Is the JSF a highly-capable world-leading fighter or a P.o.S. or something in between?
Interesting arguments …the fact is, the F-35 is now so expensive that it cannot be risked in combat. It sucks up so much money that it really cannot ever be cost competitive, and it is only marginally better than the F-16.
All of this is irrelevant to the main objective…which is keeping the builders and subcontractors in business. As the the USA manufacturing base disappears, military contracts represent lucrative opportunities, which is why we will see more such programs in the future. The argument always has been…“how will we be able to keep defense contractors alive…so that they will be there in event of war”?
Simple-keep buying more and more hardware.
I think ralph makes a sad and horribly true point; the F-35 is so preposterously expensive you can’t afford to use them to fight wars.
One of the more amazing stats I have ever heard is this; Canada planned on buying 65 new F-35s. (The plan is now up in the air, no pun intended.) The proposed cost of the plan was, at a low guess, $25 billion, there being some dispute over the real figures.
By way of comparison, the cost of all the fighters used by the RCAF is all of World War II - at a time when the RCAF became the fourth largest air force in the world, and operated perhaps a thousand fighters at once - was less than that even if you adjust for inflation.
Given that it’s hard to believe 65 fighters is actually a useful number to defend the airspace of a country this big, and even the RCAF states it’s the absolute minimum possible number to be worth buying at all, we’re now entering the point where fighter aircraft development costs are so high that building stuff better than the stuff we have now simply isn’t justifiable. Even the USA and its monster defense budget is balking at the cost of new fighters. I think things have to go in one of three directions:
- The pilot-flown fighter is abandoned in favour of cheaper remote controlled fighters,
- Western nations simply continue building planes like the F-18, or
- Some technological advancement is made that would allow the price of next-generation fighters to be more sane.
Interesting argument, although I don’t think it’s true. Yes, we’ve sunk an absurd amount of R&D money into the F-35, but the cost for manufacturing another one is not so much ridiculously more:
Navy:
F/A-18E/F = $66.9 million (cite)
vs
F-35C = $100 million (estimated in full-rate production - cite)
Does anyone anywhere operate an air-to-air capable UAV?
Is it stealthy enough? That’s really the only relevant question. Compared to the F-15E Strike Eagle, it has an inferior payload (18,000 lb to 23,000 lb), range (590 nm to 790nm, combat radius), and speed (Mach 1.6 to 2.5 I do not believe the F-35 can supercruise, unlike the F-22). The difference is that the F-35 is stealthy and the F-15 is not. In a modern air defense environment, that is the difference between being able to operate or not operate at all. Supposedly. We may soon find out, if NATO planes attack an opponent operating modern surface to air missile systems like the Russian S-300.
How expensive is the plane, really? I’ve seen several figures for it, but between counting costs several different ways, and the different treatment of inflation between the 1970s-80s when the F-15s were built and today, how much more expensive is the F-35?
FWIW, the B-2 actually is one of those planes that’s too damned expensive to actually use much. At 2 billion USD + per copy. I’m just not sure whether the F-35 is in that boat. Even if it isn’t, still what if it’s more cost-effective to simply continue using the F-15/F-16/F-18F with jammer packages and other SEAD assets? What if the F-35 is stealthier than the F-15, but still not stealthy enough to survive against those SAM threats, and you need to abandon the idea of manned aircraft totally? While, AIUI, no one’s yet fielded a capable anti-air UAV, is the tech that far out of reach? We already fly recon UAVs very long distances and at jet speeds. We use UAV bombers. One-shot only, but still. Is the AI good enough? Is it trustworthy enough?
Also when you consider how few foes have SAM capabilities like the S-300, do we need the F-35 to drop bombs on opponents like Afghanistan, Libya, or Syria? OTOH, if we don’t start developing this sort of thing now, we may not have the leisure to in the future.
But survivability in a fifth-generation anti-air environment is the important question to ask when determining if it’s a dog or not. I’m not going to know the answer. No one without access to data from things like Green Flag can. And even there, I am guessing there are a lot of unknown unknowns.
The standard F35 is basically a glorified F16. I really like the NAVY variant with its STOVL capabilities. Having that said I’m hoping it proves to be an effective multi-role fighter.
I’m still not clear on why the UK got itself involved in this mess instead of navalising the Typhoon which would have been a lot cheaper as I understand it, would have lead to more standardisation across the services, would have more than sufficed for the sorts of engagements the UK finds itself in, and wouldn’t see us developing supercarriers with no planes to fly off them for years to come.
Yes, the fact that the F-35 is supposed to be all things to all people has made it horribly expensive and not very good. Are we really going to risk a $250 million aircraft to bomb some Afghan tribesmen? It is now costing the US something like $50 million to kill one Afghan “insurgent”…future wars are likely to include USA bankruptcy!
No. Such technology is probably decades away. UAVs capable of air-to-air combat against even a rudimentary opponent are a figment of people’s imaginations at this point.
Despite ralph124c’s authoritative and very, very well informed comments about $250 million aircraft, it’s clear that the JSF is slowly getting the problems worked out of it. What people need to get over is this idea that it is a superweapon that single-handedly can shoot down entire Chinese fighter squadrons.
It is ironic that the criticism of the JSF on its capabilities – that it should be a more capable aircraft to fight modernizing adversaries – stands in stark contrast to the criticism, often from the same people, that the US military is buying weapons to fight a Cold War-type adversary. Well, which is it? The JSF is a waste of money to bomb Afghan tribesmen? Or the JSF isn’t exquisite enough to take on fifth generation Chinese fighter aircraft?
Meanwhile, new cost estimates have reduced the lifetime expense of operating the F-35, from $1.1 trillion over 55 years to less than $900 billion over the same time.
It’s too early to tell.
I remember the F/A-18’s early days - It was similarly lambasted as a lackluster, try to do everything and end up doing great aircraft. Today it is a fully mature, tested and capable aircraft. It may not be the best fighter or best attack platform on paper, but it gets the job done.
As for expense, if you can’t afford to have it blown up, then you can’t afford it. Right now most of the expense is wrapped up in development and tech. Those costs usually even out over the years.
What are the limiting factors behind such a very long time to develop autonomous UAV fighter a/c, in your opinion?
As to the second paragraph I’ve cited: Isn’t it both? Afghan tribesmen etc… don’t have sophisticated anti-air systems necessitating a stealthy vehicle. And the first link from the OP suggests that the F-35 will not have a satisfactory kill ratio against 5th-Gen air superiority fighters.
Although I have some initial questions with the simulation the articles’ authors cite. Like how many Chinese were going against how many US aircraft? Were AWACS or other command and control assets available? Were independent, networkable air search and fire control radars available for the U.S. team, or were the F-22s and -35s required to self-designate? Why were the F-35s required to get into the merge? Did they not have enough BVR missiles? And if they didn’t, why not disengage to the cover of friendly air-defense, and return to base to rearm? Etc… The article reads a bit like the U.S. team was told to go dogfight and see how they do with the F-35, regardless of whether those tactics made sense or not.
It’s too late now, the costs are already sunk into the F-35 program whether it makes sense to use the aircraft or not. But for most projected uses in the next twenty years or so, would it be cheaper to use previous generation aircraft, supplemented with support aircraft, and no less effective, than it would be to use the F-35? Honest question, I really don’t know the answer.
Because it will have to be autonomous, and not just remotely piloted. The current state of autonomous technology for UAVs is more on the order of: fly to these three points, loiter in this specific area for three hours, then return via these three points and land. There is no pilot that maneuvers the aircraft during its flight; the UAV basically follows a set of pre-programmed waypoints. Those waypoints can be changed in flight, of course, but there is no pilot banking or controlling the throttles.
The time lag to control an air-to-air combat UAV is simply too great under any circumstances. When the ability to lock on a target, fire a missile, and then maneuver again are events that have to happen in matters of moments, having a couple second lag as commands are passed from a remote operations site to an uplink, bouncing off a satellite and then down to the aircraft, is just unworkable.
So we need a UAV that is big enough to carry sensors to detect enemies at long range, and carry useful amounts of armaments, which is something that doesn’t exist right now. That’s not too hard, one can assume. But given the timeline of military development, we’re already talking 5 to 10 years to design, test and field such an aircraft to do something that has been done since forever on manned aircraft.
We need a UAV that is smart enough to execute effective air combat maneuvers that aren’t based on pre-programmed waypoints. (For example, the enemy has just passed the friendly UAV: now execute a split-S, arm the Sidewinder, lock on a high-off boresight target, and fire if everything looks good.) That technology is a long way off, and I would bet it would have to be demonstrated in ground or naval units first.
And I think the most challenging thing is that a UAV would have to be REALLY smart to operate in an electronic warfare environment. If the enemy is jamming GPS, radar, and satellite communications, the UAV will have to be reliable enough that it can carry armament and go destroy things with the military having great confidence that it isn’t going to blow up airliners or schools, and has a good shot at making it back home in one piece. That, I think, is going to take decades to figure out.
I meant to respond to this too: the idea of having a high-low mix of fighter aircraft is reasonable… but that’s where the Air Force will be in the next few years anyway: F-22s are the high, F-35s are the low. Now, do you want a high-medium-low, F-22/F-35/F-15 or F-16?
Given that, under current projections, an F-35 will probably be about $30 million more per copy than the 4+ gen fighters out there (ballpark $80 million vs. $110 million), and that reduced purchases of F-35s will raise the price somewhat… So if we bought 800 4+ gen fighters we would save $25 billion over the next several decades, but that’s a $25 billion savings out of approximately $900 billion we would spend on tacair during the same period. Is that really a huge savings?
Then consider if the F-35 is going to be challenged in the future combat environment, the 4th generation fighters are just going to be mincemeat. There’s no getting around that.
I don’t share the faith in the Pentagon F-35 program manager’s estimates for subsequent unit costs that you do. A lot has to break right for the unit cost to get down to $110M. Including complete fulfillment of all future orders, which is why, cynically, I think the manager released the figures he did. As it is, from the link at the end of Post #4, it’s 153M. Still, it’s not that much of a change (2x) if indeed it costs $80M to build a new F-15/-18F. Though, with a billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon, you’re talking about real money. OTOH, the -15s and -18s are already built, and would just need to be modernized and periodically overhauled to be kept in service. Then again, if we were going to do that, we’d have kept the A-10s… Tough decisions. Do we need to buy additional airframes? How many -15s, -16s, and -18s are in service now?
It really depends on the threat analysis. If the U.S. gets in a conflict with Russia, China, India, Brazil, you get the idea, then the aircraft are going to need to exist in a very tough top of the line air defense environment. Which means stealth, for the time being.
What are the sunk costs on the F-35 program now, if the whole thing was going to be scrapped? How would that compare to the costs of buying some or all of what Lockheed Martin would like the U.S. to do?
As to the UAV questions, thanks for your involved answers. I agree that sat links have too much lag for something as dynamic as air-to-air. But would LOS SHF data links from something like an E-3 to a remote drone formation reduce the lag to a manageable level? Alternately, if the platform must be fully autonomous, doesn’t the AI for many commercial flight simulator software already do many of the tasks that would be required? I.E., detection, IFF, engagement, and then the sub-decisions within the decision to engage. Or is this an illusion from the user interface? One big problem I can see is, what sensors will be used to expedite the intercept? Is the drone going to be continuously radiating, either LiDAR or RADAR? Or is the drone going to rely on visual CCD and is going to try and do image recognition? Will the drone IFF protocol be fail-deadly or fail-safe? A bunch of other questions come to mind too.
I don’t think it would take 5-10 years to adapt an existing platform to go autonomous, however ineffective that autonomous platform would be, but I think it definitely would take that time and more in order to get a design that could take full advantage of being unmanned. Really, I don’t think it’ll happen until the U.S. gets its head handed to it by a fleet of them. And I don’t see that happening for awhile.
IF nothing big and surprising is found in testing in the next couple years (who knows the odds of that?), prices will come down anyways due to the learning curve: basically, every time the number of articles produced doubles, the price will drop by a fairly predictable margin. On something like the F-35, I wouldn’t be surprised if we are talking about 10, maybe 15%. So, by 2018, even if the production rate were steady at roughly 35 a year, a $150 million aircraft would cost $135 million or so. If quantities go up, the price goes down further. It isn’t rocket science, it’s basic business.
F-18s cannot be extended very much. Due to the harsh landing on carriers, there’s an established limit on the number of traps that they can do in their lifetime, which is in the thousands but I don’t recall the number for sure. After that, they are retired from Air Wing duty and sent off to be used only in shore-based training. So, the Navy has to do something: buy F-35s or buy more F-18s. They can’t extend the F-18 fleet for decades more life like the Air Force can probably do with its fleet.
But the Marine Corps is in the worst position. If the STOVL isn’t available, they have a bunch of big deck amphibs with nothing but V-22s and helos to put on them. Harriers are done, they aren’t being built, there’s no way to extend their life. The F-35 is literally the only option to have aircraft on these amphibious ships.
Uh, Lockheed Martin makes the F-35, so they want the program to continue. I don’t know the number right offhand, but my ballpark guess is that we’ve probably spent about $80 billion on R&D and production for the JSF.
And have a bunch of pilots stationed on such an aircraft? Still doesn’t deal with the electronic warfare environment.
What do you mean, commercial flight simulator software? I just don’t know what you’re talking about – like what commercial pilots train on to qualify to fly a new jet? There’s no “engagement” in such things.
But look at it this way: the biggest challenge for the F-35, without a single bit of doubt, is the software. There’s something like 10 million lines of code, and the whole system has been in development for more than a decade. Do you think an autonomous UAV is going to be more or less complicated than that?
To build a new aircraft platform that is intended to be anything more than a bare-bones pickup truck (which is what a Predator is) that integrates radar, sophisticated weapons, EW protection, and a host of other important systems EVEN IF it isn’t autonomous sure the heck is going to take 5-10 years at least. There’s just no argument possible about it. It’s just a fact.
The X-47B test aircraft just accomplished the first autonomous carrier landings ever, just weeks ago. The first flight of the X-47B was two years ago. The first prototype was rolled out in late 2008. The construction of the X-47B began in 2005. And this is a UAV whose only purpose was to land on an aircraft carrier. That’s it, and it took eight years (not even counting the five plus years of development before that!) for it to proceed from bending metal to landing on a carrier.
The Naval variant is the F-35C, used for catapult launches off our CV’s. The Marine variant (F-35B) is the STOVL-capable one, which appears to be the least-capable of all variants (except for its STOVL ability).
It’s not a $250 million aircraft. It’s more like a $120-$153 million aircraft, and that’s expected to fall to $85 - $110 million as production ramps up. Besides, it’s not really at risk if it’s doing a bombing run over Afghanistan (at least no more at risk than doing training flights over the Arizona desert).
Like the old TFX the F-35 is the old unworkable DOD dream of an all in one package, the TFX became the F-111 which was unable to fill any role because it was just a big ol target. The Navy quietly backed out of TFX and developed the F-14, the first superfighter. Expect them to do the same with unmanned fleet defense, they can loiter longer at a much greater range than a manned aircraft, and if you have vectored thrust, stealth, and the ability to pull 10g turns nobody is going to shoot you down.
The F-22 is a real beauty, though kinda delicate. Nobody else is going to build a fleet of comparable aircraft, they have no role, The Russians like to design them and build prototypes but they don’t produce them and must get a good laugh at all the money we waste on such useless projects.
What do you think the Navy is going to do between now and 2055 when this unmanned fighter is finally ready?
Because the Navy is already looking at concepts for 6th gen fighters that might - might - join the fleet in 20 years or so. Guess what: they are manned aircraft.
Ravenman’s point about the length of time it will take to develop an air-to-air-capable UAV is a good one. It’s decades away.