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Newest Stealth Fighter's Ground Attack Sensors 10 Years Behind Older Jets'
schwit1 writes with this excerpt from The Daily Beast: America's $400 billion, top-of-the-line aircraft can't see the battlefield all that well. Which means it's actually worse than its predecessors at fighting today's wars. .... The problem stems from the fact that the technology found on one of the stealth fighter's primary air-to-ground sensors—its nose-mounted Electro-Optical Targeting System (EOTS)—is more than a decade old and hopelessly obsolete. The EOTS, which is similar in concept to a large high-resolution infrared and television camera, is used to visually identify and monitor ground targets. The system can also mark targets for laser-guided bombs. ... Older jets currently in service with the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps can carry the latest generation of sensor pods, which are far more advanced than the EOTS sensor carried by the F-35. ... The end result is that when the F-35 finally becomes operational after its myriad technical problems, cost overruns, and massive delays, in some ways it will be less capable than current fighters in the Pentagon's inventory.
The F-35 is already a resounding success at its primary mission. I refer, of course, to pork distribution.
Worse sensors, less maneuverable, requires more maintenance, extremely expensive, uses more fuel.
How is this thing an improvement exactly?
It's the military industrial complex way!
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
My God, the JSF is such a pork-rolled boondoggle. Something that does everything will do none of it well, and this is no exception.
The JSF is nothing more than a bunch of pork-barrel projects rolled up into a hopelessly useless flying piece of shit. It's years behind schedule, many times over budget, and does not do nearly what it was advertised to do.
Just kill it already. Kill it with fire.
Problem solved!
Why aren't weapon systems modular allowing for easy upgrade? No money in that?
And why use human pilots for combat craft, a drone could accelerate and turn under massive G forces and still function where a human would black out.
1st: make a fast, sturdy air frame with a reliable engine, 2nd make all electronics and weapons modular easy to replace and upgrade, 3rd get rid of the human.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
When F-35's start dropping out of the sky, and America realizes that Chinese and Russian planes which cost 4% of the cost are actually superior (Yes, I know they stole quite a bit of tech -- but this is war we're talking about, right?) then and only then will there be a long-overdue house-cleaning in the defense industry.
I say bring it on. The forthcoming ass kicking of America's air force is going to represent a monumental turning point in world history.
The good news is, we'll finally be able to dump this silly manned-airforce and go full drone like we should have 10 years ago.
Now that many different planes are being replaced with the F-35, I'm sure they'll NEVER make an upgraded camera module specifically for it. It's not like they ever upgraded the cameras on anybof the aircraft it's replacing.
Oh space. There's no room for a high res camera. Looking at the 4mm X 4mm , 8MP camera on my phone, I'm having trouble believing that they'll never be able to fit a high-res camera in the plane.
The A10 is the best ground support aircraft ever made
With the new fangled electronics I bet they can tag on another 100 or so million dollars to each of the F35, and with the 100 or so million more they sure can find more ways to distribute the pork
Anyhoo, do you know that the F16s UAE is flying have newer version of electronics than the one the American Air Force is using?
Even things like cars are like that too. The models for 2015 will have parts on them that haven't been upgraded since the 80's.
Those "sensor pods" are shaped like external fuel tanks. They've got that rounded and curved shape, to make them aerodynamic. Which is horrible for stealth. The F35 has to pack all its baggage inside the fuselage, with minimal openings.
A huge part of this question then becomes a tradeoff between stealth and features. You have to gve up some stuff if you want to be stealthy. So far, on the F35, most of those drawbacks have been "bought out" by spending a crapton on working around them. Stealt VTOL for example was a major PITA.
Considering the already absurd cost of the avionics electronics developed for the F35, tacaking on a completely new ground sensor package (and finding a place to PUT it inside the airframe) would have raised the cost quite a bit. Those sensor pods have been a work in progres for the last 15 years, the R&D is already mostly done. You can't compare that to a completely new package. (and you thought the rest of the new F35 had bugs and glitches?)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
First of all, those older jets are upgraded while the F-35 is being delivered according to a contract. That's not government incompetence. That's contract law, and no respectable contractor is going to write an agreement where the specifications can change at the last minute. In all probability, the military has already accounted for this and has planned upgrades.
Second, very few people are saying that government should control healthcare. They are saying that the government should control health insurance. Other countries already do this and have had very positive outcomes.
F-35, as with the V-22 Osprey should have never been built, but due to well placed people in Congress, are forced onto the military because it brings home the bacon and jobs, which translates into VOTES. The A-10 costs tons less & is a proven ground attack platform, not to mention more survivable.
But... it has its own Facebook pages. It *must* be good.
https://www.facebook.com/thef3...
https://www.facebook.com/Suppo...
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
It seems we have gotten over the ethical questions concerning the ethics of using drones in warfare. It would seem that the best choice would be a more powerful drone. Jet fighter pilots are too fragile. Start cranking up that imagination and start designing more innovative and powerful ones.
is that it is fucking useless.
We have RADAR now so sensitive it can pick up turbulence generated by the flapping of a sparrow's wing. THEY HAVE TO DIAL IT DOWN for most practical applications, including tracking air displacements due to exhaust-baffled (AKA "thermal" stealth) aircraft.
If you want, you can build your own K-Band for around $70, not including the two coffee cans. In fact with the same kit and a laptop you can build a synthetic aperture RADAR imaging system capable of not only locking and tracking targets, but also capable of passing that data in realtime to an external guidance system.
Gugol it yourself, it's all on the MIT public website.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Until a Jam Proof Drone cane be made, manned fighters will be around.
They expect the pilot to use his iPhone... Can't wait to see that insurgent instagram feed.
lucm, indeed.
It's a great point: people who don't have an emotional investment in the Department of X can easily see that the people who make up the Department only care only for improving their own power and financial position, and are making X even worse both by getting in the way and also by consuming valuable resources that could be used to actually provide X instead.
The difficult part is realizing this is true for all X, even the ones which are your personal favorites.
"More proof the US defense industry has nothing to do with defending America"
http://pando.com/2014/12/18/the-war-nerd-more-proof-the-us-defense-industry-has-nothing-to-do-with-defending-america/
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Obviously, if it's located in the nose... then they need to replace EOTS with the Super New Optical Targeting System, or SNOTS.
Seems to me the state of the art in sensors 10 years ago was far more than adequate for any conceivable mission even now. There have been no magic advances by any potential adversaries since then. Hell, even 23 years ago the state of the art in Desert Storm was shooting fish in a barrel, and zero susceptibility to enemy aircraft.
Yeah, the F-35 is essentially a piece of gold plated crap, but I don't see anything that savages trapped 1000 years in the past are going to do to challenge its air supremacy, given the numbers, and given its more rational sister planes. Of countries which in the wildest imagination could be envisaged as adversaries, only Russia and China are even in the same universe. But when you show me evidence that their training and experience level is within 1/10 of the US, I might get concerned.
Israel is probably close in technology, training and experience. Good thing as far as fantasy matchups go that they are not raving, frothing maniacs and have no industrial manufacturing base. They don't even have enough ammunition for more than HOURS of real combat, and no possible way of replenishing it domestically on real time.
If the plane makes it to mass production and get widely implemented, which it seems destined to do thanks to inertia and politics... I predict the F-35 will be awesome... in about 15 or 20 years, once they've worked all the bugs out and upgraded the systems.
At air to air combat, its not really all that well suited. Gobs of other (older and newer) aircraft are better fighters than the '35. Its better suited as an A35 (ground attack aircraft), but as stated, its ground sensors are old as dirt. You really want a lot more plane for the buck. There are older ground attack aircraft that are better too: better slow speed maneuverability, better lift at low speeds, more nimble, and better at low-speed close-in warfighting (and a better munitions load that is better suited for air to ground: many many small bombs that can precisely hit dozens of targets, as opposed to just a few very large munitions that are designed to his only a few targets from high speed and altitude. Some described the F35 as pork, but really its a turkey. A very expensive, ineffectual turkey. As a fighter, it has a combat radius of 613 nautical miles. Since it only has one engine, when the engine fails or gets shot out, that's only a few hours flight to pick up the pilot (if they survive). Just look for the big smoking hole in the ground. A twin engine means you get home slower, and in one piece. A combat radius of 613 nautical miles means if you try to intercept from a long way off, you can only meet up with them for a few minutes before you have to turn around and look for more fuel. Where are the old fighters with a 1500nm combat radius? Multiple attempts at airspace interception could be fended off with the same fighter. Now you need to launch a squadron in a piecemeal fashion. Bah!
I worked on this. It is horrible. It was sold on the "we can use off the shelf gear for testing and prototyping" kind of model (since 1553 is expensive in dollars, size, mass, and power, for a whole variety of reasons, not the least of which is it is used only in things that cost millions of dollars and are in small volumes).
Anyway, why 1394 and not Ethernet? Because back in the 90s, when they were choosing this kind of thing, there was the perceived need to have isochronous interconnects to do hard real time functions. I think this was largely because people were used to 1553, which has "bus schedules" with major and minor loops: remember that 1553 was designed for fairly dumb peripherals (position encoder like a pot, actuators like motors and hydraulics, or cockpit instrument displays) and so, flight control software (which is tough to update) was developed based on the assumption that you could get deterministic timing with a time sequenced bus (like 1553).
Not so strangely, 1394 provides this on 8 kHz time slots: because that's what the phone system used as its sampling rate, so for multimedia applications, 125 microseconds is considered "adequate", assuming you have buffers, etc.
Ethernet, in the 90s, was perceived has having significant non-determinism (remember, this is back in the days of the vampire tap 10Base5, or maybe 10Base2 thin-net days, with modern twisted pair just coming into play). Two solutions: "just have lots of excess capacity, and there's an almost bounded maximum latency" and "design your algorithms to tolerate missing/late packets" both were perceived as incredibly risky, and potentially resource intensive. Remember, this is "fly-by-wire" software we're talking about here, and moving from a "gear train, fixed timing" model of software to something a bit "softer real time-ish" makes people real nervous (justly so).
However, 1394 also has stuff like hot-plug and automatic distributed network inventory and reconfiguration, which add an element of non-determinism. There you are in your 10G turn, having just done your lob-toss maneuver, and oops, an upset causes you to renegotiate the entire flight network configuration. Renegotiation is fine when watching a DVD, not so fine when doing active flight control management at 1kHz update rates.
1394 does not lend itself to simple redundancy schemes (channel bonding in Ethernet, A and B bus for 1553). It also has weird handling of a mix of high and low speed devices, when doing a pass through. And, 1394 PHY and MAC devices are complex and expensive. So as soon as you start to "customize" it to overcome all these peculiarities that make 1394 unsuitable for fly by wire, you lost the thing that originally sold it: "It's cheap mass produced COTS".
You'll note that no cars use 1394 for engine control. CAN bus is really the modern 1553 replacement (similar 1 Mbps sorts of data rates). But CAN bus is, of course, European in original and "not invented in america". It also can't handle the putative data bandwidth requirements for JSF (because the "one true bus" must handle everything from gunsight video to radar data to cuing to stores management to pilot monitoring to, well, you name it).
The sooner 1394 fades into oblivion, the better.
Oh, by using bistatic or multistatic radar where the emitter is civilian (like a TV or radio station) or very cheap and multiple, one can beat the ARM. The ARMs aren't cheap, either. You don't want to invest multimillion dollar missiles against several hundred thousand dollar RF sources (or decoys)
Hey Elon Musk, please go into the business of making planes for the US military. We need you in that area! Thanks.
I can understand the initial purchase (in that we needed something to replace the obsolete F-111 Aardvark and at the time it wasn't known how bad F-35 would turn out to be. But now our government wants to buy MORE of these things despite no evidence that they are actually any good as an airplane? Why?
Does Australia actually need that many airplanes? (its not like there are any countries in our region that are likely to decide to attack us so the only real mission for the F-35 is going to be sending a few to help in some foreign war and we dont need anywhere near as many aircraft to be able to do that)
Is Abbot just following through on a commitment originally made by Howard when he placed the first order of F-35s?
Is Abbot deliberately doing this to make the budget look worse so he can justify his unpopular budget cuts?
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... --
The whole thing is a failure, and appears only to be designed to extract maximum profit for defence contractors. The original technical requirements have just been reduced to allow this failure to be delivered, and even then, hardly on schedule. Problems include:
- Structural weight - would need a fundamental redesign to fix. This one will be with the F-35 for life. At this stage, it can not be fixed. For anyone having worked on aircraft, this one should be obvious.
- Lack of power for avionics growth, and for a large primary radar. The lack of payload, space, and electrical energy for a radar means the F-35 will never get 'first look' at even current generation Russian and Chinese types.
- Limited weapons payload, particularly for internal weapons stores.
- Insufficient payload to sustain flight with proper protection against even small arms fire, limiting usefulness in a strike role.
- Variety of avionics problems.
- Limited VLO capability, on account of necessary shaping that resulted from design compromises for V/STOL variant. Front aspect is probably best, but still apparently a long way from being survivable against modern airborne radars.
- Poor manoeuvrability compared to previous and current generation aircraft.
- Lack of real supercruise capability.
- Limited range.
- No thrust vectoring.
- No side-looking radar.
- No supersonic weapons delivery
- Insufficient fuel for cooling of a competitive avionics suite.
Based on the stated capabilities, the F-35 will be:
- unable to run from an enemy
- unable to get first look at an enemy
- unable to engage a distant enemy first, due to inability to carry heavier longer range missiles in sufficient quantity, so even if it had a more powerful radar that could get 'first look', it could not get 'first shot'.
- inability to outmanoeuvre Russian and Chinese types
- poor IR/optical sensor fit
- inability to hide from an enemy, due to poor VLO shaping, particularly in the bands that modern Russian radars are designed to detect
- susceptible to damage from very basic weapons systems, with insufficient ability to extinguish fires
These are only some of the more basic problems. The whole aircraft is riddled with inherent design compromises that seem to make its survivability against previous and current generation types very limited indeed, and compromise its suitability for any roles against enemies with any kind of moderate capability.
o myghty brain, what do you eat that you are so bright?
And here less than a month ago i got modded as a troll for saying how much of a piece of crap the F-35 was, and pointing out it's massive overruns in budget bullshit. This has been in the news for years now. I can't believe there are still idiots who think this program is worth a shit.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
First of all, those older jets are upgraded while the F-35 is being delivered according to a contract. That's not government incompetence. That's contract law, and no respectable contractor is going to write an agreement where the specifications can change at the last minute. In all probability, the military has already accounted for this and has planned upgrades.
I doubt it. Airframes develop very slowly but electronics is quickly obsolete. The prudent thing to do in the spec would be to say "we will have a sensor pod X by Y by Z inches with attachment points T,U,and V. The sensor pod (yet to be developed) will require # amps of power at #volts using a HIJ connector, and please run a ABC connector to that area with specification EFG connecting to the main bus." They didn't do that. They settled on the sensor knowing it would be obsolete before the aircraft flew.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
This article is complete BS, pretty much everything it states is a lie. My guess is that the source an "air force official affiliated with the f-35" was really a retired air force official who was on the program 15 years ago if even that. It's possible the source was some random blogger with no actual inside information on the program.
I'll tear this article apart piece by piece.
"The problem stems from the fact that the technology found on one of the stealth fighterÃ(TM)s primary air-to-ground sensorsÃ"its nose-mounted Electro-Optical Targeting System (EOTS)Ã"is more than a decade old and hopelessly obsolete."
"EOTS is about a [1990s-era Northrop Grumman AN/AAQ-28(V)] LITENING II-equivalent targeting pod.Ã"
wrong wrong wrong wrong. Straight from Air international f-35 2014 special page 26 - page 30 go over the EOTS.
"The resulting EOTS leverages on the experience gained from producing the LANTIRN targeting system, the AN/AQQ Sniper Advanced targeting pod, and the AN/AAS-42 infrared search and track system used on the F-14d Tomact." So the statement in the article that the EOTS was designed as an upgrade over the the LANTIRN 10 years ago and is inferior to the new pods is a straight up lie.
"Both pods also incorporate the ability to mark targets with an infrared laser beamÃ"which the EOTS lacksÃ"that helps pilots and ground controllers coordinate their attacks"
"ÃoeAt no point is F-35 fragged to have VDL [video down-link] unless it carries a targeting pod and the F-35 EOTS does not have and will not get an IR [infrared] marker,Ã the first F-35 official said. ÃoeIt wonÃ(TM)t fit in the space available.Ã
Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies. Ok, if the source truly is affiliated with the program or "familiar" with the program, he's either lying or brain dead.
From air international page 26 "The EOTS provides laser designation, laser spot tracker for cooperative engagements, air-to-air and air-to-ground tracking FLIR, digital zoom, wide area IRST and generation of geo-coordinate to support GPS-guided weapons."
Wait, didnt this "air force official" say the ETOS had no laser spot tracker? Lies.
Can the sniper and litening-se pods do all of what the EOTS can do? Didn't think so.
As far as space being a problem, once again, another lie.
From air international "One reason for the difference in size between the sniper pod and the EOTS is the cooling method used. Most conventinal targeting pods such as Sniper are air-cooled requiring the necessary system to be carried on the back of the pod. The ETOTS is a liquid-cooled system using PAO (polyalphaolefin) fed from the aircraft."
Also, due to space limitations and not wanting a hunking pod on the bottom of the JSF for aerodynamics and stealth characteristics, "the EOTS optical path is therefore folded via mirrors and prisms to refract the light off several different surfaces to direct it on to the focal plane array and fit within space."
The EOTS panels are only a small portion of the whole EOTS. The article really reads like the source was a random blogger that they are labeling an airforce official.
"More damningly, the F-35 wonÃ(TM)t be able to send even its already lower-quality live video down to those soldiers on the ground because its specifications were set before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan started. "
You've got to be kidding me lol
From air internaitional page 30
"the HMD can present video source and symbology commanded by the aircraft's mission computer..."
If it can feed video footage to the HMD in real time, and can also feed video to other f35s in real time via MADL, it's a pretty stupid statement to say that video cannot be sent to ground troops. The only limitations are the f35 communicating with other assets without losing its stealthiness (as we all know, MADL only works with other f35s and they are already working on ways to relay information to legacy platforms without losing stealth).
So overall, the article is at best ill informed and at worst intentional misinformation bordering on propoganda. Joke of an article and the author should be ashamed that he put this crap on the internet.
So, older jets have been upgraded with newer sensor pods designed for them, and these newer sensor pods aren't compatible with the new platform. So... think very hard... why is this a problem? One 'plugin' hasn't been updated to the newest framework-- that does not imply the newest framework is flawed, inferior, or un-needed (as the commentors, summary, etc do).
the Osprey is the one thing we have now that we didn't have in the '70s that could have changed the outcome of a mission. That being the raid into Iran to save the hostages.
The Air Force deems the Warthog unacceptably 'unattractive'. The plane does its job outstandingly well, offers its pilot exceptional protection, but ... it's ugly. The Air Force doesn't like "ugly". "Ugly" pilots get screened out during training, only T. Cruise types need apply. Same with ugly planes.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
you wouldn't be talking. :-)
Any public comment regarding the capabilities of advanced weapons systems should be taken with a bucket of salt, and that includes the positive news. When it isn't ill-informed opinion it is spin or irrelevant distractions and cherry picking for political point scoring.
Stop kidding yourselves guys, you know jack shit about the machine and how useful (or not) it will be in future operations.
So is this to say that the F-35 JSF is the windows vista and/or windows 8 of the DoD weapons inventory?
So the story is true, in a meaningless pedantic way, and totally false within the context...
Sounds perfect for Slashdot!
'and FOX News!'
War Nerd captures the truth about the F35 very, very well. Read it and learn.
Stealth is also trivially countered for very low cost - basically all stealth planes are über-expensive sitting ducks. It's not just planes but fancy semi-stealthy ships with expensive ECM that can be completely neutralized because they are so out of date. BTW I used to be very intimately involved in designing weapons systems like this and the solution is not more technology at higher prices because it's not really possible to keep up to date with the way the Pentagon runs programs. Instead it would be wise (yet probably impossible) to fall back and analyze what the actual threats and missions really are and decide soberly and with full humility what really gets the job done for the cheapest price. Basically what War Nerd says about the A10 vs. F35. It won't happen that way though.
Governments are better advised to spend money on preventing wars. Train diplomats and come to better solutions than wasting money on weapons. Even if they are top of the line today they will be hopelessly outdated within a few years, way before the end of the operation span. Besides that, the modern wars are not fought with fighter planes and tanks. Look at the fight against IS, the bombing campaigns are basically without any effect other than destroying important infrastructure that eventually needs to be rebuild at high cost. Places like Iraq or Afghanistan are no better off than they were 10 years ago, in many cases it got even worse. How about spending money on figuring out how to prevent that?
Check out MIL-STD-1760. Part of the reason for its development is the high cost of F35 proprietary weapon and sensor systems' communications and interactions.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.