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.
Jim: Yeah… maybe. But Russia invaded the Ukraine, and some shady motherfuckers were running a billion bioweapons facilities there. As far as I know, nothing was ever released—and the war continues to grind on, I assume.
Phileas Frogg: When I was a child and I had all of the time in the world to be bored getting driven around in the backseat of a car, I used to look out at large buildings with strange corporate names and wonder what they did in them. I’d concoct stories about secret government programs, or occult meetings, or weapons research, etc. Then I’d imagine sneaking into them and discovering their nefarious schemes. As an adult I’ve come to realize, my boredom induced imaginative ramblings may...
Bob Sykes: “Reported” A nice weasel word. “I didn’t say it” Very nearly every news story out of Ukraine that is published in the western media is an outright lie, and the publishers know it. Those deep strikes are being ordered, directed, and conducted by actual US/NATO officers servicemen. Ukraine itself is a proxy and has no say in what is done. They just provide local meat for the Russian grinder. US/NATO troops have been active on the ground in Ukraine since the collapse of the Soviet Union, well...
Phileas Frogg: Jim, I agree, but as a Catholic I still want the house cleaned up over at the Lateran Palace. With regard to bioweapons, you might be right, but I always liked to think of them as the, “Poor Nations Nuke.” I could be wrong, but I don’t think we’ve actually tried invading a nation armed with them, so they’re at least sufficiently dissuasive as to prevent American military intervention.
Jim: Phileas, we don’t need to further expand the power of the Vatican to resuscitate manly honor and suppress the women and the olds. Even the Congress’s Commerce, Equal Protection, and Naturalization Powers, properly understood, could do that. As for bioweapons, they have radically different properties and a much-different activation curve. I frankly doubt that they are actually all that useful.
Phileas Frogg: Jim, Funnily enough that’s one of the reasons I’m in favor of re-establishing the Papal States as key step in the remediation of the Roman Curia, despite the fact that it’s administered by dubiously Catholic individuals at present. As for modern bioweapons, it’s inevitable and stupid, but perfectly rational. Not every nation can afford, develop, or manage to sneak a nuke into operational existence, particularly under the watchful eye of the various Great Powers, so...
Jim: A law without a court, without an army, is hardly a law at all.
Bob Sykes: The Russians have already set up a separate combat arm for drones.
Isegoria: I’m getting strong Terminator-future vibes from drones hunting survivors in the rubble.
Bruce: At Monte Cassino, we bombed the stone building to rubble, and the Germans put machine gun nests in the randomly scattered rubble. Pricy getting them out. I expect drones to routinely arrive just after a bomb strike and nest in the rubble. Maybe in Ukraine they already are. Next, they look at the field manuals on fortifications and start sneaking construction drones into inconvenient places. Maybe in Ukraine they already are.
Jim: That is an astute observation, Phileas. Indeed, to abuse Bill Gates, “People overestimate how much decline can occur in one year, and underestimate how much decline can occur in ten.”
Phileas Frogg: When degradation happens universally, at a roughly uniform rate, it’s much harder to detect, and much more likely to be accepted as, “normal,” than genuinely isolated incidents. Isolated asymmetric catastrophes are more jarring for the public and more like to cause a response than universal and uniform ones. “Family of 3 is carjacked and killed,” in a small town is more likely to elicit a response than, “Over the course of 10 years, your small...
Phileas Frogg: The fact that they both arrived at a general method is interesting, and naturally begs the age old philosophical question: “Is reality a mathematical structure? Or, is reality necessarily instantiated with mathematical properties? Or, is reality simply able to be modeled via mathematics?” I lean towards the 2nd, but I can’t wholly dismiss the 1st and 3rd, though this tidbit does seem to argue against the 3rd indirectly.
Phileas Frogg: Unless and until they release an actual sticker price, it’s only prudent to reserve judgement given the inflationary predilections of our bureaucracy.
Jim: Don’t worry, guys, not only would they not have participated, if Our Greatest Ally had somehow received advance notice, they would have helped to stop it.
Bob Sykes: Next thing you know, people will be claiming Mossad did 9/11.
Wanweilin: In the exact place it was upgraded… hmmm.
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.