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F-35 is built for the wrong war

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Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#111

Post by dralley »

Jtsummers wrote: post #13
Terr_ wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Except it can't really be ramped up. It's enormously expensive to build a single F-35

This is completely wrong, though. It's cheaper to build an F-35 than it is to build a Eurofighter, Rafale or Gripen, which are significantly older and less capable platforms. And not even "a little" cheaper - quite a bit cheaper. Economies of scale are real

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#112

Post by expedition32 »

varjag wrote: post #20

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…

The US not going full in on drones reminds me of the British ridiculing submarines.

The Chinese are going to spam literally MILLIONS of drones all over the Pacific...

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#113

Post by _kulang »

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #110

> Think of a violin made by a master craftsman: beautiful, precise, capable of extraordinary performance, but impossible to produce quickly or cheaply. It takes time, rare expertise, and materials that cannot be sourced at scale. You would not equip an entire orchestra with instruments like that. Kinda lost me at the first sentence with this metaphor; you can and do equip an orchestra with instruments of similar cali…

I think they mean that everyone in the orchestra does not get a Stradivarius

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#114

Post by morkalork »

cyberax wrote: post #98
varjag wrote: post #20

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…

Neither Ukraine nor Russia are using manned aircraft in any significant ways. They are at most used to lob gliding bombs from far behind the front lines. > And naturally F-35s on that theatre would have been a game changer making mass strikes on Moscow possible. And then what? Kyiv has been under relentless strikes from drones and missiles for 5 years. And Moscow was hit by Ukrainian drones several times. You'll need…

It's like watching salami slicing happen in real time. It also forces a dilemma on Russia. Every move of GBAD to Moscow to defend against drone leaves an airfield uncovered. Move some to airfields and it leaves a refinery open. And on and on.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#115

Post by marcosdumay »

XorNot wrote: post #26
usrnm wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I mean not really? People focus on quantity but the German late war tank designs just sucked .

When people say things like the GP, they are talking about German early war tanks, not the late ones.

The problem is that the early WWII arms race was so fast that I don't know how anybody can say with confidence that Germany lost to worse tanks than theirs. By the time the allies got any volume into battle, they also got better designs than their earlier ones.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#116

Post by cineticdaffodil »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #96
varjag wrote: post #20

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…

No one was going to launch mass strikes on Moscow. Russian nuclear doctrine would have treated that as an existential threat. The psychology of Ukraine's drone campaign as a response to Russia's original drone launches is very interesting. It's a classic boiling frog move. Drones are seen as an improvised amateur threat. Unlike a bombing campaign, which is seen as "proper war", drones are an annoyance. They're fragil…

I dont buy that anymore. We had that "escalation" yell at every stage, every new tech. Tanks, jets, everytime ukraine got help, the "moscow puppets" yelled about nuclear war and escalation. I m of the opinion we could have stopped 4 years of butchery if we had supported Ukraine decisevly from the start. The words of the peaceniks just dont hold value anymore. They lack predictive power so significantly those utterances seem delusional at time. Quite frankly if sb marches into a peaceful neighbor country, they dont get to call for the referee the moment they kick the shit out of them.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#117

Post by maratc »

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #110

> Think of a violin made by a master craftsman: beautiful, precise, capable of extraordinary performance, but impossible to produce quickly or cheaply. It takes time, rare expertise, and materials that cannot be sourced at scale. You would not equip an entire orchestra with instruments like that. Kinda lost me at the first sentence with this metaphor; you can and do equip an orchestra with instruments of similar cali…

> the plurality of instruments in most orchestras is violins.

That only has to do with physics of sound intensity: to create a sound that is perceived as "twice as loud" as "one violin" you'd need ... ten violins.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#118

Post by dinfinity »

bawolff wrote: post #66

In the intro: > Meanwhile, modern conflict, from Ukraine’s drone war to naval engagements in the Red Sea to Iran’s own mass missile and drone salvos, increasingly favors systems that can be produced at scale and replaced when lost. In the conclusion: > 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…

> I have no idea but the article didn't really make any convincing arguments about it.

It did.

It pointed out that the bases from which the F-35s would have to operate in a war with China would be very vulnerable:

"The concentration of high-value equipment and personnel at each operating location makes the F-35’s basing problem qualitatively different from that of simpler aircraft. The loss is not just one jet but the capacity to generate sorties from that site."

It pointed out that you can't produce F-35s at scale, which fucks you in the long run:

"At over eighty million dollars per airframe, with Lockheed Martin delivering fewer than two hundred aircraft per year across all variants and all customers worldwide, there is no surge capacity waiting to be activated and no precedent for accelerating a program of this complexity on wartime timelines. When one side can produce weapons by the hundreds and thousands — missiles, loitering munitions, and one-way attack drones — while the other relies on small numbers of exquisite platforms, the advantage shifts toward the side with scale."

The key message of the article is simply this (which should not be "weird" to anyone):

"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."

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#119

Post by rstupek »

hurubaw wrote: post #97
XorNot wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The F-35 is currently about the same price to procure as Gripen, a 4th generation non-stealthy fighter. Anyone making claims about cost has a lot of work to do because the F-35 program is actually extremely cheap per unit now for what it is.

Seems like the life cycle costs for F35:s are about double compared to that of a Gripen E/F, with straight up procurement cost about a third more. https://ekonomickydenik.cz/app/uploads/2023/09/20230905-awn-... The F35 is very, very impressive, just maybe not very suitable for a long war of attrition.

The current production rate of F35s is actually higher than you might thing (>150 a year) and there is talk of adding another production line due to order backlogs.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#120

Post by sobellian »

varjag wrote: post #20

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…

The thing about the Russo-Ukrainian war is that it is a failure for both sides. The primary lesson from this war is, how do we avoid ending up like those poor guys? If the US Army fights a war with anyone, let alone China, on the doctrine that it should set up a static attritional front line with drone warfare, the joint chiefs should all be fired.
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