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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?
You need to get them off the ground before they can start dropping out of the sky.
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.
The reality is that good enough is good enough. Unlike in the movies the reality is that the military doesn't upgrade everything just because something new and shiny came out. The computer that you are typing on is more advanced than the computers in even the latest fighters. The difference is the ones in the aircraft are rarely fail and can operate in very harsh environments.
Combat drones don't need to dogfight, that is also Hollywood nonsense. They are small, impossible to see, and will shoot you down before you even know they are there, and they are already building them.
The JSF is the last project of the old guard who still think a man needs to be at the stick of the aircraft. Once the over 50 crowd in congress dies/retires you see a drastic move away from manned aircraft.
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.
So why aren't the older fighters limited to the same tech? Their interfaces must be even older.
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.