Alternatively, it could be viewed as one of the most successful US military projects ever.
It has funneled X* amount of tax money to the military-industrial complex. Siphoning that money seems to have been the US militaries primary function for several decades.
Why do you reduce the choices between "building useless piece of hardware" and "bombing innocent people" ? There are lots of choices here. Just a sample : less tax or invest more in health and education.
The military industrial complex in the US is a self-perpetuating system that just so happens to have the influence and lobbying power to get the funding.
It would have been great if some harmless or even beneficial industry had developed in this way, but that is not the case unfortunately.
The US also has a burgeoning prison-industrial complex which also, unfortunately, results in bad consequences for innocent people.
You can see these self-perpetuating systems all over the place in modern civilization. The mechanism by which they grow is the same one which causes management in large corporations to grow exponentially. The bureaucracy will grow to fill the resources available.
In the case of these self-perpetuating systems, they can grow in lobbying power and influence and increase their available resources, which allows them to expand and gain even more lobbying power and influence, and so on.
The core business could be military, or making fake vomit, it doesnt matter.
ps. 'self-perpetuating system' is just a term I use to talk about these things. Maybe theres a widely accepted term I dont know. Also all this is just a product of my own reading and ruminations.
According to Lockheed Martin, the F-35 is responsible for 194,000 jobs across 46 states. From the outset, the project was designed to be too big to fail. It's the boondoggle to end all boondoggles.
The cost is incredibly high... but as I'm reading the article, it sounds like most of these issues would apply to any fighter we build _with these capabilities_. How much of this is just the cost of building these new capabilities?
The capabilities described sound useful. And some of what we learn from it can be applied in the future to new planes. So is it a good idea to simply back off from the advanced software, and build a dumber plane just to save money? The f16 is 40 years old.. we're going to have these new planes around for a long time.
The old way of having contracters compete with designs and the loser getting $0 isn't possible when costs are this high. You need a guaranteed market or nobody will participate.
The F-35 was the result of such a program. Lockheed and Boeing were each give a billion dollars and a set of requirements and told to make the best plane possible.
Capabilities are not inevitable. You have to create R&D programs to bring them to fruition. Is the complaint here that its rolled up under the same line item?
The whole concept of manned jet fighters is laughably obsolete today. If you were designing an actual modern weapon it would be a mostly autonomous drone. Basically think of a rocket with a lot more intelligence in it. These things would be much lighter since they wouldn't need to carry a pilot, would be able to handle Gs that would turn humans into a paste, and react to changes in the environment in microseconds. There would be no competition between that and canned meat flying around. Note that Russia is moving precisely in that direction with their modern arsenal https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/best-bad-idea-ever-w...
Especially for air to ground attack this is true. Not having a human takes away lot's safety margin needs.
The question there is the impact. If you just risk some thing and money it lowers the barrier for going into action, as the risk of having to handing a flag to a pilot's family goes away.
However a such plane also has other roles. On domestic protection a key task of alarm squadrons is to take visual contact to pilots of civilian planes who lost radio contact. Also for surveillance/intelligence roles a human on board can have a better overview and decide where to go.
This approach will work for air to air as well as air to ground. You have a rocket powered drone platform that can launch micro-drones to attack targets. It could carry thousands of them and dispatch them to destroy pretty much anything around it in a matter of seconds.
Same thing goes for surveillance. Have a supersonic carrier drone fly over the target area, release thousands of small drones to photograph the shit out of it in every spectrum and then relay that back to command.
Cluster bombs are outlawed in many countries (not in the US, though) as it's too likely to hit civilians.
Also the more advanced those micro drones are, the more expensive is the deployment and the more interest an opponent has in collecting unexploded devices for reverse engineering them.
> The question there is the impact. If you just risk some thing and money it lowers the barrier for going into action, as the risk of having to handing a flag to a pilot's family goes away.
Let's say an hostile space alien invasion happen in 10 years : would it not be better to not sacrifice human at all in the fight?
> Also for surveillance/intelligence roles a human on board can have a better overview and decide where to go.
With technology, we can create an arbitrary numbers of new sensing capabilities into the machine. A human will be surpassed by a machine before our generation passes away.
> Let's say an hostile space alien invasion happen in 10 years : would it not be better to not sacrifice human at all in the fight?
Our plane technology is quite useless in such a situation (and considering that alpha centauri is 5 light years away and aliens likely use the same physics 10 years is quite unlikely ;) )
> With technology, we can create an arbitrary numbers of new sensing capabilities into the machine. A human will be surpassed by a machine before our generation passes away.
Often times the combination of human instinct and machine capability is still the best for many tasks.
> Our plane technology is quite useless in such a situation (and considering that alpha centauri is 5 light years away and aliens likely use the same physics 10 years is quite unlikely ;) )
You don't know, anything that would preemptively help to save human lives should be considered. Sending unmanned fighters or drones to probe a spaceship and gather data is wiser than sending humans to the task.
> Often times the combination of human instinct and machine capability is still the best for many tasks.
Sure. For how long tho. Also, when you fly a plane at twice the sound speed with a screen in front of you, you are already inside like a total simulated environment, your only human instinct used here is your survival instinct, which will, conveniently, save a multi-million dollars
plane from being destroyed.
> Sure. For how long tho. Also, when you fly a plane at twice the sound speed with a screen in front of you, you are already inside like a total simulated environment,
It's also not the speed one collects detailed intelligence in, which was the subject.
And yet there aren't any operational autonomous fighters and some of the higher performance autonomous aircraft have limitations that restrict their effectiveness. For example, the Global Hawk cannot fly through icing conditions[0].
In addition, air superiority fighters - the kind that emphasize high-G, stealth, and speed are somewhat outmoded in the current environment. The last decade of fighting has been against an irregular enemy without much more than pickup trucks, hiding in mountain villages. Emphasis has been moved to close air support aircraft such as the F-15E, AC-130, and the A-10. These aircraft loiter and talk with forward air controllers to direct fire into specific locations, such as a certain building or a ridgetop. How would we communicate this information to an autonomous high speed aircraft from the middle of a firefight? People haven't even been able field autonomous cars in silicon valley.
> People haven't even been able field autonomous cars in silicon valley.
The problem of unmanned maneuvers is a lot simpler in a 3D space without any obstacles than on a road with many more uncertainties and information to process. See SpaceX achievement.
Last time I suggested something similar, it was pointed out that unmanned aircraft are highly susceptible to jamming. Thus, the only way to make them really resilient is to make them completely operable without any human intervention.
It would not be cheap (if even possible currently) to write the software to handle all the unique cases that a human can deal with. To make matters worse, if the enemy breaks into your military drones, they can flip your entire fleet of drones right back against you.
That scenario reminds me of the start of Battlestar Galactica where the cylons destroy pretty much all of humanity because everything was so network connected they were able to hack into everything and the only ship that really survives the first strike is an old one that relies on humans to do most things.
> Last time I suggested something similar, it was pointed out that unmanned aircraft are highly susceptible to jamming. Thus, the only way to make them really resilient is to make them completely operable without any human intervention.
What would a human pilot be able to do if all the fighter instruments are jammed? At best the human pilot may be able to escape the battlefield I guess.
Use the machine gun, missles might still work, maneuver the jet using their vision.
A drone has to be able to do all of that and make those decisions with no human on the ground to control it if it is jammed from communication. I don't think computers can beat a human in that type of scenario yet.
Human pilots train constantly to operate effectively in a hostile electromagnetic environment. And the aircraft are designed around it. This is expected.
I mean, yes we have. This is how the Go AI was trained to beat the world champion, and it also helps to develop the autonomous cars at Waymo. Give it like 5 years and you have enough compute power to simulate many more data and situations.
I've read all that stuff before and none of it addresses the fundamental problems at issue here. We are realistically still decades of intense R&D work away from having an autonomous AI that can respond with enough flexibility to rapidly changing real world situations.
We are realistically closer to autonomous AI than you imagine. Pessimism, budget planning that didn't anticipate it, ethical concerns and human employment are slowing down the development.
I would imagine that these kinds of craft would be autonomous. You'd designate the area for them to deploy in, and they basically sterilize anything that moves there.
In simulations " But a new artificial intelligence system, ALPHA, has been besting expert pilots in combat simulations, even when the A.I. is given a handicap." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-36650848
And with a pilotless F16 "During the exercises, the F-16 planned and executed an air strike according to "mission priorities and available assets." The F-16 also managed "dynamically react to a changing threat environment" while managing "capability failures, route deviations, and loss of communication" https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a26028/f-...
I have no idea of the actual challenge, but given the missile itself is unmanned, a human would less be likely to escape if he is under pressure, stressed, or tired than an AI.
Here the AI and human would have access to the same data to make a decision and would be able to equally control the plane's movements. Surely the AI is going to out-perform the human in this task.
> Surely the AI is going to out-perform the human in this task.
Therein lies the problem. We don't have good AI to achieve these types of tasks and are not nearly close enough to achieving it for military applications. The notion that we can just make an autonomous killing machine at this stage is absolutely laughable marketing hype.
If you invest a few billions dollars to the task, you will have your specialized AI with all the sensors needed to out-perform human at this task in less than a decade. There is a reason Google employees refused to work for military.
> If you invest a few billions dollars to the task, you will have your specialized AI with all the sensors needed to out-perform human at this task in less than a decade.
Just how much money do you think the USG has invested in this space? DARPA ain't no slouch. In fact, you're using one of their projects to shit-post.
> There is a reason Google employees refused to work for military.
> I fail to see what this has to do with anything?
If the Pentagon was going to partner with Google to develop drones, maybe it means the talented people required to develop such tech simply don't want to work in the military field, but they exist elsewhere working on others projects. Money can solve all the material problems, but if people still don't want to work toward autonomous jet fighters or killing machines, then it can explains why it doesn't exist at all.
Today's systems, such as planes or engines, are so complex that the only way to achieve today's level of efficiency is to use numerical simulations, aka Computer aided designs. Google excels at organizing information, processing big data and getting answers with predictive models, they do it better than anyone else and it can be potentially applied to just about any field.
I haven't seen any evidence that Google is better at computational fluid dynamics than the large aerospace companies. This is just silly fanboyism with no basis in reality.
Your naive faith in software developers is touching, but this is entirely speculative. Until someone actually does it we don't know how much it will cost or how long it will take. Meanwhile we need to make plans based on technologies that are actually available, or at least have a clear development path.
> Your naive faith in software developers is touching, but this is entirely speculative. Until someone actually does it we don't know how much it will cost or how long it will take.
What about using those 1.4 trillions dollars to support R&D, businesses and help people to live longer and have a good life?
What about investing 1.4 trillions in genome research? in cancer research? in renewable and nuclear energy production?
Sorry, but I prefer to be a naive software developer helping connecting people together around the world than someone who helps random people to get kill.
We are not in the cold war anymore, people don't communicate with papers. We can solve problems by other means than sending missiles to each others, we can see beyond the military propaganda of the countries. We know when something is possible but not preferable : killing drones are one of those project. Technically feasible, ethically not acceptable.
No because AIs don't yet have optical sensors equivalent to human eyeballs, nor can they perform real time sensor fusion as effectively as a human brain. Maybe someday, but not today.
Please, missiles dynamics are easily predictable. You can cover your plane with detection systems, not only optical, at every angles. How would an human be better at that is beyond my understanding
No need, you just use numbers. Imagine a drone carrier platform that carries thousands of smart drone missiles and releases them in the target area. The only goal of the missiles is to lock onto anything that moves and hit it. Sure, you'll take a few out, but it's a game of numbers in the end.
A drone carrier platform that carries "thousands" of smart drone missiles would be too large and heavy for practical operations, or the missiles would be too small to have a useful range. The basic laws of physics still apply.
If you couldn't have a single platform with useful range, you could just make many platforms each carrying 100s of missiles instead. Each missile could itself have a clustered warhead. These platforms would still have superior maneuverability to jet fighters, and you could put unshielded nuclear engines on them as Russia is doing right now with their new cruise missiles https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/best-bad-idea-ever-w...
This is something that's simply not possible to do if you have a human pilot who requires massive shielding and can only handle small Gs.
Initially it was planned to become operational in 2016, but still in development, new plan is 2020-2021. With the current sanctions against Russia and it’s economic impact, I’ll be very surprised if they deliver.
In addition, that thing is silo-based, i.e. only launches from well-known locations. Naval-based ICBMs, esp. submarine-based, are more reliable.
Sort of. Some aircraft can detect targeting radar or missile launch thermal signatures to a limited extent from some directions. But it isn't very reliable or precise. Human eyeballs are still more effective in many cases.
Likely yes, but it's already been designed for humans at great cost (financial and limits in terms of size/shape, forces, etc), so this is arguably much worse than designing it solely for unmanned operation.
That is correct, the article is written to support the narrative of 'National Disaster' rather than 'Stretch goals, slowly being reached by continued development.'
What is left unspoken is that while the JSF is behind schedule and over budget, it has design specs that are currently unavailable to the "enemy" forces. So when the US builds and fields a new fighter (like the F-22 before it) it forces opposing forces to build a counter to it or some way to defeat it. In a "cold war" situation where nobody is actually shooting at each other and are just running simulations to see who would win if they did start shooting, it allows a larger economic nation to defeat the weaker economic nation by driving their economy into dirt. It also means that as long as a country is far enough ahead in that calculus it can make threats (implied or overt) that people who don't want to lose power will respect.
The first F-35 squadron has reached operational status[1] and that means that war planners have to include the F-35's capabilities in their simulations. And if in those plans they find their own aircraft are now obsolete[2] then they will have to back down rather than "poke the bear" as the vernacular goes in order to avoid a conflict that would see them removed.
The F-35 is an expensive weapons program. People want to "kill it" for different reasons. That is has encountered issues during its development are not good reasons, nor were they good reasons when they were used against the F-22 either. But the F-35 is not a 'disaster'.
There's no scenario where the US builds an advanced manned fighter or bomber of any type where it doesn't cost ~$75 million plus per unit (Russia's MiG-35 will cost them at least $80-$100m in total lifetime costs per unit for example; the Chinese Chengdu J-20 is going to be $150-$200m lifetime total cost per unit or more). And then throw in the lifetime maintenance costs. Now build two thousand of them or more, and there you go, right back at a $1 trillion program. That seemingly crazy figure will go up perpetually with inflation over decades. The next big program that involves thousands of planes will be $2 trillion, and so on.
Spending $400 billion to acquire 2,000+ planes isn't the real problem, although the click-bait headlines pretend that it is. That cost would exist no matter what, we're not building & maintaining manned planes for decades for $25m each, period. The problem is the F35 isn't really great at any specific thing.
And of course we should have just built more f22s. And we need something to replace A10s. Why can't we just redesign new planes like the f22 and a10 using today's tech, repeating the excellent design elements, no need to make them that different than before - they should be relatively cheap, right?
Certainly it would be possible to design new aircraft with new technology. But it would take 10+ years, meanwhile the existing fleet is literally falling apart from heavy use. And there's no reason to expect an alternative design would be significantly cheaper.
$1.4 trillion is a scary number to throw around but it's a lifetime cost. Add up the total life cost of all the F-16s and F/A-18s that it will be replacing for comparison.
I'm no fan of the F-35 but it is what we've got for the next 50 years so let's stop sniping and start fixing.
Therein lies the issue, the assumption a) that we're stuck with JSF program for the next 50 years and therefore b) we need to fix the fighter... because we're stuck with it. Classic sunk cost fallacy.
Yes, the $1.4 Trillion is an all-in capitalized cost for the cost of the program, but the click-baity article gets to the heart of the issue pretty quickly: that building a product for 3 different users / businesses that each have their own unique needs and requirements is a failure of a product development strategy. You can either throw money at the problem and attempt to fix the product, or come to the conclusion that it's unfixable, admit that you were wrong, come up with a better product strategy and roadmap, and start all over again.
The sunk cost fallacy is irrelevant at this point. It's too late to start over. The existing fleet of legacy aircraft is literally falling apart and will have to be replaced with something. Building more fourth-generation aircraft would be a waste because they're simply to longer survivable. So they're stuck with making the F-35 work as the only remaining option.
> Building more fourth-generation aircraft would be a waste because they're simply to longer survivable.
I don't agree. The Su-27, which is regarded as a genuine threat to 5th generation planes has been in service since the late 1970s. Modern F-16s have little in common with the first ones that saw service. Boeing has been putting money into F-15s and F/A-18s with stealth capability. Fourth generation aircraft are still survivable and they're still being developed on the field.
There's even a school of thought that suggests that when your enemy is a bunch of dudes with death wishes and pick up trucks, lower tech is an advantage. In this kind of combat, the F-35 is at a particular disadvantage. Its cannon may not be able to achieve the accuracy needed for close air support, the helmets' signal clutter is such that an F-35 is actually a danger, and even more fun, not one model of the F-35 can carry more than 220 rounds of ammunition. In comparison, the A-10 carries about 1,100 rounds. In practice, this means that whereas an A-10 could make 10-20 attack passes, an F-35 will top out at 2-4...
Point being, it might not be a very good remaining option and fourth gen aircraft are better in important ways. With some luck, the testing process will solve all of these problems, though some seem incurable.
The opinions of armchair generals aren't worth much. Simulations and exercises have shown that legacy aircraft are simply not survivable against modern integrated air defence systems. This is a demonstrated reality and no amount of wishing or upgrades will change it.
The amount of ammunition an A-10 can carry is irrelevant if it gets hit by a missile before it reaches the target.
In its current state, the F-35 has three variants. None of those variants is fit for combat of any sort. They are outclassed in close air combat tests against badly crippled fourth generation fighters. Test fighters still can't reliably hit targets during strafing runs. And, the F-35s sensors are plagued by an array of issues, to the point that test pilots need to disable systems in order to actually complete tests.
That statement of fact was not issued by a 'armchair general', it was issued by the Pentagon's senior weapon's tester.
> Building more fourth-generation aircraft would be a waste because they're simply to longer survivable.
Arguably, that's the case for manned combat aircraft generally, at least, in terms of cost-effective survivability. A point which a number of experts have been making since before the F-35s massive cost overruns and other issues.
And most of the complaints boil down to unfinished software and systems. So it’s not that the F35 is ineffective but that there is still more work to do. Happens almost every time a massive new engineering project is undertaken.
> So it’s not that the F35 is ineffective but that there is still more work to do.
A full third of the article is about how the F-35 is inferior to the A-10 for the specific application of close air support. The last part of the article is about how the F-35C is poorly designed for maintenance on aircraft carriers.
I don't see how either situation can be resolved with new software.
The A-10 is useless against countries that pose an existential threat. The US military has to plan for combat with peer nations if it wants to serve its purported role as a national defense force. Just because we've spent the last 20 years killing people in poor countries with inferior weapons doesn't mean we won't ever combat a developed nation.
> the F-35 is inferior to the A-10 for the specific application of close air support
The A-10 is defenseless against modern air defense systems; it wouldn't get within 100 miles of the battlefield against a sophisticated enemy; it would be merely a flying coffin for the pilot.
Against unsophisticated enemies, such as ISIL, a drone could do the job, based on what I understand. The F-35 could too, though it's an expensive option.
And of course it turns out we use A10s frequently right now, so it's fantastic that we have them. We need more. They are cheap. We need a variety of different airplanes for different scenarios.
> we use A10s frequently right now, so it's fantastic that we have them
We use them because we have them. Lots of people use high-carbon emissions cars and planes, and Facebook, but I'm not sure it's fantastic that we have them.
You must have missed the part where a 50k$ Czech passive radar is defeating the F35 stealth capability.
Problem of EM sensors is most often then not, are active (especially radars and IFF), they broadcast or ping signals thus leaving quite a huge EM signature that can be pinpointed precisely with 3 antennas.
There’s also, unfortunately, physical limitations such as thrust-to-weight ratios that affect its dogfighting capabilities. AFAIK these can’t be overcome with software updates but better pilot training can improve survivability.
Serious question: is dogfighting still a thing these days?
When I think of military aircraft now, I tend to imagine them taking off from a carrier, bombing a military target (or equally likely, a house, school, hospital, wedding etc), then flying back.
> Serious question: is dogfighting still a thing these days?
It's not and that is part of the basis of the F-35, if I understand it correctly, to fight future battles not past ones. A very common problem in military history is people who fought the last war, leading to things like cavalry charges against machine guns. Here are three ways to think about the F-35 and the change in technology that I've read elsewhere (I'm not a practitioner or expert):
First, someone thought to do empirical research into what actually wins in air-to-air encounters, rather than relying on theories. In Vietnam (the last time the US had more than a few air-to-air encounters), 80% of battles were over before the losers knew they had begun.[0] Contrary to the Hollywood image of mano-a-mano dogfights, the loser was basically shot in the back without warning.[1] Situational awareness is the key, according to the research. The F-35 is built around situational awareness: Sensors, stealth (counter-measure against enemy sensors), integration with other sensor systems (the plane's display shows not only its own sensor output, but also the output from all the other F-35s, as well as from ground and satellite - it's all networked in), and think of the high-tech helmet that uses cameras and AR to let the pilot see 'through' the plane.
Second, the plane is more a node on a network than an independent platform. Think of those integrated sensors: Using them, a commander can deploy any other asset on the network against an enemy, alone or in combination - missiles from the ground or and electronic jamming from another plane, for example - it's not just the fight of the plane that happened to carry the sensor that detected the target. It's the difference between a standalone computer and a networked one.
Third, think of effect of range in naval technology: Ships used to pull up alongside each other and sailors would fight hand-to-hand. Then sufficiently effective cannon were developed and ships fought each other from miles away; anyone still using boarding parties was sunk before they could get close enough; cannon maxed out at maybe a couple of dozen miles on battleships. Then naval air power was developed, aircraft carriers and planes, and their range was several hundred miles; ships relying on cannon never even saw their foes, they were just targets for the planes and coffins for their personnel (this famously happened at the Battle of Midway). The same thing is happening with fighter planes: Nobody will get close enough for dogfights; they usually won't even see the other plane. Evaluating modern planes based on dogfighting is, in this sense, like evaluating aircraft carriers based on boarding parties or cannon.
[1] People sometimes are shocked by this idea, but that is the goal of combat: To massacre your enemy before they know you are there. It's not a sporting event; you absolutely don't want a fair fight.
With the exception of your first sentence, everything you said was true. Dogfighting is still very much a thing and every operational fighter needs to be competent in close air combat. You just simply cannot avoid close air combat because missiles fail, radars get jammed, and air combat is like a ballet choreographed at speeds approaching that of sound. Point being, everything gets fucked up, so fighters need to be capable so as not to be a flying coffin. Modern planes are absolutely evaluated based on their ability to survive in close combat situations.
Over the rest of your answer, you did a good job of summarizing what the F-35 was supposed to do. It was supposed to use stealth, technology and a ton of data to avoid having to get too close. Unfortunately, the actual plane is far from achieving any of these.
The F-35s much lauded sensors don't work particularly well. Things et even worse when you have a number of F-35s operating together and sharing data. Targets outright disappear and others appear twice. In testing, F-35 pilots have taken to shutting down sensors as they're simply better pilots with less information. The helmet is a particular clusterfuck and may be incurable. It presents so much information that it has been known to actually block targets from the pilots' view. One story of the F-35 in combat is that the cameras aren't good enough to ID targets so pilots have to close in on the target to get visual ID, then fly far enough away so that their air to air missiles would work. Even if they maintain stealth (which they have trouble doing because the F-35s use so many radar signals for targeting), having to close in, then fly away to shoot gives the enemy a great window to attack. And, with the F-35s handling at lower speeds, many 40 year old planes would fucking devastate it if given the chance.
> Dogfighting is still very much a thing and every operational fighter needs to be competent in close air combat.
I did go a bit too far with my first sentence, but what you say about the F-35's effectiveness is much different than what I read from experts, who generally seem to see it as a very complex system, maturing, but with excellent potential.
In fairness, I stated my credentials (none) and cited someone with credentials. Do you have any, or is the above based on knowledge from anyone who does have them?
First, I did not say that the F-35 was a lost cause. It might be maturing, though it doesn't seem to be maturing very quickly.
There is a position within the Pentagon called the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation. This position requires a senate confirmation and serves as the Secretary of Defense's senior adviser on weapon's testing. I hope to hell that he (every DOT&E has been male, so that's not gendered language) is qualified.
The current DOT&E (Robert F. Behler) is a former Air Force test pilot who reached the rank of Major General over the course of a 30+ year military career. He has a couple of masters degrees and amongst other interesting jobs, was COO and Deputy Director of Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute. He has held the title since December 2017.
In 2016, the DOT&E annual report contained all the problems that I related in my answer to you and many, many others. You should give it a read - it's online and written in remarkably clear language. The 2017 annual report wasn't much better. It essentially said that they were finding deficiencies faster than they were being fixed and in its current state, the F-35 would not be suitable for combat.
Who are we fighting today that our current inventory of fighters can't manage? Seems like there's sufficient grace period. It's like running cable instead of just developing 5g.
Simulations indicate that legacy 4th-generation fighters are very vulnerable to the latest anti-aircraft missile systems that Russia has started selling all over the world. This is happening right now, there's no grace period.
The next 50 years? I give it maybe 30, starting from its first flight many years ago. Its replacement(s) are already being discussed. The f-35 is far from "new".
1.4 trillion has not been spent yet! Only a fraction so far. Unless we fall for the sunk cost fallacy, there is still plenty of time to cut our losses.
That number makes sense. Even if much less was spent.. enough was spent that too many politicians, generals, lobbyist dip their fingers and they don't want to look incompetent. Don't count on them pulling the plug on this project; it has to come from Congress so that those I mentioned can blame lack of founds. Otherwise they will continue party with lights on as long as they can (on taxpayers dime, of course)
Reviving F-22 production for air superiority (and export to key allies like Japan) and starting a new program for a modern close-air support fighter might be a good start.
I don't think the F-35 is a bad plane and does what it was designed to do very well, but it isn't the best tool for all the roles it is expected to fill.
We're between $100 and $200 billion into the program in total so far, including 20 years of R&D and the cost of manufactured planes. They've built 300+ planes so far.
The total acquisition cost over 40 years is set at $406 billion for 2,456 F35s as of the latest estimate. $345 billion is the cost of just the planes. $162m per plane.
You'll routinely see the media get just about every financial fact about the F35 wrong that they possibly can. For example, you'll see claims that they've already spent $400 billion on the program (with links to the GAO figures), when in fact the $400b is the planned total acquisition cost across its lifetime.
Although there are teething issues, for US allies the unit the F-35 is attractive due to a unit cost which is lower than any of its competitors (such as the Eurofighter Typhoon).
For domestic use, the F-35B STOVL jet used by the Marines is a dramatic improvement in range and capabilities over the Harrier.
The F-35A/C are less of an improvement, but I would by no means call them a failure. It's easy to criticize a program due to cost overruns and mismanagement, but that doesn't mean the end result is bad. At the very least it's a sunk cost now, so we'll just have to deal with it.
I don't even know how to respond to your comment without sounding flippant. 10 billion dollars for a questionable program would upset me, let alone 1.4 trillion. It's blindingly obvious that this is a result of graft.
No one has made a clear case that the US is in any sort of danger if we don't upgrade our planes.
Imagine if that 1.4 trillion went towards fighting global warming, cancer, or lack of health care. It's sick.
The United States has a role in the world. Leaving aside subjective thoughts on whether we should fill that role, or continue to fill that role, if we vacate that role then somebody will fill that role instead.
The most obvious and likely right now would be the PLA if the United States were to vacate that role tomorrow. Or more likely, it would go unfilled for almost a decade before the PLA takes it.
Personally speaking, I would rather the US continue to fill the role it currently has than see it vacated and filled by a group like the PLA, and in order to do that, the United States has to maintain technological and military superiority over its competition which means continuing to research, develop and procure new fighters, carriers, destroyers, submarines, and maintain the US nuclear arsenal. Or to put this another way, the world isn't standing still, so why would America?
It seems I mixed multiple issues together. I can't claim that I understand geopolitics enough to suggest that we should stop all military spending. I was mainly suggesting that for such a huge expenditure a clear case for it should be made to the public. The other issue I'm getting at is that there's no way the F35 should cost as much as it does. For instance if Musk for some reason was tasked with designing and building the next generation of aircraft I'm sure it could be done for at least an order of magnitude less than the F35. The money is mostly lining the pockets of sociopaths and massive intentionally inefficient bureaucracies.
If Musk wanted to bid on future US Military contracts I am sure he would be able to, but since he doesn't seem to be in the business of constructing fighters for the Air Force I think we can safely leave him out of this discussion.
The F-35 is a complex weapons and sensors platform, tasked, perhaps overtasked, for many different capabilities and mission-types. I think you can make a compelling argument that it may have been cheaper to divide those into separate proposals and take separate bids for more specialized fighters, but then you would have been stuck justifying each and every one of those to Congress rather than the F-35.
Not developing any sixth generation fighters when the competition is, was not an option though. I'm not happy, as a member of the public and US taxpayer with precisely how the F-35 turned out, nor am I happy that F-22 production was shut down by the Obama administration with the F-35 expected to fill its role instead.
Technological superiority does not guarantee military superiority. It is perfectly possible for a less advanced opponent to deliver more overall effect by using resources more carefully.
I don’t see any that as an argument against achieving and maintaining Technological superiority. If, hypothetically, you had to discard one in favor of the other, military superiority would win out in terms of priorities, but the US has and should maintain both.
This is really difficult to think about because the US is able and prepared to spend limitless amounts of money compared to other countries. You could argue that there is an opportunity cost to developing the F35. But has the US really limited expenditure in other areas as a result?
It seems to me that the US strategy depends on adversaries playing by the same rule book and trying to compete using similar technology. In that environment the US is absolutely going to have superiority in military capability and technology because they can spend such vast quantities of money.
The risk comes when an adversary throws out the rule book and looks for technology and tactics that nullify that advantage and are affordable. The US could be found lacking, but I don't suppose that is a fault with the F35 program exactly. And I guess that a lot of the individual technologies developed as part of the F35 program are useful in their own right.
Apologies for the later reply, it has been a busy couple of days.
Certainly there is an opportunity cost in any large-scale expenditure, but the technology developed for the F-35 will be useful beyond just the F-35.
The United States has maintained technological and military superiority over its competition precisely because it is willing to invest large sums of money into the Military-Industrial Complex. The Space Race was one expression of this, and the United States and global economy has been coasting off the technology and discipline developed precisely to safely land a man on the Moon and safely return that same man home.
Yes, there are risks to putting too much money into extremely large capital expenditures which can potentially be lost in war but that is 1. the nature of war and 2. the US Military generally looks to be effective in all theaters of war, whether their opponent is following the same the rule book or not. The Air Force has their missions, and the Army, Marines, Coast Guard and Navy have theirs.
At the scale of the Department of Defense's budget though, opportunity costs don't mean the same thing to them that they mean to you or I though. They are operating arm of the largest economy of the world and should be viewed through that lens.
As much as it sucks, military dominance matters a lot - it's likely better for the US to have the greatest conventional weapons than Russia/China/EU having them.
Given the ongoing split between US and EU it's no longer inconceivable that in 20-50 years trans-atlantic relationship deteriorates to the point of open warfare, sadly. Unfortunately, the brightest (or at least prudent) people aren't ruling either continent any longer.
I still find improbable that in 50 years there will be a single hegemonic “coalition” in Europe. So even if we will not be friends anymore US will have to deal with maybe 2-3 regional powers, not a single global one.
Your vision is unbelievable. The only way the us fights the eu is one or both sides are taken over by a complete dictatorship. The people on those countries would be diametrically opposed to this. Trump is not a dictator (regardless of his authoritarian preferences). Trump seems to be actively trying to knock the us out of cross country allegiances. I think whatever damage he causes, we'll be able to repair them over time.
Unit cost is always a difficult measure because any purchase also involves agreements on counter investments, how much of the plane you can license build yourself etc (with F-35: probably not much!).
There is also the much more important measure of total lifetime cost. Flight hours are expensive for the F-35 compared to many 4th gen fighters.
I find it difficult to see why a plane designed to work stealthily in contested airspace would be very attractive for the role European air forces like Denmark or Norway have.
The Harrier was also incredibly flawed when compared to normal fighters. It had a very poor safety record, was slow, and could not carry much fuel or weapons when taking off vertically. This was a consequence of the vertical take-off design which has never proven itself to be effective for jet aircraft. The only benefit could be that you don't need the expense of a full aircraft carrier. That might make sense for a relatively cheap aircraft, but the F35 is not cheap. And you are pushing up the price of other variants as a result of the need to have a jump jet version. All so that you can have a fighter jet land operate from an amphibious assault ship. Should that really influence the procurement of over 3000 aircraft?
Hilariously we spent all that money on R&D and then the chinese hacked the pentagon to stole the designs and made their copy plane for the fraction of the price. It says alot about the military industrial complex.
We'll be at war with them soon enough so hopefully these will perform when the time comes.
Actual real live shooting war between China and USA is going to be a nuclear war so the performance of the planes in that scenario will be kinda useless.
China has ballistic missiles with the range to hit any location of their choosing on main land USA and the tech to fit nuclear war heads onto those missiles.
The F-35 is a weapons system designed to continue the US's ability to easily win a conventional war against a high 2nd tier state power in their own territory. What this might look like is the total rout in 1991 of Iraq, which had the fifth largest army in the world, and advanced surface-to-air defenses, defeated in large part by stealth technology. This fighter is basically stating to these threats: you are not going to be able to defeat or stalemate us at our own game.
I know this isn't a popular sentiment around here but consider the difference in outcome between the 1990 invasion of Kuwait vs the 2013 invasion of Crimea: only in the one where we had absolute military superiority did the US - or "the UN" if you prefer - actually get a say in how it turned out.
Who does this entail today? The big two are clearly North Korea and Iran. Stretching it, I'd add Taiwan, Ukraine and the Eastern bloc, India on the China border, Philippines, and Venezuela becoming some type of Cuba situation. Then there are proxy wars between major powers like Syria, which will likely continue to occur in the middle east and Africa for several decades. Even if we don't enter these fights, we'll be able to give our allies this plane. (Or maybe they'll turn down the most advanced plane ever built because the pilot helmet has issues in high humidity situations /sarc.)
This isn't going to neutralize the other two main powers, it will continue to be an imperfect - maybe even useless - weapon against their anti-ship and surface-to-air capabilities. It can't defeat the 3rd world and it can't defeat a superpower. The question is: is the price worth what it can do (which is defeat 2nd tier powers / proxy adversaries for the next ~25 years)? Or is there something which can do that better?
In theory, a unified platform for all three air support roles is a good idea, but I think it's becoming apparent that airframes are too complex of systems to make universal.
I really hope they can overcome the issues because overall it should help with logistics and cost over the long term.
Yes excellent idea to have a carrier and land based shared airframe, like the hornet did. But sharing it also with STOVL?? At what point did they pause to think “wow this will either make it 2/3 almost completely separate planes, or give it a lot of compromises in efficiency for the other roles, or add billions to the cost, or all of the above”?
>I really hope they can overcome the issues because overall it should help with logistics and cost over the long term.
That ship has already sailed. According to the program manager for the F-35, there is only 20-25% commonality between the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps variants. The F-35 has all of the downsides of a compromise design, but with almost none of the benefit.
Maybe it's a disaster in the sense of Windows Vista being a disaster - without it there wouldn't have been Windows 7? So even if the current version is underwhelming, the production chain is set up and the next version will have all quirks ironed out...
The problem I have with the article is that it doesn't actually ever talk about if the ideas are good or not. It points out that the MVP of the ideas need a lot of work, and talks at length of why they don't work. For example, he spends a lot of time talking about how maintenance on the F35 isn't the same as the F18, so people who maintain the engines will have to change how they work, and new types of people will have to be added. Most interesting part of the article for me was learning about passive detecting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VERA_passive_sensor
Interesting, though i believe the doctrine is that stealth aircrafts rely on a data link from a AWACS to guild them to the target, and only turn on their own radar when within weapon range, then only for as long as is required to confirm target and launch the missile (who invariably has its own radar these days).
Not to say that there are a myriad of assumptions that go into making an stealth aircraft, as was demonstrated when apparently an F-117 was downed by a modified SAM site.
I was genuinely shocked when I read some of these points. I still have hard time believing things like survivability after the ejection and the need to repaint after every flight.
All fighters have ridiculous maintenance hours. Good ones are like 10 or 15 hours of maintenance per hour of flight.
Using paint that needs to be reapplied all the time probably isn't a good idea, but it can also just be a choice to pay to hit the bleeding edge of capability (say a stickier paint gives the plane a higher signature).
I'd also probably take that article with some salt. There's nothing preposterous about deciding to manage fuel temperature, something that article misconstrues a bit (I think by not understanding what they are doing).
I'm thinking about the Eisenhower interstate system and maybe Americans just have to figure out how to make crumbling infrastructure a national security terror. There's clearly money. Let the military complex have it to build bridges instead of bombers.
I'm also reminded by the amazing technology in the US carriers. They're floating disaster response bases. Again, find ways to funnel military money into repurposable technologies. It's palatable and it has value beyond killing power.
One size does not fit all, it would be a silver bullet, whenever F35 replaces legacy fighters. Maybe by that time the who theatre of war would change with swarms of drones.
Could order and receive Advanced Super Hornet a lot faster than that. Might not deserve the label "replacement", but it provides at least some of the same capabilities.
The article waves away the stealth benefits but that's the number one issue. If a low radar signature is important then everything else is irrelevant. And I think it is. It doesn't matter if a F-16 can out dog fight a F-35 because that's not how the engagement will play out. The F-35 will shoot down an F-16 before the F-16 knows it's there.
The "elephant in the room" is the grand bet western nations (led by the US) are making by investing in advanced and sophisticated weapons.
Historically, you did need good weapons and vehicles/horses/planes but there has always been a balancing effect caused by how much of them you have, how many troops can operate them and how well defended they are.
Aircraft carriers are a good example,they compliment existing capability by acting as floating military bases that can take the battle to the enemy's homeland. But that's the thing,they compliment,they don't replace.
Even if the F35 delivered as promised,is it better to have 10 F35 , 50 F18 or even better -- 1000+ armed drones?
They're making Navy boats smarter and more powerful as well,requiring fewer sailors. I am not against smarter technology and advanced capabilities. But it just doesn't seem wise to replace man count and existing capabilities when the new tech hasn't been battle tested against a worthy adversary.
I wouldn't want to rely on a few powerful counter measures,but rather a large number of "good enough" defensive and offensive technology.
But that's why I called it "the elephant in the room",this could work and actually counter-act other future super powers. Or history would repeat itself and the opponents will win with sheer troop count and "good enough" weaponry.
The US spends 20% of gdp on the military,yet it is quite obvious the greatest threat is internal strife and divisions typically exasperated by economical divisions. Not to mention, severe lack of physhical fitness for military-age men and women. Military leaders already consider this a national security threat. I have a feeling this might be one of the reasons they're relying on technology so much. They don't think they can mobilize and train enough soldiers in the event of yet another world war. It would be much easier to have them operate drones and wear head gear with HUD (just like in the games) that costs a fortune. They might just be playing to the nation's strength. But still,maybe if they spent 10% instead of 20% in defense (even russia and china don't spend close to 10%) ,and use that 10% for internal socio-economic stability and just maybe enact mandatory military service,that might be wiser than relying fully on technology that hasn't been battle tested against the intended scenario and adversary.
Will economic strength and advanced weaponry be enough? Maybe,but many empires with all that and more have fallen for various reasons. Economy aside,the cancerous defense-contractor industry that is the cause behind why so much of the GDP goes into defense is one of chief internal security threats. The whole industry is structured around politics so that politicians in specific districts approve spending in exchange for jobs+economy in their district. Many articles and blogs on that specific issue(e.g.: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-tra...)
It’s good to remember these kinds of corrupt disasters whenever someone says we can’t afford to pay for things like universal healthcare and free public universities in the US.
Universal healthcare would cost approximately $4 trillion per year at today's per capita spending figures. You might get that down to $3.5 trillion if you hammer down costs in the system big time and ration care as all socialized systems do.
The F35 will cost $20-$25 billion per year averaged.
Several of the most liberal states in the US - including California, New York and Vermont - have all looked at doing universal healthcare. They all run away immediately when the cost estimates come back.
No source on that figure whatsoever? Given that OECD countries spend on average about 9% of GDP on healthcare and that US GDP is 21 trillion, your estimate seems 2x too high.
Not much. You're at the mercy of a capped number of practitioners getting sanctioned into practice a year. This creates artificial scarcity.
Also, you still have the blatant consolidation of the medical industry into a gigantic monolithic hybrid of pharma, hospital, insurer, and artificially scarce doctor.
The solution is not to pump more doctors into a system geared to extract multiple industries worth of profit. Instead, it should be investing in increasing the capability of individuals to provide and manage their own medical care.
This means more accessible diagnostics tools, fewer barriers to entry in getting access to good medical literature. Investing in teaching people how to do research, and make medically relevant observations, or to at least be able to tell when "First Aid" stops, and more advanced facilities are needed. When "First Aid" can encompass using a small, affordable X-ray device cheap and easy enough to safely use in a residential home, THEN you start seeing healthcare costs plummet.
Same goes with Pharma. We have an exceedingly low capability to create environments conducive to productive research per capita. The brain power that can crank on these types of things are artificially limited by the inability of many who may have the interest and time to get access to facilities to make meaningful observations and potential discoveries.
Come up with acceptable test analogs. Document, enumerate, and simulate as much as possible so someone can pick up a protein, shove it into a tissue and see what interactions may happen.
Make the information accessible, and start working on boiling it down into learnable paths where a person can get the 80%, but still drill down into the more specialized.
Cheaper, more prolific research and education is the key. NOT letting the market sit on top the misery of the hurt and dying and demanding the toll be paid. Empower first. Optimize last.
I meant sensibly invested, so removing the caps would be part of the investment.
I figure if you move from a tight doctor market to a looser doctor market, it becomes more likely that people are working for themselves and competing for patients and so on.
No it wouldn’t, you just also implement nation-wide, government-controlled price setting like they have in Japan, as well as debt-forgiveness for doctors. They have 120 million people and it is works fine. Cheaper, everyone is healthier and lives longer.
1.4 trillion is an absolute joke. Invest that in infrastructure or energy security and I am absolutely certain that you would obtain an order of magnitude better ROI than whatever sort of benefit (protective, preemptive, deterrent, or otherwise) you are getting from these planes.
This is truly an unfathomable amount of money that I feel it's hard to understate.
Edit: I'll admit the helmet cam seemed pretty cool but 600k feels like a lot.
