Would this make highways a legitimate military target?
As another poster mentioned, fuck yes it does. They always were. Roads transport war machines.
British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways
41–50 of 332 posts
Re: British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways
#42[flagged]
"The day forward"... jeez, what is this a startup landing page?
Re: British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
The flight hours + HR costs. The key financial advantage of drones is that they don't need money to live after work, health insurance, or a pension plan. It's expensive to ask people to risk their lives for work. And specifically for forward deployment scenarios: they don't require human support infrastructure pushed forward, at great cost. Even in austere military terms, it's logistically expensive to keep a human a…
>It's expensive to ask people to risk their lives for work. Unless you're in the Russian army.
[deleted]
Re: British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
I think what a lot of countries, like Germany (German here), for a lesson, is that your current stock of weapons is most useful in the beginning of a conflict as the conflict rapidly changes weapon development and your weapon will need heavy upgrades or they are no longer useful. All western weapons get less useful by the minute.
>All western weapons get less useful by the minute.
Currently the west seems to be using Ukraine to offload their old inventory and get more recent replacements, which is why we see lots of old soviet fighters (e.g. by Croatia and Slovenia I believe?) being donated and replaced by the F-35.
Also why Ukraine will be (probably?) using the F-16 - I personally thought it would be a great opportunity to battle test the F-35, but the US doesn't seem to be interested in that.
Re: British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
"a wall of RF jamming" When using AI controlled I think the poster meant local AI controlled, no RF. We probably will also see laser communication from satellite to drones, which will be much more difficult to jam.
Having AI kill humans on their own without any supervision is an extremely controversial move. It will result in friendly fire sooner or later, and the resulting controversy is pretty much guaranteed to terminate the program. Laser comms are neat, but they suffer from things like clouds or smokescreens. And once you figure out the wavelength, a hostile laser comms sat can trivially jam it.
How can you jam a laser from a satellite to a drone, if it is one way? With the sensor on top of the drone, e.G. a Predator? Wouldn't you need something flying higher than the drone?
Re: British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways
#46[flagged]
Tank days were numbered, and yet they still are heavily used
An aside thought: the days of soldiers riding horses into battle is currently considered to be an outdated mode of warfare. It seems quaint to even consider that one day warriors on horseback may again be the prominent warring force on our planet. And yet here we're are packed with nukes, as if we couldn't make it all happen.
Re: British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways
#47Highway landing and take-off on its own is useless. F35 requires extensive machinery to maintain, in needs proper airport and hangars. It is not possible to operate it somewhere from forest! And vertical landing/takeoff can not support any load, it can not even be fully fuelled! In Czechia we are replacing Gripens that can operate from almost anywhere. It only needs a few hundred meters of road, and single truck to r…
It still saves you on cost and space to host backup airstrips in case your country enter at war if you can share part of it with civil use.
Re: British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having AI kill humans on their own without any supervision is an extremely controversial move. It will result in friendly fire sooner or later, and the resulting controversy is pretty much guaranteed to terminate the program. Laser comms are neat, but they suffer from things like clouds or smokescreens. And once you figure out the wavelength, a hostile laser comms sat can trivially jam it.
"resulting controversy is pretty much guaranteed to terminate the program." I'm not aware of any controversy that stopped weapon progress. We have biological weapon research, atomic weapons and the US used chemical agents in Vietnam. The US stopped tactical nuclear weapons because it thought they were not useful, not because of the protests in Europe. SDI was cancelled because laser weapons were not feasable in the 8…
Pretty sure "controversy" killed biological weapons and most use of nuclear (thankfully).
They're even trying to get rid of certain cluster munitions.
Re: British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways
#49"FTA: they would involve placing aluminum AM-2 mats along a strip of highway, up to 1,500 feet long. This will be sufficient for the stealth jets to carry out short takeoffs and vertical landings while protecting the road beneath them." "AM-2 matting consists of 1 1/2" x 2' steel rectangles coated with a epoxy nonskid material, available in both 6 and 12 foot lengths, and are assembled in a brickwork pattern to form…
I can’t help but think it must be about protecting the aircraft rather than protecting the surface, as in ukraine roads are commonly built out of reinforced concrete slabs, and somewhat less commonly, but still frequently, they are built to take the weight of tanks, and are wide and straight enough to accommodate even large aircraft - there’s a strip of highway north of Mariupol that was originally built to accommodate strategic bombers.
The other thing that they would do is to even out the surface - decades of frost heave has left said concrete slabs pretty uneven, even in a car, never mind a jet, landing.
Re: British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think what a lot of countries, like Germany (German here), for a lesson, is that your current stock of weapons is most useful in the beginning of a conflict as the conflict rapidly changes weapon development and your weapon will need heavy upgrades or they are no longer useful. All western weapons get less useful by the minute.
>All western weapons get less useful by the minute. Currently the west seems to be using Ukraine to offload their old inventory and get more recent replacements, which is why we see lots of old soviet fighters (e.g. by Croatia and Slovenia I believe?) being donated and replaced by the F-35. Also why Ukraine will be (probably?) using the F-16 - I personally thought it would be a great opportunity to battle test the F-…
I think the US fears losing an F-35 like they lost a F-117.