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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

#681

Post by Jensson »

johnsmith1840 wrote: post #628
sofixa wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily that's all utterly irrelevant. Like Vietnam showed, it doesn't matter how much better numbers than the enemy you have, because kill counts don't win wars. Iran is still the one closer to achieving its objectives (survival for the regime), because they don't need to do much for that to happen. Apply pressure to the Gulf states and global energy and fertiliser markets and at some point, the US will cave. The Am…

So, hypothetical. If US lost public support then destroyed all oil and major iranian infra then left what would happen? Think 20 years down the line what that would do.

> If US lost public support then destroyed all oil and major iranian infra then left what would happen?

Israel would go in and bomb the country to shit, since Israel is much more brutal than USA is.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#682

Post by KylerAce »

Beijinger wrote: post #455

No plane is invisible. It is totally unclear if Russian or Chinese technology can detect them. I mean, there is one way to find out.... This being said, should the "invisibility" fail, it becomes a plane that can't dog fight, cant fly very high, can't fly very fast, can't carry a lot of load, needs an insane amount of maintenance (10h per 1h flight) and is expensive. Big bet! Superiority comes to mind: https://en.wik…

Dog fighting is not a serious concern in modern fighter combat because missiles have gotten so effective that the current strategy has been forced into beyond visual range combat. And stealth doesn't just "fail". In bvr the first side that sees the other is the side that gets to fire a salvo first, which is the primary advantage of stealth technology: so that the enemy doesn't see you from as far as you can see them. All stealth does is linearly lower the radar return of your plane for a given distance and angle, but radar return is inversely proportional to the fourth power of distance. This means that if you get close enough then any decent radar can eventually make out an f35. The whole point of stealth is to make that distance as small as possible.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#683

Post by dwd »

defrost wrote: post #526
dwd wrote: post #520

I'm just happy the Australian Government invested in the MQ-28 Ghost Bat program. Unit cost is currently estimated to be USD$8-10m according to Boeing and we get a "loyal wingman" platform to force-multiply our small fleet of F-35s and F/A-18 Supers. It can also be remotely directed from the E-7 Wedgetail.

At a cost of $2.3 billion (AU(?)) to date so far and with costs set to increase going forward, are the flagship UAV Ghost Bat and Ghost Shark programs really bang for the buck "good investments" or examples of the ongoing Australian Defence habit of going all in for bespoke capability acquisition projects while ignoring the purchasing of “Military Off The Shelf” (MOTS) systems ? I have a gut feeling more use (if and…

Except we are now in a leadership position on these technologies. We can also ensure it meets our requirements as we did with the Wedgetail.

As far as off-the-shelf systems, we do that with the avionics and sensors.

Maybe if we had waited we could have expended our partnership with Anduril and worked with them on their CCA "Fury" program?

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#684

Post by defrost »

wredcoll wrote: post #645
defrost wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> we're talking about the part of the war that is unrelated to the weapon systems involved.

I'm talking about asymmetric strategies that can be used by a less armed actor to stand off and occassionally clearly best a better resourced actor.

You know, wooden wing hand carved swarms Vs floating fortress cities with orbiting overwatch.

The Taliban, NVA, and likely Iran will be future examples of mice left still standing after the biggest cat on the planet failed to move them on or wipe them out.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#685

Post by defrost »

wredcoll wrote: post #640
defrost wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, shi…

> Carriers are not unstoppable super fortresses

I'm geting fairly old now and I have no recollection of ever thinking such a thing ...

> but if you send out, dunno, $100m worth of subs and sink a $10b carrier,

Even better if you can send out $80m worth of torpedoes attached to cheap arse unmanned drone delivery units all embedded within a 10x magnitude swarm of cheap arse drone units that have no torpedoes.

High chance of penetration, good chance there'll be some left over to confound and confuse the next carriers.

Absolutely that keeps the high end gear standing well off from tight spaces.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#686

Post by marcus_holmes »

lenerdenator wrote: post #625
marcus_holmes wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bombing civilian infrastructure never works like this. As we saw in The Blitz (and in Vietnam, and in Ukraine), it just draws the bombed together, unifying them and hardening their resolve.

If you ignore Japan and Germany, this is absolutely true.

Japan was nuked, different thing.

Germany was not bombed into submission. Millions of Russian soldiers invaded their capital city and forced them to surrender.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#687

Post by greedo »

throwklr wrote: post #471
greedo wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are aware that China is producing two fifth gen stealth fighters, and is flight testing two sixth gen platforms? And that Chinese AAMs are world class? Read up on how Pakistan crushed the Indian Air Force recently flying fourth gen Chinese fighters using their current AAMs.

There is no evidence to show that Pakistan crushed the Indian Air force infact it's the other way around. A lot of Chinese equipment was blown out by Indian Brahmos.

Brahmos isn't an A2A missile...

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#688

Post by marcus_holmes »

lenerdenator wrote: post #646
marcus_holmes wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ra…

Again, as I replied above, Japan was nuked. There were 2 bombs. That is not "sustained bombing". Also, they were losing the conventional war and US troops had set foot on Japanese soil.

The Germans surrendered because millions of Russian troops invaded their capital city. The bombing had nothing to do with it (and I would argue, even hardened their resolve against surrendering).

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#689

Post by Nasrudith »

NickC25 wrote: post #610
cjbgkagh wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The program was intended to make money and it did. My university has ties to the military and I was talking to people working on the Joint Strike Fighter about ways to reduce software bugs, I was told candidly that software bugs are job security and they’ll be riding that gravy train all the way to retirement, which they did.

This. People don't understand that defense contractors are extremely wasteful in their spending, and the contractor's job is not to produce the latest and greatest. They have a dual mandate. 1. To keep supply chains active so we can continue to be able to wage tomorrow's war with yesterday's technology by introducing rent-seekers and middlemen into companies and processes where they shouldn't be. 2. To keep Wall Stre…

The answer is because we tried to DIY and found that the government at best works as a developer with manufacturing better off outsourced. It is 'under-orderly' compared to a planned system, but the private sector works. There is a reason why it is a norm for military industrial development.

Wall Street and Defense Contractors and Defense Lobbyists wouldn't make too much of a difference anyway when they are already jobs programs. Any sort of industry would have lead to it being an Industrial complex problem.

That people think it would make a difference mystifies me as much as when people claim that 401ks are just to make people dependent upon the market in retirement. When in reality they would be dependent upon the market either in a state funded pension system too because that is where the money comes from.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#690

Post by Nasrudith »

smcin wrote: post #557
rasz wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a serious drone war a neutral cargo ship off your coast will open hidden flaps and unleash 10K drones all at once erasing couple bases before they even know whats up.

Wouldn't that be the war crime of perfidy, similar to when the US used a secret plane painted as a civilian aircraft to sink one of the Venezuelan boats 9/2025?

Warships are explicitly allowed to use false flags at sea, provided they lower them and raise their true flag before launching an attack. So all that would change to be legal would be to raise the flag and then unleash the drone swarms.

I'm not quite sure if just putting up a military flag on a civilian transport ship makes it count as a warship or not though.

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