From a man who knew, what he's talking about, George F. Kennan:
"Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy."
" There are certain sad appreciations we have to come to about human nature on the basis of these recent wars. One of them is that suffering does not always make men better. Another is that people are not always more reasonable than governments; that public opinion, or what passes for public opinion, is not invariably a moderating force in the jungle of politics. It may be true, and I suspect it is, that the mass of people everywhere are normally peace-loving and would accept many restraints and sacrifices in preference to the monstrous calamities of war. But I also suspect that what purports to be public opinion in most countries that consider themselves to have popular government is often not really the consensus of the feelings of the mass of the people at all, but rather the expression of the interests of special highly vocal minorities — politicians, commentators, and publicity-seekers of all sorts: people who live by their ability to draw attention to themselves and die, like fish out of water, if they are compelled to remain silent. These people take refuge in the pat and chauvinistic slogans because they are incapable of understanding any others, because these slogans are safer from the standpoint of short-term gain, because the truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas — complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemma, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse. The counsels of impatience and hatred can always be supported by the crudest and cheapest symbols; for the counsels of moderation, the reasons are often intricate, rather than emotional, and difficult to explain. And so the chauvinists of all times and places go their appointed way: plucking the easy fruits, reaping the little triumphs of the day at the expense of someone else tomorrow, deluging in noise and filth anyone who gets in their way, dancing their reckless dance on the prospects for human progress, drawing the shadow of a great doubt over the validity of democratic institutions. And until people learn to spot the fanning of mass emotions and the sowing of bitterness, suspicion, and intolerance as crimes in themselves — as perhaps the greatest disservice that can be done to the cause of popular government — this sort of thing will continue to occur."
So here’s what I remember from American and World History classes.
World War II is joined by the US. Shortly after we start selling war bonds to raise tons of operating capital. We commandeer Detroit and have them build airplanes. No new cars are made for something like four years.
The draft starts, women start making the airplanes, and any raw material that goes into equipment or feeding the army gets rationed.
After the war “we need to be prepared” morphs from maintaining a strong industrial complex into a special case: the MIC. Maybe because we felt that World War III would be fought in weeks and not years.
I don’t think we know that to be the case anymore. Wouldn’t it be better for the peace time welfare of Americans to spend this volume of money on all of the constituent pieces needed to build a war machine but in plowshare form.
Domestic production of steel, aluminum, titanium, rocket motor parts. High explosives. High output robust turbofans. Transsonic passenger jets. Sensor arrays, predictive systems, generators, high torque motors (IC and electric), rifles, tents, ruggedized integrated circuits.
Only a few of those are strictly wartime products.
Churchill saw that the defeat of Britain was inevitable without allied help so through the Tizard Mission they transferred their military technology knowledge to the US in exchange for help. That included the cavity magnetron radar technology, one of the first mobile radars as well as other important innovations.
The US engaged the Germans on land but that went very poorly, so they kept doing strategic airstrikes, notably taking down the German synthetic fuel production capabilities. This forced Germans to advance east. Meanwhile America supplied the Soviets with trucks and boots, helping the Soviets fight the Germans, a successful plan that resulted in heavy Soviet casualties.
I'll just address the inaccuracies in your second paragraph.
By the time the US was engaging the Germans on land (Operation Torch in Nov. 1942), the Germans were already stuck in Stalingrad and had been defeated in their attempt to capture Moscow. They would never pose a serious threat in the East again. By spring they would be retreating as the Soviets unleashed their rebuilt armies on the weary Wehrmacht.
Operation Torch didn't go "poorly," though the green US troops didn't perform as well as seasoned British or German troops would have. Nor did US troops perform poorly during Operation Husky. By the time the Allies landed in Normandy, the US was performing extremely well.
Strategic airstrikes by the US (and British) never had a significant impact on the German industrial output. Nor did they have a damaging effect on German morale.
For the hardware at the pointy end where battles are won or lost, no.
For example, the 737 uses high bypass turbofans optimized around fuel burn, the fighter has a low bypass afterburning turbofan optimized around weight. Huge divergence. (And by the way, on both the civilian and military sides, engine development programs are yuuuge and very long. There's a reason for that that isn't simply due to greed.) The 737 has a standard weather radar, the fighter is able to focus megawatts in a narrow arc across less than a square centimeter of its nosecone and employs all sorts of trickery to resist (and possibly inflict) jamming, while detecting small targets that are trying to evade by blending into ground clutter or disappearing into something called the Doppler notch. Another huge divergence. Meanwhile the entire aircraft has been designed with stealth in mind, and that's a skill set with no civilian counterpart -- when was the last time you heard of an electrical engineer calling the shots on airframe design? Even designing for high supersonic aerodynamic performance (maneuvering, not just cruising) is pretty much a military-only skill, and supersonic analysis is wildly different from its subsonic equivalent. It just goes on and on -- I haven't even brought up guided missiles, which result from substantial development programs of their own and benefit little from civilian technology.
Now, there might be some subset of military products for which there aren't as many valuable differentiators -- I'm thinking of things like logistics assets, vehicles and infrastructure designed to move war materiel where it's needed. And there's precedent for that, where for example civilian airliners are converted into tankers. But on the whole, you can't take what you've learned building a 737 and apply that to building a competitive jet fighter inside of any reasonable time scale.
So, could you go to war with a 737 and a bunch of bombs hanging off it? Against insurgents, probably, yeah. But it's going to cost a lot more than, say, an A-10, the ground troops won't get any guns passes from you, and a single Su-27 is still going to ruin your whole day.
Another attractive option might be to skip a generation of hardware. But an important thing to remember is that every time a wise head retires from military aerospace, valuable skills and knowledge are lost. Sure, things are documented, but you can't easily replace human know how. So what happens when you go 20 years without a major fighter program? Experienced hands get thin on the ground and you spend a good amount of time and money climbing out of that hole. The upshot is that even if you'd like to get off the military upgrade treadmill for a while, you're going to pay some significant fraction of that savings down the road, whether in increased cost, schedule and/or reduced product performance.
Having said all this, I believe there are better ways to do what we're doing, and I think the F-35 was a foundationally ill-conceived program. But hand-picking a few basic military technologies to nurse while leaving the rest to whatever the civilian market will support is not the way to fix it.
SpaceX developed their tickets from blank paper without old hands from the conventional space industry guiding them.
As a result they have massively cut costs and are routinely doing what old space tells us was impossible.
The F-35 fills the same role as the Senate Launch System. It has accidental gains in terms of new technology and advanced airframes.
The military expertise of the USA could be maintained just as well if the USA would take simple measures like lifting the bans on supersonic planes put in place to kill Concorde ;)
I recall a post-mortem for the Superconducting Super Collider that pointed out a painful dichotomy: to build political support the contracts and suppliers had to be spread across many districts and states, but because it was a high tech project it was much, much, much more sensitive to component delays and quality issues.
The big takeaway: with non-challenging, small fry, projects you can play all the politics you want and still land them; challenging projects have a much stronger need to be guided by actual practical project concerns & engineering or you substantially increase the risk of failure.
The Manhattan project, and the incredible post-WW2 military engineering, worked because the brains got money and control so they build to the challenge at hand. When Porky Pig has first dibs the merely 'insanely hard' becomes impossible... Alan Kay said something to the same effect about the golden age of innovation at Xerox Parc: (brains + money) - BS = profitableSurprises.
The Manhattan project was distributed all around the country. From the pile under bleachers in Chicago, to the Hanford site in WA, the testing in the New Mexico desert, and Oak Ridge in Tennessee.
If engineering concerns dictate project planning, structure, and execution you're at least playing the game. Compromise is the nature of the beast, and practical realities dictate decisions.
If political financing, back scratching, and pocket filling dictate the projects planning, structure, and execution: you've increased complexity and risk substantially, and the likelihood that you've made the project nigh impossible to complete rises accordingly.
Fermi et al were not working in Chicago to balance the distribution of pork, IoW... Hard projects do not have the margins to allow those kinds of inefficiencies. And not to dis the military industrial complex, but that distinction is fundamental to all R&D projects. Everyone involved should have known better when this boondoggle started.
This is the same reason the SLS wont get cancelled, I believe it funds suppliers/contractors in all 50 states. It will never get voted to be cancelled.
> But the media's attention surrounding that recent increase was focused on Stormy Daniels and/or some other alleged Trump admin gaffe.
I'm a bit of a cynic, so I would readily cast a negative eye to the entire corporate media machine and assume they're void of integrity and merely interested in what grabs eyeballs and money ('if it bleeds, it leads')...
In that vein I don't think the media has attention. "Media" throws anything it can to the wall in hopes of making money, and find a public who cares very little about either insane deficit increases. Point of fact, even the Stormy Daniels sex scandal barely registers in terms of meaningful public reaction... Time was a President would be out the door for a hint of something like this.
I blame the people who have removed civics, and civic history, from childhood education. The same people who have eliminated previously sacred media segregation laws, and also eased campaign finance laws to the point of shadowy billionaires openly bankrolling national candidates and extremist agendas...
I sit corrected. The MSM has attention...to profits. They'd show a pig taking a shit if it would increase ratings.
You're not a cynic. You're spot on from my pov. It's the majority of semi-intelligent / semi-reasonable ppl who have lost their critical thinking minds.
What's going on is obvious, __if__ you're not constantly whipped up in some emotional frenzy. But that's a big if at this point.
Good one. It reminds me of Hitler's infamous Tiger II tank. Amazing, nearly unstoppable technology; when it didn't break down driving off the factory floor.
How do the issues with the F-35 platform stack up against those of earlier models? I've read anecdotes that early on the F-16 and F-15 also had significant flaws, yet those were eventually sorted out and both have become mainstays of air forces around the world.
I've no doubt there have been massive costs overruns (what government program doesn't), but would be willing to bet that the F-35 turns out to be a really good plane and does nothing to threaten the US's position as the premier air power.
The F-15 first flew in 1972, and four years later entered service. Three years after that it was seeing regular combat in Israeli service and production was being upgraded to the F-15C/D variant. By 1984, 12 years after it flew, it had all but replaced the aircraft (F-4 variants, mostly) it was intended to in USAF service.
The F-35 first flew 12 years ago. You do the math.
It's questionable if manned high performance fighter aircraft have a vital aka non symbolic role in a modern army. That's not to say the F-35 will not be used or even preform well, but consider unmanned satellites made manned high altitude surveillance obsolete even if they where not as directly useful.
It is tempting to dismiss the possibility of a serious war. We did that after the Great War, the War to End all Wars, now known as World War I. It's been a while, over 70 years now, but you can be sure that there will be another serious war.
When that happens, there will be no satellites. There will be no way to remotely operate any equipment. Mere navigation and communication will be difficult again.
Any sort of unmanned equipment will have to operate autonomously, making deadly decisions in an unfamiliar and hostile environment. That's a tall order for modern AI.
Back in the 90's missiles where already able to navigate by landmarks and stars. GPS is nice, but it's in no way needed for Drones.
The kind of war you are talking about is exactly the kind of war where small numbers of expensive F-35's will very quickly be destroyed and how quickly new weapons can enter the battlefield will be a major issue. The vast distributed supply chain is probably the number 1 issue with F-35's for that kind of a fight.
While not great as spy satellites, using flocks of cube satellites for communications would be very hard to shut down. A single launch could put hundreds of separate targets up which would need to be individually targeted. Similarly unmanned drones can fill in for spy aircraft in tactical situations and are very cost effective.
I can't say what the modern version of total war between modern supper powers would look like, but I very much doubt it would look much like WWII.
It's replacement are all supposed to be drones or at lest pilot optional.
That said, using obsolete hardware can be a budget issue. The Airforce also uses 8-inch floppy disks in missile silos for example, and sure they still work.
The F-35 program is an amazing thing in 2018 when every war in the last two decades has been mostly about ground insurgents. This, taken with the fact that we've had massive technological advances when it comes to drone warfare and the F-35 very much looks like a plane from the past, not the future. It would seem to be much wiser to scrap the program and re-focus on drone based solutions but that's going to hurt someone's ego so it's likely the F-35 will continue.
Our current adversaries are mostly insurgents - however, if you look forward at dwindling resources and nations doing the unthinkable and waging wars over them, then the F-35 makes more sense. With a complex and lengthy development process you're planning for the war after the next, not the current.
That being said, with all the problems the F-35 has, much like the Eurofighter before it, it might be no match for what another advanced economy could produce.
Seems to me that the strategic question is 'What is the cheapest means of attacking an F-35?' If the answer isn't another expensive fighter plane, e.g. a drone or flock of drones, then those future opponents may have an economic advantage, especially if resources are dwindling. I'm just recycling an old notion; at one time, fighters and bombers were much cheaper than the things they were attacking [0].
Seems like air superiority is today's "Ship of the line superiority" or "Dreadnought superiority". Won't be long before the most expensive jets are brought to their knees by something like a swarm of drones, hypersonic missiles, lasers or something else.
Seems to me that the strategic question is 'What is the cheapest means of attacking an F-35?'
Attacking ALIS. Or denying the maintenance regime - you could ground the RAF easily simply by knowing that they have to do engine maintenance on the opposite side of NATO in Turkey. That’s a long way to go for repairs if you’ve got no air superiority. Block that and just wait...
Absolutely. I'd originally thought about writing 'attacking a (flying) F-35', as I'm predisposed to thinking that it can barely carry its own weight in terms of the expense of keeping it flying.
The Russian engines they were initially prototyped with, or the Chinese engines they're planning for the production version?
I'm not sure it's hugely relevent though. The F35 procurement was structurally unsound. The result is an aircraft that's a jack of all trades and a master of none..
...or nearly none. I understand it currently holds a marginal and very expensively won advantage at long range air-to-air. Or at least it will once all the kinks are ironed out.
Top speed matters a lot in modern air combat, maybe more than ever. With modern fire and forget, datalinked missiles, the shooter aircraft can often immediately turn around after firing and run away from the missile coming at him. An F-15 can turn tail and run at Mach 2.5. If the AAM has a speed of Mach 4, the missile closes at Mach 1.5. Against the F-35, it’s closing at Mach 2.4. This means that the enemy’s AAMs have an effective range about 70% higher against the F-35 than the F-15. Now, this is of course dependent on being able to maintain long range tracking of the F-35, but my understanding is that against a high-end opponent, stealth is not a panacea.
F-35 as a plane is mediocre compared to say Su-57. I'm willing to grant that if Su-57 is to challenge F-35, F-35 loses. The thing is F-35 carried through wont be challenged by Su-57 as F-35 is a basically a flying platform. Where Su-57 is optimized for single unit operation ( and Soviets and Russians absolutely excel in that ), F-35 is optimized to be able to operate in a diverse group. What it sees, C&C sees. Until Russia or China get there, F-35 will be massively superior to anything else. For F-35 all fighting is supposed to be BVR.
You can't turn very quickly at high Mach. So, depending on range and heading it can make things worse. Remember, aircraft don't turn by hitting reverse if you are going east a Mach 2 (686 m/s) you can't just subtract 98 m/s in a 10g you need to go through a curve in the air taking a lot longer than 7 seconds to stop going east.
Start combat at lower speeds and it's going to take even longer to hit high Mach.
Which is not to say it's useless, just not as useful relative to other tradeoffs.
Yes the Chinese are having trouble producing high performance engines, and rely upon Russian ones currently. But speed (and acceleration) is extremely important in ACM. A more powerful, compact engine can supercruise, both extending range and reaction time while imparting a lot of kinetic energy to missiles, extending their range significantly.
And for the F-35, it's easy to think of it as a dogfighter, but it's really intended more for the ground attack role. It can defend itself, but it's not going to be performing CAP when the F-22 or F-15s are around.
For reliability, sure, but that doesn't matter when:
1. lives are relatively cheap
2. there is an ejection seat
3. most flights will complete without a failure
You can fight a war even if every flight has a 1% chance of a random engine explosion. There were worse odds over Europe in World War II.
GE decided to make passenger jet engines in China. There should be no doubt that the reliability (likely a function of the factory) will find its way back into fighter jet engines.
Regarding performance, that ought to match the Russian engines that were cloned.
The Chinese haven't been able to clone the Russian engines yet. Metallurgy at those levels is very tough. And Russian engines don't match what's currently used in US fighter aircraft.
Passenger jet engines don't really map to fighter engines. It's like comparing an F1 race car with a Volvo semi.
>That being said, with all the problems the F-35 has, much like the Eurofighter before it, it might be no match for what another advanced economy could produce.
Given that the F-35 was built with the latest tech that no other advanced economy even has I have no idea how anything could be built in the next 10-15 years that will significantly outclass it.
Only from long range where the F-35 was able to remain undetected and able to bug out after firing. It wouldn't stand a chance against a single F-16 in a dogfight.
Not necessarily true. The F-16 can't lock on with AMRAAM, so it would have to rely on 9X Sidewinders, which might not be able to lock on via IR depending on the initial engagement. The F-35 does have some IR masking (not as much as the F-22), and it will have the 9X Sidewinders as well.
And F-35 test pilots have continually said that the ACM performance is underrated. Sure a "clean" F-16 might be able to outmaneuver an F-35, but F-16's don't fly clean. All their shit hangs off their pylons, and cause drag etc. So it's not clear who would win. If you factor in all the sensors the F-35 has, and the fact that it will almost always get first shot on the Falcon, it's no contest. In Red Flag etc, the F-35 has dominated the F-16.
I've been trying to find out exactly what the F-35 did during Red Flag 2017 and it's all very nebulous. I also wasn't able to find any proof that the F-35 dominated the F-16 or whether it even engaged F-16's in dogfights. When the F-16 dominated the F-35 in dogfights the excuse was that the pilots were flying the F-35 like a traditional fighter and that the software wasn't allowing them to have complete control of the plane. If these factors were indeed the issue then it would be nice to see a rematch to validate these conclusions. However, I doubt we'll ever see a rematch in public between these 2 planes ever again.
It's important to remember that Red Flag etc aren't designed to validate one platform against another, but to give a holistic exercise. There are a wide array of scenarios performed at RF, where different sides have different advantages. I take claims from Cope India, RF, etc etc with a grain of salt.
However, despite the media continually looking for fodder for "military waste," the consensus I've heard is that the F-35 dominates 4th gen fighters. How it will fair against the likes of the J-20/J-31/Su-57 remains to be seen. All of them have issues; and it's not as if the fights will be 1v1.
> F-35 was built with the latest tech that no other advanced economy even has
This might be true about F-22 (or not), but F-35 does not have much of latest tech as countries are suspicious of sharing cutting edge military tech on a multinational project.
The Russian development model has been better, with orders to India paying the bills. They started around twenty years ago on the kit they flaunted in Syria. I see no reason why this development model cannot win. We have pork barrel.
It lost to the F-16 in a dogfight. Dogfights are not relevant in modern warfare and were not the consideration in the F-35s design (as is readily obvious).
When you have missiles traveling at speeds exceeding Mach 2 whether you can win in a dogfight is irrelevant, what is relevant is who sees who first.
The problem for the F-35 is that all that advanced tech is not working properly and may never work as well as originally imagined. Meanwhile, adversaries already have aircraft that are faster, have longer range, and are more maneuverable, not to mention air defense networks.
As long as the F-35's principal advantage of being somewhat stealthy holds up it will be fine against opposing air forces and AAD's. But if that advantage is sufficiently whittled away it could find itself outgunned and outclassed.
False equivalence. The Spanish Armada was massive in scale but there was not an exponential difference in capability against the British Armada as there is with US aviation technology and the rest of the world.
The last catastrophic war took place less than 90 years ago. In addition, the developed world has been "at peace" for only about 40 years (end of Cold War => MAD).
These are but rounding errors in the ~5000 year history of advanced civilization.
Looking though history major civilizations rarely fight their equals.
The world wars had a lot more to do with mechanized nations dominating their neighbors than you might think. Consider Japan crushed China and Germany crushed the majority of Europe. Those where not fights among equals.
Step back further and India and China both lost a fight with England. That's the kind of fighting that's appealing to first world nations, lot's of resources minimal effort.
I don't think Germany considered Russia even close to it's equal, and 1 vs 1 Russia without massive outside aid and unusual weather it would likely have folded quickly.
Japan attacking the US is a better argument, but the US was not exactly neutral either.
Anyway, I am not saying you're wrong, just that history is vastly more complex than just looking at the relative sizes of each nation on a map.
Even without US aid via Lend Lease, the only chance the Germans had against the USSR was if they had managed to capture Moscow and Stalingrad quickly. Once they failed to do so in the fall of '42, their fate was sealed. The Russian economy and population was too large and strong. The Germans were at the long end of a logistical tail, and weather in Russia (as Bonaparte found out as well) is a bitch.
The only thing that would have saved Germany was if Japan had fought the Russians in the Far East. But after the Battle of Khalkhyn Gol (1939) where the Soviets handily defeated the Japanese, this wasn't going to happen.
That's in context of a multi front war. In a 1 on 1 confrontation without vast foreign aid to the USSR it would have been at a massive disadvantage in 1941. Lend lease providing 30% of USSR's aircraft, 58% of their aviation fuel is no small thing. This was as far as I can tell a view shared by both sides with Stalin fearful of the German war machine.
So, I agree it was a strategic blunder, but perhaps a closer fight than many assume.
Lend Lease didn't begin to help the Soviets until middle of '42, though some British gear appears to have helped play a crucial role in the Battle of Moscow. If Germany hadn't achieved a knockout blow by Christmas, they were doomed by demographics and geography.
Lend Lease was critical before then. USSR lost ~20500 tanks late 41, that's the kind of production scale they needed to stay in the war.
It's true England provided a significant material directly at the end of 41, but IMO a larger role was covering critical shortages. The Soviet Union could cover gaps in their supply chain with foreign assistance vastly increasing the value of that aid independent from the total quantities of aid. A factory without a few critical pieces of equipment can be crippled.
On top of that, 30 to 40 percent of the entire heavy and medium tank strength of Soviet forces at Moscow was from lend lease but that's not just useful there it also means they could spread forces around more of the front. Under a minimum number and tanks are far less useful and fairly easy to take out.
Longer term all those trucks and other equipment allowed the soviets to focus more production on the war effort. They had finite steel production for example and needed to make the best use of it possible.
So, assuming Germany a one front war where Germany would have advanced further and forced the USSR to deal with even more decimated supply chains. AKA, a pure 1v1 situation I suspect the USSR would have folded fairly quickly abet still inflicting heavy casualties.
Again though, this is an alternate history without a England or USA being involved so no resistance in Africa etc.
The war in Syria is mostly about bringing gas from the Persian Gulf to Europe. The civil war in Ukraine is mostly about bringing Russian gas to Europe, too. So the developed nations are already at war over resources, though not yet against each other.
That was the conventional wisdom before World War I... and World War II. But you may be right in that the war will actually be over something much stupider than dwindling resources.
The relevant time window here is the service life of the F-35, which is probably under 50 years and I'd say the relevant probability is still approaching zero on that timescale.
Only if you assume the concept of "nation" will outlast the concept of "war".
There are a number of reasons to believe that the future of warfare will look much more like Syria, i.e. states implode from within and then break apart into a number of warring factions, each fighting over territory & resources within the carcass of the state. Actually, most of the bloodiest 20th century conflicts were of this type (eg. Russian & Chinese civil wars, Rwandan genocide & Congo Wars, civil wars in Nigeria/Sudan/Ethiopia), and historically the highest death tolls have usually occurred in civil wars where an empire breaks up or in conquests when a much more developed power invades a less-developed power (eg. Mongol conquests or European conquest of America).
WW2 was a historical anomaly in that it was fought between developed nations. It's an anomaly we pay a lot of attention to, though, because it led to the current international system of American hegemony and history tends to get written by the victors.
> WW2 was a historical anomaly in that it was fought between developed nations. It's an anomaly we pay a lot of attention to, though, because it led to the current international system of American hegemony and history tends to get written by the victors.
Because major historical powers like Rome, China, Mayans, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Macedonia, France, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, Britain never fought any wars against other powers that were at their same level of development. Oh, wait, all of them did.
The anomaly is the past two centuries or so, which have been the most peaceful times on record, particularly between major powers. (Since the Napoleonic Wars, the sum total is Crimean War, Mexican-American War, Austro-Prussian War, Franco-Prussian War, Spanish-American War, Russo-Japanese War, World War I, Russian Civil War, World War II [noting that there's a lot of related conflicts getting summed up here], Korean War, maybe War of the Pacific and the Russo-Turkish Wars). Compare that to the Early Modern, which is replete with constant conflict on Europe: 18th century alone has Great Northern War, War of Spanish Succession, War of Austrian Succession, Seven Years' War, American Revolution, and the French Revolutionary Wars, all of which were far nastier than the brief wars in the 19th century (save the American Civil War and the Napoleonic Wars).
Categorized into great power wars (between well-defined states of roughly equal power levels), civil wars (where a single state breaks up into multiple factions that then fight each other), rebellions (where a state breaks up, but into an asymmetric power balance between one province and the rest of the state), and conquests (where a much more developed power - at least in terms of military technology - invades and destroys a less-developed one) and ordered by death toll, you have:
WW2 (great power)
Mongol conquests (conquest)
Three Kingdoms war (civil)
Qing conquest of Ming (rebellion, against backdrop of civil)
Spanish conquest of Aztecs (conquest)
Taiping rebellion (rebellion)
Second Sino-Japanese war (great power, but against the backdrop of the Chinese Civil War)
An-Lushan rebellion (rebellion)
Germanic wars vs. Rome (effectively a civil war in that Roman territory was breaking up and many of the adversaries were trained in the Roman army, but you can quibble about this)
WW1 (great power)
Conquests of Timur (?)
Dungan Revolt (rebellion)
Chinese Civil War (civil)
Spanish conquest of Incas (conquest)
Reconquista (great power?)
Russian Civil War (civil)
Thirty Years War (civil - breakup of Holy Roman Empire)
Ottoman Wars (great power)
Moorish Wars (great power)
Napoleonic Wars (great power)
Mughal-Maratha Wars (?)
Yellow-Turban Rebellion (rebellion)
Second Congo War (civil)
French Wars of Religion (civil)
Indian Rebellion of 1857 (rebellion)
Hundred Years War (great power)
Vietnam War (civil, but with great power involvement)
Crusades (great power)
Readers can draw the conclusion they like from that data, but to my eyes - if you exclude WW2, civil wars and conquests end up killing far more people and remaking the map more than great power conflicts.
There are several reasons that your data isn't correct, and I'm not going to sit down and poke at every one of them, but let me point out some major things.
You have a strong need to separate out civil wars from great power conflicts, but many of them, particularly the ones that lead to lots of deaths, have very strong international involvement, and the destruction is driven in large part by foreign involvement. The Congo Wars and the Russian Civil War are good examples of this. Beyond that, you basically jump at the opportunity to classify wars as civil wars: the Germanic incursions into the Roman Empire and the Thirty Years' War [1] are in no way civil wars.
Placing importance of wars on the raw numbers of people killed is a bad way to go about things. First off, we have trouble establishing these counts even in modern contexts where sophisticated bureaucracies exist to keep track of everything (these bureaucracies have a way of breaking down in war); historical counts involve a fair amount of guesswork, and especially in list mode, you're not seeing similar methodologies being applied to ensure that the estimates are comparable. Even keeping track of wars with similar methodologies is difficult: why do we roll up all of the 14th century Anglo-French conflicts into the Hundred Years' War, yet insist on keeping World War I, World War II, the Russian Civil War, Second Sino-Japanese War, and the Spanish Civil War all separate instead of a Forty Years' War?
Most importantly, however, is that raw death totals don't reflect the impact of destruction. The deadliest war in US history is not the American Civil War, but King Philip's War, which killed 10% of the population. The Thirty Years' War was hardest in Northern Germany, where it killed about 50% of the people, while World War II only managed to kill 17% of the Poles (and most of that due to the Holocaust). Raw death counts inflate the relative importance of Chinese wars, since the Chinese river plains were historically able to support far larger population densities than in, say, Europe, so conflicts in China necessarily involve more people even at a comparable level of technological sophistication.
[1] For most of its existence, the Holy Roman Empire was not properly a country as we would understand it in our modern terminology. Admittedly, the Habsburgs were trying to reestablish it as a strong centralized state at the time, but the Thirty Years' War was effectively the point at which they gave up. It's more proper to think of the HRE at this point as closer to a 17th century organization akin to the current European Union than the modern United States.
Syria's "implosion" didn't just fall out of the sky, it was induced by the US and it's allies as a means to oust Assad. Nobody disputes that, the only thing in dispute is whether or not the ends justify the means, meaning is ousting Assad a desirable end that justifies the current proxy war or not.
> Syria's "implosion" didn't just fall out of the sky, it was induced by the US and it's allies as a means to oust Assad.
A bunch of Syrians (peacefully) protested Assad's power. He started killing people. The protests stayed peaceful for months, but eventually, the protesters got tired of getting killed, and the violence turned into a civil war. That wasn't "induced" by the US.
We already have that occurring right now in Syria, US and its allies are fighting a proxy war for Syria's resources. If the US wins then Israel will likely annex huge swathes of Syrian territory in some kind of "security zone" and begin pumping oil immediately.
If Russia wins, then Syria remains independent and Russia benefits somehow, perhaps with steep discount out for the next 50 years.
An armchair general viewpoint, but the relatively short range of modern fighters makes them of limited use beyond traditional dogfight. And it needs a LOT of support that is relatively cheap to compromise outside of your home fortress (and maybe even within it). The main role it can play is flying from a nearby base to suppress air force of a low capability adversary, but 1.5T is a steep tag for this. We should limit our losses.
I'm not sure even in a world where dogfights are still a thing that the F-35 makes any sense. If we are talking the ability to deliver air munitions, again, I just can't see it. What makes an F-35 more special than a drone?
Depends on your perspective. If you are running a consumer grade drone over 2.4Ghz, okay. However, it's actually getting impossible to jam military drones because of technologies like direct sequence ultra-wideband (DS-UWB). Further, if directed by satellite, further measures can be taken to block ground based jamming using directional antennas. Finally: AI. We are already at the point where we have weapons that when they lose communications, have their own camera for target identification.
Uh, no. Ask the Iranians who were able to capture an RQ-180 UAV. These sure aren't controlled on the 2.4 spectrum. And today's drones are meat for a manned fighter once they're detected. Clubbing baby seals is one of the terms used...
And before someone chimes in about drone fighters, that's a good 20+ years out.
I'm not sure I would even call them dogfights anymore. It's about picking up a target at long range and throwing a guided missile at it. I think one of the main benefits of the F35 is range of finding and throwing. It's not unlike the WWI scenario where the German artillery shell allied positions and the allied artillery which couldn't even throw a shell that far. Range makes things pretty one sided.
Drones are slow, not stealthy, can't vtol and fly from aircarrier, can carry much less ordinance, can be jammed, don't have air-to-air radar and modern missiles integration.
If you try to build drone with all of features of F-35, you may get even more expensive project.
The F-35 is more likely to trigger nuclear war than prevent it.
The country that is at a disadvantage because they cannot compete with the F-35 will simply nuke the other country. We're talking desperate actions from desperate nations at this point. The F-35 is not useful in proxy wars because proxy wars are not allowed to get that hot. If they were to get that hot that F-35 is necessary, then nukes are very much on the table.
I'd argue the F-35 will help keep it that way. The general idea with spending so much on military is that no country in there right mind will declare serious war on you, as it's impossible to win. The F-35 keeps it that way by furthering the gap with countries with significant airforces (of which there are only really two adversaries, China and Russia).
The Pentagon long ago learned to program for future wars, not past ones. I am pretty sure the F-35's programmatic justifications were a nod to potential adversaries who were militarily advanced, meaning China.
> I am pretty sure the F-35's programmatic justifications were a nod to potential adversaries who were militarily advanced, meaning China.
Yes, but the F-35 was also dreamed up as a way to dramatically reduce costs by sharing components. Parts commonality was supposed to be something like 80% between variants but in reality it's more like 25%. It was supposed to be substantially cheaper than the F-22 but it is almost just as expensive per unit.
And all of that points to the fundamental truth that the F-35 is not as capable as it could be because it was built with a fundamental compromise in mind. In particular, designing the airframe for the V/STOL requirement meant it had a wider radar cross section, worse cockpit visibility and worse aerodynamic performance from the start.
Had they at least broken off the V/STOL requirement into a separate airframe they could've end up with a higher performing aircraft that may have been cheaper to boot. Instead they took the mistakes of the F-111 program and doubled down on them.
All of that is undeniably, unfortunately true as well. At the end of the day the F-35 is a jack-of-all-trades and master of none that isn't even a a jack-of-all-trades.
Let's say China builds a jet that is as good as the F-35. Given our ability to precision target planes with missiles delivered by drones, what's the point of the F-35? Putting a human in the cockpit of an aircraft for any form of warfare really doesn't feel like thinking about future wars to be honest.
> Given our ability to precision target planes with missiles delivered by drones, what's the point of the F-35?
The F-35 has a smaller radar cross section than the F-22 which has a smaller radar cross section than the B-2 which has a smaller radar cross section than the F-117. The B-2's radar cross section was described as a bumble bee. If you combine that with ECMs and support for EW like Growlers, the F-35 becomes difficult to shoot down with missiles.
During the initial stages of an armed conflict, the first thing you do is go after your opponent's air superiority. That means targeting Radars, SAMs, runways, and Drone stations. This is where the F-35 is suppose to shine. It works in squadrons of 8 or more simultaneously spot, targeting, and engaging multiple targets.
How do you counter that? Will an air superiority fighter playing an intercept role to engage and take out the attacking force. That's where the F-22 comes into play. The F-22 is an air superiority fighter that will provide operational support to the F-35 engaging any threats well before they can pose a risk to the F-35.
> Given our ability to precision target planes with missiles delivered by drones
You might be overestimating the quality, reliability, stealth of drones. Up until a few years ago, you could capture (read) drone feeds[0] with COTS software / hardware. I don't mean as a hypothetical, I mean insurgents were doing this.
> Putting a human in the cockpit of an aircraft for any form of warfare really doesn't feel like thinking about future wars to be honest.
One would assume the tech simply isn't ready for a stealth plane without a human driver. AI surely isn't, and one would assume that transmissions for a remote-based pilot, as drones are operated, would be a giant signal that an advanced stealth craft is in your airspace.
I think you are forgetting how long a design lead these projects have. The first time pen was put to paper on the plane that would be the F-35 would have been in the 1990s sometimes. Drones were far away from viable then.
You won't be able to hit targets with missiles delivered by drones in a near-peer conflict. Jamming, GPS spoofing, and the current performance of drones precludes this.
You cannot blame "politicians" though even though they appear to be the ones in control of the budget. They only do what the population tells them to. The masses are far more willing to tolerate inefficient expensive bloated programs for defense than for civilian programs.
Imagine they actually made that huge trillion dollar infrastructure program. A lot of people would rail against the expense, and worse, every single exposed misstep, story of corruption (which we have from the military too of course but that does not lead people to demand a stop to financing the military), and story about inefficiency or waste will create a lot of bad press and pressure on politicians.
I must say we have pretty much exactly the situation that the overall compound will of the people wants, unfortunately. If the people could accept the level of incompetence, waste and worse that is pretty much normal for any big enterprise (including what we see in private enterprise or dilbert.com would not be so popular) then the politicians/government could experiment with massively funding something non-military for a change.
Each time I hear a story that could be changed by some people who seem to be in control (but I would like to point to the king in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's "The little Prince") I briefly try to imagine what would happen if they would actually do that. I usually conclude that people with public power (from CEO to politician) don't have nearly as much power or control as seems to be assumed, instead they just go with the flow (they have to!) and the problem is actually caused by all of us. Nobody individually though. There is a certain network dynamic that prevents the individuals from really doing things differently, there always are forces that keep us on our tracks even when individually we see other paths.
If we ever face a non-nuclear conflict with a major power, say a sizable proxy war, our drone capabilities will be greatly diminished. Command and control would likely be knocked out with trivial effort through jamming.
That leaves two options: maintain a superior fleet of manned aircraft or develop drones with fully autonomous combat capability.
It's money more than ego. It subsidizes so many jobs that any politician who would vote to scrap it would get voted out. Genius move by Lockheed Martin beneficiaries to spread the project out to as many voting districts as possible.
Like when the polish tried to stop hitlers blitzkrieg with horse drawn artillery and dragoons and whatnot. Didn't work out for them, I feel like thats what the F-35 is, some kind of flying "maginot line" or soemthing like that. It looks good on paper but is functionally useless for future conflict.
Seems like the opposite? The F35 is a highly stealthy missile delivery system. If someone brings down the US Power Grid, then the F35 can shoot down air-defenses and prepare a large-scale bombing run.
Aside from ICBMs / Nukes, it seems like superiority weapons are the best weapons of war.
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Cyber is incredibly important in today's world of spycraft and intelligence. But if war actually starts, then the little cyber toys don't really hold a candle to straight-up killing a bunch of enemies.
Now, one might be worried about the philosophy or ethics about building incredibly powerful and expensive weapons of war. But with regards to efficacy? A stealth fighter that is nearly undetectable by enemy radar that is equipped with multiple long-range missiles that can be delivered beyond the horizon is going to be a useful tool.
I don't care how good your black hat is. They probably won't survive a missile to the face. That's basically what the F35 represents.
Indeed: black hats seem to have some degree of "kids gloves" on. It doesn't seem very common for Militaries around the world to respond with lethal force vs a hack attack.
North Korea hacks the USA. Response?? Sanctions. Mostly non-military. Because if we responded FOR REAL, then it'd be seen as an unnecessary escalation. China repeatedly hacks the USA. Again: we mostly have a non-response. Its not worth it to respond with real force.
One day, real military force will become necessary to use (And I hope this day will come long after I die. But... its best to be prepared just in case...). And no number of black hats will be able to make a true military threat to another nation. At best, cyber warfare will be a precursor to actual war: a step in the escalation process.
You can't just blow up anything and everything, at least not without long term foreign policy repercussions(e.g., Iraq). How are you going to trackdown and blow up a team of hackers when they can be ANYWHERE? And not co-located.
In 2018+ a handful of well trained cyber threats can do more disruption than a F35. We need to update our "software".
> You can't just blow up anything and everything, at least not without long term foreign policy repercussions(e.g., Iraq)
And how is this any different from a potential cyber-attacker attacking the US? They can't just harm the US without repercussions either.
But at the end of the day, death is permanent. If you want someone to die, shooting them with a weapon is outrageously effective.
The fact of the matter is: the current world order has a lot of bluster. But we generally don't want to kill each other. That's why Cyber is so "effective", because we aren't killing each other. We just sorta annoy each other with relatively minor inconveniences.
If we REALLY wanted to kill someone, we have ICBMs and other such weapons of war. But really, we don't like killing people. So we don't use those tools. The F-35 is one such tool, in preparation for the day that we might start killing each other for real.
There'd also be a question of cost: if a drone could survive close enough to get into missile range, it'd be a question of whether you could buy enough drones to overwhelm the F-35 for less than $100M even if individually a drone is no match. The design left it with relatively limited weapons capacity so it's not going to end well even if it effortlessly kills the first 10 drones but the enemy can afford to send 50 and there aren't human pilots to be concerned about.
Drones that kill people in weddings and people attending funerals for those people in the weddings .. and kids .. and the insurgents that the CIA created and paid for to destabilize States.
The F-35 is really a success in its true intention: for those at the top to funnel money into all the people and companies they need political support from. Those company heads gain support from all the people under them, all the way down to the people working in the factories that span multiple states.
Who are the United States real enemies? No one. Russia and the US act like enemies, when both countries benefit in arm sales from their many proxy wars. The US literally has no enemies, except all the enemies it intentionally makes. War machines are essential in keeping people in power, and the money of war machines are essential in keeping supporters allied, by paying for them and their businesses.
You're looking at the F-35 the wrong way entirely, and same with drones. The programs exits to preserve superiority, dominance and empire. It provides funding to cronies all the way up and down the military industry stack. Any hope of it being an actual military tool should have been shelved years ago.
The United States has 11 air craft carriers in service. That is literally more than every other nation in the world combined. Endless war is necessary to sustain those in power, and be certain those in power in the US have only changed in their percentage of influence depending on the puppet elected to be on stage.
When I saw image of F-35 few years ago with some expected date of finishing the project I thought to myself. Why the hell does this thing have a window or even cockpit at all?
One of the key expectations of the F-35 program early on was that "stealth" technology would proliferate further, and the market for exporting the F-35 would be much larger than it ended up. That made it easier for everyone to keep throwing money at the problem, although I'm sure the lobbyist did more than their fair share.
This isn't exactly the first time we've seen attempts at "universal" solutions to discrete military problems. The F-111 program was another disaster in the making, only mitigated by massively changing the requirements and dropping the Navy aspect entirely. The F-35 S/VTOL Marine variant is the largest anchor around the programs neck, but its essentially the same set of problems the F-111 project ran into.
The easiest fix would have been to just tell the Marines and Navy to go find their own aircraft solutions, and let the F-35 turn into a semi-stealthy F-16 replacement. I think we might be a little past that point now, unfortunately.
> DoD has estimated that all training and operational operations over the 50-year life of the program (assuming a 30-year life for each aircraft) will be $1 trillion, making the cost to buy and operate the F-35 at least $1.4 trillion.
A little bit of clickbait there. $1.4 trillion projected over 50 years. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's a great fighter. But we haven't spent $1.4 trillion on it (yet).
The F-35 promised a major a leap in technological capability. However, technology is not at the point where it deliver on that promise.
As a software engineer, I can relate to the difficulty of joining multiple sources of data. This is something that AI can potentially do very well.
I foresee the next generation of F-series aircrafts having something more akin to an AI co-pilot. This would prevent information overload.
Instead of a pilot ingesting hundreds of data points, they could have a simple interface and all the cohesion handled by the AI.
It seems that F-35 still has problems but they are slightly different than described in the article. There is also neat solution, cut F-35 orders by third to pay for increased maintenance and operating costs. http://fortune.com/2018/03/28/air-force-f-35-cost-cuts/
The beauty of all this is that this works out fine as long as there is no large high intensity war against near peer opponent in next 20-30 years.
A lot of things would conceivably not work out fine in the scenario "high intensity warfare against near peer opponent", in any conceivable future. Just for the record.
Cutting orders just results in all the development costs being amortized across fewer aircraft, driving up unit costs. That's how we ended up with the B-2 costing almost $1B per plane.
The cost per flight hour for the F-35 should eventually be lower than the F-15/16. This will be the only way the US can maintain an adequately sized air force, and naval air arm.
People always seem to forget that money doesn't evaporate.
Public expenditure usually gets ploughed directly into national and local economies. A quarter of it comes flying right back in direct tax revenue. The rest gets spent too.
I'm not saying it couldn't have done that in a better way, educational bursaries, healthcare, etc but if you're looking at this from a purely economic standpoint, the US exports this stuff. Not something you can lump on some other causes.
A friend of mine mentioned how the F-35 runs so hot that it has to cool its fuel to stop it from boiling. If that is true, how does it retain stealth in the face of thermal radiation? Like, I get radar absorbing paint, but how does one stop heat loss?
Any design I can think of amounts to carrying some really cold stuff with you and dumping the excess heat there when you need thermal stealth, but surely that can't be it.
It is still releasing the same amount of heat, but diffused a bit more. The designers were trying to avoid really "bright" hot spots, to make it harder for IR-guided missiles to lock-on.
`After extensive troubleshooting, IT personnel figured out they had to change several settings on Internet Explorer so ALIS users could log into the system. This included lowering security settings, which DOT&E noted with commendable understatement was “an action that may not be compatible with required cybersecurity and network protection standards.”`
Whenever I'm feeling bad being behind on something, I think of the F-35. Doesn't exactly make me feel better, but at least reminds me it could be worse.
Israel took delivery of five of these 2016-2017. I wonder how they're faring.
This is from April 1 2017 and much of what was written in this article does not apply any longer. The reason the US does not go 100% into drones is because drone jamming technology is not something that can easily be countered (the Russians are jamming US drones today in Syria).
The most interesting use of the F35 is not as a weapons platform but a sensor platform for sneaking behind enemy lines and picking targets for ship based weapons platforms to attack at distance.
The F-35 is definitely not a perfect program but as far as the military and US national security is concerned, not having the first 5th generation fighter would have been a much more significant failure than cost overruns.
Beyond actual use in war the purpose of this fighter is to tell other nations that if you want to go war you need to to spend $1.4 trillion dollars and countless years of research to even reach parity.
> The most interesting use of the F35 is not as a weapons platform but a sensor platform for sneaking behind enemy lines and picking targets for ship based weapons platforms to attack at distance.
A $1.7 trillion supersonic, VTOL manned fighter as a remote sensor platform? Yeah, I don't think that's such a bright idea. That's exactly what stealth drones are for.
> This is from April 1 2017 and much of what was written in this article does not apply any longer.
I've been reading articles about the troubled development of the F-35 since roughly 2008, and there's always a comment like this: "This is outdated! It may have been true last year, but the problems are fixed now."
One wonders why the articles keep coming if that's true.
>One wonders why the articles keep coming if that's true.
Because they always manage to receive a ton of clicks? If you look at every new US weapons platform for the past 60 to 70 years there has always been huge amounts of negativity. This is really par for the course.
People used to call the F-22 the "Craptor" and I bet if we had the internet in the 50s and 60s that people would be shitting on the Saturn V.
The infamous cost estimate is spread over 60 years, start to finish. That's conveniently, intentionally left out of most articles that highlight the cost.
So first of all, the US will never buy 3,000 of the planes. You can easily cut that in half or more. I'd wager on 1,000 or less. They'll end the program and move on to the next thing/s, like they always do.
Second, they'll of course never fly for 50 or 60 years. 35-40 from today would be more plausible as an end.
Now you're down to more like $800 billion total including the next 40 years. The cost will move higher per plane, the US will buy less planes than projected, and the total outlay will drop substantially as they shift funding to new weapons programs. $20 billion per year for its life, out of what will probably be a $900b to $1t averaged military budget over the F35's life, or ~2%.
>The F-35 still has a long way to go before it will be ready for combat. That was the parting message of Dr. Michael Gilmore, the now-retired Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, in his last annual report.
Some F-35s have already seen combat for one.
Yes it's expensive but the per unit cost will be cheaper than already existing jet platforms and we plan to use this one for 50 years.
B.S. Cancel the F-35, do a new procurement round, fly-off, etc. on 3 different platforms (naval, air force, marines use cases: CATOBAR carrier based, land air strip based, VSTOL capable) for 3 different planes. The "F-35" is already substantially 3 different planes, the commonality is comparatively minimal and clearly hasn't resulted in lower unit costs (which was the original justification).
And in 20 years, you might have three fighters. By then the F15/16/18s will all be out of airframe life. And if you try to build a stealthy, VSTOL capable fighter bomber for the Marines and the British, you'll end up with, voila! The F-35B...
We're stuck with a less than optimal aircraft; but it's still the best we can currently build. And we need to recapitalize Marine aviation as well as provide a stealth aircraft for the Navy and AF. Otherwise there's just too many areas they won't be able to penetrate with the Teen fighters.
It doesn't take 20 years to design and build a fighter. You put tighter restrictions and timelines on the process and shit will get done faster. Especially since now this sort of technology isn't as bleeding edge as it used to be, and 3 separate fighters are easier to build than one fighter that is magically able to do 3 separate roles with "slight modifications" (which over time slipped into a realm of only 30% commonality between the versions).
You go back and look at programs like the F-14, which grew out of the failure of the F-111B program to see how things can be achieved. The F-111B was cancelled in 1968, the F-14 was flying in 1970 and entered service in 1974. Things might be more complicated today but the idea that it takes 20 years to bring an aircraft into service is insanity. SpaceX hasn't even been around for 20 full years and they've already gone from literally square one to building several generations of orbital launch vehicles, pioneering the landing and reuse of first stages, built a space capsule for cargo delivery to the ISS, and is nearing completion on building a manned spacecraft.
The way to ensure that it does take 20 years (or infinity) to procure an aircraft is to carefully avoid any consequences for failure to achieve the stated goals of a program in terms of schedule, cost, or capabilities. And we're certainly doing that quite wondrously with the F-35.
The F-14 dev actually started in late '66, and the F-14 didn't enter IOC until 74, so 8 years. F-15 had a 9 year development process, as did the F-16. F-22 took 24 years. The F-14 was also very rushed, and a lot of it's capabilities languished until new engines replace the TF-30 (which it inherited from the TFX project).
I'm not saying that is has to take 20 years for a new fighter, I'm saying it will. The aerospace community has consolidated incredibly since Grumman was cranking out the Tomcat. You have basically two US firms capable of building fighters now, compared to the 7-8 that existed in 1970. Add in the screwed up Pentagon procurement process, and 20 years looks optimistic.
It's not really fair to compare SpaceX since they don't have the Pentagon and Congress breathing down their necks to create jobs in 50 states.
Of course there was prior work, going back to 1903 at least, if not much further. The point is that the lag between the start of official F-14 procurement and planes flying was not terribly long. Just as today you don't have to start with a clean sheet design, there are already systems, engines, guidelines, missiles, etc. that you can borrow from other designs (including the F-35) to produce something better. The only reason F-35 isn't cancellable currently is political, not technical.
What would you have the AF/Navy/Marines fly instead? The Harrier is so far gone we've had to buy the entire remaining fleet from the Brits. The original Hornet the Marines use is on its last legs, and the Super Hornet is nowhere near good enough for near peer competitors.
F15/F16 can soldier on for a decade or more as long as they're out of range of S-300 and above SAMs. There aren't enough F-22s in our inventory, and no prospects of re-opening that production line.
The AF and USN are investigating a 6th-gen fighter, but that will be a long ways off since money is being spent like crazy on the B-21.
And back to the development process; modern aircraft are more complex, and do take longer. You can't just go back to a design/devel project from the '60s anymore than game developers can crank out a AAA game like Dave Theurer Atari did with Tempest.
And if you look at aircraft projects around the world, they all take forever. Look at Rafale, or Eurofighter, or Su-57. Developing aircraft has to include political considerations, (look at the TFX proj) as much as technical.
I realize that the F-35 is a stealth fighter, but I can't help but think of this quote whenever the F-35 is mentioned.
The results were crushing. In not a single dogfight was the F-35 able to either defend itself against an attack from the F-16 or to convert its attack into a kill
One of the big reasons the F-35 program is such a disaster is that it was intended to be a fighter that could be modified for basically all Western Bloc countrie's needs. This brought an incredible amount of complexity that not only costs more money in and of itself, but became ripe for milking by the military-industrial complex.
I guess it boils down to that - it was built primarily as a vehicle for transferring money in various directions. Not to cost-effectively project military power.
The Schadenfreude part of me is having lots of fun reading reports of the Norwegians' F-35 misadventures though!
> American jets need a shiny aircraft carrier and a coin can mess them up.
Marine variants are VTOL, USAF operates no carriers. As for the coin story, I'm sure you're confusing A) carrier FOD sweeps, which are because small debris traveling at high-speed will cause serious damage or B) one of those stories about some old Chinese woman throwing coins into a jet engine and causing a major delay and extrapolating from there.
there's a documentary I forget where that shows a russia jet closing their front of intakes and opening the top of them at take off, preventing debris on the runway from being sucked in.
The latest 29M and K models eliminated the intake plates and over-wing louvres in favour of simpler swing-down intake grilles. That saved a lot of weight and drag and gave extra volume for fuel.
There are several U.S. military aircraft that can operate from rudimentary airstrips, such as the A-10. While it's true most U.S. fighters aren't designed with engine protection systems like the MiG's, the requirement to operate from unpaved runway surfaces is so rare that it's not a real problem -- reducing weight and mechanical complexity.
This doesn't sound right. The USAF is the largest air force in the world and, as far as I know, it has exactly 0 air craft carriers. I'm sure a well-placed coin could mess up a lot of machines. Can you back up anything you said with evidence?
I mentioned the jets, not air force. Many branches of the American armed forces operate jets. Allied countries also operate American jets, even the F-35.
The F-35 has many variants, and can fulfill many roles.
> American jets need a shiny aircraft carrier and a coin can mess them up
Now it sounds like you're trying to claim that you weren't including American Air Force jets in the term "American jets". I'm not sure how anyone was supposed to know that. Without additional qualifications, "American jets" clearly includes Air Force jets. And, again, Air Force jets generally do not take off from air craft carriers, shiny or otherwise.
> Many branches of the American armed forces operate jets
> Allied countries also operate American jets, even the F-35.
> The F-35 has many variants, and can fulfill many roles
Yes. Those are all facts. Facts than have no bearing on your original post.
It's ok to admit you were wrong, you know. It doesn't reflect poorly on you.
If you believe it's to build a next generation fighter plane then yes it's a disaster.
If you believe it's a way to funnel trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to private defense companies then it's a rousing success.