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What’s Wrong with This Picture?
Is it just because I’m an aviation geek that this bothers me?
Go ahead and read the article if you want, it’s basically an advertisement for Lockheed-Martin that addresses none of the F-35’s myriad shortcomings — its exceedingly high cost, its propensity to spend most of its life in a hangar undergoing expensive maintenance on its delicate systems, or the way its performance lags that of earlier-generation fighters. It has routinely lost wargames against F-15s, F-16s, Chinese J-20s, and probably Japanese Zeroes. (And National Interest published another F-35 tongue-bath article later in the day, getting the right picture on the second try.)
This is what happens when guys with degrees in “Comparative Literature” write about military matters.
New build F-15s could carry out 80 percent of the F-35’s missions at a fraction of the cost. A license-built version of the Swedish Gripen fighter would also provide adequate air superiority in most scenarios at a savings of billions. And none of these aircraft require a $400,000 helmet custom-made for each pilot. But, as with most of the military-industrial complex, the F-35 weapon system is designed to be expensive and remain expensive and that’s how the contractor lobbyists want it.
Published in General
Turn our air superiority fighter design development over to the Israelis; they are the only ones on our side who have actual experience in fighter-to-fighter combat.
I recently saw a great video on ‘The Tomcat we could have had” and didn;t even bother to link at amonth ago or so, because the bridge was bombed long ago.
Sigh. Might be the best thing going, but we night as well lobby for B-17s.
Yeah, but I’m responding to your comment wherein you seem to think that I’m for the F-35. You catch me, right?
When I say it’s a great airplane, I mean it really is a whiz-bang invention. It’s just not the right plane for any particular job. It’s a bad buy, unless we admit that it’s the Sherman tank of WWIII, which at this price point, it will NEVER be.
The Israeli’s were the first to fly the F-35 in combat. They like it, and now have three F-35 squadrons.
They fly it over Lebanon and launch little missiles into Syria. One got hit by a SAM and is a loss. Not using it for air-to-air or long range.
Supposedly, Ward Carroll will be doing that as his next video:
https://www.youtube.com/c/WardCarroll
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29653/this-is-what-grummans-proposed-f-14-super-tomcat-21-would-have-actually-looked-like
Ivan the Syrian doesn’t fly when the Israeli Air Force is in the air. They have hit the Damascus Airport to destroy Iranian arms depots based in Damascus. The Russians have been warned that the Israeli Air Force could wipe out Syrian, and Lebanese air defenses in one night. One Israeli night attack destroyed a third of the Syrian Air Force.
Oh. Dang.
They don’t need to go far, and they’re not fighting China. The F-35 should have been our export-only option.
Carroll is a great source. He also hates Trump. It’s a wash I suppose.
Ivan the native-born, totally not Russian Syrian.
I’ve been meaning to ask for a long time: what is an air superiority fighter?
The most obvious guess to me is something like this: “an air-to-air fighter that can clear the skies of bombers and ground attack planes, and of air-to-air fighters defending them) in a selected battlefield close to the field or ship from which it’s deployed.”
Is that right, or is there more theory to it?
I’ll watch that. Here’s the one I ref’d earlier.
What was the gist of this video? (can’t remember how to create a voice-to-text on YouTube and am not able to do videos).
That’s fair enough as a definition. Another way to think of it – As a fighter aircraft designed to tactically dominate the airspace over a battlefield or project tactical dominance into enemy airspace.
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Its funny – but the US government has lost its ability to do things. Infrastructure spending gets tied up in environmental red tape for so long that the recession that the project was supposed to alleviate is long over, before ground is broken. NASA can’t design a rocket to return to the moon – they’ve been at it since 2004 – with a test flight being tentatively scheduled for feb 2022. They’ve already been at it 2x longer than the entire Apollo program – and have easily spent 4x the money. With no foot prints on the moon – or anyone’s backside for this debacle. The SLS program using recycled shuttle technology was supposed to make the design, testing and building a new heavy lift launcher quicker and cheaper than ever… The results has falsified this concept.
It will be a long time before a plane can replace the A-10.
Same with the Tomcat. Eventually we will simply decide to do without.
It may be that their missions will be better accomplished with drones.
But when the grid goes down you’d better hope the old ways still work.
I tend to agree, Drones will replace a lot of aircraft.
The F35 is so expensive – would it ever be used in combat? Let alone in low level combat were small arms fire, might bring down the F35.
The USAF tried to tell the Army that it could do CAS just as well from 35Kft.
There is actually a fourth problem although I have read that a “workaround” has been found. I’m not sure how far along they were when they found that the F-35’s software could not communicate with that of the F-22.
Of course, the pilots could communicate by voice but the all-important data links simply couldn’t be accomplished. This tells me that there are a bunch of people within the AF brain trust who can’t be bothered to talk to each other.
Yes, they wanted to use the B-1B with guns mounted in the bomb bay. It could work – but its demoralizing to the infantry who can’t see or hear the support.
The National Intrest is trash. I used to read a lot of their pieces. However, when they would write about something I was an informed amateur on, I would consider it trash. That happened to often so the areas I know almost nothing about I wonder if they were not trash also.
Their pieces are glorified opinion pieces that could very well be mostly stealth marketing pieces. It would not shock me if it was found out that it was compromised by the Chinese and Russians as a way to misinform Americans and most important policymakers in Washington.
Yay I remember years ago reading the brief on the Red and Blue flag Exercise touting how the F-35 has destroyed 3 or 4 times more F-16s and Tomcats compared to losses. Even assuming they did not play around with little details to skew the results to justify to the public and congress the 100’s of billions spent. I was like how about were we due a war game where all the older fighters are refitted with the same modern sensor sweats and electronic packages the 35 has. I bet you they would be pretty even.
I am convened we would have only given up a reduction in radar signature (aka some stealth aspect) but it would have been massively cheaper to just upgrade the existing platforms with the modern hardware which is where the F-35 excels at. So my bet is we could get a much cheaper plan that was similar to the 35.
The only thing from what I can tell is you would be giving up is what maybe a few seconds were the more stealthier 35 could Missle lock onto you and fire before the older platforms could. I don’t think that really gives them that much of an improved survivability.
Most of the negative comments about the F-35 are false, and these comparisons with older fighters are silly. The F-35 isn’t built to fight guns only fights, or fight in the way older fighters have to, which are the scenarios these bogus comparisons are based on. F-35s don’t fight alone and would kill any other fighter before the merge is even likely or the opposing pilots even know they are there.
A MIG will not live long enough to get within visual range of a low energy F-35 on its own in a guns only fight with no support in a real war.
Since the development of air-to-air missiles the Air Force has been trying to eliminate guns and gun combat from our air superiority fighters. Somehow we keep coming back to ending up in gun fights regardless of the missiles.
Often that ends up being due to rules of engagement.
Sometimes it’s just proximity.
Other times it’s numbers. If you and your wingman each are carrying four missiles and are up against six, one of you will likely be down to guns.
That brings us to another problem with the F 35 in that they do not have the capability to fire long range air to air missiles. And we don’t have such missiles anyhow.
MiGs (do you mean legacy fourth generation fighters?) present one set of concerns. Advanced Russian and Chinese fifth generation fighters lacking the F 35’s compromises present another.