> Meanwhile, modern conflict, from Ukraine’s drone war to naval engagements in the Red Sea to Iran’s own mass missile and drone salvos, increasingly favors systems that can be produced at scale and replaced when lost. The F-35 is a masterpiece. But a force designed around a masterpiece is not designed for long, protracted wars, and U.S. adversaries know this.
The problem is that the F-35 was intended to be the low cost, mass produce-able workhorse for long protracted wars against technologically inferior adversaries where extremely high performance would be unnecessary. Yes it incorporates advanced stealth and electronics that make it a very capable aircraft, especially when it's going up against F-4s, but these weren't driving the cost. The US had already developed these technologies, and once you have them putting them on another aircraft isn't too expensive. And in particular the main focus was on lifetime cost - keeping flight hours reasonable and maintenance down compared to a higher performance aircraft like the F-22. This plane was designed around exactly this sort of conflict.
The problem was horrific project mismanagement. Building factories before the design was complete, delays due to development operations being done in parallel, making essentially 3 different aircraft with radically different requirements use a common design - the initial program cost skyrocketed and the only way out was to keep upping the order quantity to keep unit costs low. Cost per flight hour was supposed to be $25k, it's now $50k. Engine maintenance time was supposed to be 2 hours, it wound up being 50. And the issues didn't stop after initial development - with each successive iteration there have been new issues resulting in further delays, with airframe delivery on average still being 8 months behind schedule. None of that had anything to do with the F-35's core capabilities. For comparison, the F-35 has lower production costs than the non-stealth F-15EX which is based on a 50 year old airframe, but it has a 30% higher flight hour cost, and the program cost is 100X for 20X airframes.
This sort of botched procurement has caused terrible issues for multiple military projects, such as the Navy's failed Constellation-class frigate program, or the Army's immediate cancellation of the M10 Booker. These aren't masterpieces built for the wrong war, these are failures at producing what was intended. One has to wonder how you can mess up Epiphone guitar production so bad you accidentally wind up with a Stradivarius. It does not bode well for the orchestra.
The program was intended to make money and it did. My university has ties to the military and I was talking to people working on the Joint Strike Fighter about ways to reduce software bugs, I was told candidly that software bugs are job security and they’ll be riding that gravy train all the way to retirement, which they did.
The F-35 is a perfect pork-barrel example: by using subcontractors distributed in many house districts, the project owner ensures its political viability. By my count, only Louisiana, Wyoming, Nebraska, and North Dakota show less than $1MM in "economic impact".
well yes you need to keep the aerospace and engineering pipelines full if you ever need to actually go to war. So boeing and all the other chumps making gravy is part of the deal in downtime
That is asinine, what do you think happens to those institutions when incompetence is what gets rewarded. The real threat to the US military is not the lack of weapons, or that the F35 is not as good or as cheap as it could have been, it's because it is a lumbering bureaucracy full of people who couldn't get better jobs elsewhere.
The most qualified candidates for what? 100% of people in the military have passed the ASVAB. And the most capable people in the military are EXTREMELY intelligent.
The problem is unlocking that brilliance in an organization which has LOTS of office politics, cross currents, uncoordinated long term goals, too many interests who get to requirements to every project, etc.
And the biggest problem is that everything the US military decides long term needs sign off by Congress, so there is always a political dimension to every project approval. Congress laughs at the F35 as the “world’s largest jobs program” with components built in just about every member’s district. The A10 is unlikable because Congress wants to keep it around, even though the AirForce thinks it’s cheaper (logistically) and safer to use other aircraft for the role. Not everybody is thinking about the same factors.
Respectfully, the problem is not incompetence or bureaucracy. There's plenty of each in the military but they are only symptoms.
I like the Stanford Beer quote - "The purpose of a system is what it does".
What does the current defense acquisition system reliably produce? Obscene amounts of money for the defense contractors, campaign contributions for politicians, promotions and well-paid private sector careers for the top military leadership. The quality and suitability of its weapon systems, though sometimes excellent, is secondary.
All people who matter in this system, the ones who built and sustain it, are rewarded by the status quo. It's working exactly as intended.
The poor incentive structure is what results in incompetence and bureaucracy. I personally would measure competence with respect to stated aims, not some unstated aim.
If we are to assume the unstated aim is long term wealth extraction then I would again suggest the current extent of short term wealth extraction is putting that long term at serious risk so I would not consider that competence either. I would consider it an emergent behaviour where two or more parasites have to compete against each other for resources from the host, each has the very strong intensive to maximise their personal take even at the risk of the killing host because to leave anything on the table is to allow the competition to have more resources which they will use to attack you with.
Perhaps if the intent is to undermine the US as part of some broader strategic goal, OK, maybe those people are competent, but I would hope that those people are a very very small number of those operating in the system.
Seems to be jobs program. I ended up in defense after a year of being out of work and while all the new grads were desperate and destitute, we were steadily hiring new juniors out of school.
I’ve heard stories from years ago about some of the waste being protected because it we weren’t producing tanks in excess of what we need, some small town in Ohio would lose a ton of jobs and their congressmen his job.
Outside of wartime, yes these are jobs programs. If we stop, we lose the know-how, man-power, and facilities. Starting back up becomes expensive, time consuming, and potentially impossible on the time scales required. That does not bode well for a war you're involved in.
These capabilities don't stick around for free. A corporation isn't going to keep around design staff doing nothing. Even if you move the design staff to the military stuff, you still need to give them work or their skills atrophy.
Incentives matter and incentivizing bugs in software is a very bad idea, it’s how you forget how to write software without so many bugs. And what was the point of it all, it was obvious even back then that the future was cheap missiles / drones.
> it's because it is a lumbering bureaucracy full of people who couldn't get better jobs elsewhere.
I don’t think that they exploit the military industrial complex for personal job security and fortune makes it likely that they’re incompetent. In fact, as a society we seem to praise those who are exceedingly successful at such exploitation, and even elect them to the highest levels of government and hang onto every word they say.
People don't understand that defense contractors are extremely wasteful in their spending, and the contractor's job is not to produce the latest and greatest. They have a dual mandate.
1. To keep supply chains active so we can continue to be able to wage tomorrow's war with yesterday's technology by introducing rent-seekers and middlemen into companies and processes where they shouldn't be.
2. To keep Wall Street, defense contractors, and defense lobbyists happy.
I gotta ask, while I have the attention of HN - why are defense contractors allowed to be public, for-profit corporations that serve Wall Street interests ahead of national defense interests? Am I the only one that sees a massive conflict of interest that can affect (or, probably has affected) our national security in profoundly damaging ways.
It almost feels like Healthcare companies, who are supposed to be focusing on our health and wellbeing, seem to focus on shareholder returns and denying service to the same people that pay the premiums. What's wrong here?
The answer is because we tried to DIY and found that the government at best works as a developer with manufacturing better off outsourced. It is 'under-orderly' compared to a planned system, but the private sector works. There is a reason why it is a norm for military industrial development.
Wall Street and Defense Contractors and Defense Lobbyists wouldn't make too much of a difference anyway when they are already jobs programs. Any sort of industry would have lead to it being an Industrial complex problem.
That people think it would make a difference mystifies me as much as when people claim that 401ks are just to make people dependent upon the market in retirement. When in reality they would be dependent upon the market either in a state funded pension system too because that is where the money comes from.
A lot of big words, but also inaccurate. If you compare the F-35 to basically any plane worldwide with similar capabilities, it's very reasonably priced. You can see that in that it's very popular for export, with pre-sales already sold out until 2035.
There are plenty of articles out there on this for those who want to Google it.
> If you compare the F-35 to basically any plane worldwide with similar capabilities, it's very reasonably priced.
If you compare corvettes to other sports cars, you'll find they are very reasonably priced. That doesn't make a corvette a good economical option for day to day commuting.
There are only 2 5th generation fighters available for export - the F-35 and the J-35. The F-35 is 40% more expensive than the J-35. No one is buying F-35s for the low price tag.
More to the point, the unit costs are low because the number of airframes scheduled to be built is enormous. The US needs to export hundreds of F35s to help distribute the massive cost of the development program. This development program was nearly 400% over initial budget, and the general managing the project was fired over it. The fact is the F-35 is far more expensive than it was intended to be.
Nothing else is remotely as capable in the modern threat environment that most countries can actually buy. That's the cold truth. They can't buy anything else that compares and the best isn't for sale.
The pressure was not "because it was the best thing for those countries or war". The pressure was because it was good for USA manufacturer and economy. It was one of the perks of being a leader of a group of allies - you can pressure them to buy your stuff.
Well if you don't let them buy it then what's the point in developing for that?
Just develop for your own militay or some poorer countries the US can't be bothered to keep as vassals.
The only features the F-35 doesn't have for a modern fight are IP ownership and range.
The former was a military procurement mistake and the latter has been worked on for years [0] but never prioritized.
Also, I'm kind of surprised this was published by War on the Rocks, because it leaves a number of extremely relevant topics unmentioned.
The B-21 explicitly addresses both issues above, while mostly resisting the urge to increase size and complexity.
The Air Force is aware of basing vulnerabilities and is looking at multiple solutions (ACE, autonomous tanking, stealth tanking, modular anti-drone aircraft shelters).
The CCA cross-service effort is already targeting pairing >1 UAV to each manned aircraft.
Replicator and other efforts are addressing the "low-at-industrial-scale" problem, and the US just used waves of Shahed clones against Iran.
The article's points would have been more valid 10-15 years ago, but all now have addressing in progress.
Ukraine would love the F35. We won’t sell it to them at any price, though, because of the escalatory concern with Russia. We only just barely decided to allow them to have F16.
In a serious war drone factories are getting bombed (by F-35s) and there is no need to handle a never-ending stream of drones. The war in Ukraine is special because neither side is capable of air supremacy.
Note that the original article doesn't say anywhere that F-35-like capability is not needed.
So Ukraine isn't a serious war then? And I take it you believe we failed to employ that strategy in Iran ... why, exactly? The alternative interpretation being that isn't how things work. Swarms of cheap drones are the new reality thus appropriate countermeasures are required on the front lines.
The key difference is that "swarms of inexpensive drones" can be made in "swarms of normal looking residential garages". The entire enterprise can be decentralized making it much tougher to target with strategic weapons.
America does not want to prepare for that kind of conflict. It wants B2 bombers because those look cool when they fly over during the Superbowl.
Ukraine is a real war and it is about men and women crawling in the mud constantly terrified of getting blown up. It is literally battle of the Somme again. How do you recruit college kids for that?
I was thinking that. For most of the last sixty years Russia / the USSR was the peer adversary usually mentioned for NATO to fight. I think they look weaker than they are because Ukraine has actually been pretty competent in the fight.
Re. no swarms of drones because the factories have been bombed, do people really think that'll work on China?
Drones can be made in ordinary civilian houses and apartments. It's too expensive to dig an underground factory just for that, and even if they do (let's assume an abandoned mine could be used), they would still have vulnerable power supply and vulnerable transport. Power plants, transmission lines, rail tracks, bridges are part of the targeted infrastructure. The further they are from the front, the more a logistical nightmare it becomes to move them to where they're needed.
I would guess that there's a big difference between assembling a drone (which can easily be done in a kitchen) and mass-producing parts such as batteries and gas engines for drones that have to fly more than a few dozen kilometers.
The US doesn’t have air supremacy in Iran. We have air dominance, but shoulder mounted infrared guided (bypasses stealth paint to go after engine exhaust) AA is still taking out the occasional F35 and A10.
RU/UA is special because RU completely screwed up the first 3 weeks of the war (likely because of the culture of sycophancy Putin has, similar to Trump) and was driven out of central UA. Russia is too proud to admit they lost and UA wasn’t allowed to attack into RU territory until their suppliers (US, EU) were confident RU wouldn’t nuke us in retaliation. Now UA is busy dismantling RU’s economy and war making industry. Ultimately it’s not comparable to any other war of our lifetimes for several reasons.
UA drone factories aren’t in large industrial buildings. They have hundreds of office / home locations where the parts are printed / assembled. RU largely has a very few mega military vendors who make drones / missiles and they have consolidated their efforts in a few (now vulnerable) locations.
F35 capability is excellent for preparing the battlefield, such as the first few hours when softening up air defenses.
But don’t underestimate how much all countries are learning from watching RU/UA or US/Iran. Drones will continue to evolve to meet the gaps in affordable interception, affordable anti-5thGen aircraft, etc. UA now has armed land, sea, and air drones and each has variants like scout, bomber, interceptor, etc. we will continue to see specialization and comparative advantage evolve in the space.
>They have hundreds of office / home locations where the parts are printed / assembled
This shouldn't be a big surprise to Russia or anyone else, as it has precedent. German aircraft production peaked in 1944 at the height of allied strategic bombing.
The US absolutely has air supremacy in Iran. You don't roll out B-52s in a contested airspace. MANPADS have an abysmal ceiling height, they are largely irrelevant short of some very narrow circumstances.
Just for your benefit, stealth coatings and materials (not "paint") are a tertiary defence after shaping and electronic warfare.
Group 3 UAS can't be assembled in homes and office buildings in any meaningful numbers. They are too big. Even Group 2 is marginal. I think you're confusing Group 1 quadcopters with long range OWA drones like Shaheds.
Realistically a Cessna single prop is roughly $100k (average between good condition used and some new ones). A Ukrainian interceptor drone is about $2k + cost of munition. And the Cessna requires an airfield, so it is geo-fenced, while an interceptor drone can take off from flat land or the back of a truck.
People need to wake up and realize the economics of war just changed by several orders of magnitude.
In WWII terms they come as a function of aircraft production capability as the stategy was to keep putting fresh young faces in trainer cockpits and advancing everybody that didn't crash after a quick run down of controls and a couple of paired instructor flights.
I had a couple of aunts that were both members of the UK/AU Women's Auxiliary Air Force (1939 - 1949) and they each had rudimentary training for spitfires, heavy bombers, jets, etc that came down to mere hours and "see how you go".
> I had a couple of aunts that were both members of the UK/AU Women's Auxiliary Air Force (1939 - 1949) and they each had rudimentary training for spitfires, heavy bombers, jets, etc that came down to mere hours and "see how you go".
Worth noting that their mission was delivery flights with the produced aircraft (a handful of them saw combat, because if you're flying a fighter plane into a warzone your guns might as well be loaded, but it wasn't the main aim). Those who were intentionally flying into combat got a little more training AIUI.
And recovery flights of downed / incorrectly landed (wrt airfield) aircraft, crossing active zones while unarmed, international delivery across the globe, and officially no fighting stuff ... although that was somewhat divorced from practice in the asian theatre.
Still, thanks for chipping in with a "no true Scotswoman" pilot variation - of course bombardiers got training in sighting, navigators in map reading .. largely at that time combat pilots got experience or got dead while exposed to all the barrack room theory about tactics that may or may not survive enemy contact.
In a serious drone war a neutral cargo ship off your coast will open hidden flaps and unleash 10K drones all at once erasing couple bases before they even know whats up.
Enough with the ace combat fanfics. In a serious drone war a neutral cargo ship would not be allowed to hang around with potentially a shitload of drones in its containers.
Wouldn't that be the war crime of perfidy, similar to when the US used a secret plane painted as a civilian aircraft to sink one of the Venezuelan boats 9/2025?
Warships are explicitly allowed to use false flags at sea, provided they lower them and raise their true flag before launching an attack. So all that would change to be legal would be to raise the flag and then unleash the drone swarms.
I'm not quite sure if just putting up a military flag on a civilian transport ship makes it count as a warship or not though.
> we would just have fleets of Cesnas flying around with a person hanging out the door with a shotgun lol.
Pfft, get real - Robinson R22 light broomstick choppers with muster pilots and crop dusting family STOLs make far more sense for their agility, ground hugging, and rough short take off / landing field capabilities.
That quibble aside, I can see things going that way, until flooding waves of many drones push up the human life cost past being able to respond.
Either way, they still need to be backed by some agile radar capabilities - variations of the E-7A Wedgetail design for ground and air to keep sensing on the hop.
This wasn't unlike how the U.S. did it in Vietnam. They would have a small, unarmed helicopter fly low with an observer and an M-16 to spot (or more likely draw fire) with some Cobra and/or Huey gunships higher up. When the little bird found some targets the big ones would come down and lay waste to the entire area.
In the Second World War, the most effective defence against Germany's V1 was getting a fast plane to fly alongside it with its wingtip under the V1's wingtip. They didn't actually "bump" the V1s, just got one wing into a kind of "ground effect" which caused it to roll beyond the capability of the gyro to compensate.
They're doing this to take down all sorts of stuff the Russians are lobbing at Ukraine.
The Booker was a perfect fit for the Army reqs, and filled a genuine need. But it didn't have a sponsor that was willing to pay for it. The Armor Branch didn't like it, and the Infantry Branch, which is the real user couldn't muster enough support in the DoD.
The Connie is a good ship and the two under contract will be fine vessels when they're commissioned. Frigates are no longer "cheap" ships, and the sticker shock was higher than expected despite the obvious changes that were going to be made to the FREMM design. But it's cancellation has more to do with dysfunction at the top of the Navy (and DoD) then the program of record.
Also, you're overestimating the flight hour costs of the F-35. Even the B model doesn't hit $50k. The other variants are closer to $35k/hour (adjusted for inflation) than $50K.
> The Booker was a perfect fit for the Army reqs, and filled a genuine need. But it didn't have a sponsor that was willing to pay for it.
The Booker was overweight, meaning it couldn't be air dropped, which was the entire purpose for the program. No one was willing to pay for it because it wasn't what anyone wanted.
> Frigates are no longer "cheap" ships
The point was to produce a cheap ship. It's a ship that already exists and had a pricetag. The issue was it went from 85% commonality to 15% commonality, ballooning the price.
> But it's cancellation has more to do with dysfunction at the top of the Navy (and DoD) then the program of record.
They are one in the same. They could have produced an invincible super battleship and it wouldn't change the fact that they failed to accomplish what they set out to do. All three programs suffer from exactly this dysfunction.
Air dropping was never part of the requirement. It would have been a "nice to have" but not required.
There was no way we were going to be able to take a base model FREMM and use it in the USN without substantial modifications. The Navy screwed up in how they sold this to Congress, and things like wanting to use smaller shipyards for political and logistical reasons doomed it.
The Constellation class frigates had no mission. Just like the failed LCS classes before them, they aren't survivable in a modern high-threat missile environment: weak radars, small magazines. And if they can't survive themselves then they're useless as escorts.
I guess they can be put to work intercepting smugglers in the Caribbean Sea or something.
The US is converging on a single class of combat ships, which is whatever DDG-X turns into. It converges what was previously destroyers, cruisers, and frigates. It is more capable and has a higher displacement than any of them despite being called a "destroyer".
Much of the distinction separation historically was that ship category reflected command officer rank. They have been decoupling that, which honestly makes sense.
I like having C++ on my toolbox, but when Bjarne Stroustoup proudly talks about "F-35 Fighter Jet’s C++ Coding Standards" I am not sure it lands how he thinks it does, given how it turned out to be.
Quite certain that it also contributed to all the software glichs F-35 suffers from.
The whole Coding Standards talk has always felt like an own goal. Don't get me wrong I have extensive C++ experience and wouldn't work on a project that doesn't have guidelines. But the fact that one _needs_ plain english and hard to check in an automated fashion guidelines when using the tool that is C++ implies something about the deeper culture and issues at play.
Sir you're holding the wrong handle. <The audience looks at a hammer with 17 subtly different handles>
This feels like what happens when the selection pressure isn't there. Building for "the next war" (or more broadly "the future") is always bound to be an utter boondoggle, because despite your best intentions and the most strenuous furrowing of your eyebrows you'll have literally no fucking idea what the actual demands of that situation will be. You have to react, that's it. Trying to predict is futile. So better to try to set yourself up to react better?
I don't think aerospace is a good example of efficiency in the private sector. Lockheed Martin did the F-35 and it's main competition in the US is Boeing...
I'm not an expert but from my friends in the industry (including multiple at Lockheed and Boeing), it's definitely not a story about how good and efficient the private sector is. Boeing especially sounds like it's been a real mess with a lot of project management issues.
Take a gander at how much SpaceX has benefited from government contracts. And for Anduril, well the phrase "all hat, no cattle" is pretty appropriate. In all my years I've never seen so much hype for a company that really hasn't produced much.
I don't know what your point is in this context. They won contracts because they were the cheapest (most efficient) provider of the services. And federal contracts are a small part of the their current revenue.
I would like to see the government (at all levels) have more in house capabilities and less absurd degrees of outsourcing.
I’m currently watching an 8-figure park remodeling project happening near home. Instead of hiring one or two competent construction managers for a few hundred thousand dollars, the city seems to be spending several million dollars for outside management to oversee this one project. (Never mind how much they’re overpaying for the actual construction.)
> I would like to see the government (at all levels) have more in house capabilities and less absurd degrees of outsourcing.
This would help at all levels.
It's very difficult as a government employee to properly supervise contractors when you have little idea what those contractors are actually doing.
But it's hard to gain that experience when you don't actually ever do those things yourself either.
Empower competent people and the government can still succeed, even today. The issue is that everything seem stacked against the idea of either retaining competence or empowering those who are competent to do their work.
Aside from the very real attempts by people to defang the government by offloading all of its functions to the private sector, government is also undermined by an entirely different coterie of idealist, who believe that all the government needs is more process and coordination.
It's very hard indeed to retain competent personnel when they're needlessly mired in non-value-added process steps that are there simply to provide CYA box-checking.
Two different issues... On one hand, government should not compete with private enterprise because it has many unfair advantages. Imagine paying taxes to subsidize your competition, who is also exempt from regulations that apply to you. That is the kind of corruption that comes from government-run businesses.
As for this one:
>I’m currently watching an 8-figure park remodeling project happening near home. Instead of hiring one or two competent construction managers for a few hundred thousand dollars, the city seems to be spending several million dollars for outside management to oversee this one project.
Every time the government touches any money, there is an opportunity for corruption. I'm betting that there are kickbacks, nepotism, or some other bullshit involved in the case you mention here. There are countless fraud schemes. California is trying to pass a law against people like Nick Shirley investigating and reporting on widespread fraud, because they know where their bread is buttered.
> On one hand, government should not compete with private enterprise because it has many unfair advantages. Imagine paying taxes to subsidize your competition, who is also exempt from regulations that apply to you.
Are there any real examples of a government entity in the US competing with a private enterprise in which it genuinely would have been better for the government entity not to compete? I’m thinking of various public utility projects in CA (these are mostly great and more cities should do it), roads (I’ve never heard of a private road operating complaining about a public road), military (contractors complain when the military fixes their own gear, and this is asinine), the military doing some of its own research as you can read about in books like Ignition.
> there is an opportunity for corruption
It could just be incompetence. I read the construction contract. If I were a contractor, I would not have agreed to the fixed price and the steep late completion penalties without charging two arms and a leg and quoting a very long timeframe.
>Are there any real examples of a government entity in the US competing with a private enterprise in which it genuinely would have been better for the government entity not to compete?
Probably everything the government touches outside of keeping the peace and helping businesses function. Government schools suck. Government insurance sucks. Law enforcement often leaves a lot to be desired. I think one could make an argument that we'd be better off with a toll road system too, but for the convenience and privacy of not having to pay tolls.
It's easier to argue for government management when a service involves practically monopolizing space, such as a road, or if the project is especially dangerous or expensive (such as utilities or the military). But the fundamental forces of competition are still beneficial even in huge and monolithic projects. Even in cases of projects commonly run by governments, the competition emerges as being between governments instead of being between companies.
>contractors complain when the military fixes their own gear, and this is asinine
I agree, it sucks. I am very pro-market but I think the government should lay down the law in these cases and say that it won't tolerate abusive prices and it demands all the technical data necessary for routine maintenance, if not the entire product.
>It could just be incompetence. I read the construction contract. If I were a contractor, I would not have agreed to the fixed price and the steep late completion penalties without charging two arms and a leg and quoting a very long timeframe.
If credible businesses are putting in lower bids and they get passed up for a stupidly expensive alternative, that reeks of corruption. But there could be requirements or assurances that we don't know about. That's up to you to find out if you are interested in that case.
A lot of people believe the gov't can do a good job when it is not being actively subverted by people who ideologically want it to fail, and grifters. The only thing that has proven more expensive than having the gov't do something is having them partner with private industry to do it.
Are you kidding? Republicans never cut anything meaningfully. They are only a shade more fiscally responsible than Democrats. Your comment totally blames Republicans and does not put any blame on Democrats who are at least 50% responsible for where we are today.
The F-35 is a massive success. It is a common design that brought together what would have been three to five different planes into one. Costs doubling is further proof of how amazing it is- inflation has basically outpaced that. Cost per flight hour has more to do with data analytics and the Socialism within the DoW (it's a jobs program) than actual need. A lot of delays were quasi-on purpose.
It has crazy supply chain logistics, and has greatly strengthened ties with our allies, and helped boost their engineering and manufacturing capabilities.
The alternative future, of just producing non-STOVL, is particularly relevant now. The USMC needs some organic aviation, but it doesn't need an F-35C. Organic drones would be an excellent fit for Wasp class ships and beach head forces.
Of course it was all tied up with needing allies to buy to increase order size, and the UK Bukit the STOVL bits, so naturally they had to buy all STOVL jets to increase British industry buy.
It's a rat's nest of everyone trying to please all their stakeholders. It is, eventually, a great jet, but it could have been a better, cheaper jet, delivered sooner, and already past Block 5.
Oh yeah, did anyone mention how long it takes to integrate a new system onto the F-35? Fracking years. All of which has to be done by LM, forever. Because the F-35 is not a jet, it's a Master Contract.
>Oh yeah, did anyone mention how long it takes to integrate a new system onto the F-35? Fracking years. All of which has to be done by LM, forever. Because the F-35 is not a jet, it's a Master Contract.
This is the new reality of military procurement and has been for years. Integrated Logistical Support contracts are preferred by senior leadership for lots of reasons that won't fit into an HN comment box, but the wave tops are that it's wastefully inefficient to have uniformed aerospace engineers, logisticians, project managers, etc. doing R&D work. Private industry does it faster, better, cheaper, and pays bigger salaries with better lifestyles which means they can attract better talent.
I've been an aerospace engineer both in-uniform and out, and I can assure you that uniformed service members (and their families!) sacrifice a lot that's hard to quantify and not always immediately apparent. It's not 1950 any more; the best and brightest mostly don't want to touch government with a 10 foot pole. There's more money and prestige elsewhere, in the private sector.
It's not just that uniformed (or DoD) engineers have no access, the subsystem vendor (e.g. Raytheon) also get no access. LM is incredibly obstructionist, even compared to the bastards at Boeing.
This cluster** has led directly to initiatives for open (Govt open) architectures and vendor agnostic interfaces for talking between vehicles and components, and between component, between jets and drones and C2 etc. That has a long way to go too, but at least we've broken with the idea that it can be a closed system.
I'm familiar with the problems of service careers. There is a lot that could be done to improve that, but that's a different discussion. I think it's extra important now that we have jet engineers who know about AI in the aviation context.
Oh, I know all about LM. I used to work on the Hercules when I was in the Air Force. Experimental flight permits, mods, block upgrades, the works. Greatest aircraft in history, if you ask me, but I digress.
Ultimately the F-35 remains Lockheed's intellectual property, which is what drives all this. They want to sell it to other countries, which they can't do if the USAF owns the IP.
90% of that are destroyed far away from targets and the other 10% do cause some damage, but it is usually far from being devastating as the drone is far from being very precise.
A single F35 which could penetrate air defense and go into the country would be a real problem. If Russia has 10 of them, I think it would significantly alter the current equation of power as it may allow for air superiority.
> A single F35 which could penetrate air defense and go into the country would be a real problem.
The difference here is an F-35 + precision weaponry + intelligence to locate high value targets.
It's always going to be cheaper / easier to use shorter-range munitions, which means the launch platform has to be higher / closer.
But without strategic intelligence (what high value targets exist, and what are they supporting?) and targeting intelligence (where are they right now, and where will they be?) neither of the other two capabilities are valuable.
Logistics and command inevitably trend towards centralization, because it's inefficient and expensive to decentralize everything (and at some point the tyranny of compounding logistics makes it impossible).
Where there is centralization, there's a high value target, and that's a job for the F-35 and exquisite standoff weapons.
Should forces be a mix of high-low? Of course! That's something the US realized in the 80s and is why we have the F-16! (still flying, being built, and exported!)
So where is the air superiority over Iran? This only proves Palmer Luckey right. Future of warfare has changed drastically and all countries are taking notes from this War.
youd want some number of both. The ideal defense net against shahed type drones looks very different from the ideal defense net against f35s. Namely, shaheds require very cheap and numerous interceptors and radars, and f35s require very expensive radars and interceptors (and a dream). Anything that works against an f35 would be an egregious waste against a shahed and anything that works against a shahed wouldn't against an f35
Depends. If I need to destroy a bunker, the Shaheds are useless. If I need to shoot down another aircraft (or a Shahed), the Shaheds are useless. That also goes for SEAD, targets that are far away, targets with ECM...
Also, the physical and economic footprint for that many drones isn't small, and a few smart bombs from an F-35 could put paid to your entire inventory.
> and has greatly strengthened ties with our allies
If you count as "allies" the smaller countries that feel like they need to buy US planes otherwise they will get bullied, knowing that the US routinely threatens to invade them... I guess.
Given budgets and slipped timeframes, there was a lot of criticism of the F-35 unifying platforms as opposed to just letting every service do their own one (or two) things as had been the norm. But, at the end of the day, not clear it was a bad strategy.
It is actually pretty clear. Getting there in the end doesn't mean it was a good choice.
The range of the F-35 is too low for the Navy, because it sits in the F-16 concept. But there is no fighter/interceptor split in the AF either, and the range is too low for AF as well.
So now we have the F-47, a very belated ack that the F-35 has short legs. But it also won't fix the problem because it is too focused on the F-22 role, absolute air dominance against e.g. J-20.
The F-35C has greater range than the F/A-18 Super Hornet, the F-16, and the F-22. It's only exceeded by the F-35A and the F-15EX. And "no fighter/interceptor split"? What does that even mean? The USAF hasn't had a true interceptor since the F-106 was retired.
The F-35 achieved exactly what was written on the tin. To be a stealthy replacement for the F-16, A-7, and AV-8B.
The fact that the USN doesn't have a long-legged air superiority fighter has nothing to do with the F-35, and the USAF never considered China as a concern when the ATF requirements were issued (that became the F-22).
So if you compare it to the previous generation turbine it's better? That isn't very interesting.
The F-35 achieved a goal that isn't needed, at the cost of extreme delay. An F-16 replacement with stealth would have been delivered faster and cheaper. The USMC could concentrate on drones, STOVL and vertical lift. A larger variant for F-15/F/A-18 replacement would have many advantages. The USN always wanted more range out of JSF, but wasn't allowed to buy it.
I’m winning a War, BY A LOT, things are going very well, our Military has been amazing and, if you read the Fake News, like The Failing New York Times, the absolutely horrendous and disgusting Wall Street Journal, or the now almost defunct, fortunately, Washington Post, you would actually think we are losing the War. The enemy is confused, because they get these same Media “reports,” and yet they realize their Navy has been completely wiped out, their Air Force has gone onto darker runways, they have no Anti Missile or Anti Airplane Equipment, their former leaders are mostly gone (This has been, in addition to everything else, Regime Change!), and perhaps, most important of all, THE BLOCKADE, which we will not take off until there is a “DEAL,” is absolutely destroying Iran. They are losing $500 Million Dollars a day, an unsustainable number, even in the short run. The Anti-America Fake News Media is rooting for Iran to win, but it’s not going to happen, because I’m in charge! Just like these unpatriotic people used every ounce of their limited strength to fight me in the Election, they continue to do so with Iran. The result will be the same — It already is! President DONALD J. TRUMP
The problem is that the F-35 was intended to be the low cost, mass produce-able workhorse for long protracted wars against technologically inferior adversaries where extremely high performance would be unnecessary. Yes it incorporates advanced stealth and electronics that make it a very capable aircraft, especially when it's going up against F-4s, but these weren't driving the cost. The US had already developed these technologies, and once you have them putting them on another aircraft isn't too expensive. And in particular the main focus was on lifetime cost - keeping flight hours reasonable and maintenance down compared to a higher performance aircraft like the F-22. This plane was designed around exactly this sort of conflict.
The problem was horrific project mismanagement. Building factories before the design was complete, delays due to development operations being done in parallel, making essentially 3 different aircraft with radically different requirements use a common design - the initial program cost skyrocketed and the only way out was to keep upping the order quantity to keep unit costs low. Cost per flight hour was supposed to be $25k, it's now $50k. Engine maintenance time was supposed to be 2 hours, it wound up being 50. And the issues didn't stop after initial development - with each successive iteration there have been new issues resulting in further delays, with airframe delivery on average still being 8 months behind schedule. None of that had anything to do with the F-35's core capabilities. For comparison, the F-35 has lower production costs than the non-stealth F-15EX which is based on a 50 year old airframe, but it has a 30% higher flight hour cost, and the program cost is 100X for 20X airframes.
This sort of botched procurement has caused terrible issues for multiple military projects, such as the Navy's failed Constellation-class frigate program, or the Army's immediate cancellation of the M10 Booker. These aren't masterpieces built for the wrong war, these are failures at producing what was intended. One has to wonder how you can mess up Epiphone guitar production so bad you accidentally wind up with a Stradivarius. It does not bode well for the orchestra.