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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

#691

Post by angry_octet »

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.

Practically speaking there are between 0 and 1 S-400 systems to worry about, and they will be one of the very first targets. Prompt global strike, JASSM-ER/LR, Tomahawk, AARGM-ER, JATM, even AIM-174B and 260s, they're all coming for it, and all the lesser S-300 (SA-10) / HQ-15, HQ-16/FK-3s etc.

The S-300 systems in Iran were completely ineffective against IDF F-35s. Doubtful they even got a detection.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#692

Post by energy123 »

pjc50 wrote: post #632
energy123 wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

> US/Israeli forces have to keep bombing militants in civilian areas forever

It's not forever. A common misconception about insurgencies is that they're impossible to defeat because they're an "ideology". But it's more about sanctuary and state sponsorship. Afghanistan was a loss because of sanctuary, as per my quote above. This article provides quantitative analysis on that:

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2010/R...

Hezbollah had sanctuary in Syria before Assad's collapse, and their state sponsorship is under strain because their supply route through Syria has been cut off and their state sponsor in Iran has degraded industrial production and finances.

> Is that the plan for Iran?

The plan for Iran is to prevent a fait accompli, defined as 10000 ballistic missiles (exceeding interceptor stockpiles) or a nuclear weapon. The best case scenario is regime change. The second best case scenario is coercing them into terms. The worst case scenario is to degrade their power projection capabilities without a negotiated agreement. But all three scenarios are considered better than the status quo trajectory by the belligerents. The status quo trajectory is seen as leading to a bigger war later (e.g. once they reach 9000 ballistic missiles instead of 5000), or worse.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#693

Post by carefree-bob »

hedora wrote: post #623
carefree-bob wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gas is certainly bifurcated. The west coast is paying up to $5.80 and Texas/midwest are paying $3.20 or so. NY and New England is paying a lot, but from Virginia on down, they are paying less. All the midwest is paying close to texas prices except Illinois, which is paying California prices. Some of that is differences in taxes, but some of it is due to getting gas from different sources. If we had a pipeline from Te…

For the national 3% average to hold, for the low end of my range (30%) to hold on the west coast, the rest of the country would have to be suffering from deflation.

There is not 30% inflation in any region. Not even 15%.

I think you have to go back to the civil war era and greenback inflation to find numbers like that in any region.

https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-pri...

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#694

Post by wredcoll »

defrost wrote: post #685
wredcoll wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 chan…

Yeah, but what's stopping the side with carriers from just attacking your torpedo launchers? That's literally the entire point of aircraft carriers, you get to attack things while the ship itself is out of range of retaliation.

If we're postulating magical "ai" attack drones loitering off the coast, what's stopping the americans from sending in their own fleet of equally magical ai attack drones to blow up all the defenders and then sail the carriers up?

Also, again, you'd have to know exactly where the carriers even are, right now $80m worth of torpedo drones would cover like .01% of china's coastal waters.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#695

Post by anigbrowl »

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.

I suggest reading Len Deighton's Blitzkrieg (among other WW2 books by him) because it goes into unusual detail on the industrial design and resource allocation decisions that went into tank production leading up to WW2.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#696

Post by defrost »

wredcoll wrote: post #694
defrost wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 chan…

Yeah, but what's stopping the side with carriers from just attacking your torpedo launchers? That's literally the entire point of aircraft carriers, you get to attack things while the ship itself is out of range of retaliation. If we're postulating magical "ai" attack drones loitering off the coast, what's stopping the americans from sending in their own fleet of equally magical ai attack drones to blow up all the de…

> Yeah, but what's stopping the side with carriers from just attacking your torpedo launchers?

Numbers game, what's the maximum number of targets that can be covered in a window, the cost of dealing with non torpedo launch capable platforms is the same as the cost of taking out an actual torpedo carrying launcher - the overwhelming threshold is something that is tested in games, of course.

> If we're postulating magical "ai" attack drones loitering off the coast

I'm not, I'm looking at a reasonable near term extrapolation of what China already has and tested.

> what's stopping the americans from sending in their own fleet of equally magical ai attack drones to blow up all the defenders

The usual constraints of hunting and finding in vast area

> Also, again, you'd have to know exactly where the carriers even are

Well, approximately .. and that's what China provides to Iran via sat coverage.

> right now $80m worth of torpedo drones would cover like .01% of china's coastal waters.

I thought the carriers were off Iran and staged well back? I can't see them being as far back as China myself, but perhaps you have some curious reason for wanting to spread them out some place far far away from the conflict. I have no knowledge of that, obviously.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#697

Post by fooker »

angry_octet wrote: post #691
fooker wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Practically speaking there are between 0 and 1 S-400 systems to worry about, and they will be one of the very first targets. Prompt global strike, JASSM-ER/LR, Tomahawk, AARGM-ER, JATM, even AIM-174B and 260s, they're all coming for it, and all the lesser S-300 (SA-10) / HQ-15, HQ-16/FK-3s etc. The S-300 systems in Iran were completely ineffective against IDF F-35s. Doubtful they even got a detection.

S300 and S400 are a bit different

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#698

Post by [deleted] »

wredcoll wrote: post #133
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...

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…

[deleted]

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#699

Post by fooker »

ceejayoz wrote: post #648
fooker wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> seem to struggle in Ukraine against far less sophisticated opponents

Yes, that's the recurring theme in modern warfare. Cheap mass produced shit makes sophisticated tech struggle. The US is now going to be immune from this, especially since we have stopped mass producing anything for thirty years.

Ukraine used cheap drones to destroy a few S400 setups.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#700

Post by Schiendelman »

space_fountain wrote: post #678
Schiendelman wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those satellites KNOW where the freighters are going, and check in every day on progress. They aren't looking for something that's intentionally sailing in an unpredictable direction (with no radio emissions in wartime).

Why not? It's not exactly hard? The exact capabilities aren't public, but there are companies that provide daily synthetic radar captures for the whole globe and similarly companies that do this for imagery. It would take ages but I think you and I could both right an algorithm to classify if an image or high map has an aircraft carrier in it? Even if you can't get data for the whole globe taking a photo of a 10 mile…

I understand you don't think it's hard. It's hard. I'm trying to provide information to help people here understand why. What you're proposing doesn't work. Are you interested in understanding why it doesn't work?
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