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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

#491

Post by jjk166 »

greedo wrote: post #268
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…

The Booker was a perfect fit for the Army reqs, and filled a genuine need. But it didn't have a sponsor that was willing to pay for it. The Armor Branch didn't like it, and the Infantry Branch, which is the real user couldn't muster enough support in the DoD. The Connie is a good ship and the two under contract will be fine vessels when they're commissioned. Frigates are no longer "cheap" ships, and the sticker shock…

> The Booker was a perfect fit for the Army reqs, and filled a genuine need. But it didn't have a sponsor that was willing to pay for it.

The Booker was overweight, meaning it couldn't be air dropped, which was the entire purpose for the program. No one was willing to pay for it because it wasn't what anyone wanted.

> Frigates are no longer "cheap" ships

The point was to produce a cheap ship. It's a ship that already exists and had a pricetag. The issue was it went from 85% commonality to 15% commonality, ballooning the price.

> But it's cancellation has more to do with dysfunction at the top of the Navy (and DoD) then the program of record.

They are one in the same. They could have produced an invincible super battleship and it wouldn't change the fact that they failed to accomplish what they set out to do. All three programs suffer from exactly this dysfunction.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#492

Post by kalleboo »

cm2012 wrote: post #352
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…

A lot of big words, but also inaccurate. If you compare the F-35 to basically any plane worldwide with similar capabilities, it's very reasonably priced. You can see that in that it's very popular for export, with pre-sales already sold out until 2035. There are plenty of articles out there on this for those who want to Google it.

> You can see that in that it's very popular for export

It's very popular for export since the US has been forcing their allies to buy them over any alternatives, this was shown in the WikiLeaks cables.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#493

Post by dralley »

01100011 wrote: post #162
dinfinity wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am sure people will take issue with this comment but look at the relative restraint of Russia in Ukraine [...] vs, say, WWII. They have been bombing civilian infrastructure, abducting children, torturing and executing civilians and POWs, executing deserters or wannabe deserters the entire fucking Ukraine war. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_the_Russo-Ukrain... Restraint, my unbleached asshole.

No one is fire-bombing cities yet, despite Ukraine pulling a WWII Japan and distributing weapons production amongst residences.

Wrong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0BttoqSbeE

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#494

Post by angry_octet »

stackghost wrote: post #395
angry_octet wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wav…

It's not just that uniformed (or DoD) engineers have no access, the subsystem vendor (e.g. Raytheon) also get no access. LM is incredibly obstructionist, even compared to the bastards at Boeing.

This cluster** has led directly to initiatives for open (Govt open) architectures and vendor agnostic interfaces for talking between vehicles and components, and between component, between jets and drones and C2 etc. That has a long way to go too, but at least we've broken with the idea that it can be a closed system.

I'm familiar with the problems of service careers. There is a lot that could be done to improve that, but that's a different discussion. I think it's extra important now that we have jet engineers who know about AI in the aviation context.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#495

Post by rich_sasha »

As an armchair military hobbyist, I read this with interest.

The question is, what should be the alternative? Large numbers of "cheap" F-15/16/18 planes? They're not exactly cheap. Military kit prices are notoriously hard to reason with, but some googling tells me a new F-15 costs about the same as a new F-35. Adjusting for total lifetime costs and availability, according to Claude (lazy I know), Gripen is the cheapest western plane to fly at around 28k/hr, Rafale/F-15..18 sit around 50-60k/hr, F-35 around 100k. Eurofighter allegedly even higher at 120k.

I'm not saying these are good numbers! But if they aren't total nonsense, you could have, allegedly, twice the number of gen-4 fighters (4x with Gripen). That's a lot, but not an order of magnitude. It's not like you could swarm the sky over China with gen-4 fighters Vs homeopathic amounts of F-35. And I can well believe in a real big war, preserving a smaller number of more capable planes and pilots is better than starting with a lot of still-expensive planes and lose them more quickly.

At the same time, Israel is reported to have lost over a dozen of pricey, advanced, but more expendable non-stealth drones over Iran. They were probably used in riskier fashion, but I'm not sure what would happen if you replaced them with gen-4 fighters.

It's also possibly one of the most mass produced fighters at the moment. Production numbers exceed 1000 iirc. So hard to argue it cannot be produced in volume.

Finally, the comparison to cheap lawnmower drones is also IMO a bit out of place. They're so cheap because their capabilities are near 0. It just so happens that they have a niche they are perfect for. For sure there's going to be more and more autonomous planes in the sky, but not sure about the general usefulness of the Shahid-style drones. They are perfect for terrorising Ukrainian civilians and disrupting woefully under defended Russian industry.

I'm not saying I know better than the expert article, it just misses to me the alternative, and it's not obvious what it should be. And if youre making a bad choice, when the other choices are actually worse then your choice might be, in fact, good.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#496

Post by energy123 »

Article misses the main thing that matters in air superiority fighting: who gets to protect their industrial production.

Low tempo is irrelevant. What matters is whether you can deliver those munitions to the factories early in the fight to prevent it from becoming an attritional war.

In Ukraine, they both have air parity so they can't do that.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#497

Post by hedora »

dgroshev wrote: post #304
Animats wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ukraine's top drone commander was interviewed by The Economist.[1] He used to be a commodities trader, and he looks at warfare from that perspective. His goal is to kill Russian soldiers faster than Russia can replace them, until they run out of young men. His drone units are currently doing this, he claims. They supposedly lose one Ukrainian drone unit soldier per 400 Russians dead. Material cost per dead Russian so…

The development and production lifecycle _has_ to be long for a country not fighting a current war. Ukrainian munitions get used up almost immediately. They don't need to stockpile, they are in a steady state wartime production. On the contrary, peace time countries have to stockpile. A manufacturing line cannot be ramped up from zero to wartime, we need low volume manufacturing to retain the expertise and the supply…

Stockpiling doesn’t really do much vs. investing in manufacturing.

Contrast the US in the civil war or wwii to the current situation. In both those wars, civilian factories were rapidly converted for the war and manufacturing capabilities were ramped fast.

In Iran, we’ve burned through years or decades of manufacturing capacity and probably used up most of our top tier stockpile.

That only exhausted/destroyed about 33% of Iran’s cruise missile stockpiles. It’s unclear what it did to their drone manufacturing capabilities. It guaranteed they’ll pursue nuclear capabilities moving forward.

At the same time, US investment in manufacturing is tanking due to warmongering and isolationist economic policies.

Iran stalemated us in a month or two, and all the trends I see (education, manufacturing, high tech innovation) point to US capabilities eroding rapidly in the short to medium term.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#498

Post by discodave »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #488
etempleton wrote: post #485

I see what the author is saying and I agree to some extent, but I think the F35 is mostly irrelevant in terms of the argument being made. I think it is needed and does it's job as a deterrent. The F35 means that that no one can really control the skies against the US. Iran was considered to have fairly robust air defenses and that was all but destroyed within days. So the F35, as the author states, is performing well…

F-35 isn't a deterrent. Nukes are the deterrent. Iran and Venezuela lacked nukes. North Korea doesn't lack nukes. The F-35 is just peacocking but ultimately useless. If these war games were realistic the game ends on the first move which is asking the question "Do they have nukes." If the answer is yes, then the game doesn't even start.

Nuclear weapons are a deterrent against somebody invading the US (or another NATO country) but that doesn't make conventional forces not a deterrent against other kinds of aggression. Many attacks have been made against the US and not resulted in nuclear retaliation, like 9-11.

India and Pakistan have nukes and have fought each other recently so your assertion that "has_nukes() == no_game_start()" is *false*. Nukes, however probably will deter India from doing the full-Putin into Pakistan.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#499

Post by marcus_holmes »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #458
marcus_holmes wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bombing civilian infrastructure never works like this. As we saw in The Blitz (and in Vietnam, and in Ukraine), it just draws the bombed together, unifying them and hardening their resolve.

Can you use an example that doesn't prove the exact opposite? Bombing absolutely worked in Vietnam so much that the south didn't actually lose the war until 2 years after the USA left. The war becoming a political nightmare is why the USA left not because the horrendously effective bombing stopped working. Ukraine is really weird to put in here because Russia has fail to establish any effective air superiority so I c…

You're suggesting that bombing civilian infrastructure will cause the Iranians to surrender (or to concede negotiating points in order to stop the bombing).

My point is that this doesn't work - the British under The Blitz famously had "Blitz Spirit" that was all about enduring the bombing and showing the Germans that they couldn't be beaten like this. The Vietnamese did not try to stop the bombing by surrendering or negotiating, and neither have the Ukrainians; again, if anything, they are more unified and more resolute because of the Russians attacks on their infrastructure.

Can you give me a single example where prolonged bombing of civilian infrastructure has brought a country to the negotiating table? Or made them surrender?

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#500

Post by marcus_holmes »

bpodgursky wrote: post #445
marcus_holmes wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your definition of "complete dominance" is different from most people's. If you completely dominate your enemy, you prevent them from being able to affect the situation. Iran is maintaining a blockade over a major shipping lane that the USA does not want them to. The USA's inability to prevent this shows that they are not "completely dominating" Iran.

No, "air dominance" is a well recognized term, it means you can fly your planes basically anywhere you want, to take out whatever target you want, without risk from AA. They are using it exactly how anyone familiar with warfare terminology would understand it.

I think the accepted term is "air supremacy" which is a completely different set of words (and meaning) from "complete dominance"
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