The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed • Hacker News Board

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#821

Post by bluejekyll » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 4:52 AM UTC

Kranar wrote: post #814

thorwasdfasdf wrote: post #811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but why in the world does it need to cost that much? what's wrong with just using the jets we already have. I mean we have like a gazillion of those things. what percentage of the military/armed forces is currently being used or has been used over the last 10 years. I'm guessing it's a very small percentage.

Because the U.S. military basically runs a massive socialized jobs program and every politician works to get a piece of it for their state. No politician wants to be the one to make the case to shut down the factories that produce these things, even when the military has advised Congress to do so [1]. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-end-of-t...

What I’ve always found strange about this is that there would be far better areas to spend money that would directly benefit society. Education, rail, manufacturing modernization, health.

Instead we have jets we don’t need, and tanks sitting in a desert unused.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#822

Post by vinceguidry » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 4:56 AM UTC

roninhacker wrote: post #806

djur wrote: post #793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with that is that there is no direct correlation between tax receipts and budget outlays. Money being spent in 2021 is not being "paid for" by taxes received in 2021, or for that matter in 2022, 2023, or any other particular year. That's the theoretical problem; the practical problems you encounter as a result include how you deal with programs that are technically 'paid for' by specific taxes (do you try…

I mean, forgive me for being obtuse, but...why do we even pay taxes at all? Like, I understand the "prole logic" of a balance between income and expenditures, but if the government doesn't seem to care, why should I?

Paying taxes is a form of civic participation. Sounds crazy, but reading about the system Russia uses makes me leery of forcing the government to make itself financially independent of its citizenry.

Theirs is a system called "tributary taxation." How it works is, anybody who is anybody in Russia has a boss. Not a boss like you have a boss, a political boss, think Boss Tweed back in the day. That boss has a boss, who has a boss, and so on until you have the one person in Russia all this money flows to, President Putin.

How much do you pay to your boss? As much as you wish/can. This isn't the mob. The price for falling behind isn't Ivan turning your knees into baseballs. You simply find yourself slowly forced out of political relevance. Pay to play at it's highest and finest. At a certain level you become untouchable by low-level cops and the like.

The government getting its operating budget from us makes the government accountable to citizens in the end. What we call 'corruption' becomes the norm otherwise.

More here: https://www.quora.com/Will-Russia-abandon-the-tributary-taxa...

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#823

Post by woeirua » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 4:56 AM UTC

onepointsixC wrote: post #414

woeirua wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to replace 10 excellent pilots with 10 good pilots to win a war of attrition. You just need 10 pilots that can fly, lock a missile and fire. Because if you're losing 10 planes to every 1 that you're killing the life expectancy of any pilot is going to be really low period. Counterpoints: 1 - Most critical infrastructure is located far inland away from areas that are vulnerable to cruise missiles and th…

>You don't need to replace 10 excellent pilots with 10 good pilots to win a war of attrition. You just need 10 pilots that can fly, lock a missile and fire. That's not how it works. The F35 will detect those pilots far sooner than they will detect it and shoot them down before they even see them. Combine a battle space with dozens of MALD decoys flying around drawing shots, those poor pilots would have never had a ch…

> That's not how it works. The F35 will detect those pilots far sooner than they will detect it and shoot them down before they even see them. Combine a battle space with dozens of MALD decoys flying around drawing shots, those poor pilots would have never had a chance because the F-35 pilots would never give their enemy the chance to shoot at them in the first place.

It matters when we're talking about full scale war between major powers. For some context, the US alone built 85,000 planes at the height of WW2 in one year alone. Granted planes back then were much simpler, but industrial processes have significantly improved. It's reasonable to say that the Chinese could produce 10,000+ 3rd or 4th gen fighters per year. Even at ridiculous kill ratios of 100:1 for each F22 and F35 it's easy to see that the balance of power would be pretty tenuous there. If the US wants to decisively win, it needs to ensure surge production capacity of up to several thousand stealth fighters per year.

Since the US let the INF lapse it will certainly build longer range cruise missiles. The entirety of mainland China will certainly be within range of those missiles from a variety of platforms within a few years if not sooner.

Not overnight, but it can be done.

Generals in every war for the last 150 years have been sure that technology would let them break the back of their opponents in record time. The reality is that in almost every case wars turn into long drawn out affairs that rarely go as well as one side had hoped before the conflict started.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#824

Post by kaonashi » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 5:08 AM UTC

The goal seems to have been to siphon as much money as possible to defense contractors while being politically unassailable, so I think it's succeeded admirably.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#825

Post by Gustomaximus » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 5:29 AM UTC

First, not an expert, just armchair critic so take what I say with a large pinch of salt, but...

I think something US should take out of this is consider what Russia do with their monkey model strategy. Basically with something like tank/jet they do 2 models, one with all the bells and whistles and the other is a simple version.

This has 2 main uses;

1) Export market so they can sell simpler/cheaper and not share all tech. America does this somewhat but more on the tech protection side I believe.

2) Manufacturing output potential, so in a war countries win in the either the first strike or attrition. If you hit the attrition stage you want simplified options so factories can output faster vs the multiples the premium version take in time and resource.

If they had this, it might have given a low cost daily driver option while not forgoing the top end capability.

The other thing I thing Russia does I feel countries like mine (Australia) and other western nations should do more of is work out how to expand military into absorbing civilians. This way you can scale down the size generally whilst having solid plans on how to scale up quickly beyond the usual reserves. I've raised this before but people say military tech is too advanced. But I feel humans are smart and adaptable, I've little doubt if they look into this they would realise maybe women in their 60's (example/guess as far from normal military recruits) might make great radio operators with minimal training or drive supply lorries. Having this knowledge would give a huge force multiplier to armies if they want to scale fast and ideally help reduce the need for as large standing forces.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#826

Post by Retric » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 5:32 AM UTC

greedo wrote: post #727

Retric wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Modern sensors, communications systems, missiles, etc are absolutely crucial on a modern battlefield. Further, the F16’s people are talking about very much needed a replacement. The newest was built in 2005 and while it’s a solid multi-role, all weather, air-to-air and air-to-ground fighter the design is showing it’s age. But, the F35 isn’t simply a modernized F16 now it does stealth, STOVL, etc. So you need to c…

Where are you getting your information the the newest F-16 was built in 2005? F-16s are still in production. Whether it's the Block 60 or the Block 70/72, the F-16 is being equipped with AESA, can carry almost every Western weapon, and other than lacking stealth, is still quite competitive in the air.

My understanding was the last US F16 was delivered in 2005 with remaining production going to international partners. EX: https://www.defenseworld.net/news/24742/Lockheed_Martin_Deli...

Modernization of existing aircraft continued, but the US’s physical aircraft are only going to last to ~2040.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#827

Post by rurounijones » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 5:33 AM UTC

hyko wrote: post #51

jbob2000 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Empires fall from within. Yes, nobody will stop the US with military, and nobody would try because that's not how you win. You don't need a big military to crush the fragile supply chain that a plane like this demands.

I don’t really understand this line of reasoning; it’s not like the person bearing the most rudimentary weapons is at an advantage? What’s the plan, lose in aerial combat but win in a fist fight? Who says it has a fragile supply chain anyway? It certainly has a complex one, but then so do things like nuclear weapons and nobody is clamouring to abandon them on that basis. Protecting that chain and the logistics around…

I think the point is that if you want to harm a nation you have various avenues of attack of which overt military action is only one.

If the US is unbeatable militarily then you, as a poorer advesary, don't try to match it, you use one of the other avenues like causing political de-stabilisation for example, interfere with elections maybe.

Therefore is the military persuing "perfect" at high expense instead of "good enough" at a lower expense which would still be good enough to fulfil its requirements.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#828

Post by flockonus » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 5:33 AM UTC

It absolutely blows my mind how antiquate air force research is. An effort to develp an array of remotely controlled C4 packing "kamikaze" drones that when produces in mass would cost about $1k each is infitnitely more interesting, and yet gov. spends this kind of money on over complicated technology.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#829

Post by brokenmachine » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 5:41 AM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #244

misiti3780 wrote: post #86

The saddest thing about all of this IMO is they have been working on this for 14 years, and how much money was spent/wasted? Now, read about Skunkworks - they were able to build the SR71 (without supercomputers) in less than half that time and for a fraction of the cost. This isn't just planes, this seems to be everything nowadays. Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chan…

I think your points are certainly common ones, but unfortunately they rely on three major misunderstandings. The first is that all the "cool shit" we built in the first half of the century was the low-hanging fruit of new scientific understandings and materials. It's not that we were smarter, it's nothing to do with toxicity, it's just that we exhausted most of what you can easily do with nuclear, steel, engines, etc…

>Being able to access Wikipedia or Google through speech recognition

Terrible. Absolutely hopeless. Every few years I have another go at speech recognition, and it still sucks.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#830

Post by angry_octet » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 5:42 AM UTC

greedo wrote: post #754

angry_octet wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drone swarm concept is irrelevant to the high and fast fight, but very relevant to infantry and armour. Of course HN is getting it confused. '3D printed jets!' they cry. However smart jets will be a thing, as evidenced by the Boeing Loyal Wingman program (awful name). The uninhabited jet will push further into the engagement envelope, pull higher Gs, risk SAM lock-on to take out the SAM, fly in the dust like Torn…

The failure of Pantsir in Libya has been fascinating. One has to wonder if it's a failure in design/tech or in training and operations? Same with the drones that were used with impunity in Nagorno-Karabakh. I also wonder if the Russian's have been hyping their SAM systems too much. Not that they're not formidable, but they often seem to make their A2AD systems sound impenetrable.

If you're flying an Apache and you crest a hill and there's a ZSU or an SA-9 on the other side that is a brown pants situation. Obviously you try everything possible to avoid that engagement envelope. But with a drone it is feasible to push harder.

It's possible that the Pantsir-S export firmware isn't as good, but being totally spanked can't be good for export sales. The Turkish drones (eg Bayraktar TB2) have the indigenous KORAL EW system for both sensing and jamming, and given the platform SWaP constraints it must be pretty smart, though I don't know how they are preventing algorithm compromise given drones get shot down fairly often. Crypto presumably.

Given the relatively static setup, it is likely that the positions of the SAM sites is heavily compromised via local informants, leakage from cell phones and aerial surveillance. And rather than integrated A2AD it is probably more isolated sites. But still very impressive for a 659kg drone to be able to take them out.