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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.
The A10 is the best ground support aircraft ever made
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.
So why aren't the older fighters limited to the same tech? Their interfaces must be even older.
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
This is not a technology problem, this is military politics. Basically the USAF brass doesn't want to do air-ground missions, they want to do air combat and stealth bombing because it's a lot cooler and less dangerous (for the pilots) since there's basically no serious opposition. So they sabotage every aspect of their capabilities that would allow them to do air-ground missions, like pillaging the A-10 supply chain or doing this kind of cheap stunt with the F-35, hoping that drone technology will be mature soon enough to do the dirty jobs.
Anyone who has worked on large IT projects has seen this kind of thing. The big cheese and the overpaid consultants focus on the cool but useless features that look good in PowerPoint presentations and during board meetings (like a fancy iPad-optimized dashboard or an accountant-customizable expense approval workflow that will never be used) while the really important parts like integration or bulk updates, which will be used on an hourly basis, are neglected and downplayed because they are not sexy and will be a nightmare to operate.
lucm, indeed.