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F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

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Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

#241

Post by nradov »

mschuster91 wrote: post #211
brobdingnagians wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do drones get around the issue of communications jamming? I suppose they have some way (autonomous would be one way), but it seems to me that if communications are cut off, having a pilot with human judgement to respond to changing conditions will almost always have some advantage. Although, you could get a pretty advanced autonomous system that responded to changes from a pre-programmed attack plan.

> How do drones get around the issue of communications jamming? For one, by making it harder to jam in the first place. Starlink with its extremely directional antennas is a good example - an opponent would need an equally massive fleet of satellites or high-altitude ECM planes to jam it, and the latter ones can easily be targeted by anti-radar rockets. This is why the US government has been pushing insane amounts of…

A near peer adversary will attempt to degrade Starlink (and other military satellite constellations) as their first step in any major conflict. China is making huge investments into EW, cyber, and ASAT. The US military has to plan to fight with little or no satellite support.

Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

#242

Post by ethbr1 »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #161
mrtksn wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All that might turn out to be irrelevant as the drones prove detrimental in a warfare. With the advancements in AI in recent years, it will probably get harder and harder to justify carrying a biological being and all the support systems onboard. At some point, a warplane capabilities might become irrelevant and the only important aspect would the the implications of carrying a solder onboard and making the downing o…

How do drones get around the issue of communications jamming? I suppose they have some way (autonomous would be one way), but it seems to me that if communications are cut off, having a pilot with human judgement to respond to changing conditions will almost always have some advantage. Although, you could get a pretty advanced autonomous system that responded to changes from a pre-programmed attack plan.

> How do drones get around the issue of communications jamming?

AESA derivatives as bidirectional communication devices seem like they will render jamming a lot less effective. Simply by virtue of being able to pump radar levels of power into communication.

And current trends seem to be converging on flocks of drones, of which one or two can be specialized with uplink. Or simply babysat by stealthy HALE platforms like the RQ-180.

You'll have to blanket an area with ungodly amounts of energy to fully jam point-to-point, highly directional links, especially for close range hops.

Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

#243

Post by mrtksn »

ceejayoz wrote: post #221
mrtksn wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

let the human pilot make decisions == let the machine make decisions It's not like pilots are making political decisions. They pilot and shoot predefined targets, avoid hostile actions. AI is capable of doing this. > Not in the realm of "should I shoot that thing?" sort of decisions. On the contrary, AI is very capable of making that decision. There are no philosophical dilemmas or children in the skies and even if t…

Military pilots absolutely make all sorts of decisions, like "that looks like a civilian target, maybe I have incorrect info" or "a little kid just ran into the target area" or "the controller says I just shot at friendlies". I would not currently trust an AI to handle those very well. What would an AI have done in this situation? What should it have done? "Russian pilot deliberately fired missiles at a Royal Air For…

AI can absolutely say "that looks like a civilian target, maybe I have incorrect info" or "a little kid just ran into the target area" or "the controller says I just shot at friendlies".

What makes you think that AI can't incorporate those into decision making? Pilots do these through instruments anyway.

Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

#244

Post by miguelazo »

skazazes wrote: post #122
AndyMcConachie wrote: post #96

The F-35 really is the most expensive joke in American military aviation history.

So much so that America's allies are lining up to get them!

Yeah, and that's totally legitimate interest. Has nothing to do with sleazy lobbying and attempts to curry political favor.

Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

#245

Post by mrtksn »

nradov wrote: post #234
mrtksn wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

let the human pilot make decisions == let the machine make decisions It's not like pilots are making political decisions. They pilot and shoot predefined targets, avoid hostile actions. AI is capable of doing this. > Not in the realm of "should I shoot that thing?" sort of decisions. On the contrary, AI is very capable of making that decision. There are no philosophical dilemmas or children in the skies and even if t…

Nonsense. AI can work well enough for striking certain known targets. But it is simply not capable of following complex rules of engagement or adapting to highly dynamic situations in real time. We are at least decades away from that capability in a general sense. What you see in movies is not reality. Sixth-generation tactical aircraft (the successors to the F-35) are likely to be optionally manned. They will be abl…

If you haven't notice, lately AI is pretty good at woking with information that never seen before.

Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

#246

Post by SonicScrub »

xjlin0 wrote: post #208
slavboj wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire point of the airplane is to never get into close combat. It's like asking which navy has better bayonets.

F-4 Phantom was a great fighter serving US Navy, Marine and Air Force. It equipped with missiles to kill enemies in the beyond visual range, didn't equip internal guns in the first generation because "it shouldn't get into close combat" .....

The issue with the F4 wasn't the lack of a gun alone, and focusing on that aspect 50 years after the Vietnam war clouds the current state of things. The issue was that missile technology was in it's infancy and unreliable, coupled with US fighter pilot training focusing on interception of long-range Soviet nuclear bombers. The US never really envisioned a conventional war being possible in a post-nuclear world. Note that despite this, what the US deemed "inadequate" air dominance was still a roughly 4-1 air-to-air kill-ratio in their favour during the beginning-middle of the Vietnam War.

Once pilot training changed to focus on fighters, the kill-ratio shot up to 15-1 for the last half-year or so of the war. The number of these kills made by F4s with guns was small compared to F4s with missiles (even given the unreliable state of the technology at the time), as you can see for yourself: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_aerial...

(Note that this is the case even in the later years of the war, when F4 mounted gun-pods were more common)

The narrative of the Vietnam War that gun > long-range missile wasn't even true then. And certainly isn't so now that missile technology has matured. A quick glance over to modern air campaigns is proof. Beyond visual range missiles and long-range radar systems are king. There's nothing wrong with having a back-up close-range weapon (same reason why soldiers carry knives), but the use-case is niche, and we shouldn't be designing our fighters around this combat situation. The equivalent would be arguing that soldiers should carry broadswords, and using the handful of knife engagements as evidence to why edge-weapons are superior to guns.

Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

#247

Post by dogman144 »

valec wrote: post #185
brobdingnagians wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read some analyses of the F35 vs A10 which don't favour the F35 for CAS operations much. The main thing I saw was that F35 requires more maintenance and longer runways than the A10 and is more fragile. It depends on what kind of a war that is being fought, but in a major great power war, you couldn't always guarantee having nice high quality air bases, runways, and support teams near the front. Sometimes it is p…

The F-35 has a much faster response time than the A-10--and, more importantly, survivability. In a contested environment, "suboptimal" CAS from an F-35 dropping precision munitions is much better than non at all (A-10 would get shot out of the sky by any near-peer before it could approach the theater). The A-10 also has high maintenance costs and a relatively low loiter time. For fighting terrorists in flipflops, som…

This is an… unorthodox take from the ground commander/fires perspective or conversely the orthodox take from the USAF perspective.

Hard lessons from the GWOT have firmly put the A10 as the most capable CAS platform, and it’s taught as such in all joint fires classes to forward observers and also via unit history/anecdotes fires units (“A10 saved my butt in ‘12”). A10 pilots and units also have a much better rep for CAS than F16 etc units (w/e the USAF name is?).

As in, from the ground units perspective, the unit actually needing and coordinating the CAS, everything you’ve argued is against the grain.

However, the USAF has been running the exact argument you’re using for years.

What matters more - IRL combat experience and successes with the A10 platform, or the 10 year PR campaign to get rid of it for no good reason from the combat perspective.

Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

#249

Post by areyousure »

the_sleaze9 wrote: post #190
melling wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of an absurd thing to say. However, it’s repeated all the time, and in every generation in some form. One really has nothing to do with the other. If we could educate people at a younger age so they understand this, maybe we can make more progress in creating a better society. Start with the fact that military spending has decreased as a percentage of GDP: https://www.statista.com/statistics/217581/outlays-for-d…

What an odd form of comparison, Military spending is almost entirely a function of tax, not Gross Domestic Product of a country. But taking just one aspect of that graph – overall military spending - it's true that spending has decreased since we were involved in a full scale occupation of another country, assaulting several others, then whack-a-moling the downstream consequences of those wars. It is also (in my humb…

> While spending on education was 42.5 billion in 2022.

In case anyone was curious, https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/ reports total spending of $1.76 trillion on education in fiscal year 2022. (It also reports defense spending of $1.11 trillion. The subpage https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/defense_spending includes the number $765.8 billion as part of a breakdown.)

Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

#250

Post by aftbit »

btbuildem wrote: post #70

An 80's movie dream is playing out for some rural kids, where they stumble upon a smouldering high-tech wreckage and as they explore it, men in suits pour out of black SUVs and talk to them in taciturn ways. Seriously though, these jets sound terribly overpriced for how unreliable they seem to be.

The real question IMO is whether the 6th generation fighters (Next Generation Air Dominance program in the USA) are making the right design trade offs. They are projected to be bigger, more expensive, and ordered in fewer numbers than even the F-22. Are we better off with fewer but more advanced super weapons, or with many more cheaper weapons? In the era of UA/RU war where few-thousand-dollar drones are spanking multi-million dollar EW and AA systems, this may not be the right trade off.
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