Does anybody in the industry know why there was a push to move away from specific role planes that excel in one area to ones that can do any area decently? I know in theory that there would be savings having one platform, but making one jet modular for 3 different roles is seeming to be more difficult than just designing 3 different jets. It can't beat the EuroFighter in a dog fight and can't match the stealth bomber for ordinance carried (actually a guess...please correct me if wrong) and can't match the A-10 for ground support. It just seems like a massive mistake that is now too big to fail.
US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets
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Re: US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets
#22I haven't been paying any specific attention to F-35 news, but I can only ever recall reading negative press. I know this particular project has been extra troubled, but is that the norm for new military vessels/vehicles?
It's the norm for any new generation fighter, but the F-35 is easily the most complex platform ever developed.
Debugging the F-22 took over a decade, and there's still intermittent problems. That was a platform started in 1981 and tested in 1997.
The F-35 by virtue of having reinvented everything from the helmet to the engine is in for a lot more trouble. It started in 1992 and had a first flight in 2006, ten years after the F-22's first.
If the F-22 is any benchmark the F-35 has another decade of trouble, possibly more.
Re: US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the US were to permanently lose a big chunk of its airpower, Taiwan would have to rejoin China soon after.
Considering the US won't formally recognize Taiwan, they are, according to the US government, already part of China so I guess we apparently don't need that 'big chunk' of our airpower.
If the US loses Taiwan as a potential staging area, geopolitics all around the South China Sea would change significantly. Basically, every country adjacent to the South China Sea would lose a big chunk of their autonomy.
Re: US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets
#24I haven't been paying any specific attention to F-35 news, but I can only ever recall reading negative press. I know this particular project has been extra troubled, but is that the norm for new military vessels/vehicles?
There's a film called The Pentagon Wars that seems to describe the exact same issues in regards to the Bradley fighting vehicle, so while I can't say if it's the norm, it certainly isn't unique.
Re: US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets
#25sensationalist headlines at best. grounding is temporary for 24-48 hours due to crash in sc
Pretty standard response -- inspect everything to make sure there aren't any more of the faulty components (which evidently they've identified, which is a bit surprising in terms of speed), and then let them fly again. Happens all the time.
Re: US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets
#26Over a trillion dollars over 28 years. There are about 250 million U.S. taxpayers. That's $150 out of the pocket of every single taxpayer, every year, just to cover the cost of this one monumentally embarrassing failure. If you're a U.S. citizen born after 1974, you've been setting fire to this money annually for your entire adult life. No value has been provided other than as a government subsidy to military contractors, and if the whole point is just to transfer wealth to military contractors then we might as well just call it a subsidy and have them sit on their hands rather than continually embarrass us with their empirical incompetence. It's hard not to seethe with rage at the thought of all the better things that this money could have been spent on. I look forward to wasting my tax dollars on this boondoggle for the rest of my life.
Re: US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets
#27I haven't been paying any specific attention to F-35 news, but I can only ever recall reading negative press. I know this particular project has been extra troubled, but is that the norm for new military vessels/vehicles?
It's very much the norm. The JSF is the safest program that's ever been fielded -- the Osprey had multiple crashes and fatalities at this stage of its development. Government procurement needs an overhaul, and this program has been badly over budget and time, but it is delivering a successful product.
> It's very much the norm. The JSF is the safest program that's ever been fielded -- the Osprey had multiple crashes and fatalities at this stage of its development.
Is that per flight hour or some other metric? Care to provide a link?
Re: US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets
#28Over a trillion dollars over 28 years. There are about 250 million U.S. taxpayers. That's $150 out of the pocket of every single taxpayer, every year, just to cover the cost of this one monumentally embarrassing failure. If you're a U.S. citizen born after 1974, you've been setting fire to this money annually for your entire adult life. No value has been provided other than as a government subsidy to military contrac…
It’s even worse, since there is also the opportunity cost of what could have been done with all the time & materials. A purely direct wealth transfer of the net profit would at least save that all, which could have gone into something else.
And possibly also environmental costs.
Re: US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? Air superiority is important for power projection. Edit: So I'm getting a comments here that are much lower-quality than I expect from this place. Geopolitics is not like interpersonal relationships. There is nobody governing governments. It's a free-for-all, literally the state of nature. In societies it seems like "Might makes right" is a dated concept, but you have to remember that's within the frame of a gov…
Do you really think that someone would attack the USA if they hadn't air superiority ?
Power-projection is about using our resources to most effectively influence others. Its not about defense, but about offense.
IIRC, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were supported by two Super-Carrier strike-groups stationed in the Indian ocean. Super-carriers, by themselves, can take on multiple foreign army bases.
Super-carriers however, are very weak defensively. If any war were to seriously start vs the US, the super-carriers would almost instantly fall to a series of cruise missiles (aka: suicide drones from the 1970s). I mean, we've got some anti-missile protection ships around them, but its cheaper to build 2000 cruise missiles than 1 super-carrier + its fleet of aircraft.
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Anyway, the point of power-projection is that these bases are mobile. As we finish up our job in Afghanistan / Iraq, we can move these super-carriers elsewhere for support. Puerto Rico was serviced by a super-carrier Abraham Lincoln for instance (hospitals on board, + Helicopters delivered supplies), while the Super-Carrier Ronald Regan helped Japan clean-up the Fukashima Nuclear disaster.
Power-projection is more than just killing people. Its about building mobile bases around the world which can help people during disasters.
In fact, I'd argue that these super-carriers primarily deal with diplomatic details and are near useless in a conventional war.
Anyway, the F35 air superiority is an important piece of a super-carrier. Winning any dogfight by destroying approaching aircraft before they're even on the horizon is an important piece of the puzzle... keeping the Super-carriers well defended.
Furthermore, the F35's stealth capabilities project power many miles away. Remember that an F35 looks like a baseball to radar installations, its stealth capabilities are incredibly advanced, and only a few nations can even detect the thing. So the radius that these aircraft project beyond the mobile Super-Carrier Strike Force is huge, and a huge benefit to the USA.
Obviously, no sane person wants to actually use these weapons to kill people. But they can be used to get an edge on diplomacy. In the worst case, if we are forced to use military might to solve a problem, the F35 will be useful.
Re: US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets
#30Over a trillion dollars over 28 years. There are about 250 million U.S. taxpayers. That's $150 out of the pocket of every single taxpayer, every year, just to cover the cost of this one monumentally embarrassing failure. If you're a U.S. citizen born after 1974, you've been setting fire to this money annually for your entire adult life. No value has been provided other than as a government subsidy to military contrac…
I mean it's not like the money just went into a hole. These things were built by U.S. factories. Not the best use of taxpayer money by any means, and we are right to be angry, I just want to point that out.