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F-35 is built for the wrong war

warontherocks.com

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Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#631

Post by celsoazevedo »

nalekberov wrote: post #561
celsoazevedo wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a native English speaker, so it's possible I'm misunderstanding something (my apologies in that case). Here's my reasoning: - The title is "F-35 is built for the wrong war". - The article suggests that the plane was designed to deal with other threats, not with many cheap drones and missile salvos. That it's a bad tool for the tasks it is now is used for. It's not about war being right/wrong or good/bad. - Yo…

Comparing DIY to war is another level of ignorance. Well I guess the only thing I can ask you to please stop whataboutism and think about the consequences of the things rather than doing logical check.

I did not compare DIY to war, I gave you an example - even called it a terrible example! - to show how your comment and the article are about different subjects. If this is "whataboutism", then I don't know what that word means any more.

And I do think about the consequences of these weapons, both offensively and defensively, but I will focus on that on a thread about the consequences of war, not on one that asks if the plane is good at shooting down waves of offensive drones or not.

You know that part about not twisting what I wrote or assuming bad faith? This is why I wrote it. It's a shame that you've decided to ignore it... not a good way to have discussions online if one side does that.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#632

Post by pjc50 »

energy123 wrote: post #622
pjc50 wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Iran war isn't over yet. Plenty of time for it to become attritional, especially if the people who want Big Gaza / "mowing the nuclear lawn" to become the status quo are in charge. After all, Afghanistan was a quick victory, 20 years of attrition, and eventual exit.

Without factories? I doubt it. I'm not saying the US is going to win (in the sense of achieving objectives), but it's not going to be an attrition war like in WW2 or Ukraine. Japan had factories. Ukraine has factories. You can't sustain a modern war without factories. Afghanistan wasn't an attrition war (where the outcome is a collapse of one side). The CENTCOM commander explains best why the US lost, it's because of…

> You can't sustain a modern war without factories

No, but somehow Iranian backed Hamas and Hizbollah forces manage it from factoryless regions of Palestine and Lebanon. That's what I meant by "big Gaza": a region that's substantially damaged but still capable of fighting, where US/Israeli forces have to keep bombing militants in civilian areas forever. Every few weeks a new pile of dead kids for social media. Is that the plan for Iran?

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#633

Post by cyberax »

panick21_ wrote: post #620
cyberax wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

_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…

> 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 US was not prepared. The laser systems were nowhere to be seen, and there are no interceptor drones on the field right now. Or at least not in the quantity needed to protect valuable targets (like AWACS planes).

Also, lasers are just a waste of resources anyway. They only work when the LoS is available, and tracking a small target over large distances requires highly precise machinery. Exactly something that you want on a battlefield.

> 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.

F-35 is not designed to bomb critical resources. It's a fighter jet.

> 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.

It's not the point. The enemy doesn't need to suppress F-35s to keep launching salvos of hundreds of Shaheed drones into YOUR critical infrastructure that you can't protect. That's the whole point of the article.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#634

Post by wredcoll »

maxerickson wrote: post #407
wredcoll wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> engagement geometry means an 4:1 fight is always going to be costly That's not how 6th gen fighter combats work. You get hit by missiles and explode without ever even detecting the opponent. Does china have better stuff than f16s? Sure (and modern f16s are not the same as 1970s f16s which makes my point harder to understand in the first place anyways) but at some point, with some military technologies, you can't be…

It depends a little bit on how many bang bangs the boom boom has.

You fire all your missiles then.. you turn around and leave. The enemy isn't in range to engage you, you're flying away at least the same speed they're chasing, what are they going to do?

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#635

Post by wredcoll »

angry_octet wrote: post #479
wredcoll wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> engagement geometry means an 4:1 fight is always going to be costly That's not how 6th gen fighter combats work. You get hit by missiles and explode without ever even detecting the opponent. Does china have better stuff than f16s? Sure (and modern f16s are not the same as 1970s f16s which makes my point harder to understand in the first place anyways) but at some point, with some military technologies, you can't be…

That's how your imagination of 5th fighters work (because there are no 6th gen fighters in service), as if they are somehow invisible. This is a misunderstanding of RADAR. Lower frequency RADAR will pick up F-35s, but not with enough precision to generate a target track. Pilots spend a lot of thought on the problem of signature management. A Chinese Wedgetail would be extremely dangerous, as it could provide a very g…

I'm not trying to say that f35s are immune to modern chinese technology, I'm trying to say they're immune to previous generation stuff. They don't need to be literally invisible, you can know where they are all you want if you can't actually hit them with a missile.

There's a lot of things that complicate actual fights, people get lucky, people get unlucky, you do clever things like predict incoming sortie directions and saturate that area, but while the f35 is not produced in the same numbers as say, the p51, it's not "the last starfighter" either, the opponent has to get lucky a whole bunch of times before their ability to resist has been removed.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#636

Post by kjkjadksj »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #595
8note wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can look into game theory and crisis bargaining to see when and when not nukes make sense. theyre very expensive to use, so the benefits of war have to be extraordinary to match

game theory assumes rational actors

It wouldn’t be wrong. Nixon got drunk and called for a nuclear strike on North Korea. Kissinger told everyone to ignore this order and the world did not blow up that day.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#637

Post by wredcoll »

shmeeed wrote: post #583
wredcoll wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is literally the point: it's easy to tell them to point a satellite at beirut and get pictures every 3 hours or whatever, it's much more difficult to tell them to point at a location in the middle of the pacific ocean... because you don't know the location in the first place. Beirut doesn't move around a lot. Carriers do. While there are a lot of satellites pointing at the earth at any one moment, this isn't som…

>because you don't know the location in the first place Do you seriously think China doesn't track US carrier movements?

Do you seriously think the US Navy doesn't avoid Chinese tracking? What kind of a question is that? Like, there's probably a magazine that lists the cruising destinations of most of the carriers, what ports they're going to stop at next, etc, because, you know, they're not at war and trying to maintain secrecy.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#638

Post by kjkjadksj »

carefree-bob wrote: post #171
expedition32 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US not going full in on drones reminds me of the British ridiculing submarines. The Chinese are going to spam literally MILLIONS of drones all over the Pacific...

Drones have a limited range and limited capacity to inflict damage. Yes, they are effective at hunting infantry, but you can't reach across an ocean and strike the US with "millions of drones". Relatedly, aircraft carriers are great for beating up on small powers, but they are vulnerable and would not be effective at reaching across the ocean and bombing China. Plus, both nations have nukes, so the idea of either Chi…

All you need to do is trojan horse a container ship or three and the US is on its knees.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#639

Post by wredcoll »

mcv wrote: post #603
wredcoll wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if you've looked recently, but the pacific is, likev pretty big. Maybe even bigger than that. The primary problem with killing carriers is, has been, and will be, finding the things.[1] Drone strikes on oil refineries work because, with few exceptions, the refineries rarely move. You can literally program a drone to go x miles in a specific direction and then drop a bomb. It's also considerably harder to…

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.

> 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.

The pacific ocean is over 60 million square miles. A full sized carrier group probably takes up like 100 square miles when it's fully spread out, but that's a very, very, small percentage of the available search space.

And beyond that, you need to actually see the carrier with something, a laser sensor, a direct radar hit, even the human eyeball; you can't just fire a bunch of missiles in the general direction you think the carrier is at and expect them to hit anything (for one thing there's a whole bunch of other ships that will distract the targeting sensors).

Like, I cannot stress this enough, even if you knew the exact location of a carrier at a given moment, down to like 4 decimals of lat/long, and you knew which direction it was sailing, if your missile launcher is 1000 miles away you can't just program it in and fire it off and expect it to fly 1000 miles and then hit the carrier. Even with some kind of amazing on board sensors, there's a dozen other ships just existing near by, the carrier itself is moving unpredictably, not to mention the actual decoying/spoofing systems specifically designed to interfere with targeting sensors.

And this is the problem, you now say "oh well just use a platform that's closer to the carrier so it can get accurate targeting data for a weapon to hit the specific carrier", which is technically possible... until the carrier destroys your targeting platform because why wouldn't it? Whatever distance you have to be within to "lock on" to the carrier will be, pretty much by definition, in range of the carrier to shoot back at.

Hell, as far as I know, they could put literal anti-satellite missiles on carrier aircraft and just fly straight up and shoot down targeting satellites. I don't know if that's something they're currently planning/practicing, but I don't know if any reason they couldn't.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#640

Post by wredcoll »

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.

Carriers are not unstoppable super fortresses, which is why the americans have like 11 of the things, and it's definitely important not to become over confident after years without serious naval challenges, but it's also reasonable to consider all of the mitigating factors involved in large scale military exercises.

I haven't studied the HSMS Gotland incident in any great detail, but just in general for wargames, ships are required to be in certain locations at certain times, stay inside sea lanes, use transponders, ignore certain other ships and in general not completely mess up the existing sea commerce traffic that is trying to go past the exercise area.

If your carrier group is literally 1000 miles away from any piece of land and you have full authorization to sink anything that looks even slightly suspicious, it probably becomes considerably more difficult to sneak up and torpedo a carrier.

But yes, carriers will get sunk, modern warfare is in large part attritional, but if you send out, dunno, $100m worth of subs and sink a $10b carrier, that's a great return on investment, but doesn't help you in the slightest if you're now out of submarines and the enemy sails two more carriers into range.

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