One tool for all tasks means that it compromises on every task. The Navy should have stuck with the F18 Super Hornet, the Air Force with the F-22 and the Marines should be looking at a STOVL F-35 as the only variant specialized for their needs. The remaining F-35 aircraft are inferior to the F-22, which should be subject to high scrutiny and perfected with its remaining problems, which are probably code related (such as no oxygen to the pilots at times). And there really isn’t any enemy or ally near the capabilities of these craft.
As for ground forces, they want the A-10 Warthog (really titled Thunderbolt) and the Apache helicopter supporting them in a combat role.
In short the stuff we have is vastly superior to the competition.
Oh, and we might want to consider a modern replacement for the B-52 as we are running out of them.
While your proposal would undoubtedly give them better-performing equipment for the specialized roles, the idea behind the F-35 was to save money on R&D and logistics (some high % of parts commonality between the variants). Now, it may not have been all that successful, but it is kind of nice to see they understand that there actually is a limit to how much we can spend on defense and try to save some money, don’t you think?
Well put. Once again, the USA is preparing to fight WWII again, even though all of the conflicts we have been in since WWII (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya) have been NOTHING like WWII. Hence my comments. The same mentality gave us the B-2 bomber (which run about $2 billion each)-great for the contractor, not so great for the taxpayer. In short, look for more disasters like the F-35 to come online. As for the ancient B-52, it still works well-no need to replace it.
BTW-how’s the Osprey working out? Last I read, it has killed more US Marines than any enemy aircraft of its type!:eek:
I think it’s the only tilt-rotor aircraft in service anywhere, and since it’s a largely unarmed transport, there’s little wonder that our enemy’s non-existent tilt-rotor transports haven’t killed any Marines.
It’s a new technology and some growing pains are to be expected. The Marine Corps seems downright thrilled with it.
F-35 is not that bad, and Super Hornet is a pretty big compromise by itself. It tried to replace both F-14 and A-6, but couldn’t quite do it. F-22 is OK, but for most missions, F-35 will be able to do as much and for less. And Marines could never afford to develop a supersonic fighter on their own. Without F-35, they are stuck with zero STOVL fighters. And while A-10 was very good at destroying columns of Soviet tanks, that’s unlikely to happen now, is it? It sure was better at CAS than F-16, but only if allowed to fly low and slow, which present risk-averse commanders won’t allow. And a new bomber is in the works.
When and in what field of endeavor has “one size fits all” worked? A swiss army knife gives you a lousy tool for every job. It is fine for camping, but when someone is shooting at you, you want to have been sent out with the best counter weapon.
Yeah, saving money is nice, but in war, you want the right weapon for the situation, not a really lousy one that can do it if no one is shooting at you. McNamera tried this stuff when he was Sec of Def and from boots on, it was a lousy idea. There is a reason each service and each operation has a different boot. In peace time, you build your reserve of the finest tools, not waste as much money as possible on Dick Cheney’s friends.
War is not a money saving enterprise, it is the most expensive and wasteful human endeavor possible. Sometimes, it is necessary, such as Hitler and Tojo. So we prepare.
The F-35 is pretty good for most missions. But the F-16 and F-15 are better for those missions at a fraction of the cost. Except STOVL missions. And they already work. For missions where you need better, we have better: the F-22.
As for cost, I call bullshit on the F-35’s cost projection. I am not alone. Everyone outside the program thinks the cost will rise, but we don’t know how much. Why do we think that? Because all such programs have a cost rise, weapons to bridges, it all costs more. Eventually the F-35 may cost less per copy than the F-22, or it may be the same, or it may be more. I’m betting more. That is the way government procurement works. But even if they are 25 percent less (a cost figure guessed at admittedly), there will be missions where that 25 percent is needed. As a cold-hearted MRer war planner, I need the mission accomplished, and that 25 percent is no economy if the plane is shot down prior to completion of the mission, or even on the way home. As a bleeding heart liberal, that 25 percent is no economy when I explain to the widow and orphan that daddy died short of completing mission, but we saved 25 f’in percent twenty years ago during procurement.
We didn’t want to sell the F-22 to even our closest allies. That is how good it is. But we did want to keep Lockheed in business, so we commit to shutting the F-22 down and turning their line production into F-35 so we can sell a lesser plane to our allies. To benefit Lockheed. Sorry, wrong decision. The US already has specialized planes for every role of the F-35 that are better and except for the F-22, cheaper. But ultimately, the F-35 will be comparable in cost to the F-22 because both were and are way over budget. In stealth missions, the F-22 is head and shoulders better.
As for the F-35’s best and highest use, it should have been designed solely as a state of the art, non-stealth replacement for the Harrier.
The Osprey, which others have brought up, was always a pork barrel employment project. After 50 years of thought and development with 30 or so lives lost, we have a working helicopter that turns into a prop plane, which has its uses. But they are limited. It has great range and speed than a chopper, but the Chinook is cheaper, better and more reliable for virtually every mission.
And we are preparing for WWII. We are ready for it. Damn ready. But it isn’t likely to come. The current challenge isn’t from Putin or China, it is from the conflict between an almost non-existent Al Queda and our spy agencies. Our privacy and our freedom is the real and potential collateral damage. This war can be fought and won, but it needs a mind like George Marshall’s to head the effort. Petreaus was not that man. We need someone with vision in the military who can understand and lead a multi-decade effort to suss out where the individual leaders are hiding, get their information and retire them.
We do not need to topple dictators. History is replete with dictators and always will be. We can no more win that battle than we can defeat the emotion of terror. We must combat individual and groups of terrorists, not an emotion. The best we can do with the emotion is to be brave.
The F-22 has minimal air-to-ground capability. That’s essentially what the F-35 is for; in a cutting-edge war, you send in F-22s to gain air superiority and suppress enemy air defenses, and the F-35 to actually blow things up. The trick is that the F-35 can do these things nearly as well by itself, because it’s stealthy. Is it necessary? No, because we aren’t fighting the Cold War anymore, but we soon could be. That’s the thing with military weapons; you can’t stop developing them just because there isn’t a war on. Russia and China aren’t going to stop development just because they don’t have a war to fight. Our next-generations fighters are quite probably going to have to contend with the PAK-FA at some point, plus whatever the Chinese are building.
You raise two excellent points: air superiority and ground support. The F-35 is heavily outclassed by other existing aircraft in both those categories.
Air superiority. The F-22 is superior to the F-35 in air superiority. It is stealthier, faster, longer range and more maneuverable. The people who keep raising the price on the F-35 claim it will cost less than the F-22. Bullocks. They need to make more money than last quarter. They want the F-35 because it will cost more, lots more, over the long haul.
Ground Support. The A-10 Thunderbolt (Warthog) and the Apache are vastly superior to the F-35 in ground support, and at least one order of magnitude less expensive, we’ve already bought them. If I were an infantryman, I would want Apaches supporting me on the ground, not F-35s. Apaches can linger and land, F-35s are there for a minute.
The F-35 dominates at only one thing: sucking money from the American people.
Just buy a Eurofighter Typhoon at more or less half the purchase prize, and you’ll still be able to bomb the shit out of backwards Airforces while helping top nations in Europe out of their financial travails.
But if it’s just doing bomb runs over Afghanistan, everything that makes the F-35 the F-35 isn’t needed, any old bomb truck will do and would be enormously cheaper as well. We’ve (luckily) not had to fight any wars where the need for stealth has been hugely pressing. Even in the largest conflict where stealth technology was in existence, the 1991 Gulf War, the value of the F-117’s stealth dropped once Iraq’s IADS had been pummeled to the point that the SAM threat was very low as turning on a SAM site’s radar risked drawing an anti-radiation missile.
The Aardvark doesn’t deserve the bad reputation it got from the TFX program. The F-111 turned out to be an extremely successful aircraft in spite of McNamara’s best efforts to create a flop with the TFX program. The problem with the TFX program was obvious and extreme from the beginning, the Navy and the Air Force wanted diametrically opposed things out of the aircraft they were looking for. The Navy was looking for a high altitude, supersonic interceptor to carry the new AIM-54 Phoenix to engage soviet bombers hundreds of miles out from the carriers. The Air Force was looking for a low altitude deep penetration bomber utilizing the then just being developed terrain following radar to allow it to fly at unprecedentedly low altitudes, evading both SAM and fighter interception. McNamara idiotically came up with the brilliant idea of mashing them together into one airframe as a budget saving measure. The F-111 had an extremely low loss rate in Vietnam with only 6 combat losses in over 4,000 missions. At the time that it was conducted, the F-111’s involved in Operation El Dorado Canyon flew the longest combat mission the Air Force had conducted. During Desert Storm in 1991 almost 80% of the laser guided bombs used were dropped by F-111s.
Compared to what? An Apache? It can’t linger and land, it doesn’t have a swivel turret gatling gun, etc.
The F-22 is the finest air superiority fighter made for a number of reasons. It has a severe problem in cutting off oxygen for an unknown reason, but presumably, that is fixable as it has been done correctly in countless other platforms. I want the F-22 to clear the airspace and keep it cleared. I want the Apache supporting my infantry directly on the ground.
Meh. Why would we buy a 4th generation fighter from Europe when we already have at least 3 already in service ourselves? The point of the F-35 is that it’s a gen 5 platform. If we wanted to just stay with gen 4 stuff we have it already and have since the mid-70’s.
As for whether it’s a top gun or a dog, I think it’s still too early to tell. In theory, this is a platform and air frame that will be with us for decades (the current 4th generation air frames have been with us since the mid-70-'s or the early 80’s in the case of the F-18) and are still going strong, so figure this one will be with us at least that long if not longer…so we need something that is going to be viable through the mid-century at least. Retreaded F-15/16’s and F-18’s just aren’t going to cut it, realistically, that long, even assuming the US’s military role starts to fade away in the next half century.
The other thing here is that even if the F-35 (or the F-22) is a dog, the research that went into developing it isn’t wasted…we can leverage that well into the future, so I think it was worth the price from that perspective.
The point of the F-35 is to be able to launch ground strikes against targets defended by ground or air defenses. Current generation fighters aren’t able to do that against advanced foes because their radar cross section is too high.
It’s somewhat meaningless to talk about turn rate, speed, payload, etc. when comparing the F-35 to previous generation aircraft. The point is stealth. If I know where you are but you don’t know where I am, then I win. It doesn’t matter if you can cruise 10% faster or turn 7% faster. I’m going to get behind you and ambush you, or simply shoot missiles before you even know I am there.
The bottom line is that the F-15, F-16, F-18 won’t be able to operate in the future when the F-35 is in the air.
Comparing a fighter-bomber to an Apache is kind of like saying “we don’t need tanks, we’ve got machine guns, they’re much lighter and a guy can carry one!”
The Apache and F-35 (or F-16, or F-18, or any other fighter-bomber) do not do the same job, and there are many, many things the Apache is hopelessly inept at doing that an airplane can do. The Apache has been shown to have very significant limitations - sometimes to the point of complete uselessness - when asked to perform longer range strike missions, and its “longer range” is a fraction that of a jet fighter. Its effectiveness in poor weather is extremely limited, it cannot carry heavy weapons… I mean, the list goes on.
When I’m thinking about this, I keep coming back to the fact that the current crop of fighters/fighter-bombers are on the umpteenth upgrade - the F/A-18E isn’t much like the F/A-18Cs that the USMC flies, and the F-16 Block 52 models are quite a bit improved versus the early F-16As that the USAF got in the late 70s/early 80s.
I’m sure that the F-35’s shortcomings will be remedied to a large extent through upgrades and follow-on variants.
I don’t see how it’s possible to build a multi-role aircraft that covers so many other aircraft. At best we would need a cheap stealth fighter capable of landing on an aircraft carrier. what possible good is there in a vertical take-off plane in relationship to all the other aircraft they’re trying to replace?
We already have a deep penetration stealth fighter. We could use a Navy version of it if it could be modified and built cheaply. but is it mission critical for the Navy? What’s the point of an expensive stealth fighter that sits on a ship that can’t be hidden? We already have a stealth drone program for the Navy that’s coming along nicely.
Stealth aside VTOL certainly seems like a major flaw in a joint strike aircraft. When would we ever use it?
It’s because the Marines are the most important branch of the military. The Air Force and Navy requirements sound like they’re reasonably compatible - the carrier version needs bigger wings and the gubbins for a hook landing - but the Marines requirement for STOVL distorts the entire airframe, making the F-35 fatter and slower even in the versions that leave out the lift fan.
