Is it better for the prospect of peace if the U.S. and its adversaries all have large fleets of cheap warplanes or small fleets of expensive ones? I would argue that the F-35 is not only very expensive for the U.S., but has actually increased the cost of fielding fighter jets (as well as air defense systems) for the entire world. And therefore it has made it more expensive to fight a war for every country. Now ask yourself would you rather live in a world where the cost of wars is lower or higher?
The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
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Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
#272“The F-35 has failed” is a strong statement that depends on what your definition of success is. Did it fail because it couldn’t replace the F-16? Did it fail because it’s expensive and bloated? Do those things even matter? I’m not defending the F-35 but anyone deeply and intimately familiar with the platform knows and understands that it is a Ferrari. You don’t bring your Acura TSX to a Formula 1 race track to win a…
Trickle down, whether it's in the economy or here, is bullshit. Spending a trillion dollars on a program may lead to some good coming out of it, but it's about as disingenuous as saying that spending $3000 on a shitty computer that crashes all the time is OK because the cat got a box out of the deal. Yes, it's technically true, but completely unrelated.
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Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
You need to command them from close by, because anything else will be jammed. It needs to be an integrated concept with manned fighters, AEW&C, strike, etc.
Like the European FCAS.
Yes but FCAS will take forever, repeating the mistakes of JSF by coupling everything in a giant program. The Chinese will have it by the end of the decade.
Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
#274The article doesn't substantiate the headline. It's like saying that the navy admits that battleships have failed because of the development of LCS.
Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
#275What a complete load of BS. The program was expensive, but as soon as someone tells you that $100m for brand new fighter is expensive, you know that they're either lying or don't know what they're talking about.
Edit: None of you, including me, have enough understanding of this topic to even begin to discuss it in a serious manner. Have you ever heard some technically illiterate family members debate Apple vs Microsoft vs Dell computers? That's what you all sound like right now.
Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
#276The saddest thing about all of this IMO is they have been working on this for 14 years, and how much money was spent/wasted? Now, read about Skunkworks - they were able to build the SR71 (without supercomputers) in less than half that time and for a fraction of the cost. This isn't just planes, this seems to be everything nowadays. Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chan…
You misunderstand the purpose the F35- it is a jobs and pork program first and foremost, like SLS. It has the side benefit of keeping people trained to build this sort of thing, so SpaceX can hire them. We can build cool shit, but our government and most companies don't optimize for that.
it was money wasted that could have been spent on a lot of other more useful things.
Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Experts from EASA didn't say it was impossible, but rather not economicaly feasible. And with SpaceX not publishing any financials we have no way to tell which side is right.
Are you really suggesting that throwing away a booster worth many tens of millions of dollars is more economically feasible than reusing it? Elon makes it pretty clear in this tweet it's very financially sound to bring back a booster "Payload reduction due to reusability of booster & fairing is https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1295883862380294144?lang...
There were mutiple reason, citing from top of my head as I don't find he old paper anymore. Reasons were:
- Reliability and insurance costs - limited number of launches - refurbishment costs of boosters ompared to new ones - heavier and more expensive boosters to make them reusable
This paper was way before SpaceX tried that. And whther or not reusable boosters are really a financial success is impossible to tell without published financials from SpaceX. The paper alsosaid, that reusable boosters become interessting with a high number of commercial launches, something they didn't see to happen. And that part alone makes Starlink so interessting, because it is basically SpaceX increasing its own number of launches.
Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could take the entire defense budget, and the defense budget from every other country in the world, and you would be less than 50% of the funding you would need for a single year of Medicare for all. The US spends about $3.6 trillion per year on health care. I have no idea what UBI might cost, but I know we don’t have the tax revenues to get even close. Maybe the money printer can go brrrr a little bit faster.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... "Taking into account both the costs of coverage expansion and the savings that would be achieved through the Medicare for All Act, we calculate that a single-payer, universal health-care system is likely to lead to a 13% savings in national health-care expenditure, equivalent to more than US$450 billion annually (based on the value of the US$ in 2017). T…
The Lancet study is very flawed on several economic fronts, the biggest being that it assume the government could tax / collect 100% of spending that Americans do voluntarily today in the private system to devote it to a government run plan. That is completely improbable and unrealistic expectation.
it also assumes government run systems will be as or better efficient than private system, we have 100's of years of history (including this very story) the proves that to be a fallacy
Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
#279F-35 is not expensive if you consider the alternatives: Brazil bought 36 JAS-39E for $5.8 billion. [1] Taiwan ordered 66 F-16V for $8.1 billion. [2] Korea is going to get 20 F-35A for $3.3 billion. [3] [1] https://www.flightglobal.com/saab-brazil-finalise-gripen-ng-... [2] https://nationalinterest.org/feature/taiwans-f-16v-fighter-j... [3] https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2019/10/10/s...
Militarism is a colossal waste of taxpayer money.
Well, that's not really what's being discussed here.
Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
#280This is just another sign that the US defense establishment has opened its eyes to the reality that the US could lose a war of attrition against a major power. We have focused too much on high tech weaponry, and we're now vulnerable to being overwhelmed by large numbers of low tech enemies. It doesn't matter if your fighters have a kill ratio of 10:1 if your enemy can replace those 10 fighters faster than each one of…
There are numerous problems with such logic:
Just because you can replace those 10 fighters faster doesn't mean you can replace the pilots with equivalently good ones as quickly.
Great power wars in the modern era will have some of the most decisive action happen far sooner than you can get into production capacity battles. At which point one side will lob several hypersonic missiles into the shipyards, factories, and fabs of their opponents and the ability to replace lost platforms will have been neutralized.