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.

Comments

Drone It

[thedonger]

How much extra to make a drone version with 360 degree cameras? Fuck it. We're at $1 trillion. What's a few hundred billion more?

Re:Drone It

[nyet]

Not only that, but no artificial limit to g. No pilot to keep conscious.

Re:Drone It

[trout007]

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.

Re:Drone It

[Junta]

Drones with weapons aren't autonomous.

Re:Drone It

[Penguinisto]

Perhaps, though to be fair, much of this can be worked around (for how much? Tons o cash, eh?)

It's fairly standard that smaller/slower aircraft are very often more agile than the bigger boys - you just have to find the aircraft's strengths and play to those. For instance, the tiny T-35/F5 can commonly out-maneuver an F-15... at lower altitudes. At higher altitudes, the F-15 handles itself better in the thinner air of the upper stratosphere.

The F-16 is more than agile in lower altitudes, because it was built to be a combination air/air air/ground fighter, which leads me to believe that maybe these dogfights were conducted at lower altitudes... I am also curious (haven't looked) as to what the flight/fight profile of the F-35 is in the first place. if it's Air Superiority, then that usually means higher altitudes where there may be a better advantage. Anything else appears to be a whole lot of incompetence in design.

All that said, they had to know there were going to be compromises when doing the whole stealth (maneuverability) and STOL/VTOL (engine power) thing.

Or, best bet may be to scrap the damn thing and hold a competition for an aircraft that's worth a damn, and this time make the entrants build a working prototype *first*, without any governmental money up front... like they did in the old days.

Re:Drone It

[Sloppy]

make the entrants build a working prototype *first*, without any governmental money up front

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.

Re:Drone It

[fustakrakich]

It was built to fly in the dense atmosphere of Venus. Or maybe it's actually a submarine (like 007's Lotus). It will pull lots of g's when it hits the water. Remember, it's a secret weapon.

Re:Drone It

[bluefoxlucid]

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.

Re:Drone It

[bluefoxlucid]

It sounds to me like our current crop of F16 fighters are superior. Why do we have a $1 trillion plane? I'm not saying it's a lot of money--it's only about $100bn every year, maybe less, for 10 years of development; and even $1 trillion right now one time wouldn't be a world-changing amount of money--but this is a lot of waste that could have gone elsewhere, for no obvious purpose. Somebody said, "We need better planes!", and I question why, when we have such fantastic planes, and when historical wars included clearly-inferior planes like MIG fighters wiping the floor with models three decades more up-to-date.

Re:Drone It

[neilo_1701D]

I am also curious (haven't looked) as to what the flight/fight profile of the F-35 is in the first place.

It's a replacement for everything. In theory, it can do the job of the A-10, F-16, F/A-18, and Harrier Jump Jet (to name a few)

In practice, so many competing priorities means compromises.

Re:Drone It

[Krishnoid]

They see themselves as terrible assassins, not righteous heroes fighting a murderous enemy.

See, that's the problem -- as long as they see themselves in either role, it won't work. Perhaps if they were isolated at youth, taught to fight each other, and then misled into thinking it was just a really good video game or simulation of some sort. I bet they could make a movie out of that.

Re:Drone It

[lgw]

Originally, the F22 was to fill the air superiority role (and it does that better than any fighter ever made), and the F35 was the mish-mash of other roles. Everyone following this stuff knew the F35 wouldn't be great at any one particular role, but for dogfighting it was always a joke - and really, that was OK, as the F22 had its back if needed. But we stopped buying F22s way too soon, we don't have enough, and the huge R&D costs weren't spread across enough planes.

The F35 always seemed like the result of no clear charter for it's role: "just do everything". It's not a bad plane for the requirements as presented: for a jack-iof-all-trades plane it's great at nothing, but it's really as good as you could reasonably expect given the lack of a specific role.

The Air Force also has a problem that we've spent too long dropping bombs on opponents with no real air power. We should be using actual bombers for that role: far cheaper per bomb, but fighter pilots run the place. As a result, we get fighters trying to be bombers on top of everything else, and no plans to replace the aging bomber fleet anytime soon (admittedly, a B52 is fine vs an opponent who can't shoot back, but even the B1 is getting old vs an opponent who can).

Re:Drone It

[DarkOx]

Drone pilots don't seem to have much of a conscience either.

BUNK!

Drone piolots have no doubt done somethings history won't look kindly on but so has basically every fighting man using whatever technology and tactics. Sure maybe some just do it for the pay check or lack of other options but most of the people that enlist in our volunteer armed services have some conviction about defending the nation.

They are fed probably ten times as much propaganda about the enemy as the rest of us and yet 9999 times of 10000 or more they continue to treat the enemy humanely and frequently place themselves in grater danger to do so. Drone pilots might not face that personal danger and not facing that choice probably makes them better not worse when it comes to "doing the right thing". Suppose all the drone missions were instead flowing with manned aircraft, with pilots always wonder when they might be surprised by some AA device left over from previous conflicts. Do think they would make more or fewer errors?

Militaries kill people and break things, its what they do on a very very fundamental level. Whatever the mission is that is ultimately how it will be effected if you employ the military to do it. Sometimes that is the right thing. I'll be the first to say the middle east aint our fight, and we should bring both the troops and the drones home. Please though lets put the blame for those casualties where it belongs. On the people giving the orders and overseeing the programs. Not on our pilots, sailors and soldiers who really are just following orders.

If your CO handed you a photo of a nondescript building and said "Intel says a terrorist cell is hiding out here, hit it with a hellfire" What would you do? You would probably do what most of us would take them at their word and follow the order. When you read next week in the Time about how the CIA fucked up again and the place was full of civilians you'd feel guilty and not re-enlist when the time come, a problem the Air Force currently is having.

I hope you take some responsibility for it when you next visit the ballot box and cast your vote for someone who will stop doing this crap.

Re:Drone It

[Anonymous Coward]

We're not "at $1 trillion." The $1 trillion figure is the total program cost, through 2038, including all development, procurement, training, operations, upgrades and repairs. Between now and 2038, by simply extrapolating 2015 figures, (which is a conservative approach) the US will create about $385 trillion of wealth and the Federal government will collect $71 trillion in tax revenue. Spending 0.2% of that product on a powerful weapon is entirely reasonable.

As for the F-35; it's a stealth multirole fighter with VTOL. Dog fighting was never the top priority. Using the F-16 to disparage new designs, as was done with the Eurofighter and the F-22, is now a traditional tactic of pentagon critics and should be dismissed as the bullshit that it is.

The story is a hit piece from an anonymous source written by a peacenik named David Axe that advocates, among other stupid things, abolishing the US Air Force.

Re:Drone It

[gstoddart]

In theory, it can do the job of the A-10, F-16, F/A-18, and Harrier Jump Jet (to name a few)

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.

Re:Drone It

[NicBenjamin]

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.

Re:Drone It

[Anonymous Coward]

Contrary to popular belief, G-limits are not generally due to pilot endurance but airframe load limits. They also aren't simple knockdown values. Saying an aircraft can 'pull 9g's' doesn't really mean a lot. Under what conditions? At what altitude? At what speed? With what stores? At what fuel state? What are the roll limits? A F-16 can pull a lot of Gs under specific conditions, conditions generally not met in combat.

A clean F-16 can blackout a pilot. A F-16 with a combat load, generally, can not. Same for all the F-teens. That lady saying 'Over-G' isn't telling you you're about to black out, she's telling you you're breaking the airplane and you need to stop.

Could you design an unmanned aircraft that can sustain 15g? Sure, but why? G load is the result of a lot of variables, so more G doesn't nessecairly translate into 'more maneuverable'. These days higher g loads don't necessarily net you anything and cost you a bundle in airframe weight. That means gas, guns or sensors you're leaving on the ground to make MGTW.

Missiles should be pulling the g, not the aircraft.

Re:Drone It

[NicBenjamin]

Current planes are much superior at fighting World War 2, where dogfighting at speed was the norm.

For future wars it's not quite so clear. The last time we engaged in any real dogfights was Vietnam. The Iraqis, who had the planes to dogfight us in the first war, fled to Iran because they figured they'd die of massed missile fire before they got into cannon range.

The theory behind F-35 is that it's virtually impossible to detect, and we have the electronic warfare capabilities to detect anything anyone else actually has. That means that F-35 should be able to fly around at Mach 1.6 with being targeted by the enemy (who don't even know where it is), while firing off it's missiles whenever an enemy aircraft gets into range. It's more a submarine or cloaked starship then a fighter craft. If it works it'll revolutionize aerial warfare and instantly make every Air Force in the world obsolete. Especially the one belonging to Vladimir Putin.

Re:Drone It

[Junta]

That may be a valid concern, however that's orthogonal to the point about whether a pilot needs to be inside a craft or not.

Points can be made about how susceptible it would be to jamming attacks and such. However as it stands the statement that drones have no conscience is about as useful as saying a bullet has no conscience.

Re:Drone It

[Gryle]

Getting on to most military bases in the US is fairly easy. Getting into the secured buildings where the interesting stuff goes on is much much harder.

Re:Drone It

[Junta]

The same could be said of pretty much every advancement. Guys with clubs are cowards because the barehanded guys don't have a chance. Guys with swords are cowards because the guys with clubs don't stand a chance. Guys with arrows are cowards because the guys with swords across the field don't stand a chance. So on and so forth.

Of the factors driving reluctance to engage in harming other people, I don't think giving the other guy a sporting chance to kill you is a good factor. As others have pointed out, without your own life on the line you may have the opportunity to be more careful about how you proceed. If you are in imminent danger of getting killed, you may be more likely to make hasty judgment calls, collateral civilian damage be damned.

Re:Drone It

[schnell]

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:

• It's stealthy(ish), and has an Active Electronically Scanned Array radar . Part of the idea is that you can see the other guy but they can't see you, so you have blown them out of the sky at BVR (Beyond Visual Range) and never had to get to the point of a dogfight.
• It's supposed to replace a bunch of different fighters and attack aircraft among the services' current fleets with a single airframe. Better QC, cheaper spare parts, buying in bulk, yadda yadda. The different models for the Air Force (F-35A), Navy (F-35C) and Marines (F-35B) turned out to be more different than expected, but that at least was the idea.
• America's allies wanted access to a fifth-generation fighter for their own militaries - which they weren't going to build on their own - and if the US didn't build a relatively affordable one (we weren't going to sell anyone the F-22 since it's our trump card for air superiority) they were going to have to buy them from Russia or China.

Debatable reasons include:

• It - like the military itself - is kind of a Federal jobs program. If you keep your existing jets and don't build new ones, then you lose the employees with the skills and experience needed to do the job. (Kind of like we may not be able to build new nuclear weapons if we wanted them because we haven't made them for so long and everyone with any experience has retired.)

Bad reasons include:

• The military and its defense contractors need new weapons programs to work on in order to justify their careers and existence (military procurement officers) and make money (contractors). Both groups have strong influence in congress, not least because of all the jobs they support (see above).
• The F-35 was intended to revolutionize weapons system procurements by using a strategy of "concurrency" - think of it like agile vs. waterfall development. The idea was better stuff, quicker and cheaper. It turned out - like some of the lessons Boeing learned with the 787 - that agile development may work great at Facebook but it's a train wreck when applied to aerospace, military systems and gigantic procurements. Oops.

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.

Re:Drone It

[aix tom]

Especially the one belonging to Vladimir Putin.

I wonder how the same dogfight test would play out against the Sukhoi PAK FA, the somewhat comparable new Russian stealth fighter. The F-35 seems to have a maximum g-load of 9g, while the PAK-FA has one of over 9g. The thrust/weight ratio of the PAK FA also is higher, at 1.02 to 1.36 depending on configuration and fuel load, compared to the F-35s of 0.87 to 1.07. (At least as far as the "official/unclassified" specifications seem to go)

Re:Drone It

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that the US always is fighting the last war. After 9/11, a lot of money has been spent to deal with asymmetrical warfare, essentially fighting Vietnam but in desert country. Drones are useful, because (if intel is correct), they can do relatively pinpoint strikes without videos of civilian death tolls hitting Al Jazeera the next day (again, assuming intel was right, and the place was an ammo stash and not a madrasa full of little ones.) In reality, the only way to fight a war like ISIS is to do what was done to Germany -- level all cities (and all buildings in the city) that even are rumored to have insurgents. Without the commitment to do actual, yucky warfare that completely breaks all resistance... half-ass measures just creates emboldened enemies (think "Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!".)

I really wonder if the US could fight a war against an organized country without a major sea change. The circus about military contracts was a major blow to readiness. First it was no-bid contracts... then contracts only given to HUBs that had relatively little to no experience. There is something humiliating about basic things like shower heads not being grounded, causing fatal electrocution and batteries with cracks in them repaired with Loctite.

The last time a "full-ass" conflict was done... was under George Bush Sr, when he dealt with Iraq invading an ally. The US came in, cleaned house, re-established Kuwait, and left without damaging Saddam so much that Iran or other outsiders felt they had a free invitation to invade the now-weakend Iraq. Of course, his son destroyed the country resulting in a power vacuum and the crap we have today.

The US also has the weakness that propaganda works on the people, but not the other way round. ISIS's sole reason they exist is because of YouTube and CNN. If their gory videos didn't make it out of the region, other nations wouldn't be recognizing ISIS's flag as a sovereign country, and they wouldn't be getting recruits worldwide from disaffected people. You get some FX artists good at moulage work, grab some kids and babies, make a video about a missile hit with all the damage done, and US people will be protesting in the streets for surrender, peace at any cost. No political official in the US has the cajones to stop the press from showing videos (even faked) 24/7. Losing the propaganda game lost Afghanistan and Iraq.

Who knows... maybe true war between nations has become obsolete... but that was said before World War 1, and it only took a month for uneasy neighbors to become dire enemies, and in the age of the Internet, it might just take only seconds to minutes before all hell breaks loose globally.

Re:Drone It

[CronoCloud]

Cowards. But thats become the American way.

So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak.
â" Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The art of using troops is this:
â¦â¦When ten to the enemyâ(TM)s one, surround him;
â¦â¦When five times his strength, attack him;
â¦â¦If double his strength, divide him;
â¦â¦If equally matched you may engage him;
â¦â¦If weaker numerically, be capable of withdrawing;
â¦â¦And if in all respects unequal, be capable of eluding him,
â¦â¦â¦.for a small force is but booty for one more powerful.â
â" Sun Tzu, the Art of War

There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all Hell. -- William Tecumseh Sherman

I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country. -- Patton

The American Military has advantages, it uses them. It is not cowardly to use one's military advantages. If I have a gun that shoots a mile and yours only shoots a half a mile, why should I close to a half a mile, I should stay out of your range and kill you when you are easy prey and can't shoot back.

Re:Drone It

[Martin Blank]

The main problem is the Marines wanting a replacement for the Harrier, something that can do STOL/STOVL operations, and that is completely under their control. The JSF was already under development, and the contractors said they could figure out how to make it fit the Marine requirements. What we got was a fighter that can't dogfight, a strike aircraft with a pitifully small payload, and the political impossibility of starting over from scratch.

One of the lessons that came out of this and the Zumwalt-class destroyer programs is that the military should stop trying to cram every feature into a program. While the proliferation of designs led to unwieldy logistics in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, the attempts to simplify everything have resulted in a reduced overall capability and the need to extend the lifetimes of planes the new projects were meant to replace. The F-15 and F-16 will still be around for decades, and may form a larger part of the tactical strike platforms than the USAF would like to admit. The same will probably be the case with the F/A-18E against the Navy's F-35C.

Dedicated designs are the most efficient. Some of them turn out to be spectacular at other jobs. The F-15 was designed with the adage "not a pound for air-to-ground" and yet from it was developed the F-15E Strike Eagle, an extremely effective air-to-ground platform. Hopefully the military is listening when it goes trying to build its next platform, a replacement for the B-1, B-2, and B-52 expected to come online between 2035 and 2045.

Re:Drone It

[amorsen]

Drone pilots don't seem to have much of a conscience either. They are far removed from the action, the consequences, less involved.

Drone pilots suffer at least as much from PTSD as regular pilots. However, their work environment is tailored to ensure that their kill performance is excellent. If a pilot who is in a plane does not take a shot, it seems to be considered more of a judgement call based on what they saw, whereas if a drone pilot fails to take a shot, all the video evidence is there to go through in the debriefing. Those who fail to perform or who want to leave the assignment are threatened with dishonourable discharge.

Do not judge them as people without conscience. They are victims too.

Re:Drone It

[amiga3D]

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.

Re:Drone It

[bradrum]

I don't think the A-10 (or even a replacement) is meant to go head to head with the best AA systems that the enemy has to offer. It is meant to loiter around behind the front until called in for close air support. I am guessing that some kind of air defense suppression unit would precede the A-10 type aircraft so that it could operate and do its job.

I understand that AA systems are much more mobile and have higher performance than when the A-10 was designed so maybe a replacement that has higher performance or is harder for modern AA to target would be in order. But to say that close in air support aircraft are obsolete seems a pretty brash thing to say.

Re:Drone It

[NicBenjamin]

And the F-16 is such a terrible design that it only sold 4,500 units to 24 countries. Much worse then the twin-engine F-18 sales of 1,480 to 8 countries.

Moreover it's hard to do twin engine VTOL, and the Marines insisted. They probably should not have been humored (or should have been humored by being allowed to by their own, special, Marine Corps plane), but once that decision was made twin engines went out the window.

Re:Drone It

[Ecuador]

See, that's the problem -- as long as they see themselves in either role, it won't work. Perhaps if they were isolated at youth, taught to fight each other, and then misled into thinking it was just a really good video game or simulation of some sort. I bet they could make a movie out of that.

No, it would suck as a movie, Hollywood would completely miss the point of the story. Better if it was a book. Or even a series of books - you could even narrate it from different points of view.

Re:Drone It

[subreality]

The idea was better stuff, quicker and cheaper. It turned out - like some of the lessons Boeing learned with the 787 - that agile development may work great at Facebook but it's a train wreck when applied to aerospace, military systems and gigantic procurements. Oops.

One of the basic ideas of agile dev is to get a partially-working system in the field ASAP. Doing so lets you figure out much sooner (10% into a project) that the design requirements are wrong, and that you need to rethink what you're doing. In this case, the loop wasn't closed - there were plenty of early signs that it was going wrong, but the project just kept going forward without reevaluating the basic requirements (VTOL being the most obvious case).

I don't think that means agile dev won't work for aerospace generally. It's more an indication that the organizations involved (governments and military contractors) are too heavy to handle an agile process: imagine trying to go back to congress once a month to get the requirements updated based on dev feedback. Smaller, independent companies like SpaceX can manage a much faster, cheaper cycle on the space side, and I think it's possible for a new military aero supplier to do the same.

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.

That wasn't only seen in hindsight. It's obvious that adding complicated, heavy components to something that's supposed to be fast and reliable is going to create problems. It was more of a "let's see how well we can apply modern materials and design to make this work" kind of thing... Initial tests showed it was possible, but a bit further into the program it was clear that it was still too much of a tradeoff to be worthwhile.

Re:Drone It

[trout007]

I actually just made it up. Of course it can black out a pilot. I just wanted to see what score I would get.

Re:Drone It

[DerekLyons]

One of the lessons that came out of this and the Zumwalt-class destroyer programs is that the military should stop trying to cram every feature into a program. While the proliferation of designs led to unwieldy logistics in the 60s, 70s, and 80s

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.

Re:Drone It

[inhuman_4]

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.

just let it go

[thaylin]

We have tools built decades earlier that was better. Why cant we just let this go, a trillion dollars is a lot of friggen money, dont keep adding to it. If the vendor cannot come through on their promises cut them and go with someone who will.

Re:just let it go

[Penguinisto]

Welcome to Sunk Cost.

Sucks, but breaking that addiction is incredibly hard... doubly so when egos are just as much on the line as money.

Big giant scam ...

[gstoddart]

This damned plane has been a big scam from the beginning.

It was going to be all things to all people, but in reality it was a way to get other countries to pay for the R&D of a huge wishlist of things which was never going to come true.

As someone who lives in one of the countries who got suckered into the F-35, this program has been nothing but lies and bullshit since it was announced.

This was the military listing a huge wishlist of things, including a pony, they were going to do.

Instead, it's underperforming, not up to the claims, over budget, years behind schedule, and still a crappy replacement for the things it was supposed to be doing.

Everything about the F-35 has been a pile of lies of bullshit since it was announced. And it seems like everybody (except the people selling it and the people who got conned into signing up for it) has know this for that entire time.

I hope everybody says "piss off" and walks away from the contract.

This plane is proving what people have been saying for the last decade -- that it was never going to live up to the promises made.

As a supposed air-superiority platform, this is an utter failure. I bet they don't even have the VTOL version working yet.

Re:Big giant scam ...

[zamboni1138]

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 project has been a success

[Snotnose]

It was designed to send money to certain locales and pockets. It's done a great job of it.

Not much of a plane tho.

Re:Dogfights?! What year is it?!

[gstoddart]

WTF?! When was the last time you've ever heard of a dogfight?
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.

Well, the reality is, like shock and awe, you can't just pretend you don't have to cover certain parts of warfare.

So, bombing the shit out of stuff and thinking people will become demoralized and welcome you with open arms ... utterly useless if you can't put boots on the ground. For the same reason that bombing ISIS only goes so far.

And, likewise, if you can't maintain air superiority in an up close and personal manner, you can't do the roles like close air ground support. So if you do have boots on the ground, you can't keep them safe if you get your ass kicked.

People can pretend this will never be needed again. That doesn't mean if you ever found yourself in an actual war you wouldn't.

So, if the people you're up against have things which can beat you down in a dogfight, you could quickly find yourself realizing you're ill equipped for a given situation.

Somewhere along the line they decided to make the Swiss-Army knife of aircraft, which it turns out is terribly suited to most of its applications.

Which is moot, because the plane is so late and over budget it should never go into production .. in which case it's years of wasted money and effort to come up with a solution which doesn't work.

Which, sadly, was what people said from the beginning.

Re:Not to say it's unnecessary

[Major Blud]

"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.

Yes dogfights still happen

[sjbe]

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.

This is why we can't have nice things

[pinkstuff]

• $30 Billion per year to would end world hunger
• $17 Billion per year currently spent by the US on the Nasa space program
• $4.8 Billion per year currently spent by the US on cancer research

• And the US spends $1000 Billion+ on a plane, designed to kill. Imagine, if you can, a world without war, it's easy if you try.

Re:This is why we can't have nice things

[GuB-42]

Can you please stop with this $xxx can end world hunger nonsense ?
First of all, people don't eat money. So if there are 10 people and food for 9, you can give as much money as you want and it won't change the fact that one of them won't eat.
Ok, so let's be a little smarter and use this money to better manage our agriculture. Now we have enough rations for everyone. World hunger ended... or is it ?
Not yet, because we also have to prevent local chieftains from diverting this food supply and use it to assert their power. Basically, it means some kind of a police force is needed to make sure food really goes to who is hungry. Now we have food going to people in need. Word hunger ends... for now.
Because, you see, in third world countries, birth rate is sky high, balanced by high mortality. Lower the mortality rate and you get exponential growth, which mean more demand for food, making the "food for everyone" program harder to maintain. So we need to either hope for a rapid transition or use drastic measures like China did with the one child policy.

As for war, it may be the most effective way to limit world hunger : war kills and dead people don't need to eat. A nightmarish reasoning that is hopefully flawed but I think not more so than your pipe dream.

No Source, No Story - complete bullshit

[whodunit]

The big red flag that nobody caught (since nobody actually reads the articles) is that the story is completely unsourced. Where did the author of this blog get his hands on this information? Why can't we see it? What's the name of it? When was it declassified? A quick google search finds the same story being echoed verbatim by the likes of the Daily Mail and others; all of which simply link back to this blog as the source. Until we see an actual source, it's bullshit - how are we supposed to know they didn't just make this up?

The article summary said "can't turn or climb fast enough" but the article itself showcases the pilot complaining about nose-rate only - i.e. turn rate. As anyone who knows anything about Air Combat Maneuvering can tell you, turn rate is the LEAST important aspect of maneuverability. Roll rate is far, far more important, as every aerodynamic maneuver aside from a loop begins with a roll. Aircraft with superior roll rate can shake better-turning fighters through maneuvers like the rolling scissors. Unsurprisingly, its through tactics like these that the F4F Wildcat held its own against the Japanese Zero, and when the Wildcat was up-engined to become the F6F Hellcat it dominated the Zero flat-out. The US Navy would later adopt the F4F Phantom, a fighter that eschewed turn-rate entirely in favor of absolutely insane thrust (the jet set several world speed records.) They were told this plane could not dogfight - and then pilots like Duke Cunningham defeated nimble little MiG-17s in close combat.

Once upon a time a group of industry experts who thought the Japanese had it right formed a clique named the "Lightweight Fighter Mafia," and their efforts eventually produced the F-16. Pleased with their accomplishment, they spent their time since then spewing BS about every single aircraft to come after it, including the F-18. To this day you hear people claiming the F-18 is a "turkey" and "can't dogfight" and that the navalized F-16 was passed over by the Navy due to sheer inter-service rivalry and pigheadedness. That this bullshit flies in the face of actual pilot accounts doesn't seem to slow them down a whit. The F-22 had its turn on the bullseye, and now it's the F-35s turn.

In light of the decades-old pattern of "sneer at the new expensive jet" popular amongst industry professionals and armchair warriors alike, a complete failure of the article to quote any opinion on the F-35s vertical maneuvering ability (the go-to counter to turnfighter tactics) and the simple fact that the source is completely undisclosed, I'm calling bullshit on this one - and on everyone who decided to sling out a pithy comment without doing a five-second bullshit check. I thought /. readerbase was supposed to be smart?

War is Boring is shit

[inhuman_4]

Oh look, another F-35 hack job by David Axe from War is Boring. Maybe if he wasn't so consistently full of shit, or actually had a source to quote I'd bother to read his blog.

First, it's a strike fighter, why the fuck are people getting so worked up about dog-fighting? You know that these planes are not yet rated for their full flight envelope, or you would if Axe did his job. You would also know that the F-35 has more than twice the range of the F-16. Imagine that, a strike fighter that carrier more weight in fuel than point defence fighter. It's almost like dog-fighting wasn't the primary design goal. You know what else can't dogfight? The A-10 that guys like Axe are always furiously masturbating over.

Second, this isn't the 1970s. Sure dogfights may happen, but a hell of a lot less than BVR attacks and SAMs. And before anyone starts talking about Vietnam, go look at the numbers for that war. The little blurb you got about F-4 Phantom from watching Top Gun is wrong. For every plane lost in a dogfight, two were lost to AA missiles, and five were lost to SAMs, in the fucking 70s. Lord knows the world hasn't had any other conflicts since then from which to draw lessons.

Third, it's the most expensive plane program in history at $1T? No shit, the program is to build and maintain almost 3,000 fighters over 50 years. In fact is "almost" as expensive as the $3T to keep doing what we are doing: pumping out a half dozen different air frames with no common supply chain so that each one can be good at exactly one mission. But if you still think it is too expensive, I have to ask, compared to what? The F-22? Not even close. The Eurofighter? Lol. Russia's latest vaporware? Sure if they ever build more than some prototypes. Some last generation platform with no stealth? Sure that will make a great strike platform against an air defence system in contested air space. The money you save on a "cheap" F-16 Block 60s at $70 million vs an F-35A at ~$85-90 million, won't even cover the cost of all the extra shit you have to attach to it to F-16 to get the same performance.

These endless hack jobs on the F-35 project need to stop. This isn't 2008, we have over 100 of these things flying already. They are a mostly known quantity, and they greatly out perform the systems they are going to replace.

Re:Centered tags?

[RDW]

Seriously slashdot? What is this crap?
They are slowly fucking up the front page design, one annoying step after another.

Inspired by the stealth design of the F-35 ('Operation Boiled Frog'), the Lockheed-Dice production team are hoping to fly under the radar by sneakily changing the front page one element at a time, so that in 6 months time the site will look exactly like Beta. However, as in the case of the F-35, the final product will be superficially flashy, but less functional than the previous design.