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Declassified Pentagon F-35 Study Details Reliability, Security Woes

bloomberg.com

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Re: Declassified Pentagon F-35 Study Details Reliability, Security Woes

#21

Post by mrtksn »

hunglee2 wrote: post #4

Yet despite these problems, the F-35 remains the most commercially successful airframe in the world, with over 670 sold, and 2,500 on order from US-allied countries all over the world. What could explain this sales pipeline, if the F-35 was the boondoggle this article implies it to be?

> What could explain this sales pipeline, if the F-35 was the boondoggle this article implies it to be?

Easy, desire to please American politicians to fetch political support from the USA and strengthen your position as military ally. Ideally, you will be looking so scary that you wouldn’t have to actually use the plane.

Re: Declassified Pentagon F-35 Study Details Reliability, Security Woes

#22

Post by lm28469 »

mrtksn wrote: post #15

Elon Musk recently made some remarks about F-35 on Twitter: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1860574377013838033 It's exactly what I was thinking about: Having a pilot onboard is overhead and its a limiting factor for the flight envelope as you have to keep it alive. Besides, it's not invisible despite calling it that. It's visible in the visible spectrum and hearable in the human hearing range, which means that you can…

> Besides, it's not invisible despite calling it that. It's visible in the visible spectrum and hearable in the human hearing range

We didn't wait Musk to know planes weren't literally invisible or silent lmao, maybe don't take your military analysis from a man child with 0 experience in the domain.

They either fly high enough that you neither hear nor see them, or low/fast enough that you're dead long before you're even aware something is coming.

Also we already have unmanned aircrafts, a lot of them. Internet army experts will tell you f35 are useless because they're not invisible (duh) meanwhile in eastern Europe people are getting killed by 70+ years old tanks and other ww2 era surplus

Re: Declassified Pentagon F-35 Study Details Reliability, Security Woes

#23

Post by wepple »

mrtksn wrote: post #15

Elon Musk recently made some remarks about F-35 on Twitter: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1860574377013838033 It's exactly what I was thinking about: Having a pilot onboard is overhead and its a limiting factor for the flight envelope as you have to keep it alive. Besides, it's not invisible despite calling it that. It's visible in the visible spectrum and hearable in the human hearing range, which means that you can…

> remote control + AI?

We might be getting close to advanced AI for a lot of domains, but are we ready to have one making independent decisions with bombs?

I’m not a military expert but I’d much prefer having a human making decisions rather than AI for at least the next decade. I’m not sure that remote connectivity is reliable and high bandwidth enough everywhere for a drone fighter jet

Re: Declassified Pentagon F-35 Study Details Reliability, Security Woes

#24

Post by mrtksn »

lm28469 wrote: post #22
mrtksn wrote: post #15

Elon Musk recently made some remarks about F-35 on Twitter: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1860574377013838033 It's exactly what I was thinking about: Having a pilot onboard is overhead and its a limiting factor for the flight envelope as you have to keep it alive. Besides, it's not invisible despite calling it that. It's visible in the visible spectrum and hearable in the human hearing range, which means that you can…

> Besides, it's not invisible despite calling it that. It's visible in the visible spectrum and hearable in the human hearing range We didn't wait Musk to know planes weren't literally invisible or silent lmao, maybe don't take your military analysis from a man child with 0 experience in the domain. They either fly high enough that you neither hear nor see them, or low/fast enough that you're dead long before you're…

Musk can be many bad things, but he is also right in some things.

Flying high might make it invisible for human observers but the idea is that it’s not invisible in that wavelength, therefore it must be possible to create devices that can detect it.

Also, this is a brand new machine that is still not ready. Just write it off, liquidate any useful work that might have been done on it and go all in drones. What’s the point of insisting on a job not done when already looks obsolete?

Re: Declassified Pentagon F-35 Study Details Reliability, Security Woes

#25

Post by lloeki »

orwin wrote: post #10
hunglee2 wrote: post #4

Yet despite these problems, the F-35 remains the most commercially successful airframe in the world, with over 670 sold, and 2,500 on order from US-allied countries all over the world. What could explain this sales pipeline, if the F-35 was the boondoggle this article implies it to be?

For the first sales (Australia and either Norway or sweden, i dont remember), the US and lockheed Martin hid away the issues and lied on operating cost and availability. For sales to NATO: you have to buy a plane that can carry the US bomb if you don't have one yourself (despite the fact that nukes will probably never be launched from aircrafts if at all). For sales against competition, i don't have a lot of data, bu…

> despite the fact that nukes will probably never be launched from aircrafts if at all

"if at all": that's deterrence. I don't think any nuke-able aircraft small-country customer intent is to launch, but you gotta have the ability to.

"from aircrafts": when you have no submarines/silos and carting ground launch platforms around is impractical for your country, aircraft is the only remaining option to display deterrence factors.

Re: Declassified Pentagon F-35 Study Details Reliability, Security Woes

#26

Post by mrtksn »

wepple wrote: post #23
mrtksn wrote: post #15

Elon Musk recently made some remarks about F-35 on Twitter: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1860574377013838033 It's exactly what I was thinking about: Having a pilot onboard is overhead and its a limiting factor for the flight envelope as you have to keep it alive. Besides, it's not invisible despite calling it that. It's visible in the visible spectrum and hearable in the human hearing range, which means that you can…

> remote control + AI? We might be getting close to advanced AI for a lot of domains, but are we ready to have one making independent decisions with bombs? I’m not a military expert but I’d much prefer having a human making decisions rather than AI for at least the next decade. I’m not sure that remote connectivity is reliable and high bandwidth enough everywhere for a drone fighter jet

We already have drones that are making independent decisions with bombs, but that’s not the point. You can still have people in the loop, people that are not on board.

Re: Declassified Pentagon F-35 Study Details Reliability, Security Woes

#27

Post by euler_angles »

reisse wrote: post #17
mrtksn wrote: post #15

Elon Musk recently made some remarks about F-35 on Twitter: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1860574377013838033 It's exactly what I was thinking about: Having a pilot onboard is overhead and its a limiting factor for the flight envelope as you have to keep it alive. Besides, it's not invisible despite calling it that. It's visible in the visible spectrum and hearable in the human hearing range, which means that you can…

> Why just not drop any manned vehicles and go for the remote control + AI? What is the logic? When the F-35 program was started in late 1980s-early 1990s, neither reliable remote control nor AI existed (I'm not even sure supersonic-reliable remote control exists now). Now, if there exists research programs utilizing unmanned fighter jets, they're likely classified and we won't know about them for quite some time.

DARPA's Air Combat Evolution program (ACE) began with AIs fighting each other in a simulated environment in a tournament. Then the winning AI fought against a human (USAF Fighter Weapons School graduate) in that simulated environment, and won. The company that developed the winning AI, Shield AI, has gone on to deploy an AI in an actual F-16 that has flown against a human in trials.

https://www.darpa.mil/program/air-combat-evolution

Re: Declassified Pentagon F-35 Study Details Reliability, Security Woes

#28

Post by lloeki »

mrtksn wrote: post #26
wepple wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> remote control + AI? We might be getting close to advanced AI for a lot of domains, but are we ready to have one making independent decisions with bombs? I’m not a military expert but I’d much prefer having a human making decisions rather than AI for at least the next decade. I’m not sure that remote connectivity is reliable and high bandwidth enough everywhere for a drone fighter jet

We already have drones that are making independent decisions with bombs, but that’s not the point. You can still have people in the loop, people that are not on board.

Arguably even before drones, missiles have some form of "AI" to autonomously make calls, e.g Tomahawk TERCOM and DSMAC (arguably navigation, but hey, for a missile navigation ends in controlled descent into terrain)

Re: Declassified Pentagon F-35 Study Details Reliability, Security Woes

#29

Post by DocTomoe »

hunglee2 wrote: post #4

Yet despite these problems, the F-35 remains the most commercially successful airframe in the world, with over 670 sold, and 2,500 on order from US-allied countries all over the world. What could explain this sales pipeline, if the F-35 was the boondoggle this article implies it to be?

Is it? The 737 has been sold 12000 times, with thousands of orders in the pipeline. The A320 is not far behind, but only got introduced twenty years later

Even if you just consider military airframes, the MiG-21 has been built 11000 times, and is/was used by more than 50 operators world-wide, all of which have paid for the privilege.

Then there's the C-130, with 2500 units produced and operated by 70 countries.

The first American Fighter jet would be the F-4 Phantom II, with 5000 units built, and used extensively abroad.

The F-16 has 4600 units built up to now and is used by more than 25 countries.

(I'm ignoring the P-51 with its 15000 units here because they were mostly used by the US and rarely sold abroad).

tl;dr: The F-35 is not the most commercially successful airframe in the world, in fact, it does not even come close.

Re: Declassified Pentagon F-35 Study Details Reliability, Security Woes

#30

Post by oefrha »

mrtksn wrote: post #15

Elon Musk recently made some remarks about F-35 on Twitter: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1860574377013838033 It's exactly what I was thinking about: Having a pilot onboard is overhead and its a limiting factor for the flight envelope as you have to keep it alive. Besides, it's not invisible despite calling it that. It's visible in the visible spectrum and hearable in the human hearing range, which means that you can…

> it's not invisible despite calling it that. It's visible in the visible spectrum and hearable in the human hearing range, which means that you can build detection and tracking systems in those wavelengths instead of pretending that its invisible because its hard to detect at radar wavelengths.

That’s not a gotcha you seem to believe it is, it’s like the first thing you learn about stealth technology and has been apparent to anyone following military news to any extent in the past forty plus years. That you somehow think it’s something that went unnoticed and the thousands of people working on this every day has been “pretending” after reading some Twitter posts is absurd and funny.

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