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

#951

Post by dillondoyle » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 6:09 PM UTC

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #848

dillondoyle wrote: post #803

If we are looking for 'affordable, lightweight fighters' to 'complement a small future fleet of' F35s sholdn't we just build a ton of uber cheap drones? The F35 is supposed to have amazing networked situational awareness (idk the military terms) which seems like a great platform to control a fleet of slave drones? Kind of like an aircraft carrier, surrounded by a lot of support.

The square-cube law implies some performance characteristics that only big-enough craft can fulfill, and at that size point you aren't saving money with "disposable" cheap-and-small drones. Specifically, air resistance scales with cross sectional area, while fuel storage and engine power output scales with volume. You can trade off fuel for engine power by making a more missile-like design, but then you're left with…

But wouldn't there still be a lot of savings for not having a human and all the controls that come with it - and maybe some more flexibility in design?

It sounds like they are looking for air-to-air replacement?

Not caring bombs saves a lot of weight and size.

Hell maybe even just do what terrorists have learned and make cheap kamikaze drones which are really fast and simply blow up.

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

#952

Post by brazzy » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 6:38 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #527

brazzy wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be communism, and we can't have that. The reason why the USA uses the military as a jobs program is that it's the only thing that gets bipartisan support.

Communism does an even worse job of allocating resources.

The point is that having a government jobs program to build infrastructure has absolutely nothing to do with communism.

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

#953

Post by Barracoon » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 6:42 PM UTC

cameldrv wrote: post #281

GcVmvNhBsU wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious what your background is to make those statements. My experience from Red Flag and other exercises is that the 5th gens (22 & 35) have a much better K/D and survivability. When you expend all of your stand off weapons or need to get a B-2 deep into a contested airspace, including against SAMs, you need a 35 going in to do sanitization. No F-16 is fighting off both SAMs and a huge ass wave of J-10s or any J-20s…

Is this really realistic though? I'm curious about your professional perspective. My impression of the present/near future of air combat is a stealthy fighter with AMRAAMs in front, radar off, and a quarterback aircraft in back out of missile range, with the radar on. The front fighter fires and turns around, and the missile gets mid-course updates from the quarterback aircraft. When the AMRAAMs are depleted, you lea…

So if you buy into the concept of maneuver warfare you want to hit the enemy's center of gravity and reduce their will to fight. If you're trying to do that to China, you need to hit them hard and fast deep in their country's borders (I mean, Russia too to an extent). If you play this tit for tat fighter threat game, that doesn't happen and you're essentially in a war of attrition. That means you don't hold B-2s until a fighter threat is neutralized, you send them in to hit the CoG early so the war lasts days instead of years.

F-35s are really going to be doing counter IADS so their loadout reflects that. Maybe you get a couple A2A missiles loaded in, but primarily for self defense. If you want offensive counter air, you're bringing the F-22s (or probably the NGAD) loaded out appropriately.

Anyway all this just affirms the original idea, which is that you can't prosecute a war against peer adversaries with 4th gen fighters. Our 4th gens can still take down the enemy air threat, but the IADS means those 4th gens are not even getting into the air space.

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

#954

Post by runarberg » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 7:21 PM UTC

pasabagi wrote: post #860

shakezula wrote: post #840

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a hardcore leftist, even I have to admit there are benefits of neoliberal policy to a strong internationally present military that at least pretends to uphold human rights and has a bunch of other countries that also pretend the same. It’s better than the alternative.

I think the war in Yemen is a good case study of the downsides of the US as global police. It is a war that was only possible through the US and UK supplying arms, and was prosecuted by a nation that doesn't even pretend to uphold human rights. This is also pretty typical - while many western nations 'care' about human rights, they don't see any problem with arming client regimes who are often gratuitously sadistic,…

The human rights track record of the USA military should for sure include:

* Arming the Saudi regime with intent to sustain the horrors in Yemen

* Extrajudicial killings with drones in various sovereign non-warring nations such as Pakistan and Libya often with far more civilian casualties then combatant.

* Illegal indefinite detention and torture in offshore prison such as Guantanamo.

Those are the human rights horrors which the USA military is currently engaging in. History shows us that it is capable of far worse and there is no reason to believe it won’t engage in in the near future.

As far as security goes there is little reason to believe that it extends any further then to secure the interest of private companies engaging in foreign affairs. It seems to me that the human rights narrative of GPs is entirely fiction.

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

#955

Post by N1H1L » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 7:27 PM UTC

darkteflon wrote: post #809

bumby wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The root of the F-35 program's problems is a cost plus style contract that gave Lockheed every incentive to overrun I’m fond of the saying “once you understand people’s incentives, you understand everything” as it applies to contracting. I will add, however, that fixed price contracts have their own problems as it relates to cutting corners. E.g., it can put downward pressure on retaining talent and performing best…

Incentives seem to have huge explanatory value wherever you look, don’t they. I’d like to add a classic Warren Buffet quote into the mix: “Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.” Does anyone have any views on what constitutes canonical reading on incentives? Some of the classic game theory works? Would love to hear opinions on this.

Incentives in my opinion leads to Goodhart's law [1].

In fact, I will go a step further - most incentives are chosen by well meaning people. There is neither malice nor incompetence going on. What happens is that every incentive can be perverted, and will be perverted over time. Over time, then that incentive, that was once chosen with good intentions, becomes perverse.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

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

#956

Post by N1H1L » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 7:33 PM UTC

sayhar wrote: post #485

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the US does have a problem with building civil engineering projects today, that dynamic isn't really what happened with the F-35. The root of the F-35 program's problems is a cost plus style contract that gave Lockheed every incentive to overrun on cost and time table. Ash Carter fixed that by telling Lockheed if they didn't agree to his new contract he'd kill the entire thing. And oh hey what a surprise sudden…

Thank you for bringing a structural, informed approach to this. I'm getting a little tired of the tendency to handwave blame "cultural decline" rather than actual looking into the policies and details.

Even more important to understand that we humans as a species are extraordinarily poor at understanding complex systems. Larger, older organizations will become complex over time, and complexity increases at higher than linear rates. This is why a lean, happy startup at 50 employees often becomes an unmanageable disaster at 200 employees.

Human societies have become incredibly more complex over time, and development of communication has contributed to it.

The point I am trying to make here is that this is not cultural decline, but rather a society that has grown incredibly more complex, while we humans have not learnt how to deal with it.

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

#957

Post by runarberg » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 7:38 PM UTC

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 might be digging my self in some mud here but when you say:

> Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chance we could do something like that in this toxic environment of today.

Are you for real? It is hard to find any more toxic place in resent history then during the horrors of World War 2.

This time saw a holocaust with forced labor and mass killings of religious and ethnic minorities in multiple countries accross at least 3 continents. It saw indiscriminate bombing of heavy civilian population centers in densely populated centers in Asia and Europe. It saw mass famine and starvation in several regions of the world. About 3% of the entire world population died in these horrors, and many more lost their homes and livelihoods.

And you mention the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as some kind of an achievement. Between 129,000–226,000 people died in that terror, and two whole cities were leveled to the ground, with the mass homelessness and medical and social emergencies that follows.

Perhaps it is not your intention to devalue these horrors and you are simply trying emphasize what was possible when the political climate was more unified. But please be careful with your words. Don’t describe our time as toxic while glorifying the most toxic times ever witnessed in our recent history.

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

#958

Post by bumby » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 7:38 PM UTC

N1H1L wrote: post #955

darkteflon wrote: post #809

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incentives seem to have huge explanatory value wherever you look, don’t they. I’d like to add a classic Warren Buffet quote into the mix: “Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.” Does anyone have any views on what constitutes canonical reading on incentives? Some of the classic game theory works? Would love to hear opinions on this.

Incentives in my opinion leads to Goodhart's law [1]. In fact, I will go a step further - most incentives are chosen by well meaning people. There is neither malice nor incompetence going on. What happens is that every incentive can be perverted, and will be perverted over time. Over time, then that incentive, that was once chosen with good intentions, becomes perverse. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_…

Incompetence may be too strong of a word but I think there can be a lack of thinking about second and third order effects when the “measure becomes the target”.

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

#959

Post by brianwawok » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 7:43 PM UTC

chillfox wrote: post #709

brianwawok wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it have a human pilot? Any combat aircraft project with a human on board should be stopped. It has no hope of long term parity of a drone controlled airplane without having to cart around meat bags with limited speed and turning power.

The problem there is if it gets hacked then in the best case it's grounded and in the worst case it's now the enemies aircraft.

And humans can't be hacked?

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

#960

Post by chipsa » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 7:59 PM UTC

greedo wrote: post #943

xnyan wrote: post #933

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The F-22 was and is an excellent aircraft I love jets and the F-22 is both my favorite fighter and likely the best air superiority fighter in the world, so I get where you are coming from, but it is not an excellent aircraft for the current USAF mission when you look at it as a whole. Not only is the procurement cost of an F-22 extremely high, operationally it has been plagued by issues that hare only partially ele…

I look at the F-22 as an aircraft that was born too soon. The ATF program started in 1981, but nobody anticipated the fall of the Soviet Union. So it really never had a real need. Now its technology is outdated (in terms of electronics), and the stealth technology is expensive to maintain and support. It's still an incredible fighter, arguably the best in the world. It's like some of the pocket battleships produced b…

Essentially no battleships that weren't complete by the start of the war for whichever country actually saw combat in WWII. The vast majority of battleships that saw combat were from the interwar period, if not WWI.

Also pocket battleship mostly refers to the heavy cruisers that Germany built during their rearmament program.