F-35 logistics system to be reinvented and renamed, official says

1. The US hasn't had to overcome a first-rate Integrated Air Defense System since the 1970s. UAVs, while hard to detect due to their small RCS, have extremely poor overall survivability. It's part of what makes them so cheap.

2. The US is rarely flying drones against an adversary with robust Electronic Attack capabilities. They're pretty useless if their datalinks to their Ground Control Station are jammed and you don't have HARMs on-hand to suppress/neutralize/destroy the jamming source.

3. The future of air power is likely to be a mix of manned fighters with UAVs as wingmen or forward-deployed scouts/sensor platforms, and then further in the rear big (manned) "bombers" with deep magazines throwing missiles into the fight from far away, handing off target tracking to the manned fighter. Even something like an F-15 Strike Eagle or a Su-34 could fulfill that latter role with the right electronics suite and ordnance upgrades...

It covers things like tracking wear&tear of components so that you know when to replace parts, and more importantly, know when to schedule repairs - it's crucial that you have well-planned maintenance that ensures maximum availability of aircraft, so you need to stagger them - which is non-trivial to do. That's probably the "MVP" level, which to be practical might involve tons of other stuff.

On a predecessor to ALIS for a different plane, even planning a mission went through it - you had someone come to you with requirements, and you'd arrange which plane, which pilots, which technicians to prepare it for flight, where are the tools they need for it, generate a fueling chart, everything based on the availability and qualifications.

Once the plane returned from mission, you'd enter various flight data, including stuff like "how many rounds the autocannon fired" so that the underlying MRP system could calculate maintenance dates and the like.

The ultimate goal is that you have a squadron that has maximum possible availability so it can fulfill its job in the air, without surprise maintenance (or worse - stuff breaking down) foiling your mission plans, and where your stores contain enough of all materiel necessary.

ALIS covered, AFAIK, all elements of logistics for F-35, a giant integrated system. Great on paper as the top level idea, everything got worse the more you got into implementation of the goals. I heard of rebasing where the bringup of local ALIS node took longer than the whole rebased mission. Downloading flight records post-flight would take longer than the flight. Planes that won't fly unless connection with "cloud" part of ALIS (all hosted centrally in USA) was done at least once a month. Gigantic amounts of data you had to transfer between "cloud" and local instance, making it more than problematic to run on ships equipped with F-35B and F-35C.

And of course the fact that data packages describing the operation theater can be generated only by one or two labs in USA (good luck, export customers!)... which is part of the ALIS cloud (and now ODIN cloud), which also is hosted by Lockheed Martin in USA.

Now that I think of it, ALIS explains significant portion of the money USAF puts into Starlink as its only customer...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22105850

GPS jamming can be made vastly more difficult by special antenna configurations, and additionally I'd hope that military drones have precise IMUs and star trackers to serve as fallback.

https://pando.com/2015/09/24/war-nerd-why-f-35-albanian-mush...