You could have 100% of the population agree and it wouldn’t make a difference. There are no good or politically viable solutions.
Canceling the F-35 isn’t a good solution.
Buying JAS-39s isn’t a politically viable solution.
Opponents of the F-35 sound like Republicans on repealing Obamacare. They are… insistent.
But this isn’t business in the sense that you’re arguing. Defense procurement, especially vital combat systems, aren’t the same as buying trucks for the USPS. You can make the case that it should be more similar, but I think you’d have a tough row to hoe if you’re going to argue that it should be exactly the same.
I sincerely doubt any conflict will go nuclear “very quickly.” Both those superpowers realize that any nuclear exchange would be the end of civilization. Any chance of a nuclear exchange will be from a fringe lunatic like Kim Jung-il, and he knows NK will cease to exist if he initiates such an exchange.
So yes, we need 5th generation fighters to keep us on the forefront of military technology and keep any potential adversary in line.
What’s really funny about the OPs line of thinking on this is that both Russia and China (ironically using stolen plans and a design cribbed, badly, from the F-35 :p) are trying to develop 5th gen fighters as well (so are several other countries, though many US allies are pooling their efforts into F-35)…yet the OP thinks he knows better than not just the US but all these other countries too.
If the OP is correct then why would anyone bother developing any advanced military equipment? I mean, just retread the old stuff since it’s good enough to deal with low scale opponents and simply put money into nuclear weapons, since they are the only weapon that would matter against top tier countries. Why can’t literally every top tier nation see this obvious, to the OP, truth?? :smack:
Flight software, be it aircraft or spacecraft, has ALWAYS been problematic precisely because it is groundbreaking NEW stuff. Not because there is any inherent flaw leading to some sort of programmatic “death spiral.” That is pure poppycock, and the following statement in your OP is absolutely false:
Each new generation of fighter, bomber, cargo hauler and spacecraft has faced the same issues for the same reasons since the dawn of the digital age. It’s called “progress,” and the F-35 program is doing it better than ever. The F-35 code base is no different than any number of contemporary aerospace programs including new civil designs and satellites on orbit today in this respect.
Now if you “want” the program to fail, you’re gonna have to figure out how to access Lockheed classified domains and do some work. Maybe the Chinese can assist. I hear they are familiar with the situation… :rolleyes:
Emphasis mine.
I’m only going to comment on that one bolded sentence because I have neither knowledge nor interest in the F-35 controversy as a whole. But the Canadian F-35 procurement story spans a handful of different governments and three different prime ministers. The secretiveness of the Harper government in particular over this initiative, coupled with constant news stories about technical problems and huge cost overruns, was already creating strong opposition to the program when the scathing auditor general’s report hit the news in 2012. This independent report basically accused the Harper government of dishonesty, incompetence, and “ineptitude piled on ineptitude” over their handling of the program. Meanwhile military experts were questioning the suitability of the F-35 for Canada’s unique needs, such as the growing importance of long-range Arctic patrols.
Given the growing opposition from professional and public sectors, the damning AG report, and the growing problems and expenses associated with the program, it should hardly be a surprise that the current PM expressed his opposition to the program. Yet at the same time, until a suitable process is in place for selecting a viable alternative, Canada is still in the program, and just last June made the necessary payment to remain a level 3 industrial partner with Lockheed on the F-35.
So your statement blaming the current PM for stepping back from the F-35 commitment because he’s allegedly clueless is wrong no matter how you look at it.
In a sense, that’s true.
But when a poster is willing to make ardent claims that the facts support his conclusion… and then slink away when the conclusion does not come to pass… there’s another dynamic in play.
Anyone can post an opinion, to be sure. But a claim of near-certainty in a given outcome combined with an unwillingness to place a verifiable consequence – like a bet – on the outcome suggests a lack of any real willingness to be accountable for the accuracy of the prediction.
Look, I wasn’t trying to summarize the entire Canadian Governments’ past and current views in nine words. But Trudeau’s cluelessness on this issue is obvious. “It doesn’t work and is far from working” coupled with an inability to decide on whether there’s a competition or not, shows both lack of familiarity with the issue beyond a sound bite and total indecisiveness.
And the reason I brought up Canada at all is that they are, for the most part, the only country part of the program that is so screwed up on whether they actually want the F-35, that the anti-F-35 crowd sometimes uses Canada as an example of a country that is smarter than everyone else. But it’s not cunning insight into the pros and cons of the plane, which would of course be fleshed out if there were a competition - it’s basically incompetence, IMHO.
I wonder if the F-35 has a headphone jack
Drones aren’t actually all that cheap, at least if you want them to have radar, the speed and ceiling necessary to have a chance at an engagement with something like the F-35, and some sort of air-to-air weapon system. For reference an MQ-9 costs us $17M, has no air-to-air capability, and it putters along at ~200 mph.
There isn’t a country in the world that can afford to exchange very many of these hypothetical “cheap drones” (which would cost tens of millions of dollars per copy) for AIM-120’s at $500K-$2M each.
Because the right people were bribed? Remember that this is Lockheed we’re talking about. They are known for this. Way back when, they managed to get half of europe to buy the crap Starfighter.
It was also sold to the politicians with the idea that those ‘allies’ would share in the production of this plane, thus creating jobs.
No slinking away, I do have to sleep sometimes you know? The facts do support my conclusion that the F-35 program is currently in a death spiral as it’s defined in the software project management world. I have made clear it’s possible they’ll get out of it, it’s also possible they won’t and that Block3F will never be delivered.
But hey, yeah it’s absolutely fine that defense companies never ever have to take responsibility or take a dive in their profits because when they bid on a contract for a certain delivery and then take 10 years longer than they said to deliver. They fully deserve the $5 billion a year profit they make!
F-35 is not in a death spiral for the simple reason there is sweet fuck all as an alternative. The cupboard is that bare.
It has to “work”, there is literally nothing else in the pipeline. Of course the definition of “work”, is flexible (a fact Lockheed has taken advantage of), so it might never perform to specifications.
For the US that might be true, but it’s not true for Australia and other partners, we do have alternatives and I sincerely hope that our government wakes up and cancels our order. Don’t bother claiming that the F-35 is actually better value than anything else, that’s only true when (and IF) Block 3F is actually delivered, something that we have very good reasons to doubt will ever happen. Australia simply doesn’t need 72 5th Generation fighters by virtue of our geographic isolation. Indonesia is the only country that we could really have a border dispute with, and that’s incredibly unlikely in the next 30 years. China? They could never actually threaten Australia’s territory, the supply lines are just too long.
So yeah the only reason we “need” 72 Stealth Fighters is to loan them to the US whenever there’s another US led unnecessary war. I’m completely ok with us not doing that.
What alternatives does Australia have? There is the Euro-fighter and thats about it. The Gripen; too short legs. A Russian fighter? No. Rafael, a hanger queen if there ever was one. And still a generation behind F35.
The UK is probably fucked too, or at least the Fleet Air Arm. Other Euro partner… cannot really say.
A smaller order of 4th or 4.5 generation fighters, one option is to update to the latest spec super hornet, but we really don’t need 72 of them. Tell me one good reason why geographically isolated Australia actually has a need for 5th generation fighters at all?
You know, I knew this had to be where you were going when you said the Abrams would have a one week life-span and any fool could see it. I’ve got news for you: if you’re talking about a ‘real’ war ala thousands of Warsaw Pact tanks punching at the Fulda Gap, nothing is going to have an average life span of more than about a week. Even if weapons systems could survive for longer in such a massive conventional conflict, it’s ultimately irrelevant since the nukes are going to start flying; probably before the first week is even up. The cost-effective way to stop a massive armored assault in a ‘real’ war isn’t to put M-1s in the way to slug it out with T-64/72/80s. You just drop pop nuclear warheads over those massive tank columns. Better yet you explode nuclear warheads over the cities where the civilians in the country that made those tanks live. The Abrams hasn’t been without its flaws, but it has performed exceedingly well in every conflict it has seen action in. I for one would much rather be a crewman in an Abrams with its extreme emphasis on crew survivability even if the tank is so badly disabled that it becomes a total write-off than a crewman on one of those former Soviet T-series deathtraps where anything penetrating the turret and crew compartment is very likely to set off all the stored ammunition and send the turret flying 40 feet into the air.
I thought the complaints about the Abrams were not its performance, but the fact it was a fuel hog an required supporting elements to remain far too close for comfort as well as being prone to breakdowns.
The B1 has has a rep as a hanger queen.
One of the more serious faults of the M1A1 was that it had become a purely tank-killing machine; the blinders of the tank being the best anti-tank weapon had led to completely neglecting the fact that it wasn’t the only mission of the tank. When introduced, the 120mm Rheinmetall gun in the M1A1 that replaced the 105mm in the M1 did not have any HE or canister rounds at all. The HEAT round it initially used was a very sub-par anti-personnel round and the standard ammunition load out (which was reduced to 40 rounds for the 120mm compared to 65 rounds for the 105mm) on the M1A1 was mostly APFSDSDU, the HEAT rounds were for taking out armored vehicles that weren’t tanks and a DU round would be overkill on. The only real anti-personnel capability on the M1A1 was the machine guns, and the commander’s .50 and the loader’s 7.62mm required them to stick their heads out of the hatch, leaving only the coax 7.62mm if the tank had to button up. This problem was pointed out by a number of observers both before and after Desert Storm, but nothing had been done to rectify the situation by the time the Second Gulf War came around and the Abrams found itself fighting insurgents in cities, not tanks in the desert. A crash program was put in place to both produce a canister round for the 120mm and to make a HEAT round that was an effective anti-personal round.
ETA: Not that any of this or it being a fuel hog have anything to do with a one week lifespan in an all out conventional war ala NATO vs. the Warsaw Pact.