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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

#641

Post by wredcoll »

nerdsniper wrote: post #550
wredcoll wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but satellites... orbit. They don't just fly in arbitrary directions following a target.

Even something like a rain storm can lose visual track of a carrier group, or even just night time, at which point you've now got an increasingly large area to search again to find the carrier which can be anywhere inside a several hundred mile circle.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#642

Post by amluto »

Schiendelman wrote: post #309
tempest_ wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A carrier battle group can easily be seen and tracked by commercial satellite constellations. At minimum they travel with 6 or 7 ships and leave a wake a mile long and they only go tens of miles an hour, it isnt a speed boat. Here is an Indian carrier (formerly Russian) on google maps and the US ones are large https://www.google.com/maps/place/14%C2%B044'30.3%22N+74%C2%... I think people forget how many satellites ar…

Satellites aren't pointed at "all parts of the planet". They're generally taking regular photos of known locations, when the right type of satellite passes over. That's where you get lucky shots like the one you noticed. Then that satellite has to orbit, and there isn't another one nearby just ready to take another photo. Then the carrier changes direction...

Now I’m contemplating just how small and light of an instrument could be carried on a Starlink-style satellite that could detect a large ship. A smallish COTS telescope, e.g. a Celestron 8SE ($1700 retail) could easily see a ship from the Starlink constellation altitude.

Never mind that the Starlink radio arrays are, well, radio arrays that quite effectively cover the whole planet. If you think of each satellite as a radio telescope, its resolution is crap and probably cannot disambiguate a carrier group from anything else (at least according to disclosed specs). But it would be quite interesting to build a synthetic aperture array out of multiple satellites. This would rely on emissions from the ships themselves, but I bet it could be done and could locate ships quite nicely.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#643

Post by wredcoll »

hedora wrote: post #511
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…

What is the carrier for if the jets it carries cannot stop swarms of drones? The only thing I can come up with is “war crimes”, but, as Iran pointed out, if you can afford an aircraft carrier, you have trillions of dollars of easily hit civilian targets, so you pretty much automatically lose if the other side retaliates in kind.

> What is the carrier for if the jets it carries cannot stop swarms of drones?

What makes you think they can't?

Ignoring some kind of dedicated anti-drone missile systems that they could equip (if you're just hitting drones you could probably carry like 500 tiny missiles or something, who knows), you can just go and destroy whatever platform is carrying the drones, since your carrier aircraft is pretty much going to outrange it by definition.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#644

Post by wredcoll »

nerdsniper wrote: post #553
wredcoll wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China is putting containerized missile launch tubes and drone launch systems on their container ships. If these get widely deployed at some point, there could come a time when there will be weapon systems already on-location in all of the major ports of China's adversaries. Most naval facilities have civilian ports nearby. Why not just put a nuke in their instead? Like, how is this supposed to work, china just has…

> How is this supposed to work, china just has a totally not suspicious container ship sitting in every major port not moving or carrying cargo or letting anyone inspect it and nobody notices that its full of weapons? Actually, exactly like that. It looks completely normal. Container ships are super massive, and generally containers are only searched after they're offloaded, before leaving the port. So they don't get…

> Actually, exactly like that. It looks completely normal. Container ships are super massive, and generally containers are only searched after they're offloaded, before leaving the port. So they don't get searched if they remain on the vehicle.

And nobody is searching them during a state of war?

> A lot of drones have surprisingly long range.

I guarantee a missile launched from a f35 launched from a carrier has a much longer range.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#645

Post by wredcoll »

defrost wrote: post #468
wredcoll wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Torpedoes cannot be launched from manned / unmanned surface vessels? They're getting close enough to target the carriers without being sunk.. how exactly?

Relatively low cost, numbers and sheer persistance. Post WWII US has always struggled with asymmetric wars that can't be solved with military dominance and rarely addressed on deeper issues. This current Iran conflict is reminiscent of the Taliban in Afghanistan, who survived 20 years in a frozen conflict with the US before taking back control of the country when the US withdrew. The betting is strong on Iran still s…

> Post WWII US has always struggled with asymmetric wars that can't be solved with military dominance and rarely addressed on deeper issues.

I mean, yeah, we're talking about the part of the war that is unrelated to the weapon systems involved.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#646

Post by lenerdenator »

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 and Germany.

Even if it doesn't cause them to "surrender" - I still don't know what the point of this whole "limited operation" is - it would effectively set back Iran's ability to operate a nuclear materials enrichment program, among other things.

I'd also like to point out that German raids on Britain, American raids on Vietnam, and Russian raids on Ukraine are not exactly comparable to the sort of bombing raids carried out by the Allies (particularly the US and UK) in Germany and Japan in scale.

If anything, the Iranians are trying the same strategy the Nazis did with the V1 and V2 with their drones and missiles: use them as a weapon of stochastic terror against the population of the region and on the occasional industrial target.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#647

Post by fooker »

wredcoll wrote: post #635
angry_octet wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I'm trying to say they're immune to previous generation stuff

S400 works just fine for detecting F-35s.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#648

Post by ceejayoz »

fooker wrote: post #647
wredcoll wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I'm trying to say they're immune to previous generation stuff S400 works just fine for detecting F-35s.

For certain definitions of "works".

They don't seem to have fared all that well against US/Israeli F-35s in Iran, and seem to struggle in Ukraine against far less sophisticated opponents.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#649

Post by maxerickson »

wredcoll wrote: post #634
maxerickson wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The enemy isn't in range to engage you

That's convenient. Hopefully they don't use their massive numerical advantage in some sort of scheme to make it not true.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#650

Post by wahern »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #540
wahern wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Iran War never looked good on paper. The only people who thought it would succeed were Trump and the cast of characters he surrounded himself with. I doubt if many congressional Republican chickenhawks thought it would succeed. The only way to oust the regime is with ground troops, ripping out the Revolutionary Guard and its tentacles. For all its corruption, Iran is far from a failed state, and there aren't fact…

> The Iran War never looked good on paper. The only people who thought it would succeed were Trump and the cast of characters he surrounded himself with. Not to nitpick, but “looked good on paper” was an euphemism for “the powers that be think its doable”. Amd yes, yiu are right: Trump surrounded himself with “loyalist” this time that won’t go against hime like in the previous administration, but with the very undesi…

An invasion likely would turn into a quagmire, but what keeps regime proponents eternally hopeful is that unlike Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, etc, Iran has a robust political system. The dictatorship notwithstanding, it has a vibrant parliament and, by global standards, a decent electoral system. The Ayatollah rules by following the maxim, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. If you could excise the Revolutionary Guard (a big if), you wouldn't necessarily need to change the government or its institutions. The existing liberal and moderate factions could quickly fill the vacuum, and would be happy to do so. You wouldn't get a pliant Iran, but that's for the better.

So by invasion the idea would be to rapidly, physically excise the apparatus the Ayatollahs use to maintain control. The structure and identity of that group is well known. It's a large group, and you couldn't catch all the leaders, but so long as you can stop their ability to enforce their rule through execution, you give the rest of the country time to shut them out of the institutions. In theory just weeks.

The problem is the very thing that makes regime change a plausibly good idea--a stable polity and modern, liberal-ish institutions--is the very thing that could result in failure. The Ayatollahs understood that a fragile, backwards system would be a weakness to their rule. Their military and bureaucracy are professional; they know how to follow orders, without being micromanaged, and even if everyone wants regime change, there's a huge collective action problem.

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