[b112]

Just made me realise, this is just like the F-35.

Its turn around time is ridiculous, it has to be maintained with specialized equipment/hangers, along with external contractor assistance.

Compared to the Gripen, as an example, which can land on a freeway and be up in the air again in a few minutes.

One was designed to be used in war, in desperate scenarios, with no ability to coddle it. The other, the F-35? Is designed around milking the taxpayer as much as possible, and employing people in as many politician's states as possible.

The shuttle was like that, I think. Which is really sad.

[throwaway85825]

The F-35 is designed to be able to break into and defeat modern air defense networks.

The gripen is a much less capable non expeditonary platform designed to maximize asymmetric losses if sweden is invaded. As a small country sweden has to follow a porcupine strategy to deter invasion.

Presently the actual comparable to the F-35 is attritable drones, which is why every mid-size and major power is developing them.

[ls612]

The Russians have been trying to use attritable drones for years to break down the Ukrainian IADS and have not yet succeeded. Meanwhile the Israeli F35 fleet with no direct American support was able to crack open Iran’s air defenses at the start of the Twelve Day War with relative ease.

[dmix]

Israel used long range air launched ballistic missiles (ROCKS) and cruise missiles, mostly from F15s, to degrade Iran's ancient radar network and S300s (which allegedly weren't moved around much). That was before the invasion, so Iran didn't have much long range radar coverage when the war started.

[throwaway85825]

The shahed/geran is just a low cost cruise missile. The f35 comparable is a loyal wingman that does manned/unmanned teaming and carries A/A and A/G.

[XorNot]

Loyal wingman aircraft would have to be stealthy though to do it.

The whole point of the F-35 is that it is a stealthy platform with a very advanced set of targeting and weapons capabilities: but the issue is a similar capability drone would basically have a similar price tag since the expense of the pilot is minor in that case.

Like plausibly the best autonomous F-35 platform would just be an F-35.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Low-level drones are also stealthy. If they're not stealthy enough you can send them in bulk to overwhelm defences.

Ukraine's success with precision targeting of Russian assets would have been unthinkable with a fleet of F-35s and associated missiles because of the cost.

Cheap, smart, disposable drones are orders of magnitude cheaper and at least as effective for many mission profiles.

[XorNot]

The F-35 would've been used to take out the air defenses and cheaper munitions used for everything else.

Which is exactly what it was used for in Iran.

[fragmede]

It's not the expense of the pilot but the fact that the human pilot is subject to human biological constraints. Ie they black out after 9 Gs or so. An autonomous platform you'd want to design to be able to routinely do outside that envelope in a way that a platform designed for a human occupant is not.

[XorNot]

Its a nontrivial exercise to design a plane which can regularly do more Gs then that though.

There's no drones currently in development AFAIK with this goal either - the focus is on getting them to do useful mission without a pilot, rather then out dogfight or outmanoeuver missiles.

Basically the point stands: a hypothetical "better then F-35" drone is likely more, not less expensive then an F-35.

[throwaway85825]

The US lost several aircraft rescuing the downed pilot in Iran. Not necessary with drones.

[throwaway85825]

There are at least a dozen stealth loyal wingman programs/prototypes.

[ls612]

Such a platform does not exist today in active service in any military (so far as we know).

[thunderbird120]

>Its turn around time is ridiculous, it has to be maintained with specialized equipment/hangers, along with external contractor assistance.

>Compared to the Gripen, as an example, which can land on a freeway and be up in the air again in a few minutes.

I have no idea where people got the idea that the F-35 requires a major refit after each sortie or that it needs climate controlled hangars, but there's literally no truth to any of it.

The turnaround time for an F-35 after a mission in a wartime scenario isn't going to be much different from any other older fighter jet. Refuel, rearm, get back in the air.

One of the key requirements for the F-35 programs was to minimize extra care needed for the RAM (Radar Absorbent Material). Unlike older stealth aircraft the F-35's ram is "baked in" to the aircraft skin, rather than being a coating. The F-117 and B-2 require climate controlled hangars because their coatings are old and delicate, the F-22 doesn't, but needs regular touch-ups for its coating, the F-35 is just left sitting outside most of the time regardless of where it's operating, a desert, the arctic, a jungle, the deck of a ship, you just leave it out there. The only common maintenance done on the F-35's RAM is replacing a relatively small amount of special RAM tape which is usually used around the edges of the access panels which are opened for other types of maintenance.

[Gravityloss]

I think there's also some exaggerations about the differing highway landing capabilities of various aircraft. [1] is a video showing Eurofighter, F/A-18 and F-35 all landing on a highway in an exercise. Capability with stores and fuel load is another thing but I've read material that doesn't find the contemporary aircraft drastically different in that regard. Now, maintenance hours per flight hour and general operability certainly are interesting topics and there could be large differences.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKbgtixpfIc

[p_l]

Landing is the trivial part, though the USAF traditions of "FOD walk" do seem funny to air forces where donations you found out the aircraft spent whole day flying with maintenance toolkit left in intake.

The maintenance is the real difference - US specifically USAF gear is designed for nice air conditioned hangars to do regular maintenance, Gripen, MiG-29, and to way lower effect F-18 (when compared with F-16) - the first two assume forward bases without ability to do major maintenance, and even the latter (and other carrier adapted ones) promote things like quick swap engines because that's no space for hangar queen to have deep engine maintenance just so engine vendor can claim long time between overhauls

[throwaway85825]

The main reason the Mig29s have a reputation for easy maintenance is because they don't replace parts, they just throw away the whole airframe. The structural and engine service life is like 1/10th that of western fighters.

[p_l]

Not really. This "reputation" is based on misunderstanding of differences in doctrine.

The engines did have lower overall hours, yes, but the suggestion they need whole overhaul after very few hours is because it looks so when looking at it from USAF doctrine where "removing engine and sending it to special facility" is only for rare complete overhauls, and local mechanics are supposed to do regular minor work all the time.

MiG-29 instead was done under doctrine that the airbase does not have mechanics capable of doing such overhaul, nor the facilities to do so, and instead you swap the engine and send the used one to maintenance facilities further away from the front, same with other aggregates.

[Gravityloss]

Me-109 was similar

[wildzzz]

The Gripen is a light multirole aircraft like the F-16. The F-35 is a stealth strike fighter. It requires another level of special care to maintain its stealth performance. If you want mass-produced stealth aircraft, that's what's required. Stealth aircraft up to this point have been in extremely limited numbers at astronomical costs.

[throwaway85825]

The f35 has been produced in sufficient numbers that its purchase price is lower than that of 4th Gen fighters. The maintenance cost is higher though.

[wildzzz]

True, its really the first mass produced stealth plane. Everything before it has been in pretty limited numbers (even the F-22 didn't break 200). We definitely could build a new non-stealth fighter that's cheap to build and maintain but that's like saying we should design a new incandescent lightbulb, the money spent on development just isn't worth it over just building more F-35s.

[whatevaa]

Gripen will not be able to fly higher than tree lines in zones with active anti-air. Russia can't really use any of it's air power in Ukraine war, for example.

F35 can actually do something in such scenarios, as detecting them in the first place is hard.

[throwaway85825]

Russia can and did start the war with using airpower but stopped due to losses. Currently Russia is using its airpower to lob guided bombs which is effective due to the limited range of ukraines missiles. They have nothing comparable to the R33.

[noir_lord]

Agreed and specifically in the case of the Gripen the “test condition” was “Needs to be serviceable by a few conscripts working under the direction of one person who knows what they are doing”.

It’s an extremely different design goal, the US doesn’t mind exotic weapons that require exquisite (and expensive) methods of servicing, they have the budget and the assumption that a well equipped air field will be immaculately maintained.

Meanwhile the Mig-29 designers assumed it’d operate from damaged/poorly maintained fields, so on the ground you can shut the primary air intakes and it uses ones on top of the plane to get air, drastically reducing the FOD risk on taxi/takeoff.

I do wonder how well the F-35 would fare in an actual shooting war against near peers when all the peacetime assumptions breakdown.

[throwaway85825]

That's a reason the Mig-29 is no longer in production. Point defense fights are obsolete.

The F-35 was just in a war, in Iran. It performed as expected and was able to roll back Iran's air defense network in days.

[GolfPopper]

>It performed as expected and was able to roll back Iran's air defense network in days.

"Rolling back" Iran's air defense seems like very fuzzy phrasing. Certainly, Iran was not able to close its own airspace, nor prevent ongoing airstrikes on many American and Israeli targets. At the same time, my armchair observation is that a great many US and Israeli airstrikes were accomplished using stand-off weapons [1], which would not have been needed if the United States and Israel had achieved 'air supremacy'[2] as has been the case in America's conflicts in recent history.

The observed trend in USAF readiness has been downward for some time [3][4]. Air war is more than single sorties. If you have anything resembling an accurate summary of sorties flown, targets successfully hit, and number of combat-ready aircraft throughout the (currently on hold) war, and so on, please share. Absent such detailed information, all we have are various degrees of speculation.

1. https://news.meaww.com/us-used-tomahawks-himars-standoff-wea...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_supremacy

3. https://www.airandspaceforces.com/air-force-mission-capable-...

4. https://havokjournal.com/culture/military/the-hidden-erosion...

[throwaway85825]

Iran innovated with the loitering optically guided missile. This was enough to dissuade a longer air campaign. Political support is low so any losses create a political problem.

[imtringued]

Ok sure, the US didn't have air supremacy, didn't stop them from sending B-52 filled up with JDAMs.

[throwaway2037]

    > an actual shooting war against near peers

Who could this be? I can only think of Russia or China.