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The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

forbes.com

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Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#151

Post by ancientworldnow »

antattack wrote: post #88
digi59404 wrote: post #7

“The F-35 has failed” is a strong statement that depends on what your definition of success is. Did it fail because it couldn’t replace the F-16? Did it fail because it’s expensive and bloated? Do those things even matter? I’m not defending the F-35 but anyone deeply and intimately familiar with the platform knows and understands that it is a Ferrari. You don’t bring your Acura TSX to a Formula 1 race track to win a…

It's a fail because we are moving into unmanned fighting vehicles. Something that F-35 program has failed to foresee. Basically F-35 is the fighter of tomorrow fighting threats of yesterday.

But that's not what this article says. They're claiming the air force requesting a new manned fighter is evidence it failed.

Meanwhile the F-35 is explicitly designed to control swarms of unmanned drones.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#152

Post by missedthecue »

thanatosmin wrote: post #96
missedthecue wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The total costs to keep all F-35s in the air until 2070 (likely after you and I are dead and in the ground), would not even cover 6 months of Medicare for all or UBI. Not sure how you can draw such an equivalence.

Just the acquisition costs would cover the entire NIH budget for a decade, though.

That wasn't the comparison being made

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#153

Post by solarhoma »

misiti3780 wrote: post #86

The saddest thing about all of this IMO is they have been working on this for 14 years, and how much money was spent/wasted? Now, read about Skunkworks - they were able to build the SR71 (without supercomputers) in less than half that time and for a fraction of the cost. This isn't just planes, this seems to be everything nowadays. Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chan…

What’s going on with all the Reddit level comments below your post?

I think you bring up great points. This could be a case of low hanging fruit being picked. We are at the point where everything being added is just bells and whistles since the foundation has already been built.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#154

Post by knolax »

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #5

I wonder if that also means that they are going to cut funding to the astroturfers who show up in every thread in every forum on every post singing the praises of the F-35 now.

This has got to be my favorite astroturfing conspiracy. Imagine the US government paying people to convince the oh so important programmers at HackerNews that their jet fighter is effective.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#155

Post by hindsightbias »

madhadron wrote: post #40
fallingfrog wrote: post #34

Interestingly enough Wikipedia says that the request for proposals for the F16 happened in January 1972 and the first completed fighter was accepted in January 1979. That’s 7 years, without the use of computers.

The F-16 is as very interesting case and it's worth reading about it. It was intentionally built to be a single role aircraft and the people who wanted an effective airplane in that role effectively bypassed most of the politics that would have diluted it. So, yes, the F-16 is one of the great success stories of fighter plane development.

I'll have to disagree there. It's regarded as successful because it was all that was available. Pierre Sprey, John Boyd and Harry Hillaker envisioned a light weight, day only, radarless aircraft with no bomb hard points.

Yet the single-role F-16 was morphed into a bomb truck and was considered successful by block 70 or whatever in the late eighties. Hillaker said "if I had realized at the time that the airplane would have been used as a multimission, primarily an air-to-surface airplane as it is used now, I would have designed it differently".

So as a square in a round hole, it was made to work but it wasn't brilliant foresight or (early) development.

http://www.codeonemagazine.com/article.html?item_id=37

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#157

Post by grecy »

inglor_cz wrote: post #97
misiti3780 wrote: post #86

The saddest thing about all of this IMO is they have been working on this for 14 years, and how much money was spent/wasted? Now, read about Skunkworks - they were able to build the SR71 (without supercomputers) in less than half that time and for a fraction of the cost. This isn't just planes, this seems to be everything nowadays. Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chan…

SpaceX is an interesting exception. They innovate really fast, their pace resembles that of the positive examples you mention.

Agree 100% Literally all the "experts" said it was impossible to land the booster, and now it's almost routine.

Nobody else in the industry can achieve what SpaceX have done successfully 40 times.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#158

Post by glaucon »

cwhiz wrote: post #89
rayhendricks wrote: post #72

It did not fail at providing money to the military-industrial-congressional complex. But of course we need more fighter jets instead of Medicare for all and UBI. China is not going to send fighters over to Bomb the us mainland, this thing is totally unnecessary.

You could take the entire defense budget, and the defense budget from every other country in the world, and you would be less than 50% of the funding you would need for a single year of Medicare for all. The US spends about $3.6 trillion per year on health care. I have no idea what UBI might cost, but I know we don’t have the tax revenues to get even close. Maybe the money printer can go brrrr a little bit faster.

Not a USAian but from distant observation I wonder what proporation of the total spend would disappear if you had "socialised medicine". In an ideal world this would be counter-intuitive, because competition usually increases efficiency, but as far as I can tell the provision of medical care in the US suffers from the same legalised near monoplies that many other parts of the US economy do.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#159

Post by matthewmacleod »

misiti3780 wrote: post #86

The saddest thing about all of this IMO is they have been working on this for 14 years, and how much money was spent/wasted? Now, read about Skunkworks - they were able to build the SR71 (without supercomputers) in less than half that time and for a fraction of the cost. This isn't just planes, this seems to be everything nowadays. Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chan…

Nah, we build cool shit all the time. We just rolled out a whole new vaccine technology across the world in under a year. You never really wanted a flying car, and AI-driven tech is everywhere but you just don't call it AI any more.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#160

Post by andys627 »

mohaine wrote: post #148
rayhendricks wrote: post #72

It did not fail at providing money to the military-industrial-congressional complex. But of course we need more fighter jets instead of Medicare for all and UBI. China is not going to send fighters over to Bomb the us mainland, this thing is totally unnecessary.

How are you sure someone isn't `going to send fighters over to Bomb the us mainland`? I'm pretty sure no one is going to do that and yes we way overspend on the MIC but really sending militaries over to other countries was the status quo for almost as long as countries have existed. There is no real reason to expect that will not happen again just because we are going on 80 years since anyone made a serious effort to…

It's unlikely enough that we should spend this money on Medicare for All, climate change, etc. We already have a gillion fighter jets too...
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