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Test Pilot: the F-35 Can't Dogfight
schwit1 sends this report from the War Is Boring column:
A test pilot has some very, very bad news about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The pricey new stealth jet can't turn or climb fast enough to hit an enemy plane during a dogfight or to dodge the enemy's own gunfire, the pilot reported following a day of mock air battles back in January. And to add insult to injury, the JSF flier discovered he couldn't even comfortably move his head inside the radar-evading jet's cramped cockpit. "The helmet was too large for the space inside the canopy to adequately see behind the aircraft." That allowed the F-16 to sneak up on him. The test pilot's report is the latest evidence of fundamental problems with the design of the F-35 — which, at a total program cost of more than a trillion dollars, is history's most expensive weapon. Your tax dollars at work.
The F-35's wings are too small for the mass of the plane. It can't pull enough G's to black out a pilot.
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Planes don't have an infinite amount of AAM missiles. At some point in time they will have to use their gatling guns.
And quick bombing raids without additional air support are supposed to be the JSF's forte IIRC.
I'm not going to argue with most of your points.
But the VTOL version is working: VTOL land test, VTOL sea test, and VTOL Ramp Test
The days of air-to-air combat are long gone. And where air-to-air combat is still needed, long range missiles take care of it.
That's what they said fifty years ago. (When things like the nuclear-warhead AIR-2 Genie or AIM-26 Falcon were considered a good idea.) Turned out they were wrong. (Which is one reason the US did so lousy in the early stages of the air war over Vietnam ... because we weren't teaching pilots to dog fight. Later corrected by e.g. Top Gun.)
"But how many US pilots have been in an actual dogfight since, say WWII"
I partially agree, but this is the mentality that cost a lot of American pilots their lives in Vietnam. Even the latest American jets had a hard time dog-fighting against the obsolete MIG-17. The F-4 Phantom originally didn't have a gun, because the pervasive thinking was that air combat would be fought with beyond-visual-range (BVR) missiles. This mindset started to change once the missiles (such as the AIM-4 Falcon) were shown to have serious reliability issues......and visual identity of the target was required anyway, to avoid friendly-fire incidents. By the time you get close enough to a plane to make sure it's in fact hostile, a BVR missile loses it's threat potential, and it comes down to the skill of the pilot.
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When was the last time you've ever heard of a dogfight?
1999 in the Balkans though there may be ones I'm not aware of that are more recent.
The days of air-to-air combat are long gone.
There is no evidence to support this assertion.
And where air-to-air combat is still needed, long range missiles take care of it.
They thought the same thing in Vietnam and they were wrong.
WTF?! When was the last time you've ever heard of a dogfight?
That's what they said when they built the Phantom with no cannon. That's why they had to hurriedly retrofit cannon for Vietnam, when Phantoms started getting into dogfights.
As for long-range missiles, they've been the panacea for decades, but then the military impose rules of engagement requiring positive ID of the bad guy before you shoot, and suddenly you're not at long range any more.
Waitaminute, Congressman. Why would I fund your campaign, if you're not going to vote to give the public's money to me? I thought we had a deal: you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.
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Drone pilots are actually burning out due to extreme crisis of conscious issues. They work 9-5 killing people, then go home to their families; they're not living in a constructed fantasy of good versus evil fueled by the fact that other people are living in the same fantasy and mutually trying to kill you under the impression that you're the invader. They see themselves as terrible assassins, not righteous heroes fighting a murderous enemy.
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Do ALL the operators' loved ones live on a military base? All of them? And you know that drones only work against camel humpers, right? Take on an industrialized nation and your drones become useless - and you just turned your commsats and your own bases in your homeland into legitimate targets.
Enders Game?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
OK, just in the past SIX YEARS, there have been, to my immediate recollection, THREE fatal shootings on mainland US Navy yards:
November 2009: Fort Hood
September 2013: Washington
March 2014: Norfolk, WV - the World's LARGEST Naval base.
NOT ONLY were those shootings on apparently SECURE installations, they were on installations where apparently only base police were permitted to carry ANY type of firearms. Yet, the perpetrators were able to DRIVE through the gates unchecked and wander the bases with their weapons in FULL OPEN VIEW.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
That's crazy.
So, tank-buster/ground attack, fighter jet, carrier launched fighter jet, and close air support.
There is simply no way in hell to replace the A-10, in terms of armament of hardening. Because the A-10 is ridiculous in terms of those things (and I mean that in the most awesome sense of the word, because it's legendary for survivability and that huge canon).
It can't replace the F-16, because it's not nearly as good at the same role, and can't beat it in the air.
If the F/A-18 is also a fighter I'd be curious to see if the F-35 can even touch that.
And a VTOL close air support aircraft, which is armed to the teeth and can do many tasks ... well, at this point I'm skeptical.
I'd be curious if there is a single aircraft this F-35 is supposed to replace, which it can actually best in that category.
If it is inferior in the specific features of the stuff it's replacing, it's pretty much a terrible aircraft.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Drone pilots more removed from the action than infantry? Hell yes.
More removed then the rest of the Air Force? Hell no.
The way a drone strike works is a drone loiters on station for weeks on end. During this time the drone's pilots figure out who is in the house when, so they can avoid blowing it up when the local equivalent of the Girl Scouts are in the living room. Which means drone pilots know when their target takes the trash out, whether the teenage daughter has a boyfriend who sneaks in sometimes, etc. This makes for attacks that are much easier on the civilian population then normal bombing, because you can skip the night when the girl and her boyfriend are enjoying themselves, but it makes for very stressed out drone pilots.
OTOH, an F-16 would only be able to loiter on target for a half-hour at a time, and the pilot would be spending his time there focussing on the attack, so he has no fucking idea that the terrorist mastermind he's about to attack has a daughter up to hijinks. He'll drop the bomb, write on his paperwork that the building was totaly destroyed, and dance the Dance of Successful Combat Missions.
It sounds to me like our current crop of F16 fighters are superior. Why do we have a $1 trillion plane?
There are plenty of reasons, good and bad. I'll assume you are asking a serious question, and give you the short version of the most often cited answers:
Good reasons include:
Debatable reasons include:
Bad reasons include:
There were also plenty of f***ups in assumptions the program made that were only really recognizable in hindsight, like the fact that trying to mesh the Marines' requirement for a V/STOL aircraft with the traditional designs for the Air Force and Navy hobbled the plane's performance for all three constituencies.
I know a lot of people are very critical of the F-35, and rightfully should be. But it's not as bad as it may sound - I think it will eventually turn into a decent (but never great) aircraft with a long service life. It's out there flying around today, but will take probably 10 more years to get to where everyone hoped it would be in terms of capabilities. Nonetheless, you will almost certainly still see F-35s flying around under US colors in 2050, so in the long run it will work out OK.
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That's pretty much the same sentiment they had just before the Vietnam war. And then took a big bloody nose from the inferior Migs. The worst thing about the F-35 though is it's a single engine fighter. In war redundancy is everything. When the engine on the 35 gets damaged the only option is to pull the ejection handle and hope for the best. That's a hell of an expensive lawn dart. If you want to see an example of how bad it can be just look at the F-16. It's nickname IS lawn dart. When the F-15 loses an engine they turn around and go back to base. That's how you live to fight another day. After the debacle with the F-22 and the F-105 I can't believe they bought another single engine fighter.
It did a whole hell of lot more than just lead to unwieldy logistics.
It made managing training more costly and complex. If you have, say, a class of four ships with a unique sonar, you only need a couple of dozen new bodies a year max. But you still need a complete school suite with all the requisite simulators, instructors, and maintenance and support personnel. That raises costs considerably. When I was a 98/0 instructor to support 16 crews with 5 techs each, we maintained an office of 12 people (the number was set by the number of training specialties required, and one guy can know and do so much) just to run four classes a year of 6-8 students. And that was at the tail end of initial manning - when we still needed new or converted techs by the gross lot. Class numbers and sizes went down shortly after I left.
The same is true for advanced training, unless you're lucky enough that the schools are located on the same base as the vessels. While that was true when I was a 98/0 tech... When I was an 88/2 tech, we initially had no advanced training on the OAG MK2/1 because there was no trainer in Charleston - the nearest was at the basic trainer near Norfolk. The program was nearly a decade old before they could get funding to convert an 88/1 (MK2/0) trainer to 88/2 (MK2/1).
It vastly complicated manning for much the same reason... There were only about 200 88/2 techsat any given time, so all it took was a handful of guys unexpectedly getting out, or deciding to stay in, or becoming ineligible for sea duty, or losing their clearance or whatever to royally screw up the whole pipeline.
I actually got to see both ends of that bell curve.
After I graduated from 98/0 school here at Bangor, I ended up filling a warm body billet for a year (my expensive training going to waste) because 98/0 (a community of only sixty or so at the time) was running overmanned by about fifty percent. (My class of twelve alone would have overmanned the community for a year or two until enough boats reached the stage of construction where they needed bodies.) I ended up being converted to 88/2 and sent to Charleston.
After my sea tour, I converted back from 88/2 to 98/0 and was on shore duty when the Navy desperately tried to get me to convert back. Their numbers had been wrong two years running, and average crew size had dropped to 5.8 - and the minimum to run a normal watch rotation without doubling up was 6. They'd started short cycling guys, and sending them on back-to-backs... but you can only do that so long before morale goes to hell in a handbasket, and more guys get out and your problem just gets worse. Norfolk was empty of spare bodies, Charleston was empty of spare bodies, King's Bay was empty of spare bodies... Little ol' me sitting up here at Bangor was literally the last warm body available. (But I ended up being medically ineligible for sea duty anyhow, and stayed out here.)
It also compromises combat capabilities and planning... when I was in SUBLANT, they had 88/1 (C3) boats and 88/2 (C4B) boats, and the two missiles had different ranges, different numbers and sizes of warheads, and the missile capabilities were different. There wasn't always a spare boat of the right kind available, and you couldn't swap them one-for-one. It didn't matter which way you swapped, some capability was compromised either way.
And that's just the SSBN force and doesn't even begin to address logistics problems, or the other support problems, or the maintenance problems, or... well, you get the picture. Multiply that by SSN's, FF's, DD's, and cruisers of a dozen different types and the problems I didn't even touch on and you have a hellaciously complex and expensive mess.
The Navy shifted to having more common platforms starting with Ticonderoga's and Burke's for a lot of very good reasons.
It sounds crazy because that isn't the whole story.
The F-35 comes in three variants, A for Air Force, B for Marines, and C for Navy. They are all variations on the same theme. The A is the base model. The B is pretty much the same as A but swaps out one of it's fuel tanks for a lift fan. The C is bigger version of A with folding wings, bigger wings are needed to have lower take off and landing speeds for carriers. Sharing a common platform save megabucks on all the radars, radios, FLIRs, fancy electronics, and the massive amount of software that needs to be written. It also gives them all a common engine, cockpit, and ejection system, which makes keeping spares on hand easier.
The F-35B replaces the Harrier because the Harrier is ancient and being better than it is a low bar to meet.
The F-35A replaces the F-16 by having stealth and a useful range. The F-16 was designed as a point defence fighter to defend against the Soviets over Germany, short range meant that it could be small, light, and manoeuvrable. Here are the typical combat ranges for the various fighters: F15C: 1,967 km, F-35A: 1,135 km, F-22: 760 km, F-18: 740 km, F-16: 550 km. The secret to the F-16's manoeuvrability is that they ditched a lot of fuel weight. The problem is the Soviet Union collapsed and the point defence mission disappeared. The F-16 found a new lease on life when the strapped an external fuel tank and targeting pod on it to give it enough range to be a bomb truck, but the extra weight of that fuel makes it shit for manoeuvrability. So the F-16 can either have range and shit manoeuvrability, or great manoeuvrability and a useless range. The F-35A has both, plus stealth, plus better infrared/optical sensors so it doesn't need a targeting pod.
The F-18A/C has the same problems as the F-16. So it is being replaced by two fighters, the F-18E/F Super Hornet for air superiority, and the F-35C for attack missions.
The A-10 is basically a plane without a mission. It was designed in the days before precision weapons when the only way to hit tanks was to strafe them WWII style. That means low and slow, which means it needed to be armoured against AA. Great, except the Soviets simply upped the AA from 23mm to 30mm, introduced their version of the Stinger called Igla, and added more armour to the roof of their tanks. By the late 80s the A-10 was a death trap, fly low and Soviet AA will kill it, fly medium and Igla will kill it, fly at normal hight and you can't aim. And even if you could aim it's questionable if the GAU could still disable most recent Soviet tanks. The final nail in the coffin is the Soviet Union collapsing. There are no hordes of tanks for the A-10 to kill so what good is it? Against even a moderate air defence network it can't survive, which is why it had to be pulled off attacks against Republican Guard in the Second Gulf War, too many were shot down. Against a unsophisticated enemy like an insurgency it is too expensive, if the enemy can't shoot you down send a drone. The done is more accurate, cheaper, longer loiter time, and can provide video feeds to ground commanders. During the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq the A-10 only provided something like 18% of the CAS missions, far less than the F-16s or F-18s. The USAF used the A-10s because they have them, but they don't want them.
The F-35 can replace all of those planes because one was hopelessly out dated. One had already lost its mission to the remaining two. The final two work okay, so the F-35 was designed as a upgraded version of them with better range, better sensors, and stealth.