Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

F-35 is built for the wrong war

warontherocks.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 719 posts

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#191

Post by nerdsniper »

foota wrote: post #151
phainopepla2 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Satellites can definitely do things, but they're not magical and people can track where they're looking and just... sail in a different direction I know nothing about this really, so forgive my ignorance. Assuming a carrier is found and tracked by a satellite in the ocean, how could it possibly escape the satellite's detection before being targeted by a drone or some other type of munition? If the ship starts saili…

I don't believe parent is right, but satelites don't stay in one place unless they're on the equator, because otherwise they have to be moving. This means that you need many satelites to maintain coverage of a single spot. I don't know how many military satelites China has, but I would have assumed it would be sufficient to cover the pacific sufficiently to find an aircraft carrier. (the obvious caveat here being clo…

The JWST has a 6.5 meter mirror. The largest (known) spy satellites have a mirror of ~3m diameter. At GEO (geostationary orbit) that would provide an imaging resolution of about 7 meters. An aircraft carrier is about 337x76 meters. So from geostationary altitudes, a satellite similar to a KH-11 would see an American aircraft carrier as a blob of about 48 "pixels". This is probably enough signal to track all aircraft carriers around the globe in real time. It would have a field of view roughly the size of Houston (50x50 miles) and would have enough electricity from solar panels to power reaction wheels to stay pointed at carrier groups indefinitely. (~15-year lifespan would be limited by xenon supply for ion thrusters that keeps the satellite in GEO orbit)

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#192

Post by peterfirefly »

wredcoll wrote: post #133
expedition32 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I don't know if you've looked recently, but the pacific is, likev pretty big. Maybe even bigger than that. The primary problem with killing carriers is, has been, and will be, finding the things.[1] Drone strikes on oil refineries work because, with few exceptions, the refineries rarely move. You can literally program a drone to go x miles in a specific direction and then drop a bomb. It's also considerably harder to…

If a network of hydrophones can track submarines, why can't they also track carriers?

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#193

Post by magicalhippo »

aftbit wrote: post #79
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 think the insight is that you need a high-low mix. Some threats call for top of the line capabilities (like early days of the Iran conflict with stand-off munitions and top-spec interceptors being used against Shahed drones and cheap cruise missiles). Some threats can be more economically serviced by a less capable, cheaper, and more available system.

I mean the armed forces already know this well. They have a bunch of units of regular soldiers, and then they have a few special forces units.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#195

Post by celsoazevedo »

platinumrad wrote: post #29
nalekberov wrote: post #23

Is there a “right” war?

Of course HN would downvote this.

I didn't down/up voted anything, but the title/article/thread is about piece of equipment not being a good fit for a war that happens in 2026, not if war is good/bad or right/wrong.

It's like saying that war is bad in a discussion about developing biplanes before WW2. Yes, war is bad, but that's what people are talking about.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#196

Post by von_lohengramm »

freediddy wrote: post #68
XorNot wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could also just write "magic" and say we should invest in wizards. No DJI sized drone using any available or near future technology is going to have a range of more then whatever 20 to 30 minutes of well-below subsonic flight time can get you.

You could drop them from B2 bombers and they could fall to the ground en masse at hundreds of miles an hour and then the propellers could open up as they get closer to the ground. Or you could launch them in massive containers like in Infinity War and these containers filled with thousands of them would land on the ground and open up and release the drones. You're just not imaginative enough to solve the problem you…

> like in Infinity War

Referencing Marvel movies in one's description of proposed military hardware is not only immediately discrediting but also a good sign that self-reflection is in order.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#198

Post by scottyah »

jjk166 wrote: post #158

> 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. The F-35 is a masterpiece. But a force designed around a masterpiece is not designed for long, protracted wars, and U.S. adversaries know this. The problem is that the F-35 was intended to be the low co…

The F-35 is a massive success. It is a common design that brought together what would have been three to five different planes into one. Costs doubling is further proof of how amazing it is- inflation has basically outpaced that. Cost per flight hour has more to do with data analytics and the Socialism within the DoW (it's a jobs program) than actual need. A lot of delays were quasi-on purpose. It has crazy supply chain logistics, and has greatly strengthened ties with our allies, and helped boost their engineering and manufacturing capabilities.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#199

Post by loglog »

gherkinnn wrote: post #50
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…

The ideas that I as a civilian was sold over the past decades don't appear to hold up any longer. As someone a while back put it, Russia lost several Bundeswehrs worth of equipment and keeps on grinding. Neither side is able to mass large forces, in a large part due to drones. And Iran can punish the US despite being comically outgunned. Modern equivalents of Sherman and T-34 tanks over burdensome Tigers and a popula…

A Bundeswehr worth of equipment is so little nowadays that Bundeswehr itself lost several Bundeswehrs worth of equipment while being at peace for the last few decades.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#200

Post by fsckboy »

pharos92 wrote: post #109

America hasn’t faced a peer-level, modern military since the Korean War. For seventy years, it has specialized in "wars of choice" against overmatched opponents, mistaking uncontested airspace for actual invincibility. U.S. weapons supremacy is increasingly exposed as a marketing facade. Despite a $1T annual budget, the industrial base is so brittle that strategic missile stocks were nearly depleted within a month of…

> - Invasion of Grenada (Grenadian Military) > - Rating: Poor > - Note: A very small force with limited heavy weaponry and minimal organizational depth.

> - Gulf War (Iraq) > - Rating: Competent (on paper) / Incompetent (in execution) > - Note: Iraq held the world's fourth-largest army at the time with modern Soviet equipment, but failed significantly in command, control, and air superiority.

> - Iraq War (Ba'athist Iraq) > - Rating: Poor > - Note: By 2003, the military was severely degraded by a decade of sanctions and previous losses; it collapsed within weeks of the conventional invasion.

the lesson of those wars to the US is, like sports teams, we need to deploy our forces in kinetic actions regularly or we lose our edge, lose touch with the battlefield and capabilities of opponents.

peace is better than war, of course, but you need to look at the progress of history as a stochastic process, and if you skip all the little wars because you have a choice, you will be ill-prepared for the big wars when they are thrust upon you. maybe call the little conflicts "friendlies", we need to compete in the friendlies to be ready for the unfriendlies.

Post reply on HN