This has happened to me a few times before following a single boredom-induced chumbox click.
Advanced military toys are always good for nerd sniping, recommender algorithms know this, and they will eagerly amplify a small amount of demonstrated interest into a deluge of recommendations. I'm pretty sure that's what's happening here.
So yes, it's certainly a bought and paid for PR effort, but I wouldn't conclude that it's localized in time, just that HN recently wandered into it. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll take my leave to go read about the fabulous toys my tax dollars are paying for.
> Advanced military toys are always good for nerd sniping
That and active measures. Eroding public support for your enemy's shiny new military hardware is a cheap way to destroy morale and increase the chances it'll get cancelled.
My impression is that there are two things at play:
1) Once you've noticed something, you tend to notice it more often.
2) Novel (or uncommon) articles on HN that get to the front page tend to attract other articles on the same topic. I can imagine this along the lines of:
Human 1: Hey apparently there's an audience on HN for topic X that I enjoy! I wonder if HN is also interested in this related article on topic X.
Or Human 2: Hey here's this interesting related article I discovered while looking at front-page article Y on topic X.
The summary of all of this is to say that my guess is that like attracts like and uncommon topics die down fairly quickly in time. I imagine that it is less of a concerted effort by stakeholders to push and direct topic X than just the effects of a curious and diverse group.
On the other hand, this is the second positive article on this plane to hit the top of hacker news in 3 days [1]. A trillion dollar plane that is notorious for costing way too much probably has a pretty decent marketing budget behind it, and it's not very difficult to assume that these articles are part of that somehow.
For an article that came out before this recent press rollout began, try this one: "The F-35 Is a $1.4T National Disaster"
Or another one not so long ago about still ongoing troubles with F-35C carrier version [1]. I stumbled upon that while following up to reading of the recent F-35 post on HN. Fascinating craft, nevertheless.
While at it also found some stories about F-35 helmet targeting systems, if it's anything like BAE Striker II for Eurofighter [3]
I find, anecdotally, that topics or subject trends come in waves of 2 or 3. Something will make front page of HN, and then a few days later someone else will capitalize on a proven "market of interest" and submit another article that also makes it's way up.
Could also be a paid PR campaign if you're the cynical type. 50/50
“Capitalizing on a proven market“, or maybe just simple, old-fashioned web "surfing". Following the links deeper and deeper into a topic originally found on hn. Hundreds venture off into the rabbit holes, a tiny fraction feel they found something worth sharing back to hn.
Most likely a bit of both, you are not alone in noticing the pattern.
A trillion dollar plane that's cutting edge probably has a pretty decent opposition market budget behind it from adversarial nations, and it's not very difficult to assume that these articles are part of that somehow.
One addition you have a lot of readers hitting one story, google or someone notices and ... someone(s) is going to be exposed to that topic more even if only because Google decides to push it on some of those folks.
I always found the F-35 "bad" news to be agenda driven, possibly by a foreign actor. The people I know in the Air Force are fans of the F-35, but the media never has been. I think there are certainly cost overruns, etc that deserve coverage...but I am always struck by the negative opinion even the most common person has of the fighter just from headlines, that in some cases are misleading. I just can't shake the feeling that some of it is manufactured. I could be wrong, but it has certainly felt that way to me. So, it wouldn't surprise me if the DoD is doing a bit of a PR push to restore public faith in the project.
It's $100,000,000 per aircraft, and US military spending is bigger than the next 7 countries combined. The news stories I've read about America in the past year are about how our water pipes are still full of lead, people are dying of gun violence, and government workers who live paycheck-to-paycheck got hurt by the shutdown.
I don't need a foreign actor to explain why people in America today are unsympathetic to a new technologically advanced fighter jet. Even the foreign threats of today aren't the type where air superiority would help at all.
Air superiority is the defining aspect of modern war. Whoever owns the skies wins. Whatever one's opinion on the FXX planes, the goal of maintaining air superiority into the future is completely obvious and necessary.
Well, only if you can keep fighting a defined enemy who is at all vulnerable to a traditional conflict. An enemy who is globally distributed and just targets vulnerable energy and water infrastructure over the internet is much less targetable with air power.
Why? The enemy still exists physically and can be attacked like any other target. Being distributed is precisely the reason why we need a strong Air Force with global air superiority so the enemy can't hide.
It's more like complaining about an expensive meal like it was a crazy idea to begin with, and someone points out that expensive meals can be necessary. Air superiority will obviously be one of the most expensive elements to maintain in a modern military. whether the meal should be 200 or 500, whether the restaurant could have been a much better value, it's going to be more than most any other food you buy and the problem was not in deciding to eat at an expensive restaurant, but in more specific choices of which restaurant, what you ordered off the menu, etc.
Imagine how many people you could feed for $350B. Or how much we cancer and HIV research we could fund. Denmark bought a set of these monsters and I still have no idea why we need them. Competition (SAAB Gripen, F18) was 1/3 of the price, purchase as well as ongoing opex.
That's not how budgets work. You don't automatically get to spend $350B because of a budget shift. You also have to consider the diminishing returns of things like disease fighting, crime fighting, and the incentive to fraudulently justify your research/actions.
The F-35 is designed to be more expensive but cheaper to maintain. Fleet maintenance, especially in the US eats up a massive, massive chunk of the budget. So while the F/A 18 might be 1/3rd the price, once you count in maintenance, it might not be much cheaper...and it's last generation. There is a complex math behind it. There is absolutely waste, fraud and abuse in the military...but it's probably not as much as you think since the majority of military spending in the US is actually on pensions, healthcare, housing, salaries and maintenance of aging equipment. Things that in other countries are much cheaper or just not given to soldiers. Comparing the US to China and Russian (at least their public spending numbers) is so misleading. New research and projects is a drop in the bucket.
Your comment reminds me of one of the greatest speeches of the 20th century:
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms in not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
Address by President Dwight D. Eisenhower "The Chance for Peace" delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16,1953.
It's a super expensive jet that was touted to be a good idea because cramming three roles into "one design" would lead to efficiencies and cost reductions. Instead the end result is that there's barely 30% commonality between the 3 versions while also being hugely expensive and underperforming. Meanwhile, remember that the F-22 program was effectively cut short and cancelled because it was too expensive, at around $150 million per jet.
If they had any sense they would have cancelled the F-35 program long ago and rerun a set of competition trials for each of the three separate roles.
A 737 Max costs over $120,000,000 and that’s essentially a flying bus. The F-35 is the most advanced fighter in the air.
Gun violence has little connection to budget. That’s a straw man. Dangerous water is a failure of local governments (such as Flint;) the vast majority of American water is perfectly fine. As far as government workers being “paycheck to paycheck” — that’s a problem with financial literacy. Government jobs generally have great benefits and aren’t minimum wage. Americans need more Dave Ramsey and not necessarily more Bernie Sanders.
Systems get better with refinement. The F35 is getting into the "mature technology" part of the progress curve now so it's naturally going to look better. It took a lot of money to get there but we're starting to see more positive results.
People are more likely to submit what they're reading if a similar post has already proven to be popular.
Overall JSF program aside, this is a fairly interesting and in depth (at least for this audience, this is probably just a high level overview to someone who works on electronic warfare technology) article on a particular subsystem so why wouldn't it be popular here?
The aircraft is likely to be very capable and since it embeds so much new technology delays and problems are not something surprising.
Most of the negative coverage is more around that such very expensive aircraft (and program) may not be that useful, for example, to fight terrorism or low-tech nations (and like another person mentioned in this thread, there may be more pressing matters in the US).
In the longer term however, it can be argued that maintaining that kind of advanced aerial capability may be paramount to keep balance vs countries like China.
And if you think the F-35 is too expensive, check out the F-22 which was purely air superiority!
It's just as likely that there were negative opinions created for your impression, and way people actually feel is coming to light. Disinformation cuts both ways.
It's actually been getting lots of good press for quite a while now if you follow defense news, mostly due to very good performance in wargames exercises and serious problems being resolved. That said, it's somewhat bizarre seeing a bunch of articles related to it on HN. This is really not the kind of community which usually follows that kind of thing closely. /r/CredibleDefense over on reddit is much more suited to discussions about this kind of thing.
Sorta makes sense -- it was subject to a lot of bad publicity for a long time, because all anybody knew of it was that it cost a lot, and didn't work well. That's kinda true of any product when it's in its final stage of development: there's a lot of money sunk into it at that point, and if you brought a user (or investor) in, they might question what the hell is going on if they don't have the right level of expectations set in advance (which by and large the public doesn't).
Now that the thing is actually flying, and we're starting to hear from pilots and people have gotten to see it at airshows, etc., naturally it's getting better press. This is the payoff, it's what the thing is designed to do. So it better damn well fly well and look good doing it.
There's still an open question and a debate to be had about whether the aircraft is WORTH the insane cost, and WHY the damn thing cost so much to begin with, though. I suspect it's like most things American at the moment -- we pay far too much, and get far too little for our money, compared to literally anyone else on the planet who might choose to build the same thing. (See also: healthcare, education, public transportation, physical infrastructure... we pay more and get less. Military equipment is no exception.)
But yeah, I'd expect to see better press now than when the thing was all but vaporware and a big bill.
> There's still an open question and a debate to be had about whether the aircraft is WORTH the insane cost, and WHY the damn thing cost so much to begin with
There's no question about why it costs so much. The cost is including ~3,000 planes and covers up to 2070 in maintenance costs. That's a ridiculous number of planes to be maintained for decades. We'll never come close to building 3,000 however, the program will end long before that.
Russia's new Su-57 planes are at least $50 million each. Their GDP per capita is 1/6th that of the US. Imagine paying for that if you're them. Equivalent to $300 million in the US economy, except Russia is a very poor nation and can't rationally afford anything close to spending even $50m per plane.
Let's go with Russia's $50m number however. 3,000 planes at $50m = $150 billion just to get them built. Russia would probably spend another $600 billion maintaining those planes over four decades. The F35 unit cost is around $80 to $110 million depending on the version.
The US is getting a stellar deal in scope to its economy compared to what the Russians are spending on their latest planes.
The MiG-35 will cost at least double what the last MiG-29 variation did, or around $40 million. $240 million when adjusted to US per capita output figures.
For Russia it's even worse if we look at the absolute scale of their economy (from which the cost of those planes must come out of), a mere $1.6 trillion, or nearly 1/13th the size of the US economy. If you adjust the cost on that basis, it's like the US spending $650 million per F35. Nobody would think that's a deal. Russia isn't even remotely close to matching the US in adjusted terms on its new jet costs, their wild spending is on another planet entirely.
The Chengdu J-20 looks to cost $50 million per unit or more. That's in China, where they should be able to do everything radically cheaper than the US, and where they also have a GDP per capita 1/6th that of the US. $50 million is an astronomical sum for them to be spending per plane based on their economy. Or if we adjust based on the absolute size of their economy (the US economy is roughly 47-50% larger), it still pushes that unit cost up near the cheapest F35 variant.
The Eurofighter Typhoon, an older plane, costs as much per unit as the F35.
I'm not seeing any evidence that the F35 is expensive compared to other jets in the latest generation when you adjust for the US economic output level.
Every new fighter the US has added since 1970 has followed the same pattern so it's not surprising. At least the F-35 hasn't killed a bunch of pilots like the F-14 did before they worked the kinks out.
The "positive" articles are at least talking about the F-35's attributes as they relate to its primary mission of SEAD. To me this is a recovery of some signal against all the previous noise, wherein we wondered if the F-35 was the all-around best fighter ever, and if not why not, etc.
I was recently in western China and it's nothing like people say it is. It is very peaceful and I don't have to wear my backpack facing forward and worry about thieves like I do when I'm in Ameri ---- oops wrong story.
In all seriousness, this article is pretty interesting and kinda stands on its own.
You should also visit Tibet.
There are roadblocks and military everywhere. It is bizarre.
Once I saw drunken Chinese soldiers spinning circles in the middle of a small town with a stolen tractor. Super weird scene. The locals were not happy about it.
I had the sense that mainland China IS pretty safe from petty theft because all the police. However, what is up with all the open prostitution when is it supposed to be illegal?
Sorry, but this reads like a cheap infomercial to me. Nothing wrong with extra advertising I guess (other than the fact that it is likely in the end charged to the taxpayer), but I just cannot help translating things like
"The fusion of information ... degrades a stealthy aircraft's ability to remain undetected" to "this was cutting edge stealth when conceived, but as aircraft has been in the works for so long (work started 1992, first flight 2006) its stealth is kind of useless now. We have to depend on towed decoys :(
The exotic curves are visually exquisite, and I'm curious what the production and fabrication technique and processes are.
Particularly for the jet engine housing. Is it comprised of a few large sheets, or many smaller pieces? Not sure how to get the curvature and bends consistently correct within tolerance limits for large sheets.
It seems like it would be extremely challenging.
It looks like it might be titanium?
If you know about this or have ideas, please do tell!
P.S.
What a cool read! This is the type of article I come to hacker news hoping to find :)
it's a coated composite similar to carbon, but with specified radio properties. It looks like carbon fiber with a large weave before coating.
I dropped a panel almost exactly like the one in question that was scrap from mis-machining, and it nearly deafened me, it rings like a toilet lid; like a ceramic.
source : I had a small involvement with recent US planes.
So before computer assisted drafting/manufacturing showed up, it was quite common to see Rubber Mallet in use on the production floor of the expensive planes. Workers literally had to beat certain parts of the plane into place using Rubber Mallets.
Haha very true. However using rubber mallet on stealthy aircraft would be strictly prohibited as just a small imperfection on skin of aircraft would make it show up prominently in radar.
I had thought that fighter jets used more specific aluminum alloys than titanium, but I found this on the f-35 specifically (Bruce Tanner is Lockheed Martin's CFO):
"Tanner says Lockheed uses more aluminum than steel on its aircraft projects, which in addition to the F-35, include the C-130 cargo plane, and F-16 fighter. And the F-35 uses more titanium than aluminum and steel, he said. "
Startup idea: a tool that lets you type a random word into a text box and uses machine learning to show you relevant web pages to help you find what you're looking for.
One thing that has often puzzled me is the effectiveness of an expensive fighter jet against inexpensive adversaries in a face to face dogfight. For example F-35 costs in upwards of $90 Million per unit. Chinese J-10 or JF-17 are $20 or $25 Million per unit. That's 3 fighters for one F-35. So is one expensive F-35 capable enough of taking on 3 cheaper (yet sophisticated enough jets read up on JF-17 recent achievements)? Granted pilots and ground crew on both sides are equal match in skills.
Internet bench racing of aircraft always focuses on "dogfighting". Dogfighting has no purpose in in winning the war. Striking the enemy ground targets without engaging in dogfights is successful. Do that and pretty soon there won't be any enemy fighters in the air to worry about.
Modern combat is not at all the same thing as WWI/WWII "turn and burn" stuff or what gets depicted in Star Wars.
"Turn and Burn" was already out of favor with US pilots in WWII.
If the F-35 enters into a turn-and-burn in a 3-1 situation the pilot has already failed.. if he gets out of the situation alive he's getting chewed out.
They have all kinds of training & procedures around different scenarios and those don't involve flying straight at the enemy and then getting into a turning match.
We haven't seen the deployment of a drone which can threaten manned aircraft yet. That's going to be fascinating to watch.
I'd envision "kamikaze" drones being the most feasible thing to be effective first. Basically much smarter missiles. A vision of a swarm of something that looks like a DJI phantom threatening fixed wing aircraft is pretty much fantasy right now though. Too slow, not enough weight capacity, range & loitering time & service ceiling too low, etc.. the only way I seem them being useful is 1000 of them in a dense cloud around a target.. like stationary mines in the sky hoping to be struck by attackers like a bird strike.
Modern combat is not at all the same thing as WWI/WWII "turn and burn" stuff..."Turn and Burn" was already out of favor with US pilots in WWII.
In WWII, F4 Wildcat pilots soon learned not to get into turning contests with Mitsubishi Zeros. Instead, they maintained altitude and speed, using their advantage in a dive to execute "slashing" attacks.
something that looks like a DJI phantom...the only way I seem them being useful is 1000 of them in a dense cloud around a target.. like stationary mines in the sky hoping to be struck by attackers like a bird strike.
Those drones are plenty fast enough for tanks. Why not a tank equivalent of an aircraft carrier? The tank would act as a mobile charging station and command center. Most modern tanks could be severely disabled by a shaped charge placed directly onto the barrel of the main gun, or directly onto the tread mechanism. The machine guns and targeting systems are also quite vulnerable, the loss of which would also severely degrade the tank's combat power. Tanks have acquired countermeasure systems like Trophy, but those could be overwhelmed through saturation attacks and on current tanks, they are externally mounted and themselves vulnerable.
Most modern tanks are vulnerable to shaped charges (and other effective penetrators) anywhere but the front and maybe turret sides, a fact exploited by smart submunitions that do top attacks, and can be delivered quickly over long ranges by artillery shells or rockets. This is probably much cheaper per charge and more tactically useful (one launcher covers a wider area with equal response time) than kamikaze quadcopter drones.
They'd have to fly fully autonomously with just vision, which is pretty hard to do (though not impossible). It's not as easy as putting some explosives on a quadcopter and sending it out.
It's not so simple. Wide-area active-passive-rotation jammer drone swarms will disable any advantages of smart missiles, drones and stealth. You'll resort to dogfighting again. Furthermore, people always forget that in order for smart missiles to work you generally have to continuously shine a radio beam at your target for quite a while which kills any stealth advantage you have provided the adversary has the tech to detect it.
And all of that is only in case you haven't already been hacked or spied on by other means.
There were a few public talks on youtube from relevant engineers about other possible countermeasures but I can't find them now. But the summary is that while war planes take 20 years to build, most countermeasures can be coded and iterated in a week on some existing platform as new info becomes available. Usually in the form of coordinating a swarm in certain ways and synthesising radio signals for different purposes.
"I'd envision "kamikaze" drones being the most feasible thing to be effective first."
Agreed, and that's what scares me the most. All drones "pilots" will safely return to their families, their families won't lose any loved ones, therefore they'll become even easier to brainwash into voting anyone who supports wars.
Circle closed, war becomes a 24/7/365 business worldwide and if you happen to live in the wrong place you're pretty much screwed.
Interestingly, it could also have the opposite effect. Sure, it makes it less risky for your pilots when you escalate a conflict. But it also means that if there's some sort of border clash and a couple drones get shot down, it's not as big a deal because no one was actually killed. There's some more information here: https://warontherocks.com/2019/01/game-of-drones-what-experi...
It's also important to note that in the last few decades very few US pilots have been shot down or killed, so switching to drones doesn't significantly change the equation. The majority of the dying is going to be from the infantry on the ground, which aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
and we're back to missiles. those are just missiles. next you'll invent MIRVs under the premise of saving on the cost of the "cruising" since targets tend to be clustered.
Medium-range air-to-air missles leave very little room for avoiding dogfight/furball. To get maximum range out of the missiles, the fighter must fly fast and high altitude towards the enemy.
F-35 is not air superiority fighter, so it has no speed or acceleration to leave the chasing aircraft behind after it has launched the missiles.
But F35s generally fly with F22s which is in fact an air superiority fighter. The F35 is often a "gun truck" for targets the F22 finds and annotates.
In general, one of the things that sets the F22/F35 apart from most of the competition is their AESA phased array radar, which is allegedly the best in the world. It can find enemy aircraft long before they can find it. Also, it can allow the pilot to lock and fire missiles before the enemy is close enough to target it. The dogfighting days where men such as the Red Barron or Chuck Yaeger ruled the skies are pretty much done forever. Soon enough we'll have UCAVs which can do > 12G rolls and will win every single dogfight because turns that fast cause humans to simply lose consciousness.
I think I the balance is to use each platform for what it is amazing at and supplement the weaknesses with other platforms that are better in various areas. Combined forces hit the hardest, but the electronics / SIGINT packages in modern fighters truly does set them apart. After an F35 has expended all of its rockets it can still designate targets for other combatants to destroy. The sensor fusion going on (thanks to Moore’s law and smaller / faster compute) really is something.
Sorry, I'm not a military buff, but that article refers to beast mode being:
- either 16 Air-to-air missiles
- or 4 guided bombs and 2 air-to-air missiles.
That seems incredibly underwhelming. Isn't that less than the capacity of a single ground based vehicle?
And wouldn't a fixed position defensive system have hundreds of missiles?
I can't quite see when four bombs per mission is ever going to be "an unbelievable amount of firepower".
I'll try to respond to your statements here individually.
Let's compare that to one of the more recent Soviet air superiority fighters, the Su-57[1]. For air-to-air combat, it has 4 beyond visual range missiles and 2 short range missiles. The F35 in beast mode has 16 (14 long range and 2 short range) air to air missiles in addition to its machine gun. Pretty big difference even excluding the massively better AESA phased array radars in the F35 and additional jamming / spoofing hw in the F35.
It might seem underwhelming to you, but it is still an overwhelming amount of firepower. A ground based vehicle doesn't need to be stealth or deal with gravity. Ground based vehicles also don't need to go supersonic whereas the F35 can go mach 1.6. The US anti-aircraft patriot missile launcher, the M901, can be loaded with 4 PAC-2 patriots for anti-air, or 16 PAC-3 patriots for shooting down ballistic missiles. Do they keep some extra missiles with each unit to reload? Absolutely! Hundreds? Not even close. We worked with them when I was a UAV Pilot (Shadow 200 TUAV aka a "drone" that was about 11'x13'x2.5ft).
What I can tell you, from experience, is that when a single bomb can literally level a city block, four bombs per mission is an unbelievable amount of firepower. For serious missions, you'll also have entire wings of planes continuously dropping ordinance, flying back to base, rearming and doing it again. You end up with a lot of destruction, but this is real life and not a video game. I flew many missions in OIF II (482 combat flight hours) on the reconnaissance drone the Shadow 200. We did a lot of targeting and one of the more memorable missions involved a Kiowa scout helicopter being shot down. They made a military channel special about it[2] and what ended it was dropping a single GBU50 500lb bomb on a huge weapon cache the militants were using to rearm before trying to blow up the downed chopper and the pilots time and time again.
For a huge and daring operation to blow up a lot of Syria's chemical weapon production facilities look at the number of planes involved. Note that Syria has the S200 and newer Pantsir, supposedly some of the best anti-air in the world. The mission was a total success with all targeted facilities destroyed and not a single allied plane shot down.
Does this maybe answer your question? It might not seem like a lot, but these can be very big bombs and it isn't as though the enemy is spread evenly over a city the size of New York City.
I'd envision "kamikaze" drones being the most feasible
thing to be effective first. Basically much smarter
missiles. A vision of a swarm of something..
Reminds me of this foreboding demonstration of micro drone kamikaze assassinations:
I wonder if a low cost bomber based on an airliner airframe would be useful. You could fire the super expensive rockets out of the belly, have space for a massive radar, and operate across continents without needing to refuel.
Boeing has a design for you, the 747-based Cruise Missile Carrier Aircraft [1]. The marines are currently using the "Harvest Hawk" C-130 kit [2] which launches small close air support mission missiles from the cargo hold. Also, the Boeing P-8 Poseidon [3] is a 737 based Multimission Maritime Aircraft that can launch torpedoes as well as sonobuoys. See also the Kawasaki P1 launching a Maverick air to surface missile [4].
That's essentially what the B-52 is: an airliner-sized, subsonic jet bomber with a huge capacity and a long range. And apparently they're still in active service. (After 64 years!)
The main downside that I can think of is that you really need air superiority to use them effectively, because they can't outfight, outmaneuver, or run away from any sort of enemy fighter. That's not a big deal against ISIS, but it's no good for prospective conflicts with China or Russia or whatever. Also, modern tactics tend more towards precision strikes rather than massive carpet bombing or, God forbid, nukes.
Pentagon is planning to keep B-52 in service for another 40(?) years. That's 100 years since it was first introduced. Grandkids of first pilots/mechanics who worked with B-52 will work on the same planes in year 2059.
Machine guns on aircraft are like pistols to an infantryman. They're an emergency backup if you've used up your primary ammo or someone jumps you at close range. Modern aircraft cannons have an effective range of less than a mile; the Sidewinder, our standard short-range air-to-air missile, can hit at 22 miles.
The advantage a stealth fighter such as the F-22 or F-35 has against non-stealthy fighters such as the J-10 and JF-17 really is difficult to overstate with k/d ratios in exercises being roughly 15:1[1]. Being extremely difficult to detect while also being outfitted with very high end sensors makes it almost certain that F-22s and F-35s are able to engage enemies on their own terms. A better comparison would be with China's new stealthy J-20s but we really don't have any concrete information about how good their stealth really is so it's hard to even speculate.
>Being extremely difficult to detect while also being outfitted with very high end sensors makes it almost certain that F-22s and F-35s are able to engage enemies on their own terms.
Agreed, and it's also very likely that the F-35 and F-22 would be leading and providing high quality targeting data to F-15s, F-16s, and F-18s, carrying dozens of long range air-to-air missiles.
The F-35 isn't a dogfighter in the WW2 mold of the P-51 Mustang, etc.
The F-35 was conceived of for a different kind of fight, more like a contest of swarms than a series of related but independent jousts. The F-35 is formidable because it works better in a pack than anything else out there. For example, it can fly out ahead of a mass of 4th generation fighters into an environment they couldn't survive and remain there, low-observable, long enough to feed targeting data back to the swarm who can launch a salvo of missiles from over the horizon, out of harm's way. As the article explains, stealth isn't about remaining 100% invisible, which is impossible, rather it's about preventing anyone from shooting while you get the first shot off instead.
Whether or not the F-35 lives up to this hope is another thing, but it was never conceived of as primarily a dominant dogfighter so it's fun but maybe not hugely relevant to stack it up against planes that were designed to win that fight. The F-35 seeks to win it before it even starts, instead. It remains to be seen if anything was learned from the F-4's introduction and if all of this works against peer states, but this is the idea behind it.
The F-35 isn't a dogfighter in the WW2 mold of the P-51 Mustang, etc.
Actually, a lot of the WWII fighters used their advantages in flight ceiling, armor, and speed, instead of getting into turning fights. (Though the later allied fighters could also turn.)
The Japanese even made a fighter that deliberately sacrificed turning for speed.
A dogfight scenario is exactly the point where the f-35 loses it's primary advantage, stealth is meaningless in these close range fights. An f-35 wanting to take out 3 J-10s would use its superior sensors to locate and get within range of the J-10s and fire off some AMRAAMs without the enemy knowing they are even there until the missiles are closing in on them. Even if the missiles don't manage to take out the planes, they will be too busy trying to evade to try to locate the F-35, allowing it to slip away. At least that's the theory.
If you really need three (or even two) JF-17s to counter one F-35, that makes the F-35 seem like a pretty good deal to me. That means you have to maintain and store 1/3 as many jets, train 1/3 as many pilots, burn 1/3 the fuel. Those are not insignificant costs to having an air force, and skilled pilots are a very limited resource.
This gets under-appreciated. One of the big reasons the Battle of Midway was such a turning point, wasn't mainly the destruction of ships, but the loss of so many well-trained Japanese carrier pilots. Over time, the American advantage in trained carrier pilots paid very huge dividends:
1) Because of better pilots, the American carriers were at an advantage over Japanese carriers.
2) Because there were already a large cadre of trained carrier pilots already, the US pilot schools could afford to spend more time training the student pilots before they ever got into combat. In Japan, the carrier pilots were rushed out as as fast as possible to meet the demand.
And on top of that, if you read what pilots have to say about the F-35 [1], the flight systems are powerful enough that they enhance a pilots ability so less skilled pilots are able to pull of particular maneuvers.
Dogfights don't happen anymore and never will again. Modern aircraft would shoot missiles at each other from many miles away, and even that is highly unlikely. The biggest threat to any aircraft is a surface-to-air missile. The Air Force still does dogfight training, and we all grew up on Top Gun so we love to fantasize about it, but it's simply not a concern in modern warfare.
Impossible to compare costs without adjusting for purchasing power. Chinese workers are paid lower wages that support lower standards of living, so everything made in China is cheaper. If you built the F-35 in China, every carbon fiber panel to spec, it'd probably cost that much too! Even then the accounting is complex, because sometimes the unit cost can include training and maintenance, see: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-cost-of-a-modern-jet-fight...
> So is one expensive F-35 capable enough of taking on 3 cheaper (yet sophisticated enough jets read up on JF-17 recent achievements)? Granted pilots and ground crew on both sides are equal match in skills.
According to most simulations and exercises--yes. The F-35 absolutely wipes the floor against cheaper adversaries.
Do those price differences account for purchasing power? I am sure wages and materiels in China cost less than in the US. Since the US will build major military systems domestically its going to be much more expensive. And what is the alternative? Build less effective fighters just to match the cost?
Either way I know the major benefits of the F-35 and US fighters in general are data sharing and pilot skill. The F-35s greatest strengths lean into this.
Plus they used to say it takes cca 1 million $ to train a fighter pilot from scratch properly, and god knows how long. this was quite some time ago, so I expect both cost and duration of training must be higher/longer now
>> Lost lives hurt morale quite a bit, and play badly on domestic news.
I don't follow military news but even I know that US military lagged YEARS behind private contractors in adding ground transport for troops that were safer against road-side bombs during the first few years of the Iraq War starting in 2003.
In a dogfight an F-35 has an advantage but not a 3-1 advantage. BVR it might. The real issue however is that it won't be long before nations like Russia and China will be able to reliably get a weapons-grade lock on the F-35. Some people even think Russia already has this capability (and it's very realistic to think that they do). Electronic warfare is progressing very quickly and might render stealth completely useless long before the next generation of planes is built.
> In a dogfight an F-35 has an advantage but not a 3-1 advantage. BVR it might.
The F-35 is only intended to dogfight as an absolute last resort. It's normal mode will be to detect the enemy without being detected, and to kill the enemy without being successfully attacked. In exercises it's had around a 20-1 kill ratio.
The fully networked nature of the F-35 brings huge advantages. One F-35 can use its radar briefly (the radar is also frequency-agile), find targets, and then relay target information to shooters anywhere in the area. In a recent exercise, a F-35 cued a Navy SM-6 missile from over the horizon to hit an air target.
This neatly works around concerns about limited F-35 weapon stores.
> The real issue however is that it won't be long before nations like Russia and China will be able to reliably get a weapons-grade lock on the F-35. Some people even think Russia already has this capability (and it's very realistic to think that they do).
First off, as the article points out, stealth is not perfect. It simply reduces the acquisition range of certain systems.
These towed decoys provide insurance in the case that stealth is defeated.
At any rate, there are physical barriers to putting F-35 detecting radars on fighters. IR is another matter, of course.
> Electronic warfare is progressing very quickly and might render stealth completely useless long before the next generation of planes is built.
You have it backwards. Electronic warfare is progressing very quickly, and will be use to vastly enhance the effectiveness of stealth aircraft at the expense of adversary systems.
> It's normal mode will be to detect the enemy without being detected, and to kill the enemy without being successfully attacked. In exercises it's had around a 20-1 kill ratio.
The article makes it sound like the F-35's stealth isn't so great at avoiding detection, but it's there to frustrate weapons trying to lock onto it:
> Stealth fighters, as we know them today, are not highly optimized to evade a broad range of radar types. Instead, they are optimized to give fire control radars used to actually engage targets, as well as detect them in many cases, a very tough time. The classic appendages of a fighter aircraft—nose, tail surfaces, exhaust nozzles, and even wings—do not lend themselves to broadband radio frequency low-observability, but they are conducive to maneuverability and speed. So, while aircraft like the F-35 are effective at hiding from the most threatening radar types, and especially when viewed by those sensors from certain aspects, with the frontal-hemisphere profile being most optimized, they are less adept from doing the same when it comes to radars operating at lower frequencies or when viewed from rearward angles.
> In a dogfight an F-35 has an advantage but not a 3-1 advantage. BVR it might.
BVR It's quite limited by its limited weapons load. Disregarding external weapons (if it uses any, it's no longer stealthy) it will either have 2 long range missiles or 4. Most likely the former, if it wants to also accomplish an attack mission in which it will use 2 bays for ground attack and 2 bays for medium range AA.
Now consider that it's not uncommon in BVR to launch 2 missiles at each BVR target in order to raise the chances of a hit. So basically: a stealth F-35 can attack one aircraft in BVR Then it is out of missiles. An aging fourth gen opponent will likely carry six. So the math doesn't work out in favor of the F-35 in BVR if it faces even two fourth gen aircraft. It likely fire and turn back - because it's out of AMRAAMs after the first engagement.
Any airforce with a huge fleet of aging 4th gen fighters and a lax attitude towards losing them and their pilots, can be a very effective defense against F-35's.
> Disregarding external weapons (if it uses any, it's no longer stealthy)
I wonder how much less stealthy it using external weapons. I mean, it's not like an AMRAAM has a gigantic radar signature already. Is radar signature additive? Would an F-35 with external missiles have a radar signature of an F-35 + those missiles, or does having those missiles attached to the body have some sort of interaction that makes the whole signature much bigger?
Because if mounting missiles externally results in reduced but still a decent degree of stealth, you can cram 8x AMRAAMs and 2 sidewinders on the F-35.
The way you get around this, you do a "fighter sweep" to kill all enemy fighters and then you do a bomb attack to bomb the ground targets.
Planes do not get loaded with every single potential weapon they may want to use. They have specific missions and they get armored for the specific mission.
> it won't be long before nations like Russia and China will be able to reliably get a weapons-grade lock on the F-35
They probably can do that even now, the question is about distance of such lock. If F-35 has a high lock distance advantage especially with AWACS in the back - it will have much higher probability to win the fight.
Stealth is useful, but as most military technologies it should be deployed quickly before it becomes obsolete. F-35 has been in design for over 25 years (yes. ouch!!); that is a long time for military tech to stay cutting edge.
The Su-57 definitely isn't at a disadvantage compared to the F-35. Also, let's face it, Russia hardly projects power. Any conflict with the west would likely be the US attacking Russia. Hence why Russia is putting so much effort into systems like the S-500.
The US has invaded and occupied several countries on the other side of the world in the last few decades. Russia's conflicts have been limited to their periphery and Syria, where they've always had a base.
"Russia invades neighbors" is worse, as they intend to occupy and annex. America invades with some idiot idea of democracy or projecting hard power, only to leave.
Russia invaded far off lands when they had the capacity, don't think they wouldn't do it again if their economy and population weren't shrinking.
There is actually real serious money for it - India has been wanting to buy a fleet of those planes for years and is pretty frustrated with the delay. Russia still is just not capable of producing it. Too complex tech.
Specifically the 3 major components has to be of the 5th generation - body, engine and radar. The SU-57 body is pretty much there. The radar isn't there yet where it was promised and is required to be (ie. distance, number of tracked items, etc.). The worst situation is with the engine. Russia still doesn't have 5th gen "stealth" engine. What is being flown currently is "4.5" gen - a well improved 4th. You can see it clearly here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sukhoi_T-50_Maksimov.jpg
You have a few F-35s and F-22s relaying high quality targeting information back to F-18s, F-15s and F-16s, which the US has more of, that carry lots of long range air-to-air missile against adversarial aircraft, and more of those same planes carrying anti-radiation missiles(ARM) and other stand-off weapons for suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD). And just for fun, you might have EA-18G and EC-130 raising the noise floor and other cool electronic warfare techniques to hide your LO and non-LO aircraft, AND further deny, deceive, and degrade the adversary's RADARs and communications.
The F-35s and F-22s can get up closer to the adversarial aircraft and air defense than non-LO (Low Observable) aircraft (B-1s, B-52s, F-18s, F-16s, and F-15s). A lot has been invested in the interfaces and data-links for F-35 and F-22 pilots to relay information to other platforms (Land, Sea, and Air) The key is to get better stand-off range and higher resolution targeting data for your non-LO aircraft to minimize risk and maximize hitting air and land targets.
My overall opinion of the F-35 is that it's not really a fighter, but more like an EA-35, because it has a very capable electronic warfare suite (AN/ASQ-239), and it has the ability to take that suite and collect data passively up close and personal with lower risk of detection, and can transmit a lot of high quality intel very quickly, while keeping great emission control (EMCON) with directional antennas and near-noise floor communications. It's also the only LO aircraft that can take-off a carrier. The capability to carry these towed decoys only adds more tricks and tools to the EW suite. I don't have a very high opinion of it's air-to-air combat performance, but it definitely has it's place as a great EW/SIGINT/COMINT platform.
This is a marketing video but shows the idea that deals with what you propose - https://youtu.be/e1NrFZddihQ?t=122
I think the whole video is interesting but I've set it to the piece dealing with hostile aircraft.
That's not the right question to ask. Fighter jets don't just line up face to face and start shooting. That approach has been obsolete for decades.
A more likely scenario is that one side's aircraft are destroyed on the ground using stand-off munitions. Or they get ambushed in the air and never knew what hit them.
Not necessarily. The US had the capability to destroy every N Vietnamese runway in the country and didn’t for political reasons, resulting in lots of US casualties. No reason it couldn’t happen again.
Also the price means you have fewer jets. If there is a tech flaw and handful get shot down... you're really low on jets.
I can't imagine we 100% know how effective all this tech is. We've seen how much ground warfare changed where the Humvee was found to be severely lacking, the US found that lots of high explosive bombs were less desirable now and very low explosive accurate bombs were needed.
I almost wonder if a two tiered system would be better. Top of the line, then high volume lower line where tech trickles down over time.
This would especially be handy in situations where you have air superiority and ... now still have a lot of work in the air to do, don't need expensive planes to do it, and really just want high volume coverage.
This was the idea behind the late-Cold War "high/low" concept that gave us the F-15/F-16 in the US Air Force, and F-14/F-18 in the US Navy. Initially the F-35 was supposed to be the "low" companion to the "high" F-22, but, with the end of the Cold War, that changed.
One major issue that the US has run into with deploying that strategy, in the absence of great power opponents, is that the largest long-term costs are not the airframes, but pilots and pilot training. An F-16 pilot isn't cheaper than an F-15 pilot, and getting hours for an F-16 pilot isn't cheaper than getting hours for an F-15 pilot, other than the lower fuel cost for the F-16.
That said, the F-15X that the USAF is procuring is basically going to be used as a lower-cost-than-F-35 "missile truck," so not incompatible with what you suggest.
There is one other factor here along with the cost of pilot training, and that is maintenance. The F-22 (like the B-2 and F-117) was originally a beast to maintain. The RAM coatings had to be reapplied with extreme precision, along with RAM tape along seams. At first this was a manual process, then mechanized, but still expensive in terms of money and downtime for the aircraft. The one really good thing to come out of the F-35 program has been fiber mat RAM. No need to reapply paint and tape, the RAM is integrated into body panels.
Of course this should have been applied along with improved 3D thrust vectoring to a new block of F-22’s, but that doesn’t satisfy the Military Industrial Complex’s desire for endless money, and congresses insatiable need for pork barrel projects. Plus you have the usual pissing contests and budget infighting between services, all of whom basically want their own customized air force.
I was thinking of the F16 myself but yeah any proven air-frame would work, even if possible refined it to cut some costs / options.
My understanding was the F-16's goal was initially to have a lower cost plane compared to the F-15 with some other goals that I think were regarding matching Soviet single engine aircraft's maneuverability and etc.
But why do you think the carrier is there in the first place? It's to support the planes. The planes are the whole point. If they could do without a carrier and just have the planes they would.
I think the issue here is we are interpreting "support" differently. I believe the meaning that spectramax was going for was combat support. Carriers support planes logistically by giving them a place to take off, land, and resupply.
Or twenty drones with fairly modern radar and air-to-air armaments. Or if they're cheap enough, 45-90 drones...
There are downsides to drones (loss of control is a worry), but without the need for a cockpit, you can make the plane much smaller with a much better thrust to weight ratio, and also capable of pulling off maneuvers that would render a pilot unconscious.[1]
Quantity has a quality all it's own. I would bet against a F-35 even if it was up against 30-40 P-51 Mustangs from WWII. The sheer amount of lead they could fill the sky with (for a short time) is daunting.
1: I remember 5-6 years ago someone on HN commenting that an F-16 (I think?) was capable of enough forces exerted on a pilot to easily break their neck, and was limited.
The idea of dogfighting drones makes very little sense. If you build a lot of expendable tiny planes with a high thrust to weight ratio and high-G maneuvering, there's no point having those then try to shoot some secondary projectiles at the target. It's far simplier to just fly them into it or detonate them close enough to cause fatal damage.
The concept here is the equivalent cost of machinery to a single F-35 going against an F-35. How many missiles does an F-35 carry? Drones carry missiles as well.
The older planes were just to drive a point home. How does an F-35 defend against 20-40 times as many adversaries attacking? If the F-35 is attacking, it might be faster and be able to go around an intercepting force, but that's a big if, and it's more dangerous because it may put it closer to other defensive armaments that the original path was routed to avoid.
You seem to have an unrealistic idea of how much a "drone" would cost. If you mean some lightweight slow Cessna 172 class vehicle, those are around $300K. But kind of useless in a conflict against the US.
A propeller driven MQ-9 Reaper cost over $16M in 2006.
If you mean an F-16 class vehicle capable of catching an F-35 (supersonic) and carrying half a dozen missiles, then you're in the F-16 cost range. Not having a pilot might only save a few hundred pounds.
But why use a drone to carry missiles. The US can launch missiles from Navy ships or B-52s under the control of the F-35 super AWACs.
As someone else said, the idea is not to defend against an attack by 20 drones, the idea is to blow up the drone base.
> You seem to have an unrealistic idea of how much a "drone" would cost.
It depends on the role. Probably a few million at least, you're right, but when comparing to ~90 million dollar planes, comparatively cheap. The Air Force actually already has plans for this, and the F-35 makes a bit more sense in light of that, as it can help control a swarm of drones and they can take advantage of it's enhanced sensor suite.[1][2]
> If you mean an F-16 class vehicle capable of catching an F-35 (supersonic) and carrying half a dozen missiles, then you're in the F-16 cost range. Not having a pilot might only save a few hundred pounds.
Not having a pilot would save a few hundred pounds of flesh. Having a vehicle that isn't designed around a cockpit allows for a different fuselage, with a smaller cross section, which is more aerodynamic and uses less material.
That said, the drone I referenced above cruises at close to the same speed as the F-35 from the info I've seen, and at one of the articles notes that the stated cost is $2-$3 million each.[1] It's not currently specced for any air-to-air armaments, but I imagine if they see a benefit, they'll alter it as needed.
That seems like a scenario from a video game, not a scenario from an actual battle.
Anyone who has an F-35 on-hand would have a myriad of other resources that would be more effective in dealing with a swarm of P-51s. Why not send those out instead?
WWII era Mustangs would have no way to target a modern fighter at all unless the pilot of the modern fighter was acting like a kid playing a video game. All they could do is spray in it's general direction with a hope and a prayer. Mustangs had no targeting except the pilot's visual efforts. Human visual aiming does not work well at the speeds jet operate at most of the time. This was a huge problem by the Korean war.
The F-35 would fly by unnoticed most likely to go hit it's target. If it was noticed the F-35 would not engage the enemy fighters. The Mustang could get to ~40,000ft but wouldn't perform at it's best there, it can't travel anywhere near it's max speed at that altitude and it won't be able to maneuver very well at all. Any modern jet fighter could just sail on by even at 40,000ft without a concern.
Mustangs held about 1800 rounds of ammunition. If they were trying to "fill the sky with lead" they'd expend all their ammunition in about 30 seconds. 72,000 rounds doesn't fill that much sky either.
WWII era Mustangs would have no way to target a modern fighter at all unless the pilot of the modern fighter was acting like a kid playing a video game
I think two Tuskeegee Airmen shot down German jet fighters with their guns and K-14 gyro compensated gunsights. But to get that shot, they had to be in a "furball" and they were shots of opportunity.
Big difference between the first Jet fighter which was barely operational and a modern fighter.
IIRC quite a few Me-262s were shot down by P-51s. But Me-262s had a bunch of weak points and were very immature.. IIRC some of the shoot downs were when the Me-262s were taking off or landing or otherwise vulnerable.
Real life the better plane doesn't always win. P-51s would have no trouble shooting down a marine F-35 if they snuck up on it while it was trying to do a vertical takeoff or landing.
This led me down a few google searches and I eventually found a link to a discussion of tests the British did comparing a supersonic Cold War-era jet to a WW2 fighter, the Spitfire. Very interesting https://defenceoftherealm.wordpress.com/2014/12/11/the-spitf...
Yes. But does an F-35 have 20-30 missiles? If not, then it's incapable of dealing with a swarm of 20-30 different adversaries. There's then the option to close and attempt to take out more with the built in 25mm guns, or retreat.
If attacking, it could definitely circumvent older planes (but newer drones, maybe not so much). If defending against an attacking force, it doesn't seem all that effective.
F-35s are specifically designed to act as flying sensor and communications nodes. This means that information passed from an F-35 can be used to target missiles fired from another aircraft or even a ship. Small, cheap drones lack a lot of capability and electronic warfare disrupting long range coms is a concern. The solution the airforce wants to use is to have each F-35 control a bunch of these small, low cost drones directly. The XQ-58 Valkyrie is one such example of this type of drone[1]. It can carry 8 weapons (missiles or small bombs) totaling a maximum of 550lbs in a stealthy configuration and costs about the same as a high end cruise missile ($3-4million) so if it gets shot down it's not a big deal. These cheap drones lack expensive hardware such as high powered AESA radars. A drone swarm consisting of exclusively this kind of aircraft without an F-35 would be detected by the F-35s sensors before the F-35s swarm was detected by it. This would probably result in the total destruction of the opposing drone swarm.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XQ-58
> This would probably result in the total destruction of the opposing drone swarm.
My point is, at $3-4 million each (or $2-3 million as I saw in some sources, which I included in another comment here, that's still 20+ of these drones to to each F-35 in equivalent cost. So:
- Can the F-35 actually mount enough long-range weaponry to attack 22 separate targets?
- Do the drones even need to have an equivalent sensor suite in every instance? If defending, there may be ground stations with expensive sensor packages to help to coordinate. If attacking, the impetus is on the F-35 to destroy or render all units incapable of carrying our their mission. Destroying most of them and retreating without confrontation is useful only inasmuch as it prevents the attackers mission success, or lessens its impact.
That said, given the information you presented above about the F-35 being a drone coordinator, that makes it a much more useful and effective weapon in my eyes. If it can basically act as a force multiplier for the drones by providing a much more effective sensor suite, and coordinate them so it's like one large attack vehicle, then that's providing the benefits of both types while minimizing the downsides of each. For example, I would imagine an F-35 + 20 drones would be much more effective and deadly than either two F-35's or 40 drones.
In some ways, it's a lot like how Aircraft carriers worked in the beginning of or just before WWII. Having one in a battle group provided a much larger scouting range, and the ability to harass or incapacitate some types of enemy prior to the battle group arriving (they shifted more into an attack role as the war got under way, is my understanding. Prior to that there wasn't a lot of practical experience in using them in engagements).
It's all about selecting the right tool for the job. You use the F-35's, F-22's and your long range stand off weapons from bombers to clear Surface to air threats and then use your F-15's, F-16's and F-18's which in some configurations can carry up to two dozen AA missles to clean up the low tech adversaries. If you're interested in getting a hang of how to deploy these weapons I recommend the Korean Missle Crisis scenario in Command. http://www.matrixgames.com/products/681/details/Command.Live...
Warning: Command is less of a game and more of a battlefield simulator and has a very steep learning curve if you're not used to the systems and tactics required to deploy modern combat power. I've been 'playing' it for years and without my background I'd have a very tough time. I can still only really play NATO scenarios as I'm not familiar enough with Chinese or Russian systems to use them effectively.
Even assuming every single missile destroys its target, you only have so many missiles (this ain't Ace Combat where missiles magically respawn on their pylons). If each of your planes has eight missiles, but there are 10 enemy drones for each of your planes, then you're still stuck with a 2:1 dogfight.
One or both adversaries can escape.. it can happen in seconds with two supersonic aircraft.
It's not like a video game where they exist in a modeled world where no one else is around and they both have unlimited fuel and radar works perfectly, etc..
If the two fighters "merge" at 600kts each and keep going they'll be 20 miles apart in 1 minute.
If one of them decides to light the afterburners and accelerates to 1000kts and go supersonic to escape the other one has to turn around and try to accelerate to catch up.
Not easy. The harder the chaser turns around the more speed they'll bleed off, and the more time it will take to reaccelerate. If they turn a wider circle they'll be further away and have more distance to make up.
Meanwhile the plane that has decided to "exit" might have flown into the cover of friend AAA/SAM sites or friendly fighters.
If you start talking about swarms of supersonic drones instead of an enemy fighter then suddenly the drones sound awfully expensive.
> One or both adversaries can escape.. it can happen in seconds with two supersonic aircraft.
Which is mostly useless if the one escaping is in a defending role. Good job saving the aircraft and pilot. Unfortunately your adversary is now clear to proceed to the actual target.
In war, it doesn't just matter which soldier is better. It matters how quickly they can get to where they are going, how many of them you have to field, and whether they are defending or attacking, and whether they can be easily detected while moving. Different attributes have different values in different circumstances, but being able to field an order of magnitude or more covers up a lot of downsides.
What's more powerful, 1000 trained soldiers with combat gear and automatic rifles, or 10,000 conscripted citizens with hunting rifles? It depends on the specific circumstances.
Even in an attacking role, if you're still able to be denied actual air superiority over your target after you run out of missiles (i.e. because you're unwilling or unable to dogfight and clean up the rest of the enemy's air assets), then congrats, mission failed, we'll get 'em next time.
In some cases, yes. How much does stealth help you if you're defending, not attacking? Even if you can empty your payload and retreat without them discerning where you are, how many times can you do that before they've reached their target?
Which led to guns being hurriedly added back on to the F-4s, first in an external pod mounted on a hardpoint, and then internally on later production models.
Which led to the development of training programs to teach dogfighting skills like the Naval Fighter Weapons School at Miramar (the school immortalized in the 1986 film Top Gun), because it turned out that the conventional wisdom had sunk in so deeply that a whole generation of American fighter pilots didn't know how to fight with a gun, even when they had one.
Which led to the Lightweight Fighter Program (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_Fighter_program), an effort to use the lessons learned in Vietnam to design a maneuverable, gun-included dogfighter affordable enough to produce in volume.
But the people who learned those hard lessons over Vietnam are all retired or dead now, so when people say "planes don't dogfight" nobody challenges it.
Which is how the conventional wisdom of the 1950s becomes conventional wisdom all over again.
The only problem with that whole discussion is that nobody uses guns anymore.
The lessons of vietnam you cite really aren't as you claim. The gun was never the issue -- really poor missiles may have been. Better missiles fixed the problem, not the gun.
Although a significant cause of the kill ratio issue over Vietnam was restrictive rules of engagement, which prohibited beyond visual range engagement with missiles such as Sparrow, which the VPAF had no counters to whatsoever. These rules of engagement effectively required these turning dogfights, but would not have been present in a large-scale shooting war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
This does, of course, beg the question: how well would an F-35 do in a conflict with restrictive rules of engagement, such as might be found in future US-Iraq/Afghanistan-style conflicts.
Well, Sparrow had problems of its own, namely absolutely dismal reliability and the need to maintain continuous radar lock on the target during the missile's entire flight time (e.g. no "fire and forget" capability). But that doesn't invalidate your broader point about dogfights being more likely under restrictive RoE.
The thing is though, if history is any indication, wars so total as to have completely permissive RoEs aren't the wars that we actually ever fight. Even if you imagine a war with a full-on peer competitor like Russia or China, it's not hard to imagine scenarios where RoEs are restricted in an effort to keep the scope of the conflict from widening -- an important consideration when both sides have nuclear weapons!
So I think the general point still stands. If the balloon ever goes up on World War III, we probably won't see a lot of dogfighting. But there's a whole spectrum of conflicts underneath that, and building an air force entirely around fighters that can't handle the rest of that spectrum at least competently is going to be a problem.
Also consider the massive improvements in avionics since Vietnam. You don't have to close to visual range anymore to confirm the target is a jet fighter and not a passenger plane.
The F-35 is the star destroyer in this analogy— it's got six missiles onboard, intended for taking out huge targets from far away. Star destroyers fared really badly against a large number of smaller fighters.
So the argument is that a small number of high performance fighters like the F-35 could very well not be a good match for a huge number of drones that individually are a fraction of the price.
since we're making arguments by analogy to star wars, it's worth pointing out that, in universe, it is mainly just xwings that are surprisingly effective against star destroyers. they are too small to be effectively targeted by the larger ships guns, but the only reason they are actually a threat is because each craft carries a small number of proton torpedoes, basically the equivalent of a low-yield tactical nuke IRL. the primary fighter armament (lasers) is essentially harmless to such a large ship deployed in any reasonable number.
Well, you can take the analogy right back to where it came from, WWII and planes as an effective countermeasure to ships. Small cheap planes could carry armaments still very devastating to larger ships.[1]
It's not entirely analogous to the current discussion, because there's not really a commensurate difference in maneuverability of F-35 to the drones, but other similarities persist.
If you'd like to read how the towed decoys are used in real life (F16 in this case), be sure to check out book "Viper Pilot: A Memoir of Air Combat" by Dan Hampton.
The desc of the book includes: 151 combat missions,
21 hard kills on surface-to-air-missile sites, 4 Distinguished Flying Crosses with Valor, 1 Purple Heart.
I've been into historical aspects of war/plane/ship/weapon so I've read lots of books and viewed many pics/videos related. However I had never heard of towed decoys off of a modern fighter jet like F16 until reading above book.
The book is awesome to read if you are into that kind of stuff.
I remember reading in the book where he talks about getting into a fight with the towed decoy deployed. When he was out of the fight and tried to tow in the decoy, it was gone. Meaning it had done its job and sacrificed itself and therefore saved the F16 itself.
Btw, there's been lots of discussion of MCAS on Boeing 737 MAX and how some are uneasy that software HAS to be involved for 737 MAX to stay airborne at certain times. I believe F16 was first production fighter jet where computer has to be involved in controlling every moment it's airborne. If computers on it stopped working, F16 will supposedly stop being a flying object almost immediately.
Lots of talk about the F-35 here lately and I've been meaning to ask if anyone caught the PBS NOVA "Battle of the X-Planes" about it back in 2003 [0][1]. It's a really interesting take on the program from that era. And it really shows you the complexity of building this aircraft. I saw it in high school and it made me want to major in aerospace engineering. That didn't happen, but I always think about this show and wonder if people have seen it when the F-35 is mentioned.
Ever since the SR-71 piece a few days ago (in which there are some disparaging F-35 comments), there have been a few submissions on the F-35 that appear to attempt to bolster its reputation.
Personally I have no opinion on the F-35 and its reputation other than time will tell and people other than me seem very invested in it one way or another.
I think the article as an overview of towed decoys in general is interesting and a not very well covered topic.
There's a couple things to keep in mind here. First is that the basic concept here isn't new. We've had towed decoys of some sort or another in use since the 1990s. Second is that there's very little here in the way of details, and you'd need to know a lot of specifics to be able to counter this sort of technology. Finally, there are actual advantages to letting information like this get out, as it can act as a deterrent. With technology like this, there's some calculus you have to do about the risks and rewards, taking into account the odds of an adversary copying or countering it, the value of it as a deterrent, the expense/difficulty of keeping it secret, etc.
My gut reaction is they would like to, but they realize enough of the information is already out due to carelessness, spying, etc. So they just decide to release some information, with some FUD mixed in.
This is a really interesting article. Having been interested in aviation for a long time I was not aware of these. Fascinating stuff. A much fancier version of chaff & flares. Reminiscent of submarine warfare.
I guess that once total stealth has been maxed in the "reflective" research-area, the next effective defensive would be some wide-ground arrays pointing to at least 1 satellite (making satellite techno a must) => as soon as at least 1 of the emitting array does not reach the satellite (of course something more complicated to avoid man-in-the-middle-attack, interference, etc...) it would mean that something flew through it... .
How well would a towed decoy be able to fool a missile equipped with a camera and a neural net trained on pictures of fighter jets? Are the distances and speeds too extreme for a visible light camera? Is there some technology to "blind" a visible light camera?
missiles work with radar signature or heat signature, not the visible spectrum. and yes, there are countermeasures available to 'blind' an IR sensor (like those used on short range A/A missiles)
Right, I know that you’d want to use radar for longer distances, but if the towed decoy is meant to appear as a juicy target, to take a hit for the fighter, couldn’t you just follow it until you’re in close range, and then switch to a better discriminating sensor (visible light camera in my example) to hit the jet instead?
