[yborg]

The functioning or non-functioning of the logistics system for the F-35 is largely irrelevant, as just demonstrated Lockheed is paid whether it works or not; and non-functioning is much safer for the program, as non-flying F-35s are safe from combat and accidents. In fact, low availability just provides an excuse for the Air Force to demand additional budget for aircraft. This isn't so much a combat system as a corporate welfare program.

In practice, the US has already demonstrated that its primary airpower projection is via unmanned systems, the manned combat aircraft is the mounted cavalry c. 1920.

[CapricornNoble]

>>In practice, the US has already demonstrated that its primary airpower projection is via unmanned systems, the manned combat aircraft is the mounted cavalry c. 1920.

1. The US hasn't had to overcome a first-rate Integrated Air Defense System since the 1970s. UAVs, while hard to detect due to their small RCS, have extremely poor overall survivability. It's part of what makes them so cheap.

2. The US is rarely flying drones against an adversary with robust Electronic Attack capabilities. They're pretty useless if their datalinks to their Ground Control Station are jammed and you don't have HARMs on-hand to suppress/neutralize/destroy the jamming source.

3. The future of air power is likely to be a mix of manned fighters with UAVs as wingmen or forward-deployed scouts/sensor platforms, and then further in the rear big (manned) "bombers" with deep magazines throwing missiles into the fight from far away, handing off target tracking to the manned fighter. Even something like an F-15 Strike Eagle or a Su-34 could fulfill that latter role with the right electronics suite and ordnance upgrades...

[whatshisface]

If history is any indication, the future of air power will be three years of absolutely terrible strategies after the next war starts, where the wrong weapons are being manufactured and the right weapons are being deployed incorrectly, then followed by one month of sanity which sets the military doctrine for the next two decades of peace, to remain in place as it becomes obsolete again...

[jcranmer]

A serious question here: what history are you drawing this inference from?

Popular history tends to be a distorted view of history that willfully ignores evidence to the contrary to tell a good story, and military history especially tends to fall victim here. As a good case in point, take WWI. In popular history, WWI is a war of unimaginable destruction because generals were idiots fighting Napoleonic-era tactics with modern weaponry. But that's not really sustained by the evidence. The generals and officer class were aware of how much more effective modern guns and gunnery was compared to the Napoleonic wars, and their battle plans accounted for this. Trenches came out of known tactics--on the defensive, digging in is the most effective way to avoid the lethality of opposing weapons, and an underground trench is more effective than an above-ground static fortification.

[whatshisface]

Any historical claim can be argued with, and I guess this is an example, but I would maintain that WWI involved a lot of things that wouldn't be repeated with modern knowledge. To offer another example, consider actual Napoleonic-era tactics: why was Napoleon running around and defeating everyone with them when the same guns were basically available everywhere? Ideally everyone would have copied his artillery tactics as soon as he used them once, but military leadership rarely moves that fast. If you sent a general from the era to West Point today, they would probably be able to defeat Napoleon.

[credit_guy]

> consider actual Napoleonic-era tactics: why was Napoleon running around and defeating everyone with them when the same guns were basically available everywhere?

More prosaically, Napoleon had much larger armies available to him than his opponents: "You can't stop me, I spend 30000 men a month" [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25qmz6/can_s...

[Aloha]

I would argue that WWI was so deadly because it was modern weaponry without modern medicine to go with it. We made huge strides in treating casualties between the two wars.

[spaceandshit]

Thank you for correcting a common (HN/SW) perspective I've seen recently. "Software will fix all problems, everywhere"

[foolfoolz]

these combat drones are manned, the human is just out in an air conditioned office building in nevada. there’s no reason you’d put someone at risk in a $150M fighter when you could bring 4-5 unmanned fighters with similar weapons platforms. i don’t think there’s any future with combat pilots flying top gun style

[mschuster91]

> 2. The US is rarely flying drones against an adversary with robust Electronic Attack capabilities. They're pretty useless if their datalinks to their Ground Control Station are jammed and you don't have HARMs on-hand to suppress/neutralize/destroy the jamming source.

GPS jamming can be made vastly more difficult by special antenna configurations, and additionally I'd hope that military drones have precise IMUs and star trackers to serve as fallback.

[divbyzer0]

(with my tin-foil hat securely fastened)

I've always had a suspicion that the generous piles of cash thrown at the F-35 program was really going to two programs:

1) A well-publicised cover (F-35)

2) A secret Skunk Works project like F-117, SR-71

But a corporate welfare program as you suggest is more likely.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Why not have both?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Aurora#U.S._sighting_c...

(Evidence of something moving around Mach 5 at high altitude, rattling the rocks, captured by seismic equipment since the 90ies. Overton Window has now been open long enough for Lockheed Martin to tentatively present https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_SR-72 as something new.)

[mikorym]

This is always an exciting question... You know, it's nice to daydream about all kinds of secret and mysterious projects. But I think another question is more about necessity, and I think necessity is what fuels a lot of politics around these kind of military projects. People pull towards both extremes and end up somewhere in the middle, which is maybe the mean of perceived necessity.

If the US is clever (NSA: this is your queue) it would find a way to use the current difficult political climate to focus on what they are supposed to do (I guess preventing war maybe) and in a relevant way for the times. The Russians basically did this with internet trolls. They took something simple (and amusing at times) and weaponised it.

I guess one would hope enough people that are both clever and uhm, ethical, work for the three-letter organisations.

[Patient0]

nitpick: in this context, you would want to use the word "cue" not "queue". "cue" => signal for an actor to go on stage or whatever. "queue" => orderly line of people waiting to buy a movie ticket.

[mikorym]

True, thanks. But in this case it was a fortunate fluke. Their queue is probably pretty long and unresolved as we speak.

[albemuth]

It... doesn't really work

[mikorym]

It was a typo, I acknowledged it, and made a joke. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[clSTophEjUdRanu]

It's such a good corporate welfare program that it produced an actual good aircraft.

[nabla9]

It's more worker/voter welfare than corporate welfare. Socialism for the middle class.

Lockheed Martin's long term profit margin is around 6-7 percent (recently above 9%). Lockheed pays more wages than it makes profits.

If you count the whole value chain, with contractors and their subcontractors, it's probably something like 50% total worker compensation (wages, benefits), 10% profits, 10% cost of capital, rest is taxes, real estate, energy and raw materials.

[divbyzer0]

Trickle-down economics?

[chiefalchemist]

No tinfoil hat required. Not only was this guy a famous general, he was the POTUS as well. The Military Industrial Complex is very real.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9QXjBVC233s

The Afghanistan Papers - which dropped off the mainstream media's radar almost instantly - is further evidence it's alive and well.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/...

[ptero]

Real work is (comparably) cheap. With F35 budget well over a trillion dollars this is 2-3 orders of magnitude larger than needed to fund maximum number of projects Skunk works can sustain, at max manpower. It is bureaucratic waste with minimum productive output. My 2c.

[wolfgke]

> Skunk works can sustain, at max manpower. It is bureaucratic waste with minimum productive output. My 2c.

Isn't the idea of skunkwork projects exactly to avoid bureaucratic waste for the sake of radical innovation?! Let me give three quotes from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Skunkworks_projec...:

"A skunkworks project is a project developed by a relatively small and loosely structured group of people who research and develop a project primarily for the sake of radical innovation."

"Everett Rogers defined skunkworks as an "enriched environment that is intended to help a small group of individuals design a new idea by escaping routine organizational procedures.""

"[T]he term [skunkworks] was generalized to apply to similar high-priority R&D projects at other large organizations which feature a small elite team removed from the normal working environment and given freedom from management constraints.".

In this sense, the projects you are talking about surely cannot be skunkwork projects, but are just ordinary cooperate projects with a huge conservative cooperate-bureaucratic structure.

[stan_rogers]

Yes, and that's exactly what the post you are responding to said. Read it again: it says that the money is far more than skunkworks could possibly spend, so it's far more likely that the evaporating money is being boiled away by ordinary bureaucratic waste with nothing to show for it.

[wolfgke]

I am no native speaker of English, but at

> Skunk works can sustain, at max manpower. It is bureaucratic waste with minimum productive output.

to me, "it" seems to refer to "[s]kunk work" and referring to skunk work with respect to "max manpower" does not sound like skunk work to me, but throwing lots of cooperate ressources (instead of a small elite team) at the project.

[mkl]

"It" here refers to "F35 budget". The punctuation is not ideal; I think it would be clearer something like this:

> With the F35 budget well over a trillion dollars (this is 2-3 orders of magnitude larger than needed to fund maximum number of projects Skunk works can sustain, at max manpower), it is a bureaucratic waste with minimum productive output.

[stan_rogers]

The word "Skunk" does not start a new sentence. It is in the middle of this phrase: "this is 2-3 orders of magnitude larger than needed to fund maximum number of projects Skunk works can sustain". I'll agree that the punctuation isn't ideal; that phrase should have been preceded by a comma.

[ptero]

The poster you are responding to is correct. Sorry, I could have been clearer in wording and "it"s.

Skunkworks is great, but works while it is small and nimble. Fund it fully. But this could cost billions, tens of billions at most. Not trillions that have been spent on F-35.

[chiefalchemist]

Isn't the idea of skunkwork projects exactly to avoid bureaucratic waste for the sake of radical innovation?

In the true sense of the word, yes. However, the MIC and the budgets that support it have their own working definition. It's not about the ends/results, It's about the means (swallowing more and more budget).

[chipsa]

Pay attention to the time frame for that trillion dollars: 55 years.

[LoSboccacc]

> airpower projection is via unmanned systems

I'm unconvinced by this assessment, for one they haven't had symmetrical warfare in a long time and a pilot is way harder to jam. for another long range laser ciws systems are getting more and more effective and if you armor cheap unmanned system they stop being cheap. but ultimately they have limited payload option and you can always pack more countermeasures than the enemy pack missiles so it's yet unclear what the best option is in a defended/contested airspace

[imtringued]

Honestly non fully autonomous UAVs are going to drop like flies if they encounter a F-35. People seem to fail to understand that the F-35 is also an advanced ECM platform. What is that drone going to do once its connection to the remote base is cut?

[fapjacks]

> also an advanced ECM platform

I would suggest they are primarily an ECM platform. It is well known that the F-22 is a superior fighter compared to the F-35. The main feature of the F-35 that puts fear in potential adversaries are the capabilities that become available when multiple F-35 are in the air and linked with one another (or other larger aircraft with comparable systems, e.g. AWACS).

[TeMPOraL]

Home in on the loudest RF source and try to ram it?

[LoSboccacc]

they don't have the engine and maneuverability to reach that speed. if they had, you'd have to have the same kind of logistic and complexity as a fighter craft, negating most of the above points about drones.

missiles don't have the same restrictions because they don't have to have anything in the way of performance as loiter time or target search system or payloads.

what you're thinking of are Anti Radiation missiles such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-27_(air-to-air_missile)

but that ties with the point being made originally, you have to sacrifice payload, or go bigger to have more payload options, or go sideway and have air superiority drones sweep the area before, and it all ties into the "this stuff hasn't been tested in symmetric warfare so who knows" argument.

[TeMPOraL]

I know it's far-fetched, but what I was thinking about is if the F-35 is operating in CAS mode or otherwise flies through the area drones are in, then as long as the fighter is flying towards the drones, they may have a shot at placing themselves in front of the fighter, hoping the pilot will be distracted enough to ram them.

[davedx]

Genuinely curious: how do you jam a line-of-sight radio link?

[greedo]

Determine the frequency, then overpower the transmitter. Or just kill the transmitter...

[mrtksn]

If that's the case, sounds like a very peaceful solution for the world. The alternative is pushing for actual armed conflicts where actually working machines are killing actual people for corporate welfare.

[exikyut]

Well said.

But now I wonder: if this is just so much smoke, mirrors and rose-tinted narratives of potentiality... when will the bubble pop? And what might cause that? And what might the pop (or maybe explosion) look like?

My curiosity is mostly just idle/morbid musing - this seems much like watching a moth encounter a candle.

[ppf]

I see two scenarios - the US military running out of money, or the F35 becoming necessary against an existential threat. I don't see either of those happing to the mainland US anytime soon. I'm just pissed that my own country is wasting endless money on this absurd boondoggle, where it represents a significantly larger fraction of our GDP.

[jacobush]

I guess nothing special at all, just the next big project.