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: When contemplating the occupational schooling regime, there is one thing to keep forever in mind: However much you may think you know about its perpetuators…however much you may justifiedly hate them…it is never enough.
Isegoria: Michael Strong cites John Taylor Gatto’s description of conventional K-12 education as thirteen years’ training in passivity and dependence, meaninglessness and incoherence.
Isegoria: Gatto also came up tangentially, while answering the question, Are Chinese mothers superior?
Gaikokumaniakku: I have a lot of bile to vent on the topic of miseducation. I am not yet drunk enough to start a jeremiad against Dewey (give me time, I might come back after I have liquored up) but I can drop a few links and quotes: https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto https://deliberatedumbin gdown.com/ddd/ https://www.fisheaters.c om/garbagegeneration.htm l https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Deschooling_Societ y I was prepared to claim that Rockefeller could be proven as the driving force...
Jim: Fundamental to real expertise is 1) whether the informational structure of the environment is sufficiently regular that it’s possible to make good predictions and 2) does it allow high quality feedback and therefore error-correction. This is true of surgeons doing surgery versus whatever the fuck most doctors are doing.
Bob Sykes: Greer seriously underestimates Chinese MS and PhD production. They outproduce the US by a factor of 8, and 8 of the top 10 technological universities in the world, the peers of MIT and Cal Tech, are in China. Chinese engineers and scientists lead the world in the production of new patents and papers in high-quality journals. We use 5G networks and AI programs to play games and make pornography. The Chinese use them to optimize their factories and transportation systems. They are a serious...
Jim: The only Chinese scientific product worth caring about is DeepSeek—and it is very, very much worth caring about.
Phileas Frogg: I’m curious as to the sustainability of this, in light of the historical defaults in Chinese culture and character. Either way, the West is going to be having a rough go of it for the next few decades.
Jim: Was Hitler’s Germany actually reflective of Ulyanov‘s methodology “imitated”?
Jim: Was Stalin’s reorganization a necessary precondition to Russia’s success in the Second “World” War?
Bob Sykes: The word “totalitarian” was coined by Mussolini to describe his new Fascist (also his coinage) government in Italy. He started out as a senior member of Italy’s Socialist (Marxist) Party, but was expelled when his supported Italy’s entry into WW I so that it might expand its territory. He was expelled because he promoted nationalism over the doctrinaire internationalism of the working class. Fascism, Naziism, and Communism were all competing mass movements of the 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s. They all...
Phileas Frogg: “Despite the magnitude of the problem, there appears to have been no real mechanism for catching anyone up once they’d fallen behind. As a result, these cities had 7-26% of students lingering 2 or more years behind age level in their work (and as many as 13% of students 3 years behind!)” Because they hadn’t fallen behind, they were/are – with rare exception not worth mentioning or addressing at an institutional level – exactly where their abilities had sorted...
Jim: For an interesting experiment, run that comment through this prompt: I will provide a brief passage of prose. Examine it along the following dimensions, in sequence: 1. Information density, worldview density, and rhetorical density (classify each as high or low, with concise justification). 2. Structural comparison: identify the prose tradition its form belongs to (e.g., numbered theses, manifesto, essay, op-ed) and trace that form’s lineage. 3. Content mapping: determine which intellectual...
Jim: The occupational schooling regime is characterized by the following principal attributes: 1. Strict student segregation by age 2. No meaningful student segregation by ability 3. Strictly verboten student segregation by race (however defined; even the several white races are forbidden the right to be free of each other) 4. Regimented curricula designed with no consideration for differing student ability 5. The notion that teachers are somehow responsible for their students’ differing ability 6. The...
Phileas Frogg: “Although ABT-263 worked in mice, it is too toxic for widespread use in humans.” Now I’m curious which specific enzyme mice have, or have in greater abundance, that we don’t that allows them to metabolize ABT-263.
Jim: >a German Jew defected to a foreign military to fight against his putative homeland >that Jew thereafter held communist sympathies >he even hated George S. Patton the Great >mfw
Jim: Aisurgen: “Why the comments section on this, the best intellectual stimulating blog on the Internet is full of insane anti-American conspiracists? The riddle.” The United State is many times more anti-American and conspiratorial than any of us—and I mean this literally—could ever imagine.
Isegoria: It’s one flavor of Open-plus-Disagreeable.
Aisurgen: Why the comments section on this, the best intellectual stimulating blog on the Internet is full of insane anti-American conspiracists? The riddle.
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.