Anything truly valuable is of course classified. This is to reveal no new information while showing something to the taxpayer about what billions are spent on. It's a delicate and awkward dance.
I’ve been watching the F 35 at the Baltimore Flyover this weekend. What an incredible machine. The agility and speed range that it can travel in the air is astounding.
Lucky pilots that get to fly this tech and dawn that helmet.
No US fighter jet in history can reach 2000 mph, the F-22 can get to a bit over mach 2, the F-35 can reach mach 1.6, neither is anywhere close to 2000 mph (mach ~3).
The F-15 is probably the only American jet fighter to ever get close to 2000 mph by reaching mach 2.5.
I’d rather an A/C-130 or a A-10 flying over me every day of the week. I’m sure this is cool for the pilot in the seat, but who cares about that except them.
Unfortunately the AC-130 and A-10 aren't survivable against any sort of serious aid defense system. They won't be flying over you if they get shot down by a SAM on the way there. This is the main reason the JSF program was started in 1993 and the problem has only become more severe since then.
F-35 barely has a shot against modern layered Russian air defense. It’s not stealthy enough, counting on engaging beyond the range of air defense abilities to respond is iffy, considering the range of the AGM-88G and the Russian S-400 and one would assume the S-500 is better but who knows.
The expense and rarity of the F-35 only exacerbates this problem, you can’t afford to dangle them in front of air defense so they turn their radar on, you could loose the plane.
Better luck to be had by spotting air defense from satellites and launching cruise missiles or stealthy drones.
I don’t see a place for the F-35. To fat to dog fight, to expensive, fast, and too limited in weapons stores for real CAS missions, too expensive to keep running in the numbers we would need for an actual great powers war. Barely made sense in 1993, it really really doesn’t make sense in the modern battlefield today.
In any major near-peer conflict our reconnaissance satellites will be the first casualties. Don't count on having those available to spot air defenses.
Obviously an F-35 won't be sent in alone to perform CAS in a high-threat environment (unless the situation is really desperate). But it's at least somewhat survivable. Those legacy platforms aren't survivable at all if the adversary has even basic air defenses.
Once the “destroying satellite” line was crossed (and associated Kessler syndrome destruction that would bring to the world) I can’t imagine a nuclear ICBM exchange wouldn’t be next. So I suppose none of those planes matter
Based on what’s happening in Ukraine, I suspect any airplane is basically just a lift platform for missiles. They’ll be fired off well behind the front where established air defenses can counter enemy air defenses.
A true feat of manufacturing and engineering unmatched by any other military.
Also unmatched in cost and rarity. It has been proven many time that quantity is a quality difficult to beat. The US military has been gearing and shifting toward expensive and hard to mass produce war machines. We will see how well a million dollar tank fare against 100k dollars worth of drones. Or what happen when a 10K rocket need a CWIS to take down that cost 50K to shoot.
> been proven many time that quantity is a quality difficult to beat
Sorry, what? These factors balance against each other. If there is a single domain where quality dominates, it’s in the air. American reliance on air superiority is what’s driven this doctrine into places it less applies, like on the ground.
> what happen when a 10K rocket need a CWIS to take down that cost 50K to shoot
Yes, they balance to a certain degree. But one is much easier to increase than the other, especially when you consider which country the F-35 would most likely be deployed against.
By "proven", I meant this: a while ago, the doctrine was tanks and armored infantry were the deciding factors in wars, until it was no longer so. Yet Germany was still obsessed with overengineering their tanks to the point theirs were the terror of the battlefield and almost unbeatable 1:1 by any other rivals in WW2. It won them many battles, thanked to the superior engineering and untouchable thick armor. But you know how it ended.
Same with Japan. Their battleships were the pride of their nation. Those were impressive and leviathans of the Pacific. Until the US built ships faster than these beast could destroy and you know how it ended.
In a war against peers or near peers, overbuilt tech seemed to weigh down a military more than it helps. They become strategic weapons only used occasionally unless one has the manufacturing capability to mass produce them. But the US doesn't have the steel mills and engine factories it once did. China has them now. And in my opinion, if it comes down to it, China can do to the US what the US and Allies did to Japan and Germany.
The F-35 can win battles, easily, no argument from me there. But a war is different.
>Neither is taking down an F-35.
Maybe someone said that once upon a time about the B52 Stratofortresses until the Vietnamese shot down more than a dozen of them. Powerful war machines have been constantly brought low by hordes of weak and low tech enemies throughout history. I contend that is still the same now.
5:1 and 10:1 is probably a ratio that the US can keep up with, militarily, in part because of how much the pork barrel nature of our spending means that sloshes around, and we're not hard-hit for those dollars. In wartime, we can both bring those costs down, and hopefully retool and rebuild the economy as we did in WW2 to flat out outproduce any enemy, but it's unlikely it can come to that.
What we're bad at is asymmetric warfare of the 100:1 and 1000:1, as Iraq and Afghanistan have shown.
Waste of money. Within 5 years the most effective battle aviation will be unmanned and partially AI powered (for when EW takes out the signal). It is plainly obvious that from here on out our investment should go mostly into unmanned systems
Take a look at what’s going on in the only high intensity near peer battlefield in recent decades. It’s 95% drones. $500 drone with an RPG duct taped to it immobilizes an Abrams MBT and the other two finish it off. Then Mavics drop grenades on the crew. For reach there are larger drones, cruise missiles, ballistics and hypersonics. “CAS” is bullshit in 2024. At best, planes are launching missiles or guided bombs from tens of miles away.
Whatever those are, they don't need priceless humans in an expensive airplane.
Not anymore.
Explain why, don't just downvote. At this point, the burden of proof is on you to explain why the human pilots are still needed... considering that if you didn't have to keep a human pilot alive, you could afford to build 10-100 times as many of whatever aircraft we're talking about.
> they don't need priceless humans in an expensive airplane. Not anymore
What are you basing this on?
> you could afford to build 10-100 times as many of whatever aircraft we're talking about
What are you basing this on?
Planes are capability limited by human life support. The most expensive bits inside them are still technology. Yields on some of these novel materials processes are below 1%. And that’s with expensive feedstocks like titanium.
ChatGPT can’t direct a squadron through enemy radiation and successfully conclude SEAD. Not yet. (And we have been doing that for decades. They’re called anti-radiation missiles because they’re disposable.)
It is no longer enough to assert blindly that "ML models can't do X." You must explain exactly why ML models can't do X, and admit that you were wrong the last 10 times you asserted that ML models can't do X. (Radiation? Really?)
> same thing you're basing your assertions on: what I see as common sense
Well, that and my background in aerospace engineering and training to be a general-aviation pilot. Not quite expertise. But more than common sense.
(I have some military-pilot [helicopter] and designer friends and family, but for obvious reasons, they don’t inform my public views.)
> ChatGPT isn't designed to win dogfights, but other models are, and gee, guess what, that's exactly what's happening
Terrific, can it also aim a trebuchet, because they’re equally germane to a modern battlespace.
> that you were wrong the last 10 times you asserted that ML models can't do X
What? When?
> Radiation? Really?
I didn’t name this crap [1].
I’ve followed your account for a while. Reasoning on modern military bleeding-edge technology using the fallback of common sense seems beneath you. NGAD is in design and pre-production; you’ll find their trading off what decisions are made by man versus machine interesting [2].
Reasoning on modern military bleeding-edge technology using the fallback of common sense seems beneath you.
Well, some days we all wake up in a trolling^Wprovocative frame of mind, and F35 meta-dogfights on message boards are always a hoot, but I'm only being half-facetious here. Video games had "AI" that did most of this stuff in the 1980s and the rest of it by the 2000s. So why, given modern sensor packages and modern software engineering, isn't it "just common sense" that machines are better at it than humans now, or will be soon enough?
E.g., we had a crude version of SLAM in the 1950s, with cruise missiles that combined real-time terrain correlation mapping with inertial guidance. (You have to google TERCOM to learn more about that, rather than SLAM, because SLAM meant something even more ludicrous-sounding at the time.) Now we use vastly more sophisticated techniques in household vacuum cleaners. What exactly does close-air support require that can't be handled by an AI (if not an RPV)?
As for ARM and SEAD, I honestly don't understand where you're going with that. Electronics can take a lot more nuclear radiation than you and I can, and as for EM, well, so? We know how to deal with that. On the offensive side, the Wild Weasel that fires an ARM is just the first stage of the missile, isn't it, at the end of the day? Can you elaborate on (again, exactly) why this role is inherently impossible to automate?
> some days we all wake up in a trolling^Wprovocative frame of mind, and F35 meta-dogfights on message boards are always a hoot
To be clear, I have never been a lead designer of nor pilot of any kind on a military aircraft.
> why, given modern sensor packages and modern software engineering, isn't it "just common sense" that machines are better at it than humans now, or will be soon enough?
Idk, why isn’t Cruise a murderer off meds?
> Electronics can take a lot more nuclear radiation
Radiation in this context doesn’t refer to gamma rays. It refers to detection.
> Can you elaborate on (again, exactly) why this role is inherently impossible to automate?
It’s not. Impossible and not currently possible are miles apart.
Our sensors are still prone to being overwhelmed in a way humans are not, and the time to solve that is longer than the production time for a new intermediate force, i.e. NGAD.
