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F-35 is built for the wrong war

warontherocks.com

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Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#11

Post by philipallstar »

consumer451 wrote: post #6
philipallstar wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yes, we have a load of taxpayer funded people to decide what to build.

The taxpayer funding is often the smaller part the complete lifetime pay package. > A 2014 study of U.S. Department of Defense appointees showed that 28% exited to industry. As of 2023, 80 per cent of U.S. four-star retirees are employed in defense industry.[0] There are actually entirely reasonable, rational explanations for this, but it's not a great look. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_door_(politics)

Undoubtedly so! But blame the people who get free money out of your income to be impartial and make decisions, not the people who have to earn their pay to carry out the decisions. If they wanted to prohibit that sort of thing they could.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#12

Post by JumpCrisscross »

"Just as it took the brutal reality of naval warfare in the Pacific to shift the Navy’s love from the battleship to the aircraft carrier, it may take the catastrophic failure for limitations of exquisite tactical aircraft to overwhelm the forces keeping them drinking up most of the trough.

The corrective is not to abandon the F-35 but to redefine its role. A smaller fleet should be reserved for the missions that truly require its unique capabilities — penetrating advanced air defenses, gathering intelligence in contested environments, and orchestrating distributed networks of unmanned systems. The marginal procurement dollar should shift toward platforms that are cheaper to build, easier to replace, less dependent on vulnerable forward infrastructure, and expendable in ways that manned fighters are not.

The lesson of the Iran campaign is that the F-35 performed superbly in exactly the kind of fight it was built for. The lesson for force designers is that the next war may not be that fight. The future of airpower belongs to a larger orchestra, many of its instruments unmanned, inexpensive, and replaceable. Prudence demands that the United States start building it now."

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#13

Post by Jtsummers »

Terr_ wrote: post #5
themafia wrote: post #2

It's a camel designed by committee. On paper it looks cool. In practice it was /never/ the right plane. The contractors knew and didn't care.

> designed by committee I've seen an argument--which I don't have enough expertise to advocate for--that the F35's broad but shallow appeal ("jack of all trades, master of none") has an indirect strength: A wider base of demand goes with a manufacturing and supply chain that is constantly active and can be ramped-up if needed. Speaking of military hardware in general, I can easily imagine there are cases where "best…

> A wider base of demand goes with a manufacturing and supply chain that is constantly active and can be ramped-up if needed.

Except it can't really be ramped up. It's enormously expensive to build a single F-35, let alone maintain them, and the geographic distribution of the effort only makes that worse.

And then they made it worse again by making many parts of the F-35 F-35 specific. You can't just drop in the same radio LRU from most other airframes and use it with the F-35, it has its own and its own maintenance cycles. The thing was designed to be expensive, it was not designed for manufacturing efficiency.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#14

Post by prism56 »

softwaredoug wrote: post #7

Increased defense spending actually makes the US less, not more, safe. Everyone we're going to fight is prepared for an asymmetric, cheap war. We're vulnerable in how much they can make us spend to wage that war. A million dollar patriot missile to shoot down a cheap drone, etc.

To be fair the US is making steps into this realm and it's definitely a known issue. Their Shahed derivative, laser weapons becoming more ubiquitous. I'm surprised how many drones countries are starting to manufacture. e.g the UK delivered 150k drones to Ukraine recently, based on the current state of the UK armed forces that kind of surprised me and definitely shows a change in ethos on how modern first world militaries will wage war in the future.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#15

Post by notpachet »

tpurves wrote: post #8

The insight here is, that in current warfare, quantity is the quality that matters. And with quantity, cost of replacement needs to be low, platforms expendable, cheap to maintain and resupply. It, and it's support infrastructure, need to not easily be detected and targeted by drones while on the ground. F35 is not these things. It's powerful but brittle, and like many US platforms, too much value packed into too few…

I feel like there's a brute-force analogy to be drawn with the "Bitter Lesson" that we saw in AI development.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#16

Post by jandrewrogers »

softwaredoug wrote: post #7

Increased defense spending actually makes the US less, not more, safe. Everyone we're going to fight is prepared for an asymmetric, cheap war. We're vulnerable in how much they can make us spend to wage that war. A million dollar patriot missile to shoot down a cheap drone, etc.

> A million dollar patriot missile to shoot down a cheap drone...

I guess it is a good thing then that this isn't something they actually do.

They use cheap weapons to shoot down cheap drones. Their primary anti-drone missile was developed in the 2010s and costs less than a Shahed.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#17

Post by usrnm »

tpurves wrote: post #8

The insight here is, that in current warfare, quantity is the quality that matters. And with quantity, cost of replacement needs to be low, platforms expendable, cheap to maintain and resupply. It, and it's support infrastructure, need to not easily be detected and targeted by drones while on the ground. F35 is not these things. It's powerful but brittle, and like many US platforms, too much value packed into too few…

That's not a new idea, it's the same thing Germany learned about tanks in WWII.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#18

Post by PowerElectronix »

The F-35 is the best stealth aircraft you can have in a war against china. But it alone is not going to win that war. I wouldn't say it's the wrong jet for that war just because of that.

If you put the f-35 along all the rest of the us military, the war can be won and the f-35 plays a critical role in that win.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#19

Post by zitterbewegung »

The premise that it is built for the "wrong war" is two fold. Design by committee didn't help the aircraft and made cost overruns and timelines worse but, the bigger premise or problem doesn't take to account that we still have other aircraft that fulfills other roles.

Also, the collaborative combat aircraft is being developed with the F22 and F35. Arguably though the collaborative combat aircraft is a bigger challenge than the F35 program as a whole and it is still in development whether it can be completed. We could downsize the F35 fleet or provide it in military aid but, I don't we can truly say wrong war it will still be available when a different war occurs and Aircraft have a long shelf life.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#20

Post by varjag »

Somewhat ridiculous piece. Ukraine, 4 years after, still operates a significant number of jets it entered the war with. This is despite hundreds of attempts to eliminate them on the ground with airstrikes, drones, cruise and ballistic missiles.

And naturally F-35s on that theatre would have been a game changer making mass strikes on Moscow possible. For all the dysfunctions of American military industrial complex it remains a fighter without peers (unless you count F-22) or serious AD threat.

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