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An F-35 Pilot Explains Why the Jet's Bad Press Misses the Point

pton-throw 5y ago
This article contains no new information, and could be accurately summarized "guy whose boss spent $1 trillion on the F-35 says the F-35 is a good idea." He also calls it a supersonic fighter, which isn't true. The coatings cannot withstand sustained periods of supersonic flight.
- nickff 5y ago
  Most supersonic fighters can only do so for very short amounts of time. The F-22 is the only operational fighter with real sustained supersonic capabilities.
  - tmccrary55 5y ago
    It's by Lockheed (like the F-22) and we spent crazy amounts of money on it, why the hell is the F-35 deficient here?
    - jghn 5y ago
      They're different planes with different optimizations being made. Airplanes are one giant set of tradeoffs.
      - toiletfuneral 5y ago
        Yeah, the f-35 is optimized to cost as much as possible (Edit typo)
      - sudosysgen 5y ago
        Not really. The main limiter for supercruise in the F-35 is sub-par stealth coatings that unlike the F-22's cannot handle the heat. Otherwise it could supercruise, maybe with some engine tweaks.
        jghn 5y ago
        Things like cost, politics, etc are also part of the optimizations being made for these planes.
        sudosysgen 5y ago
        You can see it that way. It's really more politics than cost in this case though. From an engineering perspective local political optimization of a national project is what I would call ineptitude. But you can call it by another name.
        jghn 5y ago
        I don't disagree. But it is what it is, and part of how things get done these days for better or for worse.
      - ldh 5y ago
        That's absolutely true, and it definitely matters when you're designing something that will see productive use for the benefit of the people paying for it, but it's not obvious that that's the case here.
    - ldh 5y ago
      Hear me out...what if we could get both contracts?!
    - SyzygistSix 5y ago
      Because ideally all supercruise does is allow enemy planes to get closer to an F-35 firing solution faster.
  - pton-throw 5y ago
    That's a little disingenuous. For other platforms, the constraint is fuel. Afterburner guzzles fuel. Only F-35 requires expensive and protracted maintenance after supersonic flight. Which is another area where F-35 is lacking: range. Without external fuel tanks it can't fight in the Pacific.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      There are actually four other operational aircraft that can reach supersonic speeds without the use of afterburners.
    - strictnein 5y ago
      > "Without external fuel tanks it can't fight in the Pacific" If only we had large floating aircraft bases and the plane also had versions that supported VTOL for even more expansive capabilities at sea.
      - sudosysgen 5y ago
        You do, but the closer they get to the target the greater the likelihood they have of getting sunk. The likelihood approaches 100% as the distance to the target is reduced.
    - skhr0680 5y ago
      By “in the Pacific” do you mean flying from US west? If things come to that, then the US is in deep trouble.
      - sudosysgen 5y ago
        Not necessarily, the US has land bases in the pacific. If you're going to base your availability of air power, which is the main determinant of success given the American military doctrine, on having a secure and available carrier at all times, you may be putting yourself in a bind when anti-ship weapons start proliferating and you become forced to increase distance between those defenses and your carriers. It also puts a hell of a single point of failure.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    That is false. Maybe you mean "only operational US fighter". The difference between the F-18 and the F-35 is that while the F-18 might need extended maintenance after prolonged (read : more than a minute) supersonic flight, the F-35 may suffer catastrophic coating degradation that may be fatal in the same flight. As for other operational fighters, the Dassault Rafale can supercruise indefinitely the Gripen indefinitely at Mach 1.3, the Eurofighter indefinitely at Mach 1.8, the Sukhoi-35 can if outfitted with the AL-41F-1S (meaning, some operational Su-35s can supercruise indefinitely, but not all). The F-22 is far from the only one.
    - strictnein 5y ago
      Only operational stealth fighter
    - caycep 5y ago
      Amusingly enough, apparently the YF-16 prototype could do it, before they changed the design for the final F-16A spec....
    - nickff 5y ago
      None of those fighters can do super cruise for a useful amount of time with a combat load out.
      - sudosysgen 5y ago
        That is incorrect. They can all supercruise with an air-superiority loadout except possibly for the Gripen where we are not certain, for over 20 minutes.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    > The F-22 is the only operational fighter with real sustained supersonic capabilities Can’t the Eurofighter Typhoon supercruise?
  - lumost 5y ago
    "Supercruising" means flying supersonically for at least 20 minutes. In a fighter aircraft the salient requirement is often not the time that the plane can fly supersonically but the distance. The Mig-31 has a combat radius of 450 miles at Mach-2.35 and a top speed of Mach-2.85. If you need a fighter to fly 500 km and engage a target, why wait 25 minutes for a super-cruising mach-1 fighter when a Mach-2.3 craft without super cruise can get there in 10 minutes?
- bsder 5y ago
  > This article contains no new information Actually, it does for me: "Just imagine how the F-16 program would have been covered today when they were crashing an aircraft almost every two weeks during several years in the ’80s and ’90s (the F-35, by comparison, has only crashed 3 times in over a decade of flying)." I had no idea that an F-16 crashed roughly every two weeks while being debugged. I imagine I'm not the only one.
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    The F-16 (designed 1973/1974) has relaxed stability, which means if the stability augmentation system fails near a stall or abrupt maneuver, the plane is lost. So lots of crashes in testing are to be expected, though in hindsight they could have used an unmanned version to iron out the flight control bugs. During an initial taxi test it actually had a roll control problem, so had to be flown off and landed - that's pretty bad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-16_Fighting_Falcon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-16_Fighting... https://medium.com/@alexjun/interesting-aircraft-of-the-day-1-b8a64ed6fe57 https://medium.com/@alexjun/interesting-aircraft-of-the-day-... The F-5 was the first new jet fighter design (1955/1956) without a fatality in test, which is notable enough to often get mentioned. It was a Mach 2 airframe with initially Mach 1.3 engines, so not a toy, though it was the smallest possible design to use standard weapons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_F-5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_F-5
- V_Terranova_Jr 5y ago
  > This article contains no new information True. And also, the author is an operator, but not necessarily someone involved in the engineering or acquisition. Nonetheless (and I say this as someone who was severely soured by my involvement with the program), people get tribal as to whether the JSF (provides an unmatched capability) XOR (is the zenith of acquisition malpractice). It's not either/or; both are simultaneously true. No one in DoD R&D/acquisition fails to appreciate how expensive these things are and this realization is certainly driving long-term decision-making.
Sophistifunk 5y ago
This is just the drawn-out version of "no, u"
aeturnum 5y ago
"Survivability and lethality in a contested environment now have more to do with stealth, sensors, data fusion, and the ability to network, than just pure turn performance. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to quantify these capabilities in an unclassified environment." This makes me think about naval development before WW2. Everyone had lots of ideas about battleships and how to pack more guns onto a faster ship and all these other things, but lots of people missed how aircraft carriers would change things. I'm sure the next war will be different. The obvious development is drones, but I also think about the plotline of the second Battlestar Galactica series where the protagonists only initially survive because their ship eschews network connections. It seems like we aren't quite sure what future battles will look like and the US is making a guess in the form of a $1.5tn plane project.
- actuator 5y ago
  I think it will be a combination of drones and cyber/electronic warfare capabilities. Drones have already shown their potential in the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict recently. From large swarm based attacks to kamikaze mode, I think drones should overtake frontline fighter planes in capability soon.
  - kbenson 5y ago
    The thing is, if increased cyberwarfare capabilities allow you to exploit some large percentage of the drone force, then that would leave an extremely large gap to exploit by the enemy. If you can't fly drones because you risk them being crashed (or worse, turned on you), then you need some backup force. That might be real pilots, or it might be non-remote-controlled drones, or some combination of things like that.
  - freeopinion 5y ago
    I think it will all come down to one plucky and very clever outsider who stumbled into the situation by accident. Oh yeah, and the girl who needs rescued from the system against which she has rebelled.
  - Stranger43 5y ago
ioseph 5y ago
The author mentions the comms and sensors being the new killer feature, putting beside stealth can better sensing and interconnect not be retrofitted to existing aircraft? Why do you need to design a new airframe around better optics?
- Pasorrijer 5y ago
  Good question! A few reasons. Weight and balance is super important so anything you add means something else needs to be added or balanced. Power requirements are also a problem. More electronics means more power maybe means new engines. Maybe that all means more weight, so you need to reinforce the structure. Which means you're heavier and need a better engine. Etc. Sensors can't just be installed, if you need to drill holes and break pressure bulkheads.
  - ldh 5y ago
    What military role does the F-35 fill in the modern world that unmanned drones can't?
    - GoOnThenDoTell 5y ago
      Flashy recruitment B-roll
    - CapricornNoble 5y ago
      Reliable Strike Coordination and Reconnaissance in a comms-degraded environment https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Strike_coordination_and_reconnaissance_(military) https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Strike_coordination_and_reconnais...
      - ldh 5y ago
        Sexy URL, sucks for you if anyone actually clicks it and/or examines your profile as a "Defense industry consultant". Just to be clear, your answer as someone invested in the defense industry to the question of "What military role does the F-35 fill in the modern world that unmanned drones can't?" is to say: >A mission flown for the purpose of detecting targets and coordinating or performing attack or reconnaissance on those targets. Strike coordination and reconnaissance missions are flown in a specific geographic area and are an element of the command and control interface to coordinate multiple flights, detect and attack targets, neutralize enemy air defenses and provide battle damage assessment Forgive my ignorance, but are you saying that we basically need a trillion-dollar endeavor to develop manned fighters which have just barely caught up to the existing technology to go pick fights abroad that we could have already been doing? What new threat are we facing here, other than a slowing of contractual dollars?
Pet_Ant 5y ago
How about versus the F-22? I wonder which he’d choose between the those two.
- dwighttk 5y ago
  “ The F-35, along with the F-22, is now the premier fighter aircraft in the world.”
  - Pet_Ant 5y ago
    That’s not the same as stating a preference between the two.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- ldh 5y ago
  He's a former Java developer who is now accustomed to Scala, obviously he prefers that to Kotlin because it's what he knows...
  - lardo 5y ago
    do you have Scala and Kotlin reversed? Surely Kotlin is the trimmed down for foreign markets version of Scala.
- nemo44x 5y ago
  The F-22 is exclusive to the USA - it cannot be exported. The F-35 can and is sold to allies and friendlies however. This should be all you need to know.
  - onepointsixC 5y ago
    That was a congressional decision and an awful one at that given that foreign purchases would have kept the production line alive.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
irjustin 5y ago
I worry the author suffers from confirmation bias. Does the bad press miss the point? So much that "point" is the cost per aircraft is nutso for what you get. Something that's stealth, dogfight, and close-in air support. And perhaps the article is right, the stealth is fantastic. Lets you fire without being seen. But after you've fired it, then what? Now everyone knows where you are and a potential dog fight is coming. It's well known its dog fighting is weak even compared to other older fighters, but maybe it's also fair to say dog fighting is a thing of the past[1]. Being a stealth mobile missile battery... Is a good long range offense a strong defense? These kinds of things can only be tested, so... jury's still out. My personal criticism comes in the close in air support, what good is all that money that was dumped into stealth doing as it just hovers above in plain view/access? Also, it does a poor job at flying slowly. It's just not specialized in it. Time will tell if the price tag is even close to being justified, but I'm still a strong skeptic. [1] https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/f-35-pilot-heres-what-people-dont-understand-about-dogfighting-and-how-the-f-35-excels-at-it/ https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/f-35-pilot-heres-wha...
- bsder 5y ago
  > My personal criticism comes in the close in air support, what good is all that money that was dumped into stealth doing as it just hovers above in plain view/access? Also, it does a poor job at flying slowly. It's just not specialized in it. This is probably a valid criticism, but aren't the current generation of military helicopters simply way better than jets could ever be at this? And they have the advantage that they can land and evacuate people.
  - onepointsixC 5y ago
    > This is probably a valid criticism No it is not. The poster is appears to mistakenly believe that F-35B's would hover for purposes of close air support. It would never do that because the VTOL capabilities of the F-35B are exclusively for short range take off and landing. The US has around 10 Amphibious Assault Ship which now thanks to the F-35B's are among some of the most capable carriers in the world. Factor in the ability to take off from rapidly constructed airbases throughout the pacific and the F-35B is one of the most dangerous airplanes currently in production. A squadron could sneak up from completely unexpected directions from bases which had not existed in your satellite reconnaissance just a day ago.
kemitchell 5y ago
Of course he does. He gets to fly it! This passage caught my eye: > The last major reason the F-35 has seen so much criticism is that it was the first jet developed in the social media age. The paradigm shift, cost, and early problems, coupled with concurrency, led to an explosion of negative social media that grew into mainstream media coverage. Cost buried second in a list of factors contributing to…social media as major factor? If it weren't for those pesky kids on the Internet!
- tootie 5y ago
  This is like saying it got a lot of bad press because everyone noticed how bad it was. We never got to complain about top secret projects because we didn't know what they cost.
- throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
  Assuming you think the USA should have the "most powerful military" (whether this should be the aim or not is a separate question); how much money is required to achieve that goal and what are your justifications for that amount? Without answering that question, how can you say that the F35 costs too much? Personally i have no idea what the true US military budget should be and I'm not even sure how you'd begin to calculate that as a civilian. One of the few things that gets passed in a bi-partisan manner by the US legislature is the military budget (apparently for 59 straight years). It's easy to look at a big number and say it's bad. But it's also easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. The average FAANG team probably costs their company multiple millions of $ per year in just employee costs. It's easy to parachute in and say that you could do it for less, and you'd probably be right. But that also loses track of bigger picture.
  - pydry 5y ago
    >Without answering that question, how can you say that the F35 costs too much? How much is too much to spend on bayonets pre WW1 to face the machine gun? The F-35 is a 1.5 trillion dollar bet on human dog fighters who cant execute high G maneuvers in a world dominated by fleets of cheap, disposable, AI piloted drones that can. Nagorno-Karabakh and Yemen have already shown a taste of this. >One of the few things that gets passed in a bi-partisan manner by the US legislature is the military budget The F35 is curious in this regard because it is so heavily criticized by Congress yet still funded. This is coz Lockheed distributed F35 jobs across the country on the basis of congressional votes. A vote to kill the F35 is thus a vote to destroy jobs in your district. Lockheed engineered the world's most unkillable military program and then milked it to kingdom come. The shareholders are certainly happy. This is, sadly, the most impressive form of F35 engineering. We will look back on many things after the next war and shake our collective heads but I suspect the most glaring and shameful error will be our willingness to indulge corporate profit margins at the expense of the body politic.
pg_bot 5y ago
The F-35 deserves the bad press. Development has been a mess because it is trying to fill every niche for every branch of the military. We could have developed several specialized planes at a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time that it took for this one plane to come into production. While I don't doubt that it is better to fly than the F-16, so would every other plane we would have developed instead of this nightmare. I also am worried that it will be obsoleted with the development of advanced military drones. Why risk a human life when you can just send a robot to the battlefield instead?
- tjohns 5y ago
  Drones are great for many missions... until you send them to an enemy that can jam the RF link used for remote control. Until we develop the technology to build an AGI, there’s still a need for fighters with human beings on board for autonomy.
  - kbenson 5y ago
    I would think that would be more justification for the F-35 as a drone coordinator or controller. It might allow for alternative control mediums (direct or relayed laser, for example), even if maybe eventually only used to update the general mission parameters of the drone if it's controlling itself (i.e. abort, change target, etc).
  - fpoling 5y ago
    I thought that frequency hopping made jamming RF links impractical and the main problem is jamming of GPS.
- irateswami 5y ago
  > Why risk a human life when you can just send a robot to the battlefield instead? That's literally the point of the F35: to stealthily penetrate enemy airspace and act as a command and control combat platform for drones. It observes the battlefield with it's amazing "eye of god" sensory field, drones are sent into the battle space automatically where they are then taken control of by the pilot.
ldh 5y ago
> When the F-35 debuted, it was inferior to the F-16 and other 4th generation aircraft. However, its potential has been steadily unlocked by the engineers, and several years ago, it surpassed the F-16’s capability. Sounds like the national defense equivalent of rewriting your website from scratch in $LATEST_WEBSHIT_FRAMEWORK. Sure, it's a worse product, but just imagine how great it _could_ be if we halt development of the working version and spend a trillion dollars making the new one work. See? It's better! And the customer is paying hand over fist, so everyone wins.
- CapricornNoble 5y ago
  >>>Sounds like the national defense equivalent of rewriting your website from scratch in $LATEST_WEBSHIT_FRAMEWORK. Sure, it's a worse product, but just imagine how great it _could_ be if we halt development of the working version and spend a trillion dollars making the new one work. And eventually the Air Force came to its senses, accepted the "pull request" for upgrades on its big workhorse F-15 "library"....and now we are getting the awesome F-15EX. Something we should have been working on before they even cancelled the F-22. This is why I like the Russian approach to military R&D: they do a small number of cutting-edge products to keep their engineers employed and their tech as current as possible given their constraints, but the bulk of their actual inventory is continuous refinements of solid legacy systems, tweaked and rolled out at fairly low cost. Su-27 -> Su-30 -> Su-34 and 35 (honestly even the Su-57 planform is clearly an extension of this airframe if you look at it closely) T-72 -> T-90 -> latest upgrade packages for both (T-72B3M and T-90M Breakthrough-3)
phendrenad2 5y ago
I think the point of the F-35 is it's one jet that can do it all. Maybe it isn't as stealthy or fast as an SR-71, and maybe it's VTOL isn't as good as a Huey, and maybe it's sensors aren't as good as a high-latitude balloon or satellite, but that's the point. It's versatile, so you can use it as the bread and butter and deploy various more specialized equipment if needed. The bad press about the jet is stuck in a 1980s mindset - no, not even that, they're stuck in a 1960s futurist vision of the 1980s that never came to pass (you can count on one hand how many "dogfights" there were in the 1980s, and they were pretty meager examples of such).
- iab 5y ago
  That is how it was sold, for sure. Unfortunately now it has become 3 jets, that can't do it all (at this point). There was supposed to be > 70% commonality, but currently less than 25%. It can't do interdiction, doesn't have loiter time & is ordnance poor wrt. current platforms, is not a great interceptor (no supercruise launch). It is a significant advancement in sensor technology and integration, for sure. The reduction in type number, and the suggestion of the NGAD (both Air Force and Navy, which suggests that they think that joint acquisition is not the way to go next time) makes me think of the classic procurement death cycle. Very happy to be proven wrong on all of this.
- GVIrish 5y ago
  > I think the point of the F-35 is it's one jet that can do it all. That was the idea, but it is also why the program has performed so poorly on cost, timeliness, and capability. The F-35 was supposed to achieve 80% parts commonality among the three variants. This would have delivered massive cost savings. Instead, the reality is less than 25% parts commonality. Also, the compromises made to accommodate all three requirement sets means the F-35 has worse aerodynamic performance and a worse radar cross section than it otherwise would've had if the Air Force and Navy could've had their own dedicated air frames from the start. The much lower degree of parts-sharing wouldn't be so bad, except that the JSF program eschewed a lot of real world testing in lieu of computer simulation. And to make matters worse they employed "concurrent development", which meant that production were getting made while the testing phase was still in progress. The result was that as problems were uncovered, expensive retrofits had to be applied to all the airframes that had already been produced. In a more traditional development strategy, the vast majority of teething issues would've been found before series production began. But concurrent development was used to try to speed up the timeline, but also make it more difficult to cancel the program. The F-35 has a lot of capabilities but it is fundamentally compromised because of the attempt to make it a jack of all trades. It has had an extremely long gestation period, very high development costs, very high operational costs, and compromised performance on several fronts. Had the DoD at least split off the USMC STOVL requirement it seems like this project would've gone a lot better.
thelucky41 5y ago
> The last major reason the F-35 has seen so much criticism is that it was the first jet developed in the social media age. The paradigm shift, cost, and early problems, coupled with concurrency, led to an explosion of negative social media that grew into mainstream media coverage. Whether the F-35 will be successful or not does not matter whether there are armchair journalists or mainstream reporters covering the project, but in this case we can enjoy the increased accountability. This should be seen as a positive effect of social media, if anything. This had me wondering how many mistakes in previous projects were smoothed over by clever marketing, and how many are being exposed now. Does social media make it easier or harder for the general public to get accurate information on this sort of thing?
Animats 5y ago
Maj. Justin Lee, USAF really is, or was, an F-35 pilot.[1] Since he's now on the motivational speaker circuit [2][3] he's probably out of the USAF. [1] https://www.aetc.af.mil/News/Photos/igphoto/2002209050/ https://www.aetc.af.mil/News/Photos/igphoto/2002209050/ [2] https://thedealerplaybook.com/justin-lee/ https://thedealerplaybook.com/justin-lee/ [3] https://www.professionalsplaybook.com/listen https://www.professionalsplaybook.com/listen
- tekacs 5y ago
  From your post, [2] says, "Maj. Justin Lee, USAF is an active F-35 Joint Strike Force pilot" [3] says, "I'm an F-35 fighter pilot for the Air Force." ... both of which seem to suggest that he's still active?
- packetslave 5y ago
  He left active duty in January, but still flies F-35s in the Air Force Reserves. Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/CJ4C_ClB01e/ https://www.instagram.com/p/CJ4C_ClB01e/
johnklos 5y ago
This reads like marketing. A pilot should be able to speak to problems with more nuance than that. This is just too awkward and too general to be taken seriously.
emmelaich 5y ago
The concurrency / collapsed timeline sounds like an agile vs 'waterfall' thing. Very probably valuable but under appreciated at the same time.
- GVIrish 5y ago
  The concurrency is a major reason for massive cost overruns. If you're building production aircraft before the testing and evaluation phase is done with prototypes, every time you find a major issue you have to retrofit dozens or even hundreds of planes. But, like a lot of things with the JSF program, concurrency made it much more difficult to cancel. Sunk costs and all that.
deleted 5y ago
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mikehollinger 5y ago
Slightly related, but there's a great hour-long lecture [1] by Colonel Randy Gordon, who's a test pilot, discussing the flight control systems for the F-22, contrasting it (a bit) to other jets, and even to a Cessna. He talks about the tradeoffs between human factors, mechanical engineering, software engineering, and shows how the software systems help the pilot. It's well worth the hour if you're an aviation geek. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n068fel-W9I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n068fel-W9I
ummonk 5y ago
Stealth technology aside, there is the question of why the new avionics technology wasn't retrofitted to existing airframes first to limit development risks and control costs.
mbgerring 5y ago
Who is the US in an air war with again?
- CapricornNoble 5y ago
  Today? Nobody. In 2003? Iraq....and shitting on the Iraqi military with overwhelming air power made the ground war 10x easier...demonstrated twice. In less than 10 years, we quite possibly could be in an air war with China over Taiwan. We can't tear down and stand up military hardware like AWS VMs. The lead times for a viable, robust capability are sadly on the order of 2 decades. For China I'd argue it's maybe half of that... Our procurement process is screwed, and I'm not convinced most of it can be chalked up to "modern tech is complex".
jlawer 5y ago
The criticism comes from many angles. It IS a very capable war-plane for many of its roles. Much more capable then the harrier and with many capabilities that the F-16 & F-18 lack. It has different solutions to the problems it faces though. Many of these new approaches to old problems that are arguable. Is a stealthy approach (F-35) more effective then raw manoeuvrability (F-16) in fighter vs fighter combat? Probably if the stealth can be maintained. Is high flying precisions guided weaponry as better then what an A-10 can do in close air support? Maybe? These points will be argued by airchair air marshals until we have another big war to "answer" the question. But the F-35 has failed at being the cheap general purpose aircraft it was promised to be. It has been earmarked to replace the F-16 in its entirety, as the low end fighter to the F-22 raptor as the high end. This was one of the reasons the F-35 has a single engine. Recent moves are to make the F-35 the new high end fighter w/ a new lightweight fighter the low end that can be cheap enough to fulfil this need.
quelsolaar 5y ago
F35 is good, but the cost of an adversaries old planes times the number of air-to-air a 35f can carry is significantly less then the cost of an F35, it may not be the most cost efficient way to go about fighting your enemy. War is about winning the economics. Can your economy and industrial output out pace what your enemy destroys, vs your opponents output and what you can destroy. Even in peace time, this is a major factor. Keeping up with the US on military spending bankrupted the USSR, at the same time as Japanese and German industries where able to leap ahead of both, since they didn't spend on military post WW2. The US may want to have a good Military to defend against China, but if it spends too much, and not enough on civil industry (and education) China may crush the US economically, without firing a bullet. You can have the most Nukes of any country, but at some point, you have enough nukes to do anything you want, and after that, any nuke you add is a drain on your economy. Having the "best" or "most" weapons isn't the same as having the right allocation of resources.
- csb6 5y ago
  > You can have the most Nukes of any country, but at some point, you have enough nukes to do anything you want, and after that, any nuke you add is a drain on your economy. If we have enough nukes to do whatever we want (we definitely have more than enough nukes), then it follows that we do not need giant conventional forces, right? We are already invulnerable to invasion/defensive war because of the nukes/geography so what is the point of conventional forces from a defensive standpoint? This means the F-35 is about offense and conflict escalation - about increasing the reach/power of the American empire. The most cost effective strategy for a nation that is not an empire in this situation would be to drastically downsize conventional forces since we already have a deterrent. Expensive new fighter jets are no longer needed for defense. So I see the F-35 program not as a counter against the U.S.’s enemies, but as a way to more effectively attack other countries.
  - quelsolaar 5y ago
    Not entirely. One could imagine that China would be willing to invade Taiwan, if the only possible response from the US would be nuclear strike. The US would not go to nuclear war over Taiwan and the Chinese know it. The F35 is able to defend US strategic interests in Taiwan (mainly chip making) in a way nukes cant. On the other hand The budget of the F35 could buy TSMC 3 times over, so it may not be the most cost effective way to defend your interests...
ncmncm 5y ago
Everything he says could be true, but still miss the point. The actual point is that we are absolutely stuck with the F-35, so had better make it good--or at least take up thinking it's good, where we can't. It is not correct to compare it to an F-16. It needs to be compared to a whole fleet of aircraft, because it costs as much as much as a fleet. Could it take on 8 F-16s at once? It is not correct to compare it to an F-16 because you can afford to fly your plentiful F-16s in harm's way, but have to keep your paltry few F-35s a hundred miles back, out of any possibility of danger. The reason we are stuck with the F-35, despite its still suffering over 600 class-A design flaws (each risks loss of airframe), is that it is built in 48 states. To kill it you would need to get senators from 24 of those states, and the other two besides, to vote against it. It could explode every time the gear doors shut, and we would still be stuck with it, and they know. Be glad it can take off and land.
rjvs 5y ago
Japan is denying that they have tightened the requirements for scrambling fighters against Chinese planes on course to enter Japanese airspace since they deployed F-35[1]. I imagine that a Chinese fighter probably costs a lot less to get into the air than an F-35 does. The airframe and engines might not have a higher MTBF than F-35 (or maybe they do) but they are certainly cheaper and easier to replace, regardless. There's an obvious economic and industrial capability question to all of this. A player with cheap planes can erode the benefits of the technologically superior one by simply encouraging them to be used more, or forcing the decision to not use them for fear of stretching supply lines... Thus reducing the required response time when it's decided to actually deploy the expensive weapon. [1] https://www.stripes.com/news/pacific/japan-denies-report-that-it-s-scrambling-fewer-fighter-jets-against-chinese-military-aircraft-1.664530 https://www.stripes.com/news/pacific/japan-denies-report-tha...

This article contains no new information, and could be accurately summarized "guy whose boss spent $1 trillion on the F-35 says the F-35 is a good idea." He also calls it a supersonic fighter, which isn't true. The coatings cannot withstand sustained periods of supersonic flight.

nickff 5y ago
Most supersonic fighters can only do so for very short amounts of time. The F-22 is the only operational fighter with real sustained supersonic capabilities.
- tmccrary55 5y ago
  It's by Lockheed (like the F-22) and we spent crazy amounts of money on it, why the hell is the F-35 deficient here?
  - jghn 5y ago
    They're different planes with different optimizations being made. Airplanes are one giant set of tradeoffs.
    - toiletfuneral 5y ago
      Yeah, the f-35 is optimized to cost as much as possible (Edit typo)
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      Not really. The main limiter for supercruise in the F-35 is sub-par stealth coatings that unlike the F-22's cannot handle the heat. Otherwise it could supercruise, maybe with some engine tweaks.
      - jghn 5y ago
        Things like cost, politics, etc are also part of the optimizations being made for these planes.
        sudosysgen 5y ago
        You can see it that way. It's really more politics than cost in this case though. From an engineering perspective local political optimization of a national project is what I would call ineptitude. But you can call it by another name.
        jghn 5y ago
        I don't disagree. But it is what it is, and part of how things get done these days for better or for worse.
    - ldh 5y ago
      That's absolutely true, and it definitely matters when you're designing something that will see productive use for the benefit of the people paying for it, but it's not obvious that that's the case here.
  - ldh 5y ago
    Hear me out...what if we could get both contracts?!
  - SyzygistSix 5y ago
    Because ideally all supercruise does is allow enemy planes to get closer to an F-35 firing solution faster.
- pton-throw 5y ago
  That's a little disingenuous. For other platforms, the constraint is fuel. Afterburner guzzles fuel. Only F-35 requires expensive and protracted maintenance after supersonic flight. Which is another area where F-35 is lacking: range. Without external fuel tanks it can't fight in the Pacific.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    There are actually four other operational aircraft that can reach supersonic speeds without the use of afterburners.
  - strictnein 5y ago
    > "Without external fuel tanks it can't fight in the Pacific" If only we had large floating aircraft bases and the plane also had versions that supported VTOL for even more expansive capabilities at sea.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      You do, but the closer they get to the target the greater the likelihood they have of getting sunk. The likelihood approaches 100% as the distance to the target is reduced.
  - skhr0680 5y ago
    By “in the Pacific” do you mean flying from US west? If things come to that, then the US is in deep trouble.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      Not necessarily, the US has land bases in the pacific. If you're going to base your availability of air power, which is the main determinant of success given the American military doctrine, on having a secure and available carrier at all times, you may be putting yourself in a bind when anti-ship weapons start proliferating and you become forced to increase distance between those defenses and your carriers. It also puts a hell of a single point of failure.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  That is false. Maybe you mean "only operational US fighter". The difference between the F-18 and the F-35 is that while the F-18 might need extended maintenance after prolonged (read : more than a minute) supersonic flight, the F-35 may suffer catastrophic coating degradation that may be fatal in the same flight. As for other operational fighters, the Dassault Rafale can supercruise indefinitely the Gripen indefinitely at Mach 1.3, the Eurofighter indefinitely at Mach 1.8, the Sukhoi-35 can if outfitted with the AL-41F-1S (meaning, some operational Su-35s can supercruise indefinitely, but not all). The F-22 is far from the only one.
  - strictnein 5y ago
    Only operational stealth fighter
  - caycep 5y ago
    Amusingly enough, apparently the YF-16 prototype could do it, before they changed the design for the final F-16A spec....
  - nickff 5y ago
    None of those fighters can do super cruise for a useful amount of time with a combat load out.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      That is incorrect. They can all supercruise with an air-superiority loadout except possibly for the Gripen where we are not certain, for over 20 minutes.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > The F-22 is the only operational fighter with real sustained supersonic capabilities Can’t the Eurofighter Typhoon supercruise?
- lumost 5y ago
  "Supercruising" means flying supersonically for at least 20 minutes. In a fighter aircraft the salient requirement is often not the time that the plane can fly supersonically but the distance. The Mig-31 has a combat radius of 450 miles at Mach-2.35 and a top speed of Mach-2.85. If you need a fighter to fly 500 km and engage a target, why wait 25 minutes for a super-cruising mach-1 fighter when a Mach-2.3 craft without super cruise can get there in 10 minutes?
bsder 5y ago
> This article contains no new information Actually, it does for me: "Just imagine how the F-16 program would have been covered today when they were crashing an aircraft almost every two weeks during several years in the ’80s and ’90s (the F-35, by comparison, has only crashed 3 times in over a decade of flying)." I had no idea that an F-16 crashed roughly every two weeks while being debugged. I imagine I'm not the only one.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  The F-16 (designed 1973/1974) has relaxed stability, which means if the stability augmentation system fails near a stall or abrupt maneuver, the plane is lost. So lots of crashes in testing are to be expected, though in hindsight they could have used an unmanned version to iron out the flight control bugs. During an initial taxi test it actually had a roll control problem, so had to be flown off and landed - that's pretty bad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-16_Fighting_Falcon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-16_Fighting... https://medium.com/@alexjun/interesting-aircraft-of-the-day-1-b8a64ed6fe57 https://medium.com/@alexjun/interesting-aircraft-of-the-day-... The F-5 was the first new jet fighter design (1955/1956) without a fatality in test, which is notable enough to often get mentioned. It was a Mach 2 airframe with initially Mach 1.3 engines, so not a toy, though it was the smallest possible design to use standard weapons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_F-5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_F-5
V_Terranova_Jr 5y ago
> This article contains no new information True. And also, the author is an operator, but not necessarily someone involved in the engineering or acquisition. Nonetheless (and I say this as someone who was severely soured by my involvement with the program), people get tribal as to whether the JSF (provides an unmatched capability) XOR (is the zenith of acquisition malpractice). It's not either/or; both are simultaneously true. No one in DoD R&D/acquisition fails to appreciate how expensive these things are and this realization is certainly driving long-term decision-making.

Sophistifunk 5y ago

This is just the drawn-out version of "no, u"

aeturnum 5y ago

"Survivability and lethality in a contested environment now have more to do with stealth, sensors, data fusion, and the ability to network, than just pure turn performance. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to quantify these capabilities in an unclassified environment." This makes me think about naval development before WW2. Everyone had lots of ideas about battleships and how to pack more guns onto a faster ship and all these other things, but lots of people missed how aircraft carriers would change things. I'm sure the next war will be different. The obvious development is drones, but I also think about the plotline of the second Battlestar Galactica series where the protagonists only initially survive because their ship eschews network connections. It seems like we aren't quite sure what future battles will look like and the US is making a guess in the form of a $1.5tn plane project.

actuator 5y ago
I think it will be a combination of drones and cyber/electronic warfare capabilities. Drones have already shown their potential in the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict recently. From large swarm based attacks to kamikaze mode, I think drones should overtake frontline fighter planes in capability soon.
- kbenson 5y ago
  The thing is, if increased cyberwarfare capabilities allow you to exploit some large percentage of the drone force, then that would leave an extremely large gap to exploit by the enemy. If you can't fly drones because you risk them being crashed (or worse, turned on you), then you need some backup force. That might be real pilots, or it might be non-remote-controlled drones, or some combination of things like that.
- freeopinion 5y ago
  I think it will all come down to one plucky and very clever outsider who stumbled into the situation by accident. Oh yeah, and the girl who needs rescued from the system against which she has rebelled.
- Stranger43 5y ago

ioseph 5y ago

The author mentions the comms and sensors being the new killer feature, putting beside stealth can better sensing and interconnect not be retrofitted to existing aircraft? Why do you need to design a new airframe around better optics?

Pasorrijer 5y ago
Good question! A few reasons. Weight and balance is super important so anything you add means something else needs to be added or balanced. Power requirements are also a problem. More electronics means more power maybe means new engines. Maybe that all means more weight, so you need to reinforce the structure. Which means you're heavier and need a better engine. Etc. Sensors can't just be installed, if you need to drill holes and break pressure bulkheads.
- ldh 5y ago
  What military role does the F-35 fill in the modern world that unmanned drones can't?
  - GoOnThenDoTell 5y ago
    Flashy recruitment B-roll
  - CapricornNoble 5y ago
    Reliable Strike Coordination and Reconnaissance in a comms-degraded environment https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Strike_coordination_and_reconnaissance_(military) https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Strike_coordination_and_reconnais...
    - ldh 5y ago
      Sexy URL, sucks for you if anyone actually clicks it and/or examines your profile as a "Defense industry consultant". Just to be clear, your answer as someone invested in the defense industry to the question of "What military role does the F-35 fill in the modern world that unmanned drones can't?" is to say: >A mission flown for the purpose of detecting targets and coordinating or performing attack or reconnaissance on those targets. Strike coordination and reconnaissance missions are flown in a specific geographic area and are an element of the command and control interface to coordinate multiple flights, detect and attack targets, neutralize enemy air defenses and provide battle damage assessment Forgive my ignorance, but are you saying that we basically need a trillion-dollar endeavor to develop manned fighters which have just barely caught up to the existing technology to go pick fights abroad that we could have already been doing? What new threat are we facing here, other than a slowing of contractual dollars?

Pet_Ant 5y ago

How about versus the F-22? I wonder which he’d choose between the those two.

dwighttk 5y ago
“ The F-35, along with the F-22, is now the premier fighter aircraft in the world.”
- Pet_Ant 5y ago
  That’s not the same as stating a preference between the two.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
ldh 5y ago
He's a former Java developer who is now accustomed to Scala, obviously he prefers that to Kotlin because it's what he knows...
- lardo 5y ago
  do you have Scala and Kotlin reversed? Surely Kotlin is the trimmed down for foreign markets version of Scala.
nemo44x 5y ago
The F-22 is exclusive to the USA - it cannot be exported. The F-35 can and is sold to allies and friendlies however. This should be all you need to know.
- onepointsixC 5y ago
  That was a congressional decision and an awful one at that given that foreign purchases would have kept the production line alive.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

irjustin 5y ago

I worry the author suffers from confirmation bias. Does the bad press miss the point? So much that "point" is the cost per aircraft is nutso for what you get. Something that's stealth, dogfight, and close-in air support. And perhaps the article is right, the stealth is fantastic. Lets you fire without being seen. But after you've fired it, then what? Now everyone knows where you are and a potential dog fight is coming. It's well known its dog fighting is weak even compared to other older fighters, but maybe it's also fair to say dog fighting is a thing of the past[1]. Being a stealth mobile missile battery... Is a good long range offense a strong defense? These kinds of things can only be tested, so... jury's still out. My personal criticism comes in the close in air support, what good is all that money that was dumped into stealth doing as it just hovers above in plain view/access? Also, it does a poor job at flying slowly. It's just not specialized in it. Time will tell if the price tag is even close to being justified, but I'm still a strong skeptic. [1] https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/f-35-pilot-heres-what-people-dont-understand-about-dogfighting-and-how-the-f-35-excels-at-it/ https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/f-35-pilot-heres-wha...

bsder 5y ago
> My personal criticism comes in the close in air support, what good is all that money that was dumped into stealth doing as it just hovers above in plain view/access? Also, it does a poor job at flying slowly. It's just not specialized in it. This is probably a valid criticism, but aren't the current generation of military helicopters simply way better than jets could ever be at this? And they have the advantage that they can land and evacuate people.
- onepointsixC 5y ago
  > This is probably a valid criticism No it is not. The poster is appears to mistakenly believe that F-35B's would hover for purposes of close air support. It would never do that because the VTOL capabilities of the F-35B are exclusively for short range take off and landing. The US has around 10 Amphibious Assault Ship which now thanks to the F-35B's are among some of the most capable carriers in the world. Factor in the ability to take off from rapidly constructed airbases throughout the pacific and the F-35B is one of the most dangerous airplanes currently in production. A squadron could sneak up from completely unexpected directions from bases which had not existed in your satellite reconnaissance just a day ago.

kemitchell 5y ago

Of course he does. He gets to fly it! This passage caught my eye: > The last major reason the F-35 has seen so much criticism is that it was the first jet developed in the social media age. The paradigm shift, cost, and early problems, coupled with concurrency, led to an explosion of negative social media that grew into mainstream media coverage. Cost buried second in a list of factors contributing to…social media as major factor? If it weren't for those pesky kids on the Internet!

tootie 5y ago
This is like saying it got a lot of bad press because everyone noticed how bad it was. We never got to complain about top secret projects because we didn't know what they cost.
throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
Assuming you think the USA should have the "most powerful military" (whether this should be the aim or not is a separate question); how much money is required to achieve that goal and what are your justifications for that amount? Without answering that question, how can you say that the F35 costs too much? Personally i have no idea what the true US military budget should be and I'm not even sure how you'd begin to calculate that as a civilian. One of the few things that gets passed in a bi-partisan manner by the US legislature is the military budget (apparently for 59 straight years). It's easy to look at a big number and say it's bad. But it's also easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. The average FAANG team probably costs their company multiple millions of $ per year in just employee costs. It's easy to parachute in and say that you could do it for less, and you'd probably be right. But that also loses track of bigger picture.
- pydry 5y ago
  >Without answering that question, how can you say that the F35 costs too much? How much is too much to spend on bayonets pre WW1 to face the machine gun? The F-35 is a 1.5 trillion dollar bet on human dog fighters who cant execute high G maneuvers in a world dominated by fleets of cheap, disposable, AI piloted drones that can. Nagorno-Karabakh and Yemen have already shown a taste of this. >One of the few things that gets passed in a bi-partisan manner by the US legislature is the military budget The F35 is curious in this regard because it is so heavily criticized by Congress yet still funded. This is coz Lockheed distributed F35 jobs across the country on the basis of congressional votes. A vote to kill the F35 is thus a vote to destroy jobs in your district. Lockheed engineered the world's most unkillable military program and then milked it to kingdom come. The shareholders are certainly happy. This is, sadly, the most impressive form of F35 engineering. We will look back on many things after the next war and shake our collective heads but I suspect the most glaring and shameful error will be our willingness to indulge corporate profit margins at the expense of the body politic.

pg_bot 5y ago

The F-35 deserves the bad press. Development has been a mess because it is trying to fill every niche for every branch of the military. We could have developed several specialized planes at a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time that it took for this one plane to come into production. While I don't doubt that it is better to fly than the F-16, so would every other plane we would have developed instead of this nightmare. I also am worried that it will be obsoleted with the development of advanced military drones. Why risk a human life when you can just send a robot to the battlefield instead?

tjohns 5y ago
Drones are great for many missions... until you send them to an enemy that can jam the RF link used for remote control. Until we develop the technology to build an AGI, there’s still a need for fighters with human beings on board for autonomy.
- kbenson 5y ago
  I would think that would be more justification for the F-35 as a drone coordinator or controller. It might allow for alternative control mediums (direct or relayed laser, for example), even if maybe eventually only used to update the general mission parameters of the drone if it's controlling itself (i.e. abort, change target, etc).
- fpoling 5y ago
  I thought that frequency hopping made jamming RF links impractical and the main problem is jamming of GPS.
irateswami 5y ago
> Why risk a human life when you can just send a robot to the battlefield instead? That's literally the point of the F35: to stealthily penetrate enemy airspace and act as a command and control combat platform for drones. It observes the battlefield with it's amazing "eye of god" sensory field, drones are sent into the battle space automatically where they are then taken control of by the pilot.

ldh 5y ago

> When the F-35 debuted, it was inferior to the F-16 and other 4th generation aircraft. However, its potential has been steadily unlocked by the engineers, and several years ago, it surpassed the F-16’s capability. Sounds like the national defense equivalent of rewriting your website from scratch in $LATEST_WEBSHIT_FRAMEWORK. Sure, it's a worse product, but just imagine how great it _could_ be if we halt development of the working version and spend a trillion dollars making the new one work. See? It's better! And the customer is paying hand over fist, so everyone wins.

CapricornNoble 5y ago
>>>Sounds like the national defense equivalent of rewriting your website from scratch in $LATEST_WEBSHIT_FRAMEWORK. Sure, it's a worse product, but just imagine how great it _could_ be if we halt development of the working version and spend a trillion dollars making the new one work. And eventually the Air Force came to its senses, accepted the "pull request" for upgrades on its big workhorse F-15 "library"....and now we are getting the awesome F-15EX. Something we should have been working on before they even cancelled the F-22. This is why I like the Russian approach to military R&D: they do a small number of cutting-edge products to keep their engineers employed and their tech as current as possible given their constraints, but the bulk of their actual inventory is continuous refinements of solid legacy systems, tweaked and rolled out at fairly low cost. Su-27 -> Su-30 -> Su-34 and 35 (honestly even the Su-57 planform is clearly an extension of this airframe if you look at it closely) T-72 -> T-90 -> latest upgrade packages for both (T-72B3M and T-90M Breakthrough-3)

phendrenad2 5y ago

I think the point of the F-35 is it's one jet that can do it all. Maybe it isn't as stealthy or fast as an SR-71, and maybe it's VTOL isn't as good as a Huey, and maybe it's sensors aren't as good as a high-latitude balloon or satellite, but that's the point. It's versatile, so you can use it as the bread and butter and deploy various more specialized equipment if needed. The bad press about the jet is stuck in a 1980s mindset - no, not even that, they're stuck in a 1960s futurist vision of the 1980s that never came to pass (you can count on one hand how many "dogfights" there were in the 1980s, and they were pretty meager examples of such).

iab 5y ago
That is how it was sold, for sure. Unfortunately now it has become 3 jets, that can't do it all (at this point). There was supposed to be > 70% commonality, but currently less than 25%. It can't do interdiction, doesn't have loiter time & is ordnance poor wrt. current platforms, is not a great interceptor (no supercruise launch). It is a significant advancement in sensor technology and integration, for sure. The reduction in type number, and the suggestion of the NGAD (both Air Force and Navy, which suggests that they think that joint acquisition is not the way to go next time) makes me think of the classic procurement death cycle. Very happy to be proven wrong on all of this.
GVIrish 5y ago
> I think the point of the F-35 is it's one jet that can do it all. That was the idea, but it is also why the program has performed so poorly on cost, timeliness, and capability. The F-35 was supposed to achieve 80% parts commonality among the three variants. This would have delivered massive cost savings. Instead, the reality is less than 25% parts commonality. Also, the compromises made to accommodate all three requirement sets means the F-35 has worse aerodynamic performance and a worse radar cross section than it otherwise would've had if the Air Force and Navy could've had their own dedicated air frames from the start. The much lower degree of parts-sharing wouldn't be so bad, except that the JSF program eschewed a lot of real world testing in lieu of computer simulation. And to make matters worse they employed "concurrent development", which meant that production were getting made while the testing phase was still in progress. The result was that as problems were uncovered, expensive retrofits had to be applied to all the airframes that had already been produced. In a more traditional development strategy, the vast majority of teething issues would've been found before series production began. But concurrent development was used to try to speed up the timeline, but also make it more difficult to cancel the program. The F-35 has a lot of capabilities but it is fundamentally compromised because of the attempt to make it a jack of all trades. It has had an extremely long gestation period, very high development costs, very high operational costs, and compromised performance on several fronts. Had the DoD at least split off the USMC STOVL requirement it seems like this project would've gone a lot better.

thelucky41 5y ago

> The last major reason the F-35 has seen so much criticism is that it was the first jet developed in the social media age. The paradigm shift, cost, and early problems, coupled with concurrency, led to an explosion of negative social media that grew into mainstream media coverage. Whether the F-35 will be successful or not does not matter whether there are armchair journalists or mainstream reporters covering the project, but in this case we can enjoy the increased accountability. This should be seen as a positive effect of social media, if anything. This had me wondering how many mistakes in previous projects were smoothed over by clever marketing, and how many are being exposed now. Does social media make it easier or harder for the general public to get accurate information on this sort of thing?

Animats 5y ago

Maj. Justin Lee, USAF really is, or was, an F-35 pilot.[1] Since he's now on the motivational speaker circuit [2][3] he's probably out of the USAF. [1] https://www.aetc.af.mil/News/Photos/igphoto/2002209050/ https://www.aetc.af.mil/News/Photos/igphoto/2002209050/ [2] https://thedealerplaybook.com/justin-lee/ https://thedealerplaybook.com/justin-lee/ [3] https://www.professionalsplaybook.com/listen https://www.professionalsplaybook.com/listen

tekacs 5y ago
From your post, [2] says, "Maj. Justin Lee, USAF is an active F-35 Joint Strike Force pilot" [3] says, "I'm an F-35 fighter pilot for the Air Force." ... both of which seem to suggest that he's still active?
packetslave 5y ago
He left active duty in January, but still flies F-35s in the Air Force Reserves. Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/CJ4C_ClB01e/ https://www.instagram.com/p/CJ4C_ClB01e/

johnklos 5y ago

This reads like marketing. A pilot should be able to speak to problems with more nuance than that. This is just too awkward and too general to be taken seriously.

emmelaich 5y ago

The concurrency / collapsed timeline sounds like an agile vs 'waterfall' thing. Very probably valuable but under appreciated at the same time.

GVIrish 5y ago
The concurrency is a major reason for massive cost overruns. If you're building production aircraft before the testing and evaluation phase is done with prototypes, every time you find a major issue you have to retrofit dozens or even hundreds of planes. But, like a lot of things with the JSF program, concurrency made it much more difficult to cancel. Sunk costs and all that.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mikehollinger 5y ago

Slightly related, but there's a great hour-long lecture [1] by Colonel Randy Gordon, who's a test pilot, discussing the flight control systems for the F-22, contrasting it (a bit) to other jets, and even to a Cessna. He talks about the tradeoffs between human factors, mechanical engineering, software engineering, and shows how the software systems help the pilot. It's well worth the hour if you're an aviation geek. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n068fel-W9I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n068fel-W9I

ummonk 5y ago

Stealth technology aside, there is the question of why the new avionics technology wasn't retrofitted to existing airframes first to limit development risks and control costs.

mbgerring 5y ago

Who is the US in an air war with again?

CapricornNoble 5y ago
Today? Nobody. In 2003? Iraq....and shitting on the Iraqi military with overwhelming air power made the ground war 10x easier...demonstrated twice. In less than 10 years, we quite possibly could be in an air war with China over Taiwan. We can't tear down and stand up military hardware like AWS VMs. The lead times for a viable, robust capability are sadly on the order of 2 decades. For China I'd argue it's maybe half of that... Our procurement process is screwed, and I'm not convinced most of it can be chalked up to "modern tech is complex".

jlawer 5y ago

The criticism comes from many angles. It IS a very capable war-plane for many of its roles. Much more capable then the harrier and with many capabilities that the F-16 & F-18 lack. It has different solutions to the problems it faces though. Many of these new approaches to old problems that are arguable. Is a stealthy approach (F-35) more effective then raw manoeuvrability (F-16) in fighter vs fighter combat? Probably if the stealth can be maintained. Is high flying precisions guided weaponry as better then what an A-10 can do in close air support? Maybe? These points will be argued by airchair air marshals until we have another big war to "answer" the question. But the F-35 has failed at being the cheap general purpose aircraft it was promised to be. It has been earmarked to replace the F-16 in its entirety, as the low end fighter to the F-22 raptor as the high end. This was one of the reasons the F-35 has a single engine. Recent moves are to make the F-35 the new high end fighter w/ a new lightweight fighter the low end that can be cheap enough to fulfil this need.

quelsolaar 5y ago

F35 is good, but the cost of an adversaries old planes times the number of air-to-air a 35f can carry is significantly less then the cost of an F35, it may not be the most cost efficient way to go about fighting your enemy. War is about winning the economics. Can your economy and industrial output out pace what your enemy destroys, vs your opponents output and what you can destroy. Even in peace time, this is a major factor. Keeping up with the US on military spending bankrupted the USSR, at the same time as Japanese and German industries where able to leap ahead of both, since they didn't spend on military post WW2. The US may want to have a good Military to defend against China, but if it spends too much, and not enough on civil industry (and education) China may crush the US economically, without firing a bullet. You can have the most Nukes of any country, but at some point, you have enough nukes to do anything you want, and after that, any nuke you add is a drain on your economy. Having the "best" or "most" weapons isn't the same as having the right allocation of resources.

csb6 5y ago
> You can have the most Nukes of any country, but at some point, you have enough nukes to do anything you want, and after that, any nuke you add is a drain on your economy. If we have enough nukes to do whatever we want (we definitely have more than enough nukes), then it follows that we do not need giant conventional forces, right? We are already invulnerable to invasion/defensive war because of the nukes/geography so what is the point of conventional forces from a defensive standpoint? This means the F-35 is about offense and conflict escalation - about increasing the reach/power of the American empire. The most cost effective strategy for a nation that is not an empire in this situation would be to drastically downsize conventional forces since we already have a deterrent. Expensive new fighter jets are no longer needed for defense. So I see the F-35 program not as a counter against the U.S.’s enemies, but as a way to more effectively attack other countries.
- quelsolaar 5y ago
  Not entirely. One could imagine that China would be willing to invade Taiwan, if the only possible response from the US would be nuclear strike. The US would not go to nuclear war over Taiwan and the Chinese know it. The F35 is able to defend US strategic interests in Taiwan (mainly chip making) in a way nukes cant. On the other hand The budget of the F35 could buy TSMC 3 times over, so it may not be the most cost effective way to defend your interests...

ncmncm 5y ago

Everything he says could be true, but still miss the point. The actual point is that we are absolutely stuck with the F-35, so had better make it good--or at least take up thinking it's good, where we can't. It is not correct to compare it to an F-16. It needs to be compared to a whole fleet of aircraft, because it costs as much as much as a fleet. Could it take on 8 F-16s at once? It is not correct to compare it to an F-16 because you can afford to fly your plentiful F-16s in harm's way, but have to keep your paltry few F-35s a hundred miles back, out of any possibility of danger. The reason we are stuck with the F-35, despite its still suffering over 600 class-A design flaws (each risks loss of airframe), is that it is built in 48 states. To kill it you would need to get senators from 24 of those states, and the other two besides, to vote against it. It could explode every time the gear doors shut, and we would still be stuck with it, and they know. Be glad it can take off and land.

rjvs 5y ago

Japan is denying that they have tightened the requirements for scrambling fighters against Chinese planes on course to enter Japanese airspace since they deployed F-35[1]. I imagine that a Chinese fighter probably costs a lot less to get into the air than an F-35 does. The airframe and engines might not have a higher MTBF than F-35 (or maybe they do) but they are certainly cheaper and easier to replace, regardless. There's an obvious economic and industrial capability question to all of this. A player with cheap planes can erode the benefits of the technologically superior one by simply encouraging them to be used more, or forcing the decision to not use them for fear of stretching supply lines... Thus reducing the required response time when it's decided to actually deploy the expensive weapon. [1] https://www.stripes.com/news/pacific/japan-denies-report-that-it-s-scrambling-fewer-fighter-jets-against-chinese-military-aircraft-1.664530 https://www.stripes.com/news/pacific/japan-denies-report-tha...