Just kidding. Anyway, let me paste the response I’ve been posting elsewhere for this:
If I never see that stupid War is Boring article on the F-35 again, it will be too soon. It’s a disingenuous, “not even wrong” piece of idiocy, like pretty much everything else on that site. It especially hurts to find myself having to defend the F-35, an aircraft I share many of your reservations about.
What even they don’t mention is the fact that the F-35 is not supposed to be an air superiority fighter. It’s a strike aircraft, first and foremost, designed with enough air-to-air capability to get out safely when everything goes to hell in a hurry. As I’ve seen it put elsewhere, it’s designed to do the job that the F-16 and F-18 actually ended up doing, as opposed to what they were designed to do. What air-to-air capability it does have is focused on the ability to bag enemy aircraft before they get into knife-fighting range. It plays to our technological strengths vs. those of out potential opponents.
There are a thousand and one problems with the JSF and how it’s been acquired, but that doesn’t mean that every bit of click-bait half-arsed “journalism” that criticizes it is justified.
I’d add that we were sold the idea that the F-22 would handle air-superiority, while the F-35 would handle strike missions and play backup support for the F-22 against second- and third- tier opponents. Now that we’ve cancelled F-22 production, we’re stuck with the F-35 for pretty much everything, at least once the legacy aircraft wear out. Restarting F-22 production at this point would likely be as expensive as just starting from a blank sheet of paper, too.
The whole boondoggle is perfectly representative of the extreme dysfunction of the post-Cold War defense establishment.
Thinking that fifth generation combat aircraft will dog fight is as silly as spacecraft having manned ball turrets (yes I’m looking at you, Millennium Falcon). People should be lucky the F-35 still has at least pilots!
On a related note, did you know that the last battleships (USS Iowa and USS Wisconsin) were stricken from the Naval Registry back in 2006?
Hey, at least they were really good for shore bombardment. The Marines really miss the BBs, even if that capability wasn’t worth the cost of maintaining them anymore.
The F-35 will not be stealthy going into a target area, because it will have all sorts of ordnance slung under its wings. It will have a radar cross section similar to an F-16 and will be findable and targetable by the usual radars.
If it is going to attack a target that is heavily defended with modern radars and missiles, it will have to go in clean, which means it will be carrying much less ordnance internally. The number of aircraft required would be substantially larger.
It will be stealthy on the way out when its wings are clean. The missions will be successful if the F-35 can get away before the bad guys show up.
As to using long range AA missiles, the USAF ,abbr title=”Rules Of Engagement”>ROE almost always forbid that and require visual identification. The Army did shoot down at least one British aircraft in the second Gulf war using BVR Patriot missiles, and the Vincennes did shoot done a civilian air liner in the first Gulf war. Who knows what happened in Ukraine? So unless the USAF is absolutely certain no innocent aircraft are in range and all radar targets are bad guys, you won’t see any over the horizon shots.
The USAF usually emphasizes the F-35′s other attributes, like networking, which allows it to swap off targets to other members of the strike force and to share targeting information. Then there is an enhanced sensor suite and improved cockpit displays.
We will have to wait and if the designers have made the right tradeoffs.
I agree with pretty much all of the points you make, Bob. We honestly have no idea what sort of situation we’ll face going into another major conventional war, especially with regard to ROE and other issues that reside in the political penumbra of a conflict. Traditional US policy has been to lose the first few battles of most major wars we get into while learning (more usually, relearning) what works and what doesn’t. With everything so front-loaded these days, I’m not sure we can afford that kind of learning process anymore. We’ll just have to hope any potential opponents can afford it less.
Scipio and Slovenian have it absolutely right. Dogfighting is as obsolete as sword-fighting. Imagine someone trying to criticize some new military rifle by saying, “Ha, that bayonet would be useless in a sword-fight, and most of the time they won’t even be attaching it! What a corrupt fiasco is this whole so-called ‘M-16′ project!”
There is so much completely irrational F-35 hate and A-10 love out there, especially online. That’s worth reflecting upon. It’s fascinating as a social phenomena, but, again, goes to show the absurdity of anything that relies on the assumption of the accuracy and reasonableness of public opinion.
The A-10 stuff is possibly even worse, in my opinion. We let it work like it was designed at the beginning of the first Gulf War, low-level strafing runs against enemy armor and battlefield interdiction strikes deep behind enemy lines. Result: in the first few weeks a bunch of them got shot down. After that they were pulled back to mid-level and fired Mavericks at the armor. Just as effective (if not more so) but it meant that the gun was nothing but dead weight. So it has remained, with the exception of shooting guys in pickup trucks. The proliferation of MANPADs may make even that too hazardous soon enough.
It can be so hard to explain to people that the gun has effectively been dead weight for more than 20 years, and that modern CAS consists primarily of dropping a smart-bomb or launching an AGM from 20,000 ft. up. Indeed, that’s the vast majority of what the A-10′s have been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There are some other important CAS scenarios, but none of them can justify a 70-rps, 30-mm shell, anti-tank Gatling gun.
It’s already much better with regular rotary-wing aviation support, but that can be slow to get on station, and has a worse MANPAD risk.
I’d rather have an AC-130 gunship circling overhead, keeping the enemy port-side and landing area-clearing artillery on their position, to help me with that mission anyday.
The reason to keep the A-10 around is not the gun, as wonderful as the gun is, but because it’s dirt cheap to operate compared to every other aircraft in the fleet. There’s no point in sending a $30k/hour F-35 or $20k/hour F-15 if the $10k/hour hog will suffice.
The F-35 is about twice as expensive per flying hour as the A-10, though the A-10 is by all accounts a terrible hangar queen. No one knows how the F-35 will be on that account.
The real issues are:
1) The A-10 fleet is being maintained mostly through cannibalization of existing aircraft. There’s no further supply of spares.
2) For the particular role it’s good at, CAS in a permissive air environment, drones cost 2/3 less than the A-10 per flying hour and replicate most of the functionality.
3) The monetary, personnel, and time expense of maintaining the A-10 fleet as a whole very disproportionate to the unique capabilities it brings to the table.
Szopen: Reminds me story of dr Witaszek who during ww2 tried to use typhus on nazis. He was captured, tortured and executed. Children were sent to German families in order to be Germanized (recovered by red cross fortunately) and wife was sent to Auschwitz.
bruce: David Drake’s ‘Lacey and his Friends’ assumes the output will go to oligarchs.
Felix: The Transparent Society by David Brin, if I recall, assumes there will always be Flockish cameras and the like. So, make their output public. Side note: Amazon’s “Customers also bought or read” for this book is quite the interesting reading list.
McChuck: Being seen in public is fine. But what Flock camera coverage does is effectively stalking.
Isegoria: I haven’t read In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man: A Memoir. Does the father come back to die under the son’s care?
Michael Lynch: Actually Junod did have that father and wrote a book about it.
Phileas Frogg: He combined gentle and meek kindness with implacable strength. A consummate Christian gentleman, and a better man than I.
Szopen: I was too young to ever read them, and in fact I only learned about them after the fall of Communism. I was only 13 when the first semi-free elections were held. I mostly remember hearing old jokes with my parents laughing and explaining why it was funny — and then slowly they stopped laughing.
Bruce: Szopen, is that what happened to Krokodil and Szpilki? Or were they too establishment?
Szopen: In Poland, a similar phenomenon appeared with respect to comedy: the quality of comedy shows fell in the first few years, because previously a lot of comedy was based on innuendos and clever allusions, hinting on something which people supposed not to know or were not supposed to think or say. Once those things could be said in the open, comedians kept depending on old tricks and it was just not fun anymore.
Gaikokumaniakku: When East Asians ask me whence come my antiquated notions of the USA, I read selections from the first Little House book to them. The dear, sweet, sympathetic little girl hopes that her father will bring back a dead bear, because she loves to eat bear meat.
Isegoria: No, xanthan gum isn’t anti-microbial. Natamycin is an anti-fungal commonly used in products such as cream cheeses, cottage cheese, sour cream, yogurt, shredded cheeses, cheese slices, and packaged salad mixes. Nisin is a polycyclic antibacterial peptide produced by the bacterium Lactococcus lactis that is used in processed cheese, meats, beverages, etc. during production to extend shelf life by suppressing Gram-positive spoilage and pathogenic bacteria.
Jim: Isn’t xanthan gum used as an antibiotic agent, especially in dairy products, or am I thinking of something else?
Jim: What actually mattered was not the profession of the user, but their expertise. The more domain experience someone had, the more successful they were in using Claude Code in that domain. And, even more interestingly, the more useful output they got from Claude from each prompt. This is because each session begins at the center of the manifold, and human expertise is required to push it further and further into distant regions. The more expertise you have, the more you can push the session in a...
Jim: Biotech is arguably AI’s most promising application.
Jim: James James: Granted, the Great Halfrican Uprising Media Spectacle presumably was astroturfed with real money—to the extent that the banks’ circulating credits can be described either as “real” or as “money”—which must then have found its way into the pockets of real people.
Jim: *A media spectacle involving Halfricans somehow, or a different media spectacle involving a rabble of white people wandering the premises of the so-called “People’s House”, one would not.
James James: Black Lives Matter may have been fleeting, but for the people who stole millions of dollars and bought multiple houses, the consequences were not fleeting. These short-term movements could also be conceptualized as temporary astroturf fronts for permanent political machines.
Jim: Politics ordinarily affects the distribution or redistribution of wealth, directly or indirectly, as its ends or as a byproduct. “Follow the money,” as they say. Thus, the enormous shorting of airline stocks just before 9/11 was politics, just as South Carolina’s tax cut on Boomers’ boats is politics, and Florida’s tax cut on Boomers’ houses is politics. By this metric, one would expect “hyperpoliticsR 21; to be something like the seizure of innocent...
Jim: There is hardly anything more unsettling than a parasite.
Oh no, the brain slugs have gotten to you too!
Just kidding. Anyway, let me paste the response I’ve been posting elsewhere for this:
I’d add that we were sold the idea that the F-22 would handle air-superiority, while the F-35 would handle strike missions and play backup support for the F-22 against second- and third- tier opponents. Now that we’ve cancelled F-22 production, we’re stuck with the F-35 for pretty much everything, at least once the legacy aircraft wear out. Restarting F-22 production at this point would likely be as expensive as just starting from a blank sheet of paper, too.
The whole boondoggle is perfectly representative of the extreme dysfunction of the post-Cold War defense establishment.
It comes as no surprise that the F-35 can’t dogfight, because it wasn’t designed to be a dogfighter. Perhaps I should’ve spelled that out.
One should never have to apologize for the obliviousness of one’s guests.
Thinking that fifth generation combat aircraft will dog fight is as silly as spacecraft having manned ball turrets (yes I’m looking at you, Millennium Falcon). People should be lucky the F-35 still has at least pilots!
On a related note, did you know that the last battleships (USS Iowa and USS Wisconsin) were stricken from the Naval Registry back in 2006?
Hey, at least they were really good for shore bombardment. The Marines really miss the BBs, even if that capability wasn’t worth the cost of maintaining them anymore.
The F-35 will not be stealthy going into a target area, because it will have all sorts of ordnance slung under its wings. It will have a radar cross section similar to an F-16 and will be findable and targetable by the usual radars.
If it is going to attack a target that is heavily defended with modern radars and missiles, it will have to go in clean, which means it will be carrying much less ordnance internally. The number of aircraft required would be substantially larger.
It will be stealthy on the way out when its wings are clean. The missions will be successful if the F-35 can get away before the bad guys show up.
As to using long range AA missiles, the USAF ,abbr title=”Rules Of Engagement”>ROE almost always forbid that and require visual identification. The Army did shoot down at least one British aircraft in the second Gulf war using BVR Patriot missiles, and the Vincennes did shoot done a civilian air liner in the first Gulf war. Who knows what happened in Ukraine? So unless the USAF is absolutely certain no innocent aircraft are in range and all radar targets are bad guys, you won’t see any over the horizon shots.
The USAF usually emphasizes the F-35′s other attributes, like networking, which allows it to swap off targets to other members of the strike force and to share targeting information. Then there is an enhanced sensor suite and improved cockpit displays.
We will have to wait and if the designers have made the right tradeoffs.
I agree with pretty much all of the points you make, Bob. We honestly have no idea what sort of situation we’ll face going into another major conventional war, especially with regard to ROE and other issues that reside in the political penumbra of a conflict. Traditional US policy has been to lose the first few battles of most major wars we get into while learning (more usually, relearning) what works and what doesn’t. With everything so front-loaded these days, I’m not sure we can afford that kind of learning process anymore. We’ll just have to hope any potential opponents can afford it less.
As you say, we’ll just have to wait and see.
Scipio and Slovenian have it absolutely right. Dogfighting is as obsolete as sword-fighting. Imagine someone trying to criticize some new military rifle by saying, “Ha, that bayonet would be useless in a sword-fight, and most of the time they won’t even be attaching it! What a corrupt fiasco is this whole so-called ‘M-16′ project!”
There is so much completely irrational F-35 hate and A-10 love out there, especially online. That’s worth reflecting upon. It’s fascinating as a social phenomena, but, again, goes to show the absurdity of anything that relies on the assumption of the accuracy and reasonableness of public opinion.
The A-10 stuff is possibly even worse, in my opinion. We let it work like it was designed at the beginning of the first Gulf War, low-level strafing runs against enemy armor and battlefield interdiction strikes deep behind enemy lines. Result: in the first few weeks a bunch of them got shot down. After that they were pulled back to mid-level and fired Mavericks at the armor. Just as effective (if not more so) but it meant that the gun was nothing but dead weight. So it has remained, with the exception of shooting guys in pickup trucks. The proliferation of MANPADs may make even that too hazardous soon enough.
It can be so hard to explain to people that the gun has effectively been dead weight for more than 20 years, and that modern CAS consists primarily of dropping a smart-bomb or launching an AGM from 20,000 ft. up. Indeed, that’s the vast majority of what the A-10′s have been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Scipio:
There are some other important CAS scenarios, but none of them can justify a 70-rps, 30-mm shell, anti-tank Gatling gun.
It’s already much better with regular rotary-wing aviation support, but that can be slow to get on station, and has a worse MANPAD risk.
I’d rather have an AC-130 gunship circling overhead, keeping the enemy port-side and landing area-clearing artillery on their position, to help me with that mission anyday.
The reason to keep the A-10 around is not the gun, as wonderful as the gun is, but because it’s dirt cheap to operate compared to every other aircraft in the fleet. There’s no point in sending a $30k/hour F-35 or $20k/hour F-15 if the $10k/hour hog will suffice.
The F-35 is about twice as expensive per flying hour as the A-10, though the A-10 is by all accounts a terrible hangar queen. No one knows how the F-35 will be on that account.
The real issues are:
1) The A-10 fleet is being maintained mostly through cannibalization of existing aircraft. There’s no further supply of spares.
2) For the particular role it’s good at, CAS in a permissive air environment, drones cost 2/3 less than the A-10 per flying hour and replicate most of the functionality.
3) The monetary, personnel, and time expense of maintaining the A-10 fleet as a whole very disproportionate to the unique capabilities it brings to the table.