The Marines are bringing back Harriers (ancient and not very effective) because the Hornets are wearing out.* The UK has a carrier in service that has no planes. The original plan was to have the JSF in service in 2010. Plans keep getting pushed back, more money is spent, and the state of the art is not standing still.
The problem with this is that the US is spending insane amounts of money for what will not be a very effective plane in any particular role. Defenders will say that the JSF can do more things than any other plane, but what is the point if in combat the plane is not the best at the role it is sent to perform?
It's hard to know what to do at this point, perhaps just keep the JSF as a VTOL replacement (there is no other) and keep some for the Air Force. At the ranges our navy will need to engage in Asia, they should think about drones and planes that are built to work very well with drones.
ISTM the F-35 will be the undoing of the U.S. military. The program seems to be eating all available time and funding but without delivering on essential core capabilities.
It certainly seems to be the undoing of the Dutch airforce. We always used to have around 100 fighters. It's going to 37 F-35s now. I wonder how many missions we can still fly with that.
When you compare the speed and effectiveness of Russia's military renewal (including planes like the Su-35) with the chain of fiascos in the US defense sector, one really wonders whether the Soviet Union's KGB campaign was a success. The KGB wanted to place deep cover agents within the US establishment (political and defense) in order to subvert the USA and damage its ability to threaten the Soviet Union. Normal KGB practice for this was to set up agents, but then let them run free with no control from Moscow or any requirement to send info back to Moscow. This made them virtually undetectable and when the Russian Federation disbanded the KGB, those deep cover agents continued to function. Soviet defectors in the 70's and 80's warned about the KGB campaign but nobody seemed to listen.
So when we see so-called "bad decisions" resulting in useless aircraft, useless stealth ships, and a whole chain of military equipment fiascos (up to and including $10,000 hammers) you really have to wonder whether the KGB won the cold war after all. We now know that the USA ran a decades long campaign to subvert the Soviet Union by sowing corruption deep within the Soviet system. How could the KGB not have done the same? Also, the Soviet Union disbanded itself quite abruptly and unexpectedly. Students of the KYB and of Russian strategy seriously wonder whether this was done to prevent the ultimate endgame in the US plan which would see Russia balkanized into a dozen small squabbling countries. Watch the film "The Turkish Gambit" to get an idea of the kind of chess games that Russians are capable of playing.
The reality of Russian intelligence activities is not a few ultra-capable super spies subverting entire procurement programs. The reality is a flood of individual little social media messages intended to feed a narrative of how strong, better, superior, unstoppable and righteous the nation of Russia is. You know, sort of like your comments in this thread.
The idea that Russia's military is "renewed" is laughable. 30 years ago they were a global superpower. Today they can't field one aircraft carrier without needing a tow. Russia is a regional power with a nuclear deterrent. And despite the rhetoric, Russia only wants to be a regional power. Their military is calibrated for that. To the extent that Russia messes with the U.S., it is only to keep the U.S. from interfering in what Russia considers to be its sphere of influence. Russia does not have the capability or interest in direct military confrontation with the U.S.
It's an interesting idea, but I think most of us here have worked for companies where we've seen this stupidity first hand. The clueless middle manager makes a bad decision, this has several knock on effects, the manager gets promoted and a lot of money has already been sunk into the bad decisions so fixing the mistakes isn't politically possible for the next guy and on it goes.
This happens every where there is humans with egos and politics in it's many forms and I doubt the KGB has infiltrated all of them.
Blaming other countries when US congressman corrupted seems to be typical response. Dont take me wrong, your claims of few agents gambling the entire US nation looks laughable to me while more number of US spies are working all over the world
The Russian military is in worse shape today than it was five years ago. Between the embargo over Ukraine and the drop in the price of oil they're broke again.
Russian military aircraft might look effective on paper but in real world operations they have mostly failed. Look what happened when they tried to deploy carrier aircraft to Syria recently.
From another hand they had only one crashed land based aircraft after 2 years of very intensive bombing in Syria, which in my understanding is a very good result.
It's interesting that while the US develops consistently better stealth technology, the Russians develops consistently better countermeasures such as VHF low frequency radar and IRST pods.
Well, I personally think that the entire question of stealth and air superiority against Russia is a mute point. With a range of just 2000km, the Russians can simply use traditional air deffence against important targets and fire missiles directly at the totally non-stealthy giant, impossible to miss aircraft carriers.
VHF band radars have too many problems to be relied upon operationally. The clutter floor is so high you can't use them to guide missiles. So you use them to cue high frequency radars... which are just the sort of wavelengths at which the F-22 and F-35 were designed to be low-observable.
IOW, VHF radars tell you generally where incoming planes are so you have a chance of shooting at them when they're right on top of you.
I don't think anyone is proposing magically shrinking VHF radar into a teeny package, but the idea is to set up a kill chain. If the VHF radar can point out the general location and IR and powerful radar such as the Zaslon can seek it out.
I remember reading a long time ago about multi-static radar systems, were you have multiple transmitters and receivers in different locations. IIRC the idea was that a) transmitters can be very cheap and even unmanned (so it doesn't make sense to fire a $million HARM to whack a $1000 transmitter) b) to the extent that stealth aircraft are designed to not reflect incoming waves back towards the transmitter, multi-static radar systems could detect such aircraft better than traditional systems.
No idea if anything like this is actually in use anywhere, or whether it was/is just an academic curiosity.
This is the physical equivalent of rewriting a complex software system from scratch. Seems like it’ll be less pain and effort than modifying the existing system, yet five years later you end up with a pile of shit that you’re tempted to rewrite from scratch. The next “rewrite” won’t have any humans onboard.
That's the thing with defence spending - with the lead time on resources like this you can't fixate on the current conflict, but need to think decades ahead.
It's not beyond the realms of possibility that nations could see themselves in a war for dwindling resources on the planet in the next 30 to 40 years.
Fair point. But which would have been better, having one F35 or having 3 F16's for roughly the same price?
There's a great (old/free) sci-fi story with the same premise (of which I can't remember the name right now). In it the leading power is engaged in a war which they should win easily, but then they keep inventing all these new and great technologies. However every time they try and implement a new one they give up more ground until in the end they're in a bit of trouble.
the legacy fighters are pretty old airframes and I think even the new blocks are going to be outclassed in any seriously contested airspace. the real comparison should not be between the f35 and f16.
it should be between the f35 and a different program which isn't a gross hodgepodge of the demands of everyone and their mom. concurrency, one size fits-all-fighter...madness.
I don’t see why this is such a big deal. It’s like saying Intel spent $3B to make development boards for their next gen chip but instead of replacing the chips on those dev boards they just bought new production boards. I can easily see how that’s less costly than upgrading the dev boards, or the aircraft in this case. I mean they’ll still have the planes for training and such.
It's a huge problem. The Air Force didn't need anywhere near 108 aircraft for flight testing and initial training. Unlike electronics development boards which are relatively cheap to manufacture, aircraft cost millions. Concurrency has been an abject failure.
Well, if they're only used for initial training, then ya.
But worth pointing out that right now, there are ~13 active duty USAF F16 squadrons, something like 17 ANG squadrons, and ~5 training squadrons. That's roughly 6:1. The USAF was planning (who knows...) to get something like 1500+ F-35s. Even at 12 active airframes per training airframe, you'd still be able to absorb 108 airframes.
If these airframes can be made into sufficiently good trainer airframes, then it could be okay.
That's a big if though, looks like Block 2B have lower G limits than the Block 3s - don't know if that's a real structural thing, or just software qualification stuff.
The real change here is that the government is bearing more of the development risk than in the past. The argument is this is necessary as companies can no longer afford to speculatively design modern advanced combat aircraft.
A great real-world example is the Russian Federation's program of new and improved military aircraft produced by several suppliers. Westerners constantly vastly underestimate the capabilities of Russia. Probably because Russians are smart enough to encourage this kind of thinking.
But when you look at the history of Russia who went from an agricultural peasant nation in 1917 to the WWII powerhouse that beat the Nazis in 1944, followed by an encore in rebuilding their country to the point where they had the first TV network in 1950, first space satellite, first man in space, detonated a hydrogen bomb only 10 months after the USA, you can see that these people are not dummies.
After decades of studying the Russians, I think the clearest way to explain who they are, is they are a nation of builders. Of course they are human and not perfect, but overall they know how to build all kinds of things and they fearlessly push forward with project after project all over their vast expanse of territory.
99% of what people say about Russia is wrong and rooted in ignorance because too few Westerners will learn Russian and get their info direct from the source. This means that Russia has not had to worry about keeping secrets from the USA because the USA does it for them. Electronic warfare capabilities are a case in point. And when you learn how the Soviets defeated American stealth aircraft capabilities even before they were deployed, you wonder why the USA spent the money to develop it.
The problem with this is that the US is spending insane amounts of money for what will not be a very effective plane in any particular role. Defenders will say that the JSF can do more things than any other plane, but what is the point if in combat the plane is not the best at the role it is sent to perform?
It's hard to know what to do at this point, perhaps just keep the JSF as a VTOL replacement (there is no other) and keep some for the Air Force. At the ranges our navy will need to engage in Asia, they should think about drones and planes that are built to work very well with drones.
*https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/u-s-marines-will-keep-the-...