Yet despite these problems, the F-35 remains the most commercially successful airframe in the world, with over 670 sold, and 2,500 on order from US-allied countries all over the world. What could explain this sales pipeline, if the F-35 was the boondoggle this article implies it to be?
For the first sales (Australia and either Norway or sweden, i dont remember), the US and lockheed Martin hid away the issues and lied on operating cost and availability.
For sales to NATO: you have to buy a plane that can carry the US bomb if you don't have one yourself (despite the fact that nukes will probably never be launched from aircrafts if at all).
For sales against competition, i don't have a lot of data, but you can check the Swiss 2022 competition between the F16, F18, Rafale, Gripen and F35, public data is scarce but basically, the Rafale and F18 would have been better on most points except VTOL and stealth. The choice however was probably economic (as while VTOL is nice, Swiss short airports are still longer than carriers, and stealth isn't that much of a factor in defense, especially in the Alps): they bought planes for less than half the price NATO countries did, and 60% of the money will be spent locally: basically 20% of the cost Germany and other NATO countries paid.
> despite the fact that nukes will probably never be launched from aircrafts if at all
"if at all": that's deterrence. I don't think any nuke-able aircraft small-country customer intent is to launch, but you gotta have the ability to.
"from aircrafts": when you have no submarines/silos and carting ground launch platforms around is impractical for your country, aircraft is the only remaining option to display deterrence factors.
If the US need Belgium planes to launch nukes, well, europe is truly fucked anyway.
If the US had the French doctrine i.e. any army moving toward France's strategic assets will be targeted with a "warning" shot (yes, the warning shot is to be nuclear), but it does not, US nuclear force is for retaliation only. It will never be launched from planes in the foreseeable future. Which is more than the operational lifetime of F35.
No, this is bully tactics and frankly i really, really hope that Trump dissolve NATO so Belgium don't have to buy planes that can fly 30% of the time.
Norway for sure, they have been in NATO since they helped found it in 1949. Us Swedes needed a while to think about it, and joined on March 7, 2024. Sweden does not have the F-35, since we build our own [1] multi-role military aircraft.
Typhoon would have been a good fit for Canada but the US vetoed it.
The F-35 has never been one of the "most commercially successful airframes". 670 sold is actually a pretty low number, considering its supposedly multi-role capabilities and its rare VTOL feature.
The sales pipeline started being agreed when the plane was still a concept, and it's almost exclusively a feature of American foreign policy: the US government worked hard, over almost 40 years, to ensure a significant part of design and production costs (and risks resulting from such) would be absorbed by allies through guaranteed sales. NATO countries have been under huge continuous and sustained pressure to buy it and to standardize their systems around it. Quite a few European governments found themselves struggling to publicly justify their choices in this matter, because in the end it mostly boiled down to "the Americans told us to buy it or else". The F-35 project simply would not be allowed to fail in the market.
As far as I know, no other weapon ever enjoyed such massive and forceful support by so many US administrations throughout the decades.
> What could explain this sales pipeline, if the F-35 was the boondoggle this article implies it to be?
Easy, desire to please American politicians to fetch political support from the USA and strengthen your position as military ally. Ideally, you will be looking so scary that you wouldn’t have to actually use the plane.
” you will be looking so scary that you wouldn’t have to actually use the plane.”
I’d say this is the main intent. But not only because of the political aspects.
AFAIK the plane is intended to be used like an ultra-mobile target aquisition and launch platform designed to engage targets Really Far Away and then return to base (any base since it’s NATO compatible). It’s not really supposed to engage in Top Gun -style dogfighting.
So the main question is the capability of the radar and the missiles you carry, not necessarily the air frame itself. And as I understand those are fit for purpose.
Ofc if you are launching missiles far away for defensive purposes surely you could do it a lot cheaper, and that I would see as the main point of critique.
I’m not saying the issues are not issues, but as a non-expert-paying-customer (my country bought 64 of them I think) as long as you get airborn, acquire target lock and can launch missile, you are more or less using the offering as promised.
> What could explain this sales pipeline, if the F-35 was the boondoggle this article implies it to be?
The overwhelming USA sphere of influence over its "allies". I don't really see a NATO member buying new fighter jets from China or Russia instead without that causing a big ruckus.
Sweden sells a really nice NATO-compatible multirole jet.
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The US isn't the only NATO member that produces fighter jets. EU members of NATO make the Eurofighter Typhoon, the Dassault Rafale, and the Saab JAS 39 Gripen.
You buy F-35s to protect yourself from the mafia .
[deleted]
4,600 F16s have been built, obviously it has the time advantage, but still, once F35 beats that number, I think it will be at the top.
There's often a certain aspect of "no-one ever got fired for buying IBM" to these sorts of things.
Its basically a arcade-chip tradeable for us-protection within the western worldorder.
The article is sensational and deeply misleading.
Yes, the plane has a lot of bugs. It's got complicated software and hardware. You can't compare it to the relatively simple older designs that didn't deal with stealth.
Yes they don't need to test dogfights because war isn't a video game. When the enemy sees the f35 it is after it already sent the missile in your direction. You don't need to dogfight if you're an invisible ghost that can kill from a distance.
The f16 had a ton of bugs such as flipping over when south of the equator. It's a much better machine now and the f35 has all the makings to be a similar leap forward.
> The f16 had a ton of bugs such as flipping over when south of the equator.
The page that comment links to lists some (minor) problems found on the real plane too though.
It's the most modern jet that can be acquired. The Gripen, Rafale, Typhoon are all very good jets, but they're around half a generation behind; they're still popular and acquired by various countries because they better fit their requirements (or because the US doesn't want to sell them F-35).
Unfortunately we do not measure combat weapons in terms of commercial success.
We measure them in terms of lethality and reliability.
[dead]
>What could explain this sales pipeline, if the F-35 was the boondoggle this article implies it to be?
A lack of actual proven fight-testing.
But it did the most extensive flight test program for anything in history [0]. I worked on this program for years. I do not think a lack of flight testing is the problem. The problems are many, but in short:
1) Lack of competent, forceful oversight from the program office. DOT&E reports about the F-35 program have, for years, given the program office recommendations that it has failed to follow.
2) A prime contractor (Lockheed-Martin) that restricts access to its data. The F-35 program had to sue LM in federal court to get access to the necessary data to make the Joint Simulation Environment (JSE) fully functional. In the end, the case was settled, but only after six years of battle. The report linked in the parent article describes how maintainers are not allowed access to servicing procedures that they have on other aircraft. I have seen this personally in flight test. Even something like a gear swing requires an LM certified Field Services Engineer to conduct.
3) A completely broken software release process. For many years in developmental flight test, we received software builds that were just entirely broken, as in, the jet would not start with that software loaded. The C2D2 process was advertised as fixing this, but really it was just a new name for the same old fly-fix-fly process. The parent report details entire versions that were skipped in the IOT&E process because they were so buggy. The program could have turned JSE into the final stop for new software builds before hitting the fleet, but it chose to pivot entirely into training instead.
I could keep going. A decade working in a program like this gives you a long list of things to talk about. But I'll stop here for now.
I highly recommend reading contemporary reporting on what are considered wildly successful aircraft (like the teen series F-14/15/16).
Hint: Just change one number and they're indistinguishable from reporting on the F-35.
Is it? The 737 has been sold 12000 times, with thousands of orders in the pipeline. The A320 is not far behind, but only got introduced twenty years later
Even if you just consider military airframes, the MiG-21 has been built 11000 times, and is/was used by more than 50 operators world-wide, all of which have paid for the privilege.
Then there's the C-130, with 2500 units produced and operated by 70 countries.
The first American Fighter jet would be the F-4 Phantom II, with 5000 units built, and used extensively abroad.
The F-16 has 4600 units built up to now and is used by more than 25 countries.
(I'm ignoring the P-51 with its 15000 units here because they were mostly used by the US and rarely sold abroad).
tl;dr: The F-35 is not the most commercially successful airframe in the world, in fact, it does not even come close.
It's exactly what I was thinking about: Having a pilot onboard is overhead and its a limiting factor for the flight envelope as you have to keep it alive. Besides, it's not invisible despite calling it that. It's visible in the visible spectrum and hearable in the human hearing range, which means that you can build detection and tracking systems in those wavelengths instead of pretending that its invisible because its hard to detect at radar wavelengths.
Why just not drop any manned vehicles and go for the remote control + AI? What is the logic? Sunken cost fallacy? Military industrial complex needs it?
The only thing I can think of is the political implications of downing plane with a soldier on board.
> it's not invisible despite calling it that. It's visible in the visible spectrum and hearable in the human hearing range, which means that you can build detection and tracking systems in those wavelengths instead of pretending that its invisible because its hard to detect at radar wavelengths.
That’s not a gotcha you seem to believe it is, it’s like the first thing you learn about stealth technology and has been apparent to anyone following military news to any extent in the past forty plus years. That you somehow think it’s something that went unnoticed and the thousands of people working on this every day has been “pretending” after reading some Twitter posts is absurd and funny.
Wow really? Someone else already noticed that invisible to radar isn’t invisible to eyesight and event teaching it? lots of smart people out there.
I’m happy that you’re feeling smart and superior but that’s not the point, the point is signal collection and processing came a long way, and maybe low radar cross-section isn’t that big of a deal anymore. At least enough to justify spending huge sums on a plane that keeps having issue and falling short.
>maybe low radar cross-section isn’t that big of a deal anymore
That's simply not true. There is not a peer or near-peer country that is not developing a variety of low-RCS aircraft.
>Besides, it's not invisible despite calling it that. It's visible in the visible spectrum and hearable in the human hearing range, which means that you can build detection and tracking systems in those wavelengths instead of pretending that its invisible because its hard to detect at radar wavelengths.
There have absolutely been programs to reduce the visual signatures of aircrafts. Yehudi lights, COMPASS GHOST, BoP, etc. Don't get your information on anything from Musk.
Good point but all these things can be fitted on a drone too.
It's not like UCAVs aren't being developed, though. Piloted aircraft have lower latency and are better for some tasks. If UAVs were ready to replace piloted aircraft in all combat roles, they would have. They have almost completely replaced piloted aircraft in ISR, for example, where they are a great fit (no Gary Powers, no latency issues). The Pentagon doesn't want to lose trained pilots.
Does it justify the expense and the shortcomings though? Horses also have some advantages over tanks, like refueling from the grass on the roadside but they become mostly ceremonial anyway.
> Why just not drop any manned vehicles and go for the remote control + AI? What is the logic?
When the F-35 program was started in late 1980s-early 1990s, neither reliable remote control nor AI existed (I'm not even sure supersonic-reliable remote control exists now). Now, if there exists research programs utilizing unmanned fighter jets, they're likely classified and we won't know about them for quite some time.
DARPA's Air Combat Evolution program (ACE) began with AIs fighting each other in a simulated environment in a tournament. Then the winning AI fought against a human (USAF Fighter Weapons School graduate) in that simulated environment, and won. The company that developed the winning AI, Shield AI, has gone on to deploy an AI in an actual F-16 that has flown against a human in trials.
Many people underestimate the challenges of working in this environment. The DARPA challenge is like saying that boxing is the same as hand to hand combat. There are many similarities but the first has rules and parameters and the second has none. I find that people in IT tend to arrogantly proclaim things along the lines of, "I've set up a Kubernetes cluster. This can't be any more difficult." but it's more like setting up a Kubernetes cluster where you're paying someone else just like you to do everything they can to destroy it including giving them a knife and stabbing you. Then letting them loose in the datacenter.
I've worked with quite a few people who were part of the AI effort, and my current boss was the architect for ACE a few years ago. All of those people were painfully aware of the gap you describe here and were actively working to bridge it.
Once an AI is able to land aircrafts on any airports, highway or carrier, is able to decide on an emergency landing, or on an emergency discharge an won't crash because of a faulty sensor (MCAS) or weird UFOs that trigger those sensors, i won't be opposed to AI-driven aircrafts.
In the meantime, Aircraft+"Ai-driven" drone is a great idea (look up to "nEUROn" if you want an idea of a combat drone capability)
> remote control + AI?
We might be getting close to advanced AI for a lot of domains, but are we ready to have one making independent decisions with bombs?
I’m not a military expert but I’d much prefer having a human making decisions rather than AI for at least the next decade. I’m not sure that remote connectivity is reliable and high bandwidth enough everywhere for a drone fighter jet
We already have drones that are making independent decisions with bombs, but that’s not the point. You can still have people in the loop, people that are not on board.
For 100% of tasks that an F35 can perform?
I know we currently have this capability, but aren’t up to speed if you can rely on it everywhere and every situation.
Arguably even before drones, missiles have some form of "AI" to autonomously make calls, e.g Tomahawk TERCOM and DSMAC (arguably navigation, but hey, for a missile navigation ends in controlled descent into terrain)
> Besides, it's not invisible despite calling it that. It's visible in the visible spectrum and hearable in the human hearing range
We didn't wait Musk to know planes weren't literally invisible or silent lmao, maybe don't take your military analysis from a man child with 0 experience in the domain.
They either fly high enough that you neither hear nor see them, or low/fast enough that you're dead long before you're even aware something is coming.
Also we already have unmanned aircrafts, a lot of them. Internet army experts will tell you f35 are useless because they're not invisible (duh) meanwhile in eastern Europe people are getting killed by 70+ years old tanks and other ww2 era surplus
Musk can be many bad things, but he is also right in some things.
Flying high might make it invisible for human observers but the idea is that it’s not invisible in that wavelength, therefore it must be possible to create devices that can detect it.
Also, this is a brand new machine that is still not ready. Just write it off, liquidate any useful work that might have been done on it and go all in drones. What’s the point of insisting on a job not done when already looks obsolete?
If a bunch of microphones and binoculars would defeat stealth fighters (or any kind of jets) don't you think someone in the US, Chinese or Russian army would have thought about it ? Just as a reminder the thing is coming at mach 1.5-2 and as soon as it can it'll send a little present coming your way at mach 2-4
> therefore it must be possible to create devices that can detect it.
What's the probability some over worked dude who tweet 20 times an hour came up with something the US military–industrial complex hasn't thought about in the last 50 years ?
Remember the early Ukraine invasion when a couple of bayraktars almost single handedly saved the country during the initial wave ? It was neither stealthy nor fast
I highly doubt f35 will use supersonic speed for anything else than repositioning/travel. In combat theaters i doubt it speed will go higher than Mach 0.8.
And anyway, if you want CAS, to stop an army, A-10 will probably be a dozen time better suited than any multirole, and especially the f35 with its ridiculously low availability rate, or even better in that particular case, an AC-130 (that is probably able to direct a drone fleet in its latest revision, but that was speculation last time i checked)
(the A-10 is the best modern plane in my opinion, i really like the F15, f18 and Rafale (those curves!), because i really like the idea of aircraft carrier but that plane is the best.)
Ukrainians already built a microphone network to detect incoming missile and planes.
Microphone network is mostly used for low speed and high noise Iranian Shahed drones which are also made from composite materials and have very low radar visibility. (For example, Moldovan military recently mentioned that they cannot detect them with their old USSR-made radars).
When one is flying towards you, you hear it from few kilometres away for minutes as it has very loud petrol-powered engine.
In contrast, when you hear low passing cruise missile, you will have just few seconds until it passes over you.
> Musk can be many bad things, but he is also right in some things
Indeed. A broken clock also tells the time correctly twice a day.
This is already the air force's tentative plan. They made several announcements (10+yr ago) when it was new about the F35 being the last manned fighter and then kinda walked that back because PR but kept pursuing it.
Yet despite these problems, the F-35 remains the most commercially successful airframe in the world, with over 670 sold, and 2,500 on order from US-allied countries all over the world. What could explain this sales pipeline, if the F-35 was the boondoggle this article implies it to be?
For the first sales (Australia and either Norway or sweden, i dont remember), the US and lockheed Martin hid away the issues and lied on operating cost and availability.
For sales to NATO: you have to buy a plane that can carry the US bomb if you don't have one yourself (despite the fact that nukes will probably never be launched from aircrafts if at all).
For sales against competition, i don't have a lot of data, but you can check the Swiss 2022 competition between the F16, F18, Rafale, Gripen and F35, public data is scarce but basically, the Rafale and F18 would have been better on most points except VTOL and stealth. The choice however was probably economic (as while VTOL is nice, Swiss short airports are still longer than carriers, and stealth isn't that much of a factor in defense, especially in the Alps): they bought planes for less than half the price NATO countries did, and 60% of the money will be spent locally: basically 20% of the cost Germany and other NATO countries paid.
> despite the fact that nukes will probably never be launched from aircrafts if at all
"if at all": that's deterrence. I don't think any nuke-able aircraft small-country customer intent is to launch, but you gotta have the ability to.
"from aircrafts": when you have no submarines/silos and carting ground launch platforms around is impractical for your country, aircraft is the only remaining option to display deterrence factors.
If the US need Belgium planes to launch nukes, well, europe is truly fucked anyway.
If the US had the French doctrine i.e. any army moving toward France's strategic assets will be targeted with a "warning" shot (yes, the warning shot is to be nuclear), but it does not, US nuclear force is for retaliation only. It will never be launched from planes in the foreseeable future. Which is more than the operational lifetime of F35.
No, this is bully tactics and frankly i really, really hope that Trump dissolve NATO so Belgium don't have to buy planes that can fly 30% of the time.
Norway for sure, they have been in NATO since they helped found it in 1949. Us Swedes needed a while to think about it, and joined on March 7, 2024. Sweden does not have the F-35, since we build our own [1] multi-role military aircraft.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_JAS_39_Gripen
Typhoon would have been a good fit for Canada but the US vetoed it.
The F-35 has never been one of the "most commercially successful airframes". 670 sold is actually a pretty low number, considering its supposedly multi-role capabilities and its rare VTOL feature.
The sales pipeline started being agreed when the plane was still a concept, and it's almost exclusively a feature of American foreign policy: the US government worked hard, over almost 40 years, to ensure a significant part of design and production costs (and risks resulting from such) would be absorbed by allies through guaranteed sales. NATO countries have been under huge continuous and sustained pressure to buy it and to standardize their systems around it. Quite a few European governments found themselves struggling to publicly justify their choices in this matter, because in the end it mostly boiled down to "the Americans told us to buy it or else". The F-35 project simply would not be allowed to fail in the market.
As far as I know, no other weapon ever enjoyed such massive and forceful support by so many US administrations throughout the decades.
> What could explain this sales pipeline, if the F-35 was the boondoggle this article implies it to be?
Easy, desire to please American politicians to fetch political support from the USA and strengthen your position as military ally. Ideally, you will be looking so scary that you wouldn’t have to actually use the plane.
” you will be looking so scary that you wouldn’t have to actually use the plane.”
I’d say this is the main intent. But not only because of the political aspects.
AFAIK the plane is intended to be used like an ultra-mobile target aquisition and launch platform designed to engage targets Really Far Away and then return to base (any base since it’s NATO compatible). It’s not really supposed to engage in Top Gun -style dogfighting.
So the main question is the capability of the radar and the missiles you carry, not necessarily the air frame itself. And as I understand those are fit for purpose.
Ofc if you are launching missiles far away for defensive purposes surely you could do it a lot cheaper, and that I would see as the main point of critique.
I’m not saying the issues are not issues, but as a non-expert-paying-customer (my country bought 64 of them I think) as long as you get airborn, acquire target lock and can launch missile, you are more or less using the offering as promised.
> What could explain this sales pipeline, if the F-35 was the boondoggle this article implies it to be?
The overwhelming USA sphere of influence over its "allies". I don't really see a NATO member buying new fighter jets from China or Russia instead without that causing a big ruckus.
Sweden sells a really nice NATO-compatible multirole jet.
The US isn't the only NATO member that produces fighter jets. EU members of NATO make the Eurofighter Typhoon, the Dassault Rafale, and the Saab JAS 39 Gripen.
You buy F-35s to protect yourself from the mafia .
4,600 F16s have been built, obviously it has the time advantage, but still, once F35 beats that number, I think it will be at the top.
There's often a certain aspect of "no-one ever got fired for buying IBM" to these sorts of things.
Its basically a arcade-chip tradeable for us-protection within the western worldorder.
The article is sensational and deeply misleading.
Yes, the plane has a lot of bugs. It's got complicated software and hardware. You can't compare it to the relatively simple older designs that didn't deal with stealth.
Yes they don't need to test dogfights because war isn't a video game. When the enemy sees the f35 it is after it already sent the missile in your direction. You don't need to dogfight if you're an invisible ghost that can kill from a distance.
The f16 had a ton of bugs such as flipping over when south of the equator. It's a much better machine now and the f35 has all the makings to be a similar leap forward.
> The f16 had a ton of bugs such as flipping over when south of the equator.
In the simulator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4541685
The page that comment links to lists some (minor) problems found on the real plane too though.
It's the most modern jet that can be acquired. The Gripen, Rafale, Typhoon are all very good jets, but they're around half a generation behind; they're still popular and acquired by various countries because they better fit their requirements (or because the US doesn't want to sell them F-35).
Unfortunately we do not measure combat weapons in terms of commercial success.
We measure them in terms of lethality and reliability.
[dead]
>What could explain this sales pipeline, if the F-35 was the boondoggle this article implies it to be?
A lack of actual proven fight-testing.
But it did the most extensive flight test program for anything in history [0]. I worked on this program for years. I do not think a lack of flight testing is the problem. The problems are many, but in short:
1) Lack of competent, forceful oversight from the program office. DOT&E reports about the F-35 program have, for years, given the program office recommendations that it has failed to follow.
2) A prime contractor (Lockheed-Martin) that restricts access to its data. The F-35 program had to sue LM in federal court to get access to the necessary data to make the Joint Simulation Environment (JSE) fully functional. In the end, the case was settled, but only after six years of battle. The report linked in the parent article describes how maintainers are not allowed access to servicing procedures that they have on other aircraft. I have seen this personally in flight test. Even something like a gear swing requires an LM certified Field Services Engineer to conduct.
3) A completely broken software release process. For many years in developmental flight test, we received software builds that were just entirely broken, as in, the jet would not start with that software loaded. The C2D2 process was advertised as fixing this, but really it was just a new name for the same old fly-fix-fly process. The parent report details entire versions that were skipped in the IOT&E process because they were so buggy. The program could have turned JSE into the final stop for new software builds before hitting the fleet, but it chose to pivot entirely into training instead.
I could keep going. A decade working in a program like this gives you a long list of things to talk about. But I'll stop here for now.
[0] https://news.lockheedmartin.com/2018-04-12-F-35-Completes-Mo...
Microsoft enters the room....
> the boondoggle this article implies it to be?
I highly recommend reading contemporary reporting on what are considered wildly successful aircraft (like the teen series F-14/15/16).
Hint: Just change one number and they're indistinguishable from reporting on the F-35.
Is it? The 737 has been sold 12000 times, with thousands of orders in the pipeline. The A320 is not far behind, but only got introduced twenty years later
Even if you just consider military airframes, the MiG-21 has been built 11000 times, and is/was used by more than 50 operators world-wide, all of which have paid for the privilege.
Then there's the C-130, with 2500 units produced and operated by 70 countries.
The first American Fighter jet would be the F-4 Phantom II, with 5000 units built, and used extensively abroad.
The F-16 has 4600 units built up to now and is used by more than 25 countries.
(I'm ignoring the P-51 with its 15000 units here because they were mostly used by the US and rarely sold abroad).
tl;dr: The F-35 is not the most commercially successful airframe in the world, in fact, it does not even come close.
https://archive.ph/0toiV
Elon Musk recently made some remarks about F-35 on Twitter: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1860574377013838033
It's exactly what I was thinking about: Having a pilot onboard is overhead and its a limiting factor for the flight envelope as you have to keep it alive. Besides, it's not invisible despite calling it that. It's visible in the visible spectrum and hearable in the human hearing range, which means that you can build detection and tracking systems in those wavelengths instead of pretending that its invisible because its hard to detect at radar wavelengths.
Why just not drop any manned vehicles and go for the remote control + AI? What is the logic? Sunken cost fallacy? Military industrial complex needs it?
The only thing I can think of is the political implications of downing plane with a soldier on board.
> it's not invisible despite calling it that. It's visible in the visible spectrum and hearable in the human hearing range, which means that you can build detection and tracking systems in those wavelengths instead of pretending that its invisible because its hard to detect at radar wavelengths.
That’s not a gotcha you seem to believe it is, it’s like the first thing you learn about stealth technology and has been apparent to anyone following military news to any extent in the past forty plus years. That you somehow think it’s something that went unnoticed and the thousands of people working on this every day has been “pretending” after reading some Twitter posts is absurd and funny.
Wow really? Someone else already noticed that invisible to radar isn’t invisible to eyesight and event teaching it? lots of smart people out there.
I’m happy that you’re feeling smart and superior but that’s not the point, the point is signal collection and processing came a long way, and maybe low radar cross-section isn’t that big of a deal anymore. At least enough to justify spending huge sums on a plane that keeps having issue and falling short.
>maybe low radar cross-section isn’t that big of a deal anymore
That's simply not true. There is not a peer or near-peer country that is not developing a variety of low-RCS aircraft.
>Besides, it's not invisible despite calling it that. It's visible in the visible spectrum and hearable in the human hearing range, which means that you can build detection and tracking systems in those wavelengths instead of pretending that its invisible because its hard to detect at radar wavelengths.
There have absolutely been programs to reduce the visual signatures of aircrafts. Yehudi lights, COMPASS GHOST, BoP, etc. Don't get your information on anything from Musk.
Good point but all these things can be fitted on a drone too.
It's not like UCAVs aren't being developed, though. Piloted aircraft have lower latency and are better for some tasks. If UAVs were ready to replace piloted aircraft in all combat roles, they would have. They have almost completely replaced piloted aircraft in ISR, for example, where they are a great fit (no Gary Powers, no latency issues). The Pentagon doesn't want to lose trained pilots.
Does it justify the expense and the shortcomings though? Horses also have some advantages over tanks, like refueling from the grass on the roadside but they become mostly ceremonial anyway.
> Why just not drop any manned vehicles and go for the remote control + AI? What is the logic?
When the F-35 program was started in late 1980s-early 1990s, neither reliable remote control nor AI existed (I'm not even sure supersonic-reliable remote control exists now). Now, if there exists research programs utilizing unmanned fighter jets, they're likely classified and we won't know about them for quite some time.
DARPA's Air Combat Evolution program (ACE) began with AIs fighting each other in a simulated environment in a tournament. Then the winning AI fought against a human (USAF Fighter Weapons School graduate) in that simulated environment, and won. The company that developed the winning AI, Shield AI, has gone on to deploy an AI in an actual F-16 that has flown against a human in trials.
https://www.darpa.mil/program/air-combat-evolution
Many people underestimate the challenges of working in this environment. The DARPA challenge is like saying that boxing is the same as hand to hand combat. There are many similarities but the first has rules and parameters and the second has none. I find that people in IT tend to arrogantly proclaim things along the lines of, "I've set up a Kubernetes cluster. This can't be any more difficult." but it's more like setting up a Kubernetes cluster where you're paying someone else just like you to do everything they can to destroy it including giving them a knife and stabbing you. Then letting them loose in the datacenter.
I've worked with quite a few people who were part of the AI effort, and my current boss was the architect for ACE a few years ago. All of those people were painfully aware of the gap you describe here and were actively working to bridge it.
Once an AI is able to land aircrafts on any airports, highway or carrier, is able to decide on an emergency landing, or on an emergency discharge an won't crash because of a faulty sensor (MCAS) or weird UFOs that trigger those sensors, i won't be opposed to AI-driven aircrafts.
In the meantime, Aircraft+"Ai-driven" drone is a great idea (look up to "nEUROn" if you want an idea of a combat drone capability)
> remote control + AI?
We might be getting close to advanced AI for a lot of domains, but are we ready to have one making independent decisions with bombs?
I’m not a military expert but I’d much prefer having a human making decisions rather than AI for at least the next decade. I’m not sure that remote connectivity is reliable and high bandwidth enough everywhere for a drone fighter jet
We already have drones that are making independent decisions with bombs, but that’s not the point. You can still have people in the loop, people that are not on board.
For 100% of tasks that an F35 can perform?
I know we currently have this capability, but aren’t up to speed if you can rely on it everywhere and every situation.
Arguably even before drones, missiles have some form of "AI" to autonomously make calls, e.g Tomahawk TERCOM and DSMAC (arguably navigation, but hey, for a missile navigation ends in controlled descent into terrain)
> Besides, it's not invisible despite calling it that. It's visible in the visible spectrum and hearable in the human hearing range
We didn't wait Musk to know planes weren't literally invisible or silent lmao, maybe don't take your military analysis from a man child with 0 experience in the domain.
They either fly high enough that you neither hear nor see them, or low/fast enough that you're dead long before you're even aware something is coming.
Also we already have unmanned aircrafts, a lot of them. Internet army experts will tell you f35 are useless because they're not invisible (duh) meanwhile in eastern Europe people are getting killed by 70+ years old tanks and other ww2 era surplus
Musk can be many bad things, but he is also right in some things.
Flying high might make it invisible for human observers but the idea is that it’s not invisible in that wavelength, therefore it must be possible to create devices that can detect it.
Also, this is a brand new machine that is still not ready. Just write it off, liquidate any useful work that might have been done on it and go all in drones. What’s the point of insisting on a job not done when already looks obsolete?
If a bunch of microphones and binoculars would defeat stealth fighters (or any kind of jets) don't you think someone in the US, Chinese or Russian army would have thought about it ? Just as a reminder the thing is coming at mach 1.5-2 and as soon as it can it'll send a little present coming your way at mach 2-4
> therefore it must be possible to create devices that can detect it.
What's the probability some over worked dude who tweet 20 times an hour came up with something the US military–industrial complex hasn't thought about in the last 50 years ?
Remember the early Ukraine invasion when a couple of bayraktars almost single handedly saved the country during the initial wave ? It was neither stealthy nor fast
https://defence-blog.com/bayraktar-tb2-drones-saved-the-coun...
btw his brand new idea is at least a hundred years old: https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-eyPsCUn0O68/V8jmQwIYR5I/AAAAAAAAK...
I highly doubt f35 will use supersonic speed for anything else than repositioning/travel. In combat theaters i doubt it speed will go higher than Mach 0.8.
And anyway, if you want CAS, to stop an army, A-10 will probably be a dozen time better suited than any multirole, and especially the f35 with its ridiculously low availability rate, or even better in that particular case, an AC-130 (that is probably able to direct a drone fleet in its latest revision, but that was speculation last time i checked)
(the A-10 is the best modern plane in my opinion, i really like the F15, f18 and Rafale (those curves!), because i really like the idea of aircraft carrier but that plane is the best.)
Ukrainians already built a microphone network to detect incoming missile and planes.
Microphone network is mostly used for low speed and high noise Iranian Shahed drones which are also made from composite materials and have very low radar visibility. (For example, Moldovan military recently mentioned that they cannot detect them with their old USSR-made radars).
When one is flying towards you, you hear it from few kilometres away for minutes as it has very loud petrol-powered engine.
In contrast, when you hear low passing cruise missile, you will have just few seconds until it passes over you.
> Musk can be many bad things, but he is also right in some things
Indeed. A broken clock also tells the time correctly twice a day.
This is already the air force's tentative plan. They made several announcements (10+yr ago) when it was new about the F35 being the last manned fighter and then kinda walked that back because PR but kept pursuing it.
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