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

391–400 of 719 posts

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#391

Post by carefree-bob »

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…

Wargames for things that will never happen is not a good reason to build more planes now, in the real world.

There are over 1300 F35s in service, 500 in the US and the rest with various allies. It is the most successful weapons system in the last century.

And you want to build more of them? Because of a wargame?

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#392

Post by amluto »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #283
amluto wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to see the government (at all levels) have more in house capabilities and less absurd degrees of outsourcing. I’m currently watching an 8-figure park remodeling project happening near home. Instead of hiring one or two competent construction managers for a few hundred thousand dollars, the city seems to be spending several million dollars for outside management to oversee this one project. (Never mind ho…

Two different issues... On one hand, government should not compete with private enterprise because it has many unfair advantages. Imagine paying taxes to subsidize your competition, who is also exempt from regulations that apply to you. That is the kind of corruption that comes from government-run businesses. As for this one: >I’m currently watching an 8-figure park remodeling project happening near home. Instead of…

> On one hand, government should not compete with private enterprise because it has many unfair advantages. Imagine paying taxes to subsidize your competition, who is also exempt from regulations that apply to you.

Are there any real examples of a government entity in the US competing with a private enterprise in which it genuinely would have been better for the government entity not to compete? I’m thinking of various public utility projects in CA (these are mostly great and more cities should do it), roads (I’ve never heard of a private road operating complaining about a public road), military (contractors complain when the military fixes their own gear, and this is asinine), the military doing some of its own research as you can read about in books like Ignition.

> there is an opportunity for corruption

It could just be incompetence. I read the construction contract. If I were a contractor, I would not have agreed to the fixed price and the steep late completion penalties without charging two arms and a leg and quoting a very long timeframe.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#393

Post by carefree-bob »

angry_octet wrote: post #280
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?

Yeah, you're not producing 5000 a year. But it's a bit irrelevant because we couldn't produce enough pilots either -- the training pyramid means you can only graduate so many new pilots each year, capped by the number of instructors at each level. There is a similar problem with drone pilots -- it took Ukraine and Russia years to scale up and get to the current level of skill. However, training drone controllers is c…

Toward the end of WW2, even though the US and UK were turning German cities into rubble, the manufacture of german planes was still so great that empty planes sat around in warehouses because they could not find pilots to fly them.

That is why autonomous drones are very promising, because for manned flight, you will run out of pilots long, long, long, before you run out of planes. I don't think it's ever happened, that a nation with a large air force ran out of planes before running out of pilots.

So complaining about manufacturing capacity of planes is a bit goofy. I'd worry about surge capacity of things that are not gated by human operators. And only in the context of a regional war of choice overseas, since we'd just nuke anyone who tried to invade us at home.

Once you understand these constraints, you can better interpret why US production is allocated the way it is.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#394

Post by carefree-bob »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #338
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?

They delivered 191 last year. So roughly 1.5 days per plane currently?

Yes, and surge requirements are generally quadruple of the normal runtime, but with lead-time. Still, no way we can train pilots at a rate of even 1 pilot every 1.5 days. And imagine the lead times on that!

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#395

Post by stackghost »

angry_octet wrote: post #245
scottyah wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ch…

The alternative future, of just producing non-STOVL, is particularly relevant now. The USMC needs some organic aviation, but it doesn't need an F-35C. Organic drones would be an excellent fit for Wasp class ships and beach head forces. Of course it was all tied up with needing allies to buy to increase order size, and the UK Bukit the STOVL bits, so naturally they had to buy all STOVL jets to increase British industr…

>Oh yeah, did anyone mention how long it takes to integrate a new system onto the F-35? Fracking years. All of which has to be done by LM, forever. Because the F-35 is not a jet, it's a Master Contract.

This is the new reality of military procurement and has been for years. Integrated Logistical Support contracts are preferred by senior leadership for lots of reasons that won't fit into an HN comment box, but the wave tops are that it's wastefully inefficient to have uniformed aerospace engineers, logisticians, project managers, etc. doing R&D work. Private industry does it faster, better, cheaper, and pays bigger salaries with better lifestyles which means they can attract better talent.

I've been an aerospace engineer both in-uniform and out, and I can assure you that uniformed service members (and their families!) sacrifice a lot that's hard to quantify and not always immediately apparent. It's not 1950 any more; the best and brightest mostly don't want to touch government with a 10 foot pole. There's more money and prestige elsewhere, in the private sector.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#396

Post by PearlRiver »

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…

In WW2 the biggest problem was not building aircraft it was training the pilots who flew them.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#397

Post by fc417fc802 »

nradov wrote: post #201
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ukraine has already launched several mass strikes on Moscow. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/moscow-comes-under-one-of... https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/russia... Even if Russia sees a particular tactic or weapons system as an existential threat it's questionable whether they have the capability to escalate further. I mean they can threaten nuclear strikes on Ukrainian population centers but…

TBF a proxy of one of the nuclear superpowers (ie Ukraine using US arms) is quite different from a run of the mill non-nuclear country retaliating against an invasion using conventional arms manufactured at home. The former invites MAD while the latter is predictable and boring. Seeing as they are the substantially larger aggressor presumably they can pull out of this war of attrition whenever they feel like it.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#398

Post by johnsmith1840 »

Thaxll wrote: post #387
johnsmith1840 wrote: post #287

So none of them lost on ground in Iran. No US ship was to my knowledge even hit by a drone/missle. Iran has been prepping forever for this with Russian/Chinese equipment. This sounds identical to previous arguments I saw of how hard it would be for US to beat Iran in open conflict. China is different but comparing theoretical ability with reality is different also. The only reality we have as of now is that f35 compl…

You completely oversell Iran capability, I guarantee you that f35 would go down in a war with a country with decent anti air such as Russia or China. Iran never invested in such technology, they put all their money in drones and ballistic missiles which were extremely effective, we are a month in and the strait is still close. Their strategy was never to try to sink us ships, it was disruption in the region to extend…

Pretty sure Iran didn't plan on being obliterated.

Why did they have a navy if this was their only plan?

Also blocking the straight is funny because the only people it hurts is everyone in the world but the US.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#399

Post by dinfinity »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #381
dinfinity wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that underwater drones exist and have been successfully used against Russian ships, right?

In the navy they call long-range underwater drones a "torpedo". It has been assumed to be a primary threat against ships for a century. Modern navies have many systems purpose-built to deal with that threat.

That's like equating a cruise missile with an aerial drone (which is nonsensical).

Now I'm not saying defense against UUVs is impossible, but plenty of defenses against torpedoes don't work against them.

Note also that part of the approach of drone warfare is sheer quantity. Stopping 1 may be trivial, stopping 5 may be doable, but stopping 20 simultaneous ones might already be too hard to do consistently and repeatedly.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#400

Post by wredcoll »

greedo wrote: post #351
wredcoll wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If China produces 100 times or 1000 times their current numbers (and they can), marginal differences in capability are not going to matter. If china somehow learnes magic and produced 10,000 f16 equivalents and got into a major non-nuclear shooting war with the united states... they'd lose 10,000 planes. At some point there is such a qualitative difference that numbers don't really matter.

You are aware that China is producing two fifth gen stealth fighters, and is flight testing two sixth gen platforms? And that Chinese AAMs are world class? Read up on how Pakistan crushed the Indian Air Force recently flying fourth gen Chinese fighters using their current AAMs.

This is why I specifically didn't say "if china made 10,000 of their current 6th gen air superiority fighter", I said f16s.
Post reply on HN