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F-35 Might Be Outperformed By Fourth-Generation Fighters
savuporo writes: Defensetech.org posted a story relaying a report from National Security Network titled "Thunder without Lightning: The High Costs and Limited Benefits of the F-35 Program". According to the story, F-35 is outperformed or showing only slight advantages in simulations and limited real-life tests by decades old 4th-generation fighters like F-16 and F18, but also MiG-29 Fulcrum and Su-27 Flanker, that are of course made by Russia and latter also produced in China.
The story also refers back to earlier report last month of F-35 performing poorly in dogfights. "In one simulation subcontracted by the RAND Corporation, the F-35 incurred a loss exchange ratio of 2.4–1 against Chinese Su-35s. That is, more than two F-35s were lost for each Su-35 shot down."
America surely has a better fighter jet up its sleeve!!!1! The pentagon must be secretly spending the money elsewhere!
Why is dogfight a parameter in assessing 5th generation plane?
It's like saying my car sucks because I can't use a crank to start the engine like the old cars could.
"Blah blah blah." - [citation needed]
When reading articles about the F-35, you have to remember that the term "Fourth Generation" and "Fifth Generation" are terms that Lockheed Martin came up with to provide some marketing cachet for the F-22 and F-35.
There is no strong definition for the term and the best description that I seen is that "Fifth Generation" fighters employ stealth and undetectable communications. This definition is used with the F-35 to indicate that it will sneak up to enemy aircraft and launch missiles before the enemy aircraft know that it is there - the F-35 doesn't have the dog fighting capabilities of the F-22 or that of other fighters.
People seem to forget that the F-35's capabilities were first defined after the first Gulf War in which F-16s and other fighter-bombers could not detect Scud missile launchers or approach ones that were detected by other platforms before being detected and the launchers moved out of harm's way or camouflaged in such a way that they couldn't be detected. Then deciding that the basic platform could be extended to a SVTOL for the Marines and a carrier aircraft further doomed it's ability to maneuver effectively against other aircraft that were designed for air-air combat.
Unfortunately, the US(AF) has put all its eggs into the F-35 basket. I don't see there being a lot of opportunities to order more F-16s or F-15s (with the F-22 line shut down).
This means that in future conflicts, the US may lose the "air dominance" that has been used in war planning over the last fifty years.
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The F-35 (program) generates FAR more pork than competing fighter jets. That's the only performance that matters. This is just like the NASA projects that are legally required to be completed, then mothballed because they're already obsolete, only with a hint of 'design by committee' to help sink it.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Clearly this can only be solved by immediately investing in a multi-trillion dollar program to develop the next generation of stealthy dogfighting fighter jets.
I'm not sure the Joint Strike Fighter is designed for dog fights in the first place. I think they're conceived to engage enemy aircraft beyond visible range and function more as a networked fighter platform. In a lecture on flying the F-35, David Berke made the point that to be tactically successful in an F-35 he had to change his approach to combat flying versus his previous experience flying Hornets. He described the learning curve as: 1 month loving it because it was new, followed by 6 months hating it because he felt like he didn't know what he was doing anymore, followed by another 6 months during which he got the hang of the new approach.
There's also talk that the F-35 could be getting a new engine in the 2020s which will improve its performance.
The future's probably in souped-up drones anyhow. You don't have to worry about pilot safety etc. and can gamble more in a dog-fight. Manned planes will not go away, but will become a niche.
Table-ized A.I.
The F-35 may have impressive tech, stealth, electronics and advanced missiles, but the Thunderbolt II is literally a flying tank that is able to take a lot of abuse and still keep flying. It also delivers an incredible amount of damage and its operating history is stellar. It's a great morale booster for ground troops, but the US air force wants to get rid of it.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Just buy some Su's. We buy everything else from China.
Table-ized A.I.
It's hard to jam every frequency, short of EMP weapons, which only affect stuff for a limited time, and your own fighters.
But drones may require more autonomous fighting when bandwidth is limited by jamming. In other words, AI. Sky Net :-)
Table-ized A.I.
No, the cons outpay the pros.
So they did their thrust/weight and wing loading comparison by loading all jets with 50% of internal fuel.
This comparison favours planes with small internal fuel tanks.
F-35 has huge internal fuel tanks, it can fly much longer with internal fuel than most other jet fighters (which need external fuel tanks, which are NOT calculated in these numbers) to fly as far.
Load all jets with amount of fuel that makes them fly about equally far and the numbers switch considerably, on favour of F-35.
The problem is they didn't build enough F-22s for that to be a viable strategy. There are only 184 of them, which is a pitifully small number when you spread them over all the potential hotspots. If even a handful are shot down it'll be catastrophic to any plan that depends on them.
... to be fair the US seem to have great success with their drones.
Sure it may not be as "fair" and may also be "terrorism" to hang them above people bombing them at will. And maybe it may also not work that great against a technical advanced enemy ("Ukrainian" rebels with Russian equipment (such as Borisoglebsk 2? has managed to shut down GPS, mobile systems and communication in Ukraine: http://www.svd.se/putins-nya-s...)
But yeah. If the current jets don't cut it will we really see new designs with humans in them? Guess higher resistance against electronic warfare would be the one reason for that to happen?
The drones seem to work so well and one don't seem to want to have humans killed unnecessarily.
Droideka.
Lasers? What are efficient ways to disturb light/lasers? Most efficient mirror?
The whole anti-F35 argument rests on the report that one (1) F117 was shot down by Serbian forces using VHF technology. Otherwise, they are only talking about the possibility of long range tracking... not fire control radar. And in the case of that F117, there was no mention of the effective RCS.
The arguments about dependency on forward bases is destroyed by VTOL capability, a fact that was not even touched on in the discussion. Similarly, while it was mentioned that the F18 could drop external fuel tanks in combat, no mention was made of the fact that the F35 could drop (or fire) external munitions in a similar situation.
Overall, the review seems shallow and slanted against the F35. Personally, I think the military has far too many toys and their budget should be cut in half. But that does not make me blind to the sloppy arguments of this review.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Last but not least: http://breakingdefense.com/201...
"“a guy with maybe 100 hours in the F-35 versus a guy with 1,500+ Viper hours? I’ve seen thousand-hour F-16 guys in two-bag D-models beat up on brand new wingmen in clean, single-seat jets. It happens. It’s the reality of the amount of experience in your given cockpit.
“Let’s see how it [the F-35] does when guys who are proficient in developed tactics do [sic] against guys with similar amounts experience–the realm of the bros in the operational test or Weapons School environment.”
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
F-35 is not meant to be a mission-specific airplane. It's meant to do many different things, and do each one of them very poorly in the name of saving cost.
Oh wait... it doesn't save cost either. In fact it is orders of magnitude more expensive than 4th gen fighters. But, look at the bright said, at least it's an economic boon for certain well-connected congressional districts.
I don't think anybody in the AF believes that F-35 seriously replaces the A-10. It was just an excuse to get rid of A-10. The Air Force simply wants out of CAS business, hoping that the Army helicopters and precision strike from fighter-bomber jets will be good enough.
Even though AF's main job for the last 20 years was about trucking the American troops and equipment back and forth to the site of deployment as well as providing CAS operations, the Air Force generals hate to be seen that way. Their minds are flying in the blue skies, where the non-existing glorious dog fights will be happening between super duper high tech fighter jets. That's why they spend their brain power so much on procuring those fighter jets, even though those are the least likely AF aircraft to see any real action.
Far fetched claim, you say? Have you read any news, or watched any videos of the air shows around the world? Gen5 and Gen6 aircraft are flying, today. We can't get our shitty Gen5 into service, because it's a non-flying piece of shit. Pilots used to claim that they could fly a brick, if they had enough power. But, I never heard a pilot claim that he could fly a fuckiing turd - and that's the F-35, a huge god-damned turd.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Dang - look at this - I'm way behind, myself. INDIA is a co-developer of a Gen5 fighter!
http://www.defensenews.com/sto...
Even Pakistan seems to be in on the act
http://breakingdefense.com/201...
This list is interesting, in that there are ten contenders, some of which only offer photos of static model planes.
http://www.wonderslist.com/fif...
Note that the Chinese offering is photographed while landing on an AIRCRAFT CARRIER - something the F-35 doesn't seem capable of doing yet.
http://english.chinamil.com.cn...
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You are stepping close to the "dirty little secret" of the USAF, that the F15 on up they have had to put limiters on the planes lower than its real abilities because the simple fact is the planes can pull off moves that will kill the pilot, the meatsack behind the stick just can't handle what the plane is actually capable of.
Which is only relevant during some types of air combat maneuvering and you may be putting a bit too fine a point on it. There is a LOT more to it than that. The F15 can pull more Gs in *some* maneuvers than pilots can handle but not all of them.
This is why building new planes (instead of simply building more of the teen series) is not only wasteful its pointless, the planes we have now can already do more than any human body can take.
There is more to the success of a fighter or bomber than maneuverability in a dog fight. How good is the radar and targeting? How fast and how well can it identify targets? How fast can the plane accelerate? What is it's service ceiling? How does it perform at various altitudes? How fuel efficient is it? How expensive is it to service? How good is the pilot's situational awareness? What sort of support infrastructure does it need? What sort of runway is required? How detectible is it by radar or other targeting systems?
Even if the plane isn't a step up in maneuverability there is PLENTY of room to improve fighters and attack aircraft in a multitude of other ways. I don't pretend to know if the F35 is better or worse than previous generations of jets but saying that humans are already at their G-load limits isn't a sufficient argument against it.
The enemy will always outnumber them by dozens if not hundreds to one. We have gotten lucky that the only ones we have been fighting are goat herders, because if we fought somebody like Russia or China with an abundance of fourth gen fighters? Our new toys would be facing 20+ to 1 odds and probably get spanked right out of the sky.
The battle doctrine of the US military takes this explicitly into account. Remember that during the Cold War they had to deal with the fact that the US might be asked to defend Western Europe from an invasion from the Soviet Union. The Soviets had more tanks they could put into the theater of combat than the US could so the only real option when you are outnumbered is to have better gear and better training. You HAVE to be able to win engagements at a better than 1:1 ratio. At least in recent days the US has proven more than capable of doing that in conventional warfare. Unless the US were so stupid as to attack China or Russia directly I don't think any country in the world would want to tangle directly with the US military.
Saying the US would be facing 20:1 odds simply isn't supported by the facts. The US has FAR more combat aircraft than any other country and the US has exactly half (11/22) of the world's supply of aircraft carriers.
And that's the point that's being missed in this discussion, the fact that the US hasn't really gone up against anyone in head-to-head air combat since the Vietnam War
You mean except for the first Gulf War? While it was a huge mismatch the Iraqi air force had plenty of Mig-29, Mig-25, Mig-23 and Mirage F1 fighters which were reasonably modern at the time of the conflict. 36 Iraqi aircraft were shot down in aerial combat. That counts as going head to head even if the outcome was decidedly lopsided.
Honestly there are only a handful of countries that really could go head to head with US airpower and have a prayer of not getting massacred and even then it would really only be over their home country or close to it. The US has more planes, (generally) better planes and pilots as well trained as any in the world PLUS better infrastructure like AWACS and refueling, not to mention exactly half the worlds supply of aircraft carriers.
Northrop built the F-20 back in the late 70's. It had better dogfighting performance than the F-16, and was cheaper and simpler. To some extent, it's dogfighting performance was too good; of the three that were built two were lost due to the pilots losing consciousness during high-G maneuvers.
They built it because the US government had said that they wouldn't sell F-16's to the rest of the world, as it was too good. Unfortunately for Northrop, they changed their mind -- and as the F-16 was so well known it won out.
The remaining F-20 is hanging in the California Science Center in LA, it's a beautiful plane.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
All of your links say that those foreign 5th generation fighters are IN DEVELOPMENT. In contrast, the F-22 has been in operational service since 2005. Here is a quote from your second to last link describing the F-22, "The world’s premier fifth Generation fighter aircraft." ...
I'm not a big fan of the F-35, but those other countries are going to find out that building an operational 5th gen fighter is a lot harder than putting some CAD and photoshop drawings together and assembling a prototype without full functionality; actually some of them are finding that out already. Here is a quote from your second link, "Despite this, Russia will need to cope with the increasing criticism voiced by India, which is partnering with Moscow on developing the aircraft, amid concerns over delivery delays and technical shortfalls of the program." If the Russians are having troubles, I doubt those other programs are going very smoothly.
I can't believe I am defending the F-35
I guess the question is what the role of the A-10 is in a world of drones.
It's definitely one of the most successful airframes in military history though.
You are stepping close to the "dirty little secret" of the USAF, that the F15 on up they have had to put limiters on the planes lower than its real abilities because the simple fact is the planes can pull off moves that will kill the pilot, the meatsack behind the stick just can't handle what the plane is actually capable of.
This is why building new planes (instead of simply building more of the teen series) is not only wasteful its pointless, the planes we have now can already do more than any human body can take. instead of pissing more money down a rathole for the F35 we should simply buy more of the teen series and if the fighter jocks still want their 1980s "stealth" tech? Just buy the F15 Silent Eagle which the last numbers I saw showed you could buy 3 of them for less than the cost of a single F35 and still have change left over.
And am I the only one who feels like we are taking pages from the playbook of the Axis in WWII and making the same dumb moves? Instead of building affordable planes we keep sinking billions into "wonder weapons" that have the exact same outcome as the 262 and Panther in that they 1.- Cost too much per unit, 2.- Are VERY prone to breakdown so 3.- They spend more time in the shop than they do in battle so 4.- The enemy will always outnumber them by dozens if not hundreds to one. We have gotten lucky that the only ones we have been fighting are goat herders, because if we fought somebody like Russia or China with an abundance of fourth gen fighters? Our new toys would be facing 20+ to 1 odds and probably get spanked right out of the sky.
With modern combat the way it is, it is very difficult for rising brass to make a name for themselves. In WWII, Korea, even Vietnam, very heavy air- to air combat and massive bombing campaigns allowed officers to build reputations and further their careers. Commanding a squadron with a couple aces in it will fasttrack you for promotion, so will orchestrating the logistics of a 6-month bombing campaign. Hell, even running a bunch of successful Wild Weasel type attacks will get you medals and promotions real quick. But strafing missions against a convoy of technicals or dropping a couple bombs on some mortar or rocket positions, what does that get you? These days, the only way to boost a career and get your name out there is to get it attached to a major acquisition program. What's a couple billion dollars in tax payer money wasted if it gets you an extra star on your collar, makes you powerful friends on Capital Hill, and secures you a good consulting job after you retire?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Actually, as I recall from the 80's, the US never renounced the first use of tactical nuclear weapons due to the numerical superiority of the Warsaw Pact forces over NATO in Europe -- that was the NATO ultimate force multiplier.
That is more or less correct. Even if they did "renounce" such tactics it wouldn't have meant anything really. A promise by a nation state can be revoked at any time.
And I recall the plans of how the USAF was going to beat the Russian Air Force by having each F-15 shoot down 5 (or was it 10?) MIG-21s. No one know how that would have really turned out.
Basically correct I think. The US would have had to use their superior airpower combined with available NATO ground forces to slow the Soviets until they could get reinforcements across the Atlantic ocean. They would have been outnumbered for a time - how long would be a question of effectiveness and how fast reinforcements could be brought up. It would be pretty desperate for a while - trading territory for time.
But if it were a full out Soviet tank invasion there is a HIGH probability that tactical nukes would have come into play. That was the real deterrent. If the soviets massed their tanks they would be vulnerable to nukes. If they didn't they would be operationally ineffective and vulnerable to US air power.
Though the Cold War has ended this situation still technically exists since Russia still has substantial ground forces. The problem is lessened with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union but I'm sure the US military and NATO still plans for it - just in case.