidth to get video back from UAV's. We're nowhere near the point where we can maintain effective communications with a squadron of drones big enough to do real damage, and the "automated killer drone AI" isn't close yet either.
Yes, the Air Force needs to anticipate the future, but I think the future is a bit further away than you think. If they're planning on using these until 2065, they might start designing drone replacements in say 2045. That's only 30 years away, and probably not a bad ballpark estimate for how long it'll take to get this technology to the point where you can start really relying on it for offensive capability. It sounds like a long time from now, but the F-22 RFP process was started just about thirty years ago.
Now there's a terrifying prospect. Is this actually something we should expect to see any time soon? My understanding has been that, films aside, "AI" software is nowhere near the point where we might run a drone that can kill on it
There are better drones being developed, but they will be expensive and will depend extensively on sat links for communicating between the drone and base station. This will be problematic against a peer foe who can jam radio transmissions.
High G maneuvering to defeat missiles certainly still happens. There is a YouTube F-16 cockpit video of one flight's encounter with a SAM missile trap in the balkans. The F-16 is supremely maneuverable. Sounds like they were desperate and barely made it out. (One plane was hit, IIRC.)
EDIT: I remembered wrong. This was the video about an incident over Iraq. Also, it was due to a mistake in mission planning.
Drones would be even better at this in many ways. Possibly worse in terms of situational awareness, however, depending on how well integrated the pilot's information is.
Actually autonomous ones are as far as I know only good for static targets (effectively they are reusable cruise missiles).Close air support or deciding whether to engage an enemy airplane or not gets tricky.
There are different types of UAVs "drones" for a more buzzword-y term, for different uses. The bigger boys such as the Predator, Global Hawk, etc use satellite navigation. There is most definitely a "lag" of sorts for those types of UAVs. The Shadow and the Hunter however, are line of sight. It limits their range severely (I got one out to 166km from the control station), but they are just as dangerous, albeit smaller and with less endurance for extended missions. It doesn't matter, they are cheap and you can launch lots of them :)
I've got 480 combat flight hours from Operation Iraqi Freedom II, from 2003-2004. We CONSTANTLY were targeting moving things and never had any real issues with it. You just use the right drone for the mission at hand. The military has dozens of different types of drones, but only the bigger ones make the news on a regular basis. The Shadow is being phased out for those types of missions in favor of the MQ-1C Gray Eagle.
Now for air/air stuff, they call those UCAS (lookup the X45-B / X47-B), the tech is still fledgling enough to need another 5-10 years before it will ever become a reality. On that, there simply isn't good enough software... yet.
Manned planes are the cavalry of the 21st century. They're glamorous and dashing, but also insanely high maintenance.
On-board AI will only get better. And you only need one kill from a disposable unit to take out a manually-flown enemy.
I think there's an argument to be made that investment in new fighter jets is potentially an effort to avoid fighting the last (aerial) war.
That is, no one expects that the USA will actually get into a war with Russia, China, or one of the other "usual suspects" which has significant air-warfare capability. The existence of sufficiently advanced weaponry (on both sides) helps ensure that such a war won't happen.
It's certainly not the biggest motivator avoiding war (who needs motivation to not fight war, anyway?), but enough of these deterrents added up helps keep negotiations civil.
All that said, it's probably just the military-industrial complex at work -- why give up multi-billion dollar fighter jet contracts for much more reasonable multi-(tens? hundreds?)-million dollar drone contracts?
Also, the air superiority that these aircraft enable, allows the use of drones, and other ground advantages.
So yes, while air-to-air dog fighting is rare (although posturing certainly isn't), it's only one use for these planes.
The only thing I can think of is creative solutions to incoming missiles, but if that really is something that computers cannot currently do, I doubt that will remain the case for long.
... has become an over-used cliche, the one thing many people know about military planning, and thus it is re-used, like the last wars' stratagems, far beyond its weight or value.
Where are you getting that idea? What other countries use drone warfare? As far as I can, it was the CIA that started the whole drone strike campaign, and I'm not aware of other countries that use it consistently.
Now, I'm not aware of an autonomous drone that can shoot down an f-22 with a missile, but it seems like a solvable technical challenge, especially if you're willing to throw a trillion dollars at the problem.
So anyway, for each f-22 send up 7 drones. one for each missile, and one to survive to get the kill, as long as the 6 lost drones are cheaper than the f22, you're winning, kinda.
Furthermore, pilots are expensive and take time to replace. I doubt there are even 10,000 combat pilots in the world (wag) kill off a few thousand, and the drones are against rookies. All the while, the drone software is improving and getting even tougher to kill. And, the drones should be capable of things that that human pilots just can't accomplish - high g turns for example.
Self driving cars aren't better than the best drivers, but they're way above average drivers, eventually the robots will be better. Same with jets. why not start now?
This doesn't exactly answer your question, but it is an interesting article along these lines: http://www.economist.com/node/14299496
A few quotes:
"Countries with 'hunter-killer' drones include America, Britain and Israel."
"'Almost all' IDF [Israeli Defense Force] ground operations now have drone support."
"...Estimates that America will spend about 60% of the total [global sales of drones]."
"Following the United States, Israel ranks second in the development and possession of drones, according to those in the industry. The European leaders, trailing Israel, are roughly matched: Britain, France, Germany and Italy. Russia and Spain are not far behind, and nor, say some experts, is China... In total, more than three dozen countries operate UAVs, including Belarus, Colombia, Sri Lanka and Georgia. Some analysts say Georgian armed forces, equipped with Israeli drones, outperformed Russia in aerial intelligence during their brief war in August 2008. (Russia also buys Israeli drones.)"
"Iran builds drones, one of which was shot down over Iraq by American forces in February... Iran has supplied Hizbullah militants in Lebanon with a small fleet of drones, though their usefulness is limited."
No other country has had any kind of conflict where a drone would have provided any advantage. Hell, even our drones are not effective and cause more problems than they are worth. We just like being screwed and bamboozled by the next big thing our military services complex has to sell us.
If you have any idea of the consequences and effects of using drones in tactical operations then you would know that if any other country was using them in the way we use them we would be crying foul and trying to passive aggressively shame them for killing innocent civilians.
I'm not asking if you agree or disagree with the use of drones in wars, I'm actually asking if there is a debate going on about the use of unmanned vehicles in wars.
A: The real mission is for the US government to send money to Lockheed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxDSiwqM2nw#t=443
By that standard, the F-35 has been a trememdous success!
$200 MM is a VERY hefty price. Hell 5 of these guys will cover our education needs across the whole damn united states.
I think you need to check your numbers? $1 billion is nowhere near what the United States spends on education each year.
Simply: Lockheed define narrow criteria that only Lockheed can win and then lobby enough to ensure those criteria are applied.
Does it have to be? Here's a similar jet: the Dassault Rafale. Its also multirole. Its not nearly as good as the F-35. Is it better than the F-22 in air to air combat? Nope. Did it shot down a F-22, ever? Yes (yes - they have official combat simulations with real planes, only the missiles are not real - and those are made to sell the airplanes so there is no incentive to go easy). Does that means its better then? Nope, still not. Most of the time, it loses.
There's several points here:
- you dont have to be the best tool for the job to be the best all rounder.
- sometimes the best all rounder is better than the best tool for the job. its cheaper (imagine 3 or 4 F-22 scale programs vs 1 F-35 program), and it does the job well enough for many tasks. in fact, air to air superiority is one of the only tasks where you currently need to specialize. Turns out that the army has done this choice as well and has the F-22.
- views you can see or read of what is "better" or "worse" regarding fighter aircrafts is most of the time completely wrong and extremely misleading. Most people have extremely, extremely high financial interests in this. Billions and billions. War is a very juicy business.
One of the points of the "co designer of the F16" (mind you, id take a F15 over a F16 ANY DAY) are the "small wings" of the F35 giving it mediocre lift.
I like this one. The F-35 has better lift and better aerodynamics than the F-16 or the F-15, or the F/A-18. But its non-obvious. This engineer knows that. The general public doesn't. (note that the main reason for this, beside better design for aerodynamics is that the body of the plane provides most of the lift).
Some of the other commons points are generally either plain false, either have truth in them but pushed further than the reality.
Some significant problems the project is experiencing:
-F-35 can't fly in poor weather because it doesn't have adequate protection against lightning strikes -Stealth coating doesn't sufficiently withstand temperature around the exhausts -Exhaust gas is too hot for amphibious ship decks for the Marine Corps variant -Rear visibility is poor, and 3D helmet designed to address that shortcoming isn't ready yet -Onboard software is severely flawed and behind schedule.
This program is already wildly over budget and is only going to continue exceeding its budget as they address the multitude of issues it has right now.
The whole point of this aircraft was that it was supposed to be cheaper and more versatile than the F-22. The unit cost is already going to be well over $100 million and that's with the assumption that our allies will buy a large number of them. Chances are several allies are going to drop out, and I suspect we are going to dramatically cut back the number we acquire as well, thereby driving up the unit cost.
On top of that, it is becoming increasing unlikely it will perform as billed. Not to mention that from day 1 the F-35 concept was ill-suited for the close air support role.
The US military would be far better off cutting its losses now and starting from scratch to develop a light strike fighter for the Air Force, a close air support attack aircraft to replace the A-10, maybe an interceptor for the Navy, and scrapping the Marine Corps variant altogether. That ridiculous STOVL requirement is a large part of why this project has gone so awry.
Do I think the F-35 is a great jet? Hard to say since it's still in LRIP. But it's reported by pilots who have flown it to be more maneuverable than F-15/16/18. Not as fast as the F-22, and not as stealthy. Longer legged than the F-18 (either version).
Where it falls down is in cost, largely due to it requiring so much commonality between the three versions. If the cost stays above $150M a copy (depends on how you calculate that, and it's a hard thing to do), it's too pricey. The F-22 would have been better for A2A, and if the line had been kept open, the Raptor's cost would have ended up below that. So if LM can get the cost down closer to the $100m mark, it'll be fine. New build F-16s are over $80M, the Silent Eagle was expected to cost North of $100m, and neither would be able to handle the role of the F-35.
Im not sure the cost is such a huge deal compared to 3 concurrent programs that make cheaper planes, due to the program cost. itd probably be about the same granted that all 3 program would have been decently successful.
comparing to 1 program doesnt work if the plane fullfill 3 roles - IMO
http://zbigniewmazurak.wordpress.com/2013/06/26/dassault-raf...
http://www.wired.com/2011/06/stealth-tech-obsolete/
It is more complicated than "LOL LONG WAVE RADAR I WIN".
"The other problem that the defender must contend with is the fact that the L-band and most parts of the S-band have radar resolution cells that are too large to provide a weapons quality track. Effectively, even if a defender can detect and track an attacking stealthy fighter, that defender may not be able to guide a missile onto that target.
That being said, both the SPY-1 and the forthcoming Raytheon Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR) operate in higher frequency portions of the S-band and are able to generate weapons quality tracks. If the Chinese system is similar—and there are indications that it is—it could generate fire-control quality guidance for the HQ-9B missiles."
Stealth provides some ability to evade however the most modern systems that are getting rolled out in the next 5 years are going to able to track a F-35 and engage it without significant hardship.
Stealth at this point is really just another layer of defense, like decoys. It'll decrease the distance at which you can truly kill a F-35. However, at 200 million each, you can afford to build a large number of missiles & mobile SAMs to take out a F-35.
The radar-absorbing paint may do something (or at least it could in theory). And long-wave radars are naturally going to bigger and more inconvenient than short-wave.
I've never really thought about it, but I think he might be right!
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jindalee_Operational_Radar_Netw...
[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20071116065249/http://defence-dat...
[1] http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military/planes-u...
Like any security measure (think of IT security), there are counter-measures. The value of security is that it raises the cost of defeating you.
The original F-16 concept included a thrust to weight ratio > 1, like the F-15's, plus 20 minutes of supercruise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercruise which we've only achieved lately with the F-22). Sufficiently strict requirements with the low weight and low(ish) cost that it e.g. sacrificed night and all-weather capability.
The Air Force wasn't interested in such a bird, but they were interested in a fighter-bomber based on it, which e.g. required serious additions to the frame and cost it the super high performance.
But in an AU perhaps the original F-16 would have turned out to be a magnificent fighter.
The USAF was really interested in a "cheap" aircraft that could replace the F-4/A7 in quantity, and function in a swing role as a bomber if it wasn't required for A2A work.
"Take it with a grain of salt" basically means "take it in a very small quantity", i.e., don't buy much into it.
If you say "large grain of salt", you're saying "take more of it", which has the opposite meaning from what you intended.
Sorry. I'll crawl back into my hole now.
"If you say "large grain of salt", you're saying "take more of it", which has the opposite meaning from what you intended."
The claim here is not the salt, the salt is the skepticism. Well, that's how I understand it anyway.
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/take-with-a-grain-of-salt...
- LETS THE INTERVIEWEE SPEAK
- listens so that she's able to accurately summarize what the guy said!
Great moment -- thanks for sharing.
If I recall correctly the F-15 was partly his baby but he only got in mid-way so couldn't make it as good as he wanted it. Then the Lightweight Fighter program was run by him and generated the YF-16 and YF-17 prototypes. The YF-16 won the competition and became the F-16. Then the Navy didn't like a single engine plane (or didn't like an air force plane) and took the YF-17 and made the F-18.
So I doubt they hated the F-15 but they definitely liked the F-16 better. I'm not sure how happy they were about the F-18 given that it was a run-around their LWF process.
> The F-35, by contrast, is being designed by some 6,000 engineers led by a rotating contingent of short-tenure managers, with no fewer than 2,000 government workers providing oversight. The sprawling JSF staff, partially a product of the design’s complexity, has also added to that complexity like a bureaucratic feedback loop, as every engineer or manager scrambles to add his or her specialty widget, subsystem or specification to the plane’s already complicated blueprints … and inexperienced leaders allow it.
For those interested in a deeper look at why the F-35 is so, well, F'd, this is a great read:
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/fd-how-the-u-s-and-its-alli...
It basically comes down to stupid design considerations forced upon the program by the various branches(mainly the Marine Corps) and how easily blinded Congress was by the notion of a (supposedly cheaper) one-size-fits-all solution.
People are interchangeable, there is no institutional knowledge, and management can solve all technical issues.
If you've read the "Boyd" biography mentioned here by other commenters, you'll recognize many of Boyd's and Sprey's criticisms of the so-called "F-X" fighter procurement program (which eventually led to the F-15) in his critique of the F-35. [1]
None of the Fighter Mafia actually "designed" any of these aircraft, but Boyd, Sprey, Christie and others did play a pivotal role in changing how the Pentagon defined and proved the specifications of the fighters it was buying. The F-X was supposed to be a larger, swing-wing, multi-role behemoth, similar to the abysmal F-111, which Boyd proved to Pentagon brass to be inferior to virtually all enemy fighters, by way of his brilliant "Energy-Maneuverability" theory. In this way, Boyd and Sprey influenced the final design of the F-15, but to a much lesser extent than the designs of the F-16 or A-10. [2]
One key point Sprey brings up in several of his other interviews on the F-35 topic (which he curiously leaves out of this one) is that, regardless of the capabilities (or lack thereof) of the F-22 or F-35, neither will ever be as successful as the historically-great fighters like the P-51, F-4, F-15, or F-16, simply because they'll never be built in sufficient numbers.
For a fighter to be great, its pilots must also be great, and to do that they must train regularly and often, something which has proven impossible with the low dispatch reliability of these complex fifth-gen fighters. Sprey notes that in WWII, the U.S. P-51 fleet triumphed over the vastly superior German fleet of ME-262s, by first developing tactics that could defeat this amazing jet (i.e., shooting them down while taking off or landing), and because there were simply more P-51s available to fight.
Sprey and Boyd were right about a few things: build them light (which helps make them fast and maneuverable), build them cheap, and build lots of them.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-15_Eagle#Or...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy%E2%80%93maneuverability_...
Also small, also cheap, and the Germans built scads of them. You could really see the difference in training and experience, however, toward the end of the war, where badly trained German pilots were thoroughly outclassed by their Allied opponents.
Almost no air-to-air combat starts out within visual range and this has been the case since the 1980s when the F-16 became available.
Part of the reason the F-16 became popular is that its cheaper to buy and operate compared to the F-4 and F-15, and even the F-16 Block 5 had an avionics package that made it quite capable in combat and achieved its first Air-to-Air kill in 1980. Smaller jets like the F-5E and the SAAB Gripen don't have nearly the same combat radius on internal fuel.
The F-35 is one of the most agile jets available when loaded for combat. Most of the claims about the F-16 are in airshow configuration and not combat loaded with drop tanks.
Until the politicians require visual confirmation of the target. Which is exactly what happened in Vietnam under LBJ. At which point Sparrows were dead weight with a lot of drag.
By 2003, the USAF made extensive use of E-3 AWACS and fighters required clearance from Joint Air Operations Center before engaging a target. The E-3 would vector the fighters for an intercept so it wouldn't start visually.
We won't really know what kind of air superiority platform the F-35 is until it's had a few run-ins with other modern fighters. Stealth capabilities and superior sensors may be more than enough to make up for lack of maneuverability. Or maybe not.
IIRC, Pierre Sprey represents one side in a political battle about aircraft design, but I hope someone here knows more about it than I do.
"The goal of generalization had become so fashionable that a generation of mathematicians had become unable to relish beauty in the particular, to enjoy the challenge of solving quantitative problems, or to appreciate the value of technique" - From the preface to Concrete Mathematics; Graham, Knuth and Patashnik
The lightweight fighter program (LWF), which spawned F-16 and F/A-18, was done for daylight dogfights, but both aircraft have picked a lot of electronics during the years and are used for laser guided precision bombing (something for which you needed an A-10 in the nineties still).
Further, AFAIK, the primary US adversary back in the seventies, the Soviet Union, was much closer technologically than what they or others are now. Russia and China are catching up though.
So a "good enough" "jack of all trades" aircraft might make a lot of sense. You might just need less aircraft in total. The US Air Force and Navy have been simplifying their inventory a lot in the past years anyway. The F-14 and A-6 are retired for example, with worse aircraft (for specific missions) used instead. You can always go in a more "hot rod" direction - but what will be the price?
General Dynamics' Harry Hillaker is the real designer of the F-16. Boyd, Riccioni, Christie and Sprey were part of the LWF mafia, while General Dynamics designed the actual F-16.
GD used a lot of resources, did a very thorough analysis and spent a huge amount of time in the wind tunnel. You can see the very visual design evolution in various stories about it. (Incidentally the LWF third place competitor Boeing design looked a lot like the GD one, as did the Vought design.)
Here is one history: http://www.codeonemagazine.com/f16_article.html?item_id=131
IMHO, the fatness-inducing lift fan space could have been ditched to make the airplane perform better. A separate less commonal version could have been created for VTOL use.
I guess this makes Boyd and Sprey co-designers in that they shaped the requirements and specifications.
http://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-Changed-ebook/d...
Oh, sure, Old Man Douglas might have drawn the outline of the DC-7's tail up in the old "lofting room", or someone said "one engine" for the F-16, or "elliptical domes" for the Titan fuel and oxidizer tanks, but after that, saying someone is THE designer of a large project is just a fib.
close combat its IR missiles anyway.
This design [0] from Burt Rutan [1] is beautiful in its simplicity. While it doesn't have the mission of objectives as the F35, I'd rather have 300 Mudfighters than a single F35.
I wonder what these projects have in common...
Very few of us can say that a design mistake on our part is the difference between life and death.
"Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new features."
Pierre Sprey, btw, is an interesting character. After retiring from military projects he became a record producer specializing in highbrow jazz obscurities. An original hipster!
