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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

#611

Post by dgroshev »

thephyber wrote: post #489
dgroshev wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a serious war drone factories are getting bombed (by F-35s) and there is no need to handle a never-ending stream of drones. The war in Ukraine is special because neither side is capable of air supremacy. Note that the original article doesn't say anywhere that F-35-like capability is not needed.

The US doesn’t have air supremacy in Iran. We have air dominance, but shoulder mounted infrared guided (bypasses stealth paint to go after engine exhaust) AA is still taking out the occasional F35 and A10. RU/UA is special because RU completely screwed up the first 3 weeks of the war (likely because of the culture of sycophancy Putin has, similar to Trump) and was driven out of central UA. Russia is too proud to admi…

The US absolutely has air supremacy in Iran. You don't roll out B-52s in a contested airspace. MANPADS have an abysmal ceiling height, they are largely irrelevant short of some very narrow circumstances.

Just for your benefit, stealth coatings and materials (not "paint") are a tertiary defence after shaping and electronic warfare.

Group 3 UAS can't be assembled in homes and office buildings in any meaningful numbers. They are too big. Even Group 2 is marginal. I think you're confusing Group 1 quadcopters with long range OWA drones like Shaheds.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#612

Post by dgroshev »

M95D wrote: post #581
denkmoon wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a serious war why would an adversary like China not put their drone factories deep underground, deep in the territorial interior?

Drones can be made in ordinary civilian houses and apartments. It's too expensive to dig an underground factory just for that, and even if they do (let's assume an abandoned mine could be used), they would still have vulnerable power supply and vulnerable transport. Power plants, transmission lines, rail tracks, bridges are part of the targeted infrastructure. The further they are from the front, the more a logistica…

Even a single Group 3 UAS like Shahed is larger than a lot of kitchens. They can't be assembled in civilian houses.

You're confusing short range, highly Ukraine-specific Group 1 quads with long range OWA drones.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#613

Post by mcv »

defrost wrote: post #605
mcv wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with killing a carrier is not finding it. They're not difficult to spot and not very stealthy. They're massive. The only real problem with killing carrier is getting close. They're constantly protected by a fleet and a small air force whose primary purpose is to protect the carrier.

Despite which US carriers are frequently "sunk" during war games. All that protection didn't stop the Swedish diesal-electric HSMS Gotland seamlessly torp'ing the Ronald Reagan in 2005. France pulled a similar score 2015, Canada "got" a UK carrier in 2007, IIRC even Australia's taken out a US ship or two in various fun ways over the years.

Diesel-electric subs seem to be the bane of carriers. I'm aware of Dutch, Portuguese and Swedish subs that have "sunk" carriers during exercises, and often together with a significant part of their fleet.

But I do wonder what the starting conditions for those exercises were. The sub's underwater range is limited (although Swedish subs seem to be better than others) and the have to come up every once in a while, at which point they're vulnerable. There's plenty of places to hide near coasts, but I can imagine that on the open ocean, it might be a lot harder for a sub to get close enough.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#614

Post by thmsths »

dmos62 wrote: post #25
usrnm wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a new idea, it's the same thing Germany learned about tanks in WWII.

I heard it argued that Germany didn't have the raw resources and production capacity to go for quantity. Especially later in the war. So quality it was.

Except that the "quality" of their tanks was not exactly top notch, worse they used a lot of resources. At that point it was just a desperate gamble: "if we can make an invincible tank, then it won't matter how few we have", we both know it did not pay off, not even close.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#616

Post by Sabinus »

nradov wrote: post #447
Sabinus wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The red line is an invasion of Moscow or a strike on Russian nuclear capabilities. Everything else is just an order for preemptive suicide.

Ukraine already executed a successful strike on Russian nuclear capabilities. In 2025 Operation “Spider’s Web” completely destroyed several irreplaceable nuclear-capable strategic bombers. https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-ukraines-spider-web-operat... There is no "red line".

The red line attack on Russia's nuclear capabilities has to present a credible and deliberate threat to Russia's nuclear strike capacity.

Operation spider web was attack on Russian airfields primarily to reduce capacity to bomb Ukraine.

You can't nuke a country for hitting some nuclear strike capabilities you're using to conventionally bomb them.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#617

Post by M3L0NM4N »

marcosdumay wrote: post #102
nradov wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in a hypothetical situation where the USA had no aircraft carriers our military probably would have conducted some raids to delay Iran building nuclear weapons. The initial strikes against nuclear facilities were done with B-2 bombers launched from Missouri.

Iran wouldn't have started to work in nuclear weapons if Bush didn't credibly threaten to invade them. Hell, Iran didn't actually work into building them before Trump decided to attack them.

This is laughably false. The leadership in Tehran is smart, and they know that nukes are the most assured path to the regime's self-preservation. (see: North Korea). They've been trying to build nukes since the 80s.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#618

Post by Rover222 »

greedo wrote: post #277
Rover222 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those traditional prime contractors are basically part of the govt bureaucracy with how they operate. SpaceX and Anduril are good counterpoints.

Take a gander at how much SpaceX has benefited from government contracts. And for Anduril, well the phrase "all hat, no cattle" is pretty appropriate. In all my years I've never seen so much hype for a company that really hasn't produced much.

I don't know what your point is in this context. They won contracts because they were the cheapest (most efficient) provider of the services. And federal contracts are a small part of the their current revenue.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#619

Post by hedora »

peterfirefly wrote: post #548
hedora wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Batteries help a lot. So do things like hydro and nuclear.

Of course, they also stretch strategic reserves.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#620

Post by panick21_ »

cyberax wrote: post #380
greedo wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

F-35s have done pretty well in both Israeli and US hands against the Russian supplied SAM systems. And if these vaunted Russian IADs can't stop Ukrainian drones with a RCS the size of a barn, they stand little chance against a stealth fighter.

_All_ the classic anti-air is useless against drones, as the US also found out. It can be easily saturated, and ground-hugging drones are not a good target for missiles anyway. Ukraine is now using interceptor drones for this reason. The issue with stealth fighters is that they have nothing to do. The enemy can launch barrages of drones from hundreds of kilometers away, outside the F-35's effective range. Or if you'r…

The US has not found that out, they knew it, that's why things like lasers and other systems have seen so much development.

Yes the war showed some new aspects, but relentless low capability drone attacks is not the same as flying an F-35 into enemy air space and bombing their critical resources with high accuracy thanks to sensors.

Mass manaufacture and drones and such need to be take into account in the future, but when it comes to what is easer to counter, mass drone attacks or F-35, ill be money on the mass drones being countered first.

There are already many system that can deal with drones quite well. Old school FLAC with improved sensors, fast shooting system, even cheaper drones as counters and of course lasers and so on in the future.

Yes S-300 doesn't deal with drones either, but its pretty clear what to develop to counter-them, how to counter F-35s is not nearly as easy.

> The enemy can launch barrages of drones from hundreds of kilometers away, outside the F-35's effective range.

If they are doing that these drones are no longer as cheap and if you fly against modern anti drone weapon that have costs of a few $ per shot down drone, the economics is no longer in your favor.

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