Curious why they committed so hard to stealth over electronic warfare capability — was that purely a doctrine decision, or did the sensor fusion architecture actually preclude both approaches simultaneously?
F-35 is built for the wrong war
701–710 of 719 posts
Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war
#702Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
US carrier groups probably pose the #1 strategic threat to the PRC in the Pacific. You can safely assume they throw whatever resources are necessary at the task of knowing their whereabouts.
I mean, you can try all you want, but there's limits to hiding a fleet of ships on the open sea. They are huge, emit immense heat signatures, and produce miles-long wakes while moving. As long as there are satellites overhead, they will be able to find them.
I suspect we might be talking past one another because we have different degrees of precision in mind: I'm not saying the Chinese could have a missile target lock on a carrier whenever they wanted, much less in wartime. Far from it. But I highly doubt you can reposition a carrier group without them catching wind of it within hours.
Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war
#703Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The previous poster was claiming that not only can the S400s not detect f35s, they can't adequately combat previous generation stuff either.
I can't comment on how accurate that is, but as for "cheap mass produced shit", I refer you to both times the US invaded iraq. Kill ratios on the order of literally 100 to 1. This is the point at which you can't actually overwhelm better technology with quantity.
Wars are, of course, incredibly more complicated than just measuring kill ratios and highscores as if it were a video game. There's usually multiple factions involved, all with differing objectives and those factions and objectives can change and mutate during the course of the war anyways.
If we look at a war the US unequivocally lost, defending south vietnam from the north vietnam invasion, there are a whole bunch of factors but exactly none of them involved some kind of "high tech too advanced" weapon system being defeated by "lower tech but more mass produced" systems.
Doing some incredibly basic research shows that the actual dollar cost of the vietnam war was, relative to the american economy and so on, pretty small, and not a major factor in the ultimate result of the war. Producing fighter jets or whatever that were 10% cheaper doesn't seem like it would have made much of a difference.
This actually kind of proves my point, we can "go to war" with iraq or iran and as long as we're not implementing literal conscription, the US is willing to maintain those wars for a very long time. There's a gigantic difference in public response between "2 pilots died when f35s were ambushed" and "10,000 american soldiers died in this month's battles around Baghdad". One of those gets you some headlines and a few protests, the other gets you voted out of office.
Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war
#704Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What are they going to do, fly over and bomb washington??
Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war
#705Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
US carrier groups probably pose the #1 strategic threat to the PRC in the Pacific. You can safely assume they throw whatever resources are necessary at the task of knowing their whereabouts. I mean, you can try all you want, but there's limits to hiding a fleet of ships on the open sea. They are huge, emit immense heat signatures, and produce miles-long wakes while moving. As long as there are satellites overhead, th…
This is the sort of arms race that is going to change every year. I just read an article that claimed that China has launched a system of satellites that use non-visual means to track ships in the pacific (via.. emissions or radar or something?) and china can certainly afford to put a bunch of them in orbit.
It's not impossible to track a carrier group via satellites, but it's not trivial either, you can't just, like, open up your windows gui and click on a satellite and click the button that says "follow this carrier" because like satellites orbit and fly around the earth and the ships can alter course when you don't have eyes on them and so on and so forth.
And yeah, as you point out, there's a big difference between having a satellite picture showing a probable carrier group at X and Y coordinates and being able to actually strike the thing.
Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war
#706Earlier 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…
> Aircraft carriers and tanks are both capable machines built and designed for a different environment than we have now.
People have been saying this for approximately the last 50 years. Maybe it's true today, but the odds are against it.
Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war
#707Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 magi…
> The usual constraints of hunting and finding in vast area
So how are you hunting and finding the carriers in the first place? You can't have it both ways.
> 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.
We're talking about a hypothetical US carrier war against china. Is there something interesting to talk about with regards to iran trying to defend against carriers?
Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war
#708Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 magi…
> The usual constraints of hunting and finding in vast area So how are you hunting and finding the carriers in the first place? You can't have it both ways. > 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, obviou…
It's 2026, PRC has GEOsync ISR (optic+SAR) with persistent coverage of Pacific and beyond. Combined with 500+ other ISR sats, they basically have full coverage in relevant theatres, with hand offs for tracking/queuing/targeting. There's really nowhere for surface combatants to evade/hide anymore vs PRC tier adversary. US doesn't have ASAT capabilities to shootdown beyond LEO. Without ranting too much, highend C4ISR is basically massive enabler/coordination force multiplier, technically it's feasible to synergize highend C4ISR and upgraded COTs low end drones swarms to kill carrier groups, either via mathematically guaranteed saturation salvos or push A2D2 past max carrier standoff range, i.e. no viable sorties without entering no escape zone. Of course tier1 response is still hypersonics (including drones), but theoretically the techstack now exists for low end loitering swarms (well relative to PRC low end) to also do so for much less.
Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war
#709Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are semi- and fully submersible variants on the way, that can stay underwater for prolonged periods of time! Sea Baby is growing into quite a few different things over the months.
The submersible drones are quite slow, and require significant support from external sensor platforms. They're useful for defending or denying constrained areas but they can't do much to protect a Chinese invasion fleet near Taiwan.
It remains to be seen whether your assay is correct or not
Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war
#710Earlier quoted context omitted.
US carrier groups probably pose the #1 strategic threat to the PRC in the Pacific. You can safely assume they throw whatever resources are necessary at the task of knowing their whereabouts. I mean, you can try all you want, but there's limits to hiding a fleet of ships on the open sea. They are huge, emit immense heat signatures, and produce miles-long wakes while moving. As long as there are satellites overhead, th…
This is the sort of arms race that is going to change every year. I just read an article that claimed that China has launched a system of satellites that use non-visual means to track ships in the pacific (via.. emissions or radar or something?) and china can certainly afford to put a bunch of them in orbit. It's not impossible to track a carrier group via satellites, but it's not trivial either, you can't just, like…
I found this worthwhile read on the topic:
https://warontherocks.com/carrier-strike-groups-should-be-re...