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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

#541

Post by varjag »

dmix wrote: post #168
BobbyJo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A significant number of jets it entered the war with" does not mean they haven't also gotten newer jets.

Pretty sure almost all of the functional ones were destroyed or were kept in such reserve for security they weren't being used.

No there are still tens of original UAF jets that by now clocked thousands of sorties. Sometimes they get shot down or otherwise lost and we get photographic evidence (tail number, sometimes even pre-war colors) that it's one of the OGs.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#542

Post by usrnm »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #499
tick_tock_tick wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Japan?

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#543

Post by varjag »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #510
varjag wrote: post #20

Somewhat ridiculous piece. Ukraine, 4 years after, still operates a significant number of jets it entered the war with. This is despite hundreds of attempts to eliminate them on the ground with airstrikes, drones, cruise and ballistic missiles. And naturally F-35s on that theatre would have been a game changer making mass strikes on Moscow possible. For all the dysfunctions of American military industrial complex it…

Ukraine fighters are operating out of long-term soviet-era reinforced concrete hangars, while transport aviation is operating out of Romania and Poland which makes striking them a political issue both solutions are a lot less relevant in case of USA remote-from-home conflicts

It's too bad the USA found itself without allies to stow their transports to. How did that happen, was it F-35? Yeah, it has to be F-35 to blame.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#544

Post by varjag »

cyberax wrote: post #172
varjag wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are at most used to lob gliding bombs from far behind the front lines. You write that, and literally quote my point about F-35 making deep strikes against dense air defense possible in the very next sentence.

It remains to be seen how well F-35s actually perform in that role against an adversary with modern anti-air defense and with modern drone-based tactics. Both Russia and Ukraine learned to avoid concentrating forces, so what are you going to strike? Use an F-35 to attack a single Jeep with a mounted machine gun? F-35 has limited range and carries very limited armament, so you can't just carpet-bomb everything. At som…

Oh I love shopping lists, let's see. The FSB HQ, SVR HQ, Rosgvardiya HQ; tens of Army offices across the city. Roscosmos HQ, listening stations for the satellite network. Precision mechanics, optics and electronic foundries manufacturing sites in Khimki, Lubertsy, Lytkarino, Krasnogorsk and Zelenograd. Kosmos concert hall on Militia Day. Am sure there's more good spots along Rublevskoye highway too.

And if there are still some GBUs left after all that, the Kremlin and even the bloody Mausoleum.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#545

Post by Manuel_D »

jjk166 wrote: post #465
cm2012 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If you compare the F-35 to basically any plane worldwide with similar capabilities, it's very reasonably priced. If you compare corvettes to other sports cars, you'll find they are very reasonably priced. That doesn't make a corvette a good economical option for day to day commuting. There are only 2 5th generation fighters available for export - the F-35 and the J-35. The F-35 is 40% more expensive than the J-35.…

The J-35 has just one export customer, Pakistan. And they have yet to even start operating these aircraft yet.

The market sure seems to favor the F-35, with 19 customers.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#546

Post by pjmlp »

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…

And proudly written in C++!

I like having C++ on my toolbox, but when Bjarne Stroustoup proudly talks about "F-35 Fighter Jet’s C++ Coding Standards" I am not sure it lands how he thinks it does, given how it turned out to be.

Quite certain that it also contributed to all the software glichs F-35 suffers from.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#547

Post by Thaxll »

jawiggins wrote: post #449
Thaxll wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I guarantee you that f35 would go down in a war with a country with decent anti air such as Russia or China How many F-35s went down due to the Russian and Chinese anti-air systems in Venezuela and Iran?

They did not have any.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#548

Post by peterfirefly »

hedora wrote: post #504
peterfirefly wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't have Germany be so dependent on Russian gas. Don't tear down nuclear power plants, build more of them instead.

Electrifying the economy with renewables (and I’ll count nuclear as renewable) is the single most important thing countries can do right now to ensure their own military and economic security. Distributed solar and wind are more difficult to bomb than nuclear, so they’re probably a slightly better choice (especially if they’re built to island / work off grid).

Non-nuclear renewables ("intermittables") need something else as back up. That is almost always natural gas.

That's been causing a lot of problems for Europe for years now.

There's the dependence on Russia, there's the dependence on the North Sea supply -- and the full-scale invasion started while the Danish fields were off-line -- and there's the dependency on LNG imports from actors that are either unreliable (the US) or far away (the US and Qatar) or both. LNG is also quite expensive.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#549

Post by joha4270 »

wredcoll wrote: post #414
nerdsniper wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The JWST has a 6.5 meter mirror. The largest (known) spy satellites have a mirror of ~3m diameter. At GEO (geostationary orbit) that would provide an imaging resolution of about 7 meters. An aircraft carrier is about 337x76 meters. So from geostationary altitudes, a satellite similar to a KH-11 would see an American aircraft carrier as a blob of about 48 "pixels". This is probably enough signal to track all aircraft…

> It would have a field of view roughly the size of Houston (50x50 miles) Wait, what? Like, this is a whole bunch of extremely unreliable numbers being stacked on top of each other to reach an unsupported conclusion, but how is a 50 square mile field of view supposed to find something in the middle of the pacific?

The satellite moves, so every orbit it captures a globe spanning strip that is 50 miles wide (here uncritically accepting the 50 miles figure).

And the carrier isn't going to be in the middle of the pacific, its going to want to launch strikes, so its going to be within (say 500 miles) of Chinese military targets, which does narrow down the size of the haystack somewhat.

But yes, this is a significant challenge. On the modern battlefield it is usually significantly harder to find something than to kill something after you have found it.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#550

Post by nerdsniper »

wredcoll wrote: post #414
nerdsniper wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The JWST has a 6.5 meter mirror. The largest (known) spy satellites have a mirror of ~3m diameter. At GEO (geostationary orbit) that would provide an imaging resolution of about 7 meters. An aircraft carrier is about 337x76 meters. So from geostationary altitudes, a satellite similar to a KH-11 would see an American aircraft carrier as a blob of about 48 "pixels". This is probably enough signal to track all aircraft…

> It would have a field of view roughly the size of Houston (50x50 miles) Wait, what? Like, this is a whole bunch of extremely unreliable numbers being stacked on top of each other to reach an unsupported conclusion, but how is a 50 square mile field of view supposed to find something in the middle of the pacific?

You only need to find the aircraft carrier once (say, when it docks) and then the satellite can remain pointed at it forever.
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