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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

#371

Post by dinfinity »

2trill2spill wrote: post #324
dinfinity wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the f35 can be built at scale Really? Can you indicate how many can be produced yearly?

It says right in the article ~200 a year. The base scenario in recent war games, the US lost 270 aircraft total, of which 206 were USAF. Japan lost 112, Taiwan's air force effectively ceased to exist. Across iterations, Air Force losses ranged from 168 to 372(mostly on the ground)in a fight with China over Taiwan. Those are substantial losses but assuming all the losses were f35(they were not) even at current non war…

> The base scenario in recent war games

January 2023. Specifically focused on an invasion of Taiwan. And the analysis report hardly mentions drones. Not saying it isn't useful info, but it is in essence not much more than an educated (but outdated) guess. Using terms like "showed that" is thus highly unwarranted.

> Those are substantial losses but assuming all the losses were f35(they were not) even at current non wartime production rates the United States could replace that in a few years time.

You make that sound as if it is not that much, even though the losses (were theorized to have) occurred within a matter of weeks. If anything, it strengthens the point that F-35 production is going to be inadequate in a longer-lasting conflict.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#372

Post by greedo »

coredog64 wrote: post #71
prism56 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 milita…

There’s credible evidence that the Shahed is itself a derivative of a late 20th century German drone designed as a loitering anti-radar munition.

Which has roots that can be traced to the V-1.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#373

Post by jandrewrogers »

fooker wrote: post #258
jandrewrogers wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quantity has been replaced by precision. In WW2 the US would send a 1,000 bombers to hit a target and still miss. That's why they needed so many. Now a single attack jet can hit multiple targets with very high probability.

Maybe you should read the article? Quantity is back in the game again thanks to drones, right now we would lose without escalating to a nuclear war.

Cheap drones are extremely limited in the kinds of targets they can reach and damage while evading air defenses. I understand this domain well.

Upgrading drones so that they have sufficient range and carry a sufficiently capable warhead and have a decent probability of surviving a modern air defense environment has been done many times by many countries. The price always comes in ~$1M/drone. It doesn't matter who builds it. Those economics get expensive fast for a weapon system you can't reuse. Much cheaper drones either have no useful range or are susceptible to even cheaper defenses; in either case they don't do any meaningful damage. That point on the price-performance curve wasn't picked at random by competent weapon designers.

Even the Ukrainian FP-5 is ~$0.5M, and it is significantly less capable than some western weapons with a similar profile.

The US has assumed drone swarm attacks would be a thing for decades and has both tested and fielded many systems purpose-built for those scenarios.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#374

Post by lesuorac »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #340
calvinmorrison wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well yes you need to keep the aerospace and engineering pipelines full if you ever need to actually go to war. So boeing and all the other chumps making gravy is part of the deal in downtime

That is asinine, what do you think happens to those institutions when incompetence is what gets rewarded. The real threat to the US military is not the lack of weapons, or that the F35 is not as good or as cheap as it could have been, it's because it is a lumbering bureaucracy full of people who couldn't get better jobs elsewhere.

> it's because it is a lumbering bureaucracy full of people who couldn't get better jobs elsewhere

So, raise the amount of money paid to the military so the most qualified candidates apply?

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#375

Post by greedo »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #132
patrickmcnamara wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which system are you talking about?

APKWS. The US took the old Vietnam-era unguided rocket pods (Hydra 70), of which they produce hundreds of thousands every year, and slapped a dirt-cheap guidance kit to the front of each rocket. Supposedly 90-95% effective. A bunch of countries are developing their own clones of the concept. A single F-16 can carry 42 missiles. They've been rapidly expanding the number of platforms they can attach these to.

Yes, APKWS is a good solution, but it really wasn't used much for C-UAS before VAMPIRE was shipped to Ukraine.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#376

Post by benoau »

lmm wrote: post #354
defrost wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In convential modern terms, sure. In WWII terms they come as a function of aircraft production capability as the stategy was to keep putting fresh young faces in trainer cockpits and advancing everybody that didn't crash after a quick run down of controls and a couple of paired instructor flights. I had a couple of aunts that were both members of the UK/AU Women's Auxiliary Air Force (1939 - 1949) and they each had r…

> I had a couple of aunts that were both members of the UK/AU Women's Auxiliary Air Force (1939 - 1949) and they each had rudimentary training for spitfires, heavy bombers, jets, etc that came down to mere hours and "see how you go". Worth noting that their mission was delivery flights with the produced aircraft (a handful of them saw combat, because if you're flying a fighter plane into a warzone your guns might as…

They're not fighter planes in Ukraine they're people with conventional weapons shooting at the drones when the planes get close!

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#377

Post by jandrewrogers »

gizmondo wrote: post #343
nine_k wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once the big valuable vessel is found, it can be reasonably tracked from orbit. The interesting thing about drones is the ability to attack from many directions at the same time, overwhelming the short-range defenses. IIRC no fewer than 5 naval drones attacked the Moskva missile carrier at once, and successfully sank it eventually. Naval drones are compact, barely visible, and, unlike torpedoes, highly maneuverable.…

> IIRC no fewer than 5 naval drones attacked the Moskva missile carrier at once, and successfully sank it eventually. That's a hallucination, Moskva was by all accounts sunk by a couple of conventional anti-ship cruise missiles.

Also, the ship appears to not have been operating any of its defensive systems at the time. It was a proverbial sitting duck.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#378

Post by monideas »

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.

There are so many companies working on this now (cheap anti-drone tech, cheap cruise missiles, cheap missile interceptors), what you're saying is kind of moot.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#379

Post by greedo »

bawolff wrote: post #72
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, etc. Except this is more propaganda than truth. In general america does not use patriots to shoot down drones except in exceptional circumstances. Not that the ecconomics of missile defense isnt a problem. It can be. But some of it has been highly exagerated.

The US just blew through a large percentage of its PAC-3/PAC-2 inventory fighting Iran. Other than Patriot, the US doesn't really have much GBAD anymore. A few Avenger systems, some Stinger MANPADs, etc. It's either Patriot or THAAD; and hopefully they're not dumb enough to be using THAAD against drones.

I'm sure they burned through quite a few AMRAAM and Sidewinders doing intercepts as well. Patriot is much more expensive than $1M (try $4M), Stinger is around 250K depending on who the customer is ($750K if you're non-US). AMRAAM is over $1M, Sidewinders $500K.

Even APKWS is $40k, and Shaheed prices are around $30k? So even that low cost option is losing.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#380

Post by cyberax »

greedo wrote: post #307
cyberax wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It remains to be seen how well F-35s actually perform in that role against an adversary with modern anti-air defense and with modern drone-based tactics. Both Russia and Ukraine learned to avoid concentrating forces, so what are you going to strike? Use an F-35 to attack a single Jeep with a mounted machine gun? F-35 has limited range and carries very limited armament, so you can't just carpet-bomb everything. At som…

F-35s have done pretty well in both Israeli and US hands against the Russian supplied SAM systems. And if these vaunted Russian IADs can't stop Ukrainian drones with a RCS the size of a barn, they stand little chance against a stealth fighter.

_All_ the classic anti-air is useless against drones, as the US also found out. It can be easily saturated, and ground-hugging drones are not a good target for missiles anyway. Ukraine is now using interceptor drones for this reason.

The issue with stealth fighters is that they have nothing to do. The enemy can launch barrages of drones from hundreds of kilometers away, outside the F-35's effective range. Or if you're moving ground forces, they'll be attacked by mobile units armed with short-range drones, also making F-35 less than useful.

That's also the reason why Russia right now is at a full stalemate. Its only semi-working strategy is to filter infantry through killzones that can be tens of kilometers in depth. Russia can easily bomb Ukrainian positions with gliding bombs or missiles like S-300. But there's just nothing to bomb, Ukrainian army is spread out.

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