Pierre Sprey on the F-35 [video](youtube.com) |
Pierre Sprey on the F-35 [video](youtube.com) |
"Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new features."
Pierre Sprey, btw, is an interesting character. After retiring from military projects he became a record producer specializing in highbrow jazz obscurities. An original hipster!
Source: Boyd - http://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-Changed-ebook/d...
Everything I've ever read about the guy as well as teen series of aircraft (F14, F15, F16 and F18) say he hated the F15 from the start.
Close air support is another matter altogether. Ugly, dirty, and a high potential for friendly fire causalities, which makes them look very bad in today's unrealistic no errors allowed environment. E.g. nowadays in our too common non-existential wars if an officer flying a plane hits friendlies, I'd suspect his career will be over.
Of course, the A-10 can do both, but the greater ability to do close air support, unlike say the F-111 back when we were flying it, means it will be called up to do so.
Another issue is that things like GPS guidance means close air support can be done without getting as up close and personal, and if the guys on the ground supply their own coordinates instead of the target's, as I seem to recall having happened at least once, it's on them.
The motto when the Eagle was being designed was "Not a pound for air to ground." This was consistent through the A model to the C model. But a funny thing happens when you design an aircraft with incredible performance; it can often succeed in secondary roles. This was true of the F-15, and it was also true of the F-14. This isn't something new, it harkens back to WW2 with the P-47.
Considering the success of the F-15 in all of it's models, I'd love to see what you consider is ruined about its design.
Also true of the Hawker Typhoon, built as a balls to the wall interceptor turned into a very very good light bomber.
The F-35 is a terrible aircraft, and the procurement is deeply suspect. The South Korean acquisition process leaked some surprising information about the acquisition process and the F-35 failed the relatively modest criteria the Koreans had set and an older aircraft (F-15) to be purchased. At the time there was loads of news about the F-35 failing the acquisition and it even made it into Aviation week. Doing a google search now, it looks like it was a smooth process from RFP to acquisition and I can't find many of the older articles [1]
The rumor is that Lockheed bribed the hell out of the Korean National Assembly and "won" the initial round of acquisition, but the agency in Korea responsible for the acquisition (DAPA) saw right through it and awarded the final contract to Boeing.
The National Assembly got upset, Lockheed got upset and probably some U.S. congressmen got upset and the entire acquisition was tossed out "recompeted" and of course the F-35 won the second time. It's a sad joke and I can't even begin to guess at the acquisition shenanigans that happened in the U.S.
1 - http://www.defensenews.com/article/20130928/DEFREG/309280008...
edit a great movie about this is the movie "Pentagon Wars" which includes this great scene.
The US doesn't want it's allies to get the best equipment for their usage - they want their allies to send them money. With allies like that, who needs enemies?
Even if an ally can be trusted with modern aircraft, often their pilots cannot be. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Cold_War_pilot_defectio...
Also, the F-35 was sold as being worthwhile because it was cheaper and easier. In reality it has been vastly more expensive and vastly less capable than alternatives, with far more maintenance per hour spent flying than most other aircraft.
If there was a hint of sanity in the USAF they'd shit-can the F-35 program and start a new round of competitive procurement for separate fighters for each role. It's worth remembering that some of the best aircraft in history have come about as responses to failed development programs. The F-14 grew out of the failed F-111B program, for example.
And yet each design is to some extent compromised by the needs of the other two. I totally understand that VTOL is cool, but why does a VTOL fighter have to have anything at all in common with two non-VTOL planes? Make it a separate program.
It would be interesting to hear the thoughts of the engineer in the video on the F/A-18. From what I've read about the Joint Strike Fighter project, from which the F-35 was borne, it seems like they were trying to recreate and expand upon the success and versatility of the F/A-18. I've always heard that the F/A-18 is one of the most useful planes in our arsenal, but it isn't highly specialized to one specific purpose.
As far as the F-35 goes, it seems like its yet another example where America is perfectly capable of building something better* than the rest of the world has, if it weren't for all of the corrupt politicians that are willing to trade real progress for personal gain.
*not that we are inherently better than everyone, its just that we poured an enormous amount of resources into this project
At the end of the day, I generally recognized that the F-15C pilot was going to be better at air-to-air, the A-10 or F-15E pilots better at air-to-ground. The F-16 pilots more jack-of-all-trade types (excluding CJs) with a slightly better aircraft that can't land on the boat. And the F-14 pilots better at drinking in the bar.
I also think the general consensus when I left a couple years back was that the F35 is a turd. Probably a better turd then anything else out there (excluding maybe the F-22), but not worth the price, and riddled with flaws. General's and Admiral's, however, put pressure on anyone who even thought of speaking negatively about the program.
If the saying goes: "Arm-chair generals study tactics, real generals study logistics," then our current crop of General's and Admiral's forgot the part about only "morons putting all their eggs in one basket." This is exactly what the JSF is: a basketful of eggs ready to break.
Unfortunately, the defense industry has gotten so totally out of control that we can't afford anything it provides. Pretty soon we will have 1 super tank, plane, submarine weapon thingy. The exit from senior military positions into the defense industry has created an awful supplier of tools to the troops. Our own leaders are so self-interested that they can't even recognize a problem: http://www.boston.com/news/politics/articles/2010/12/26/defe...
But the problem of this implicit corruption extends way beyond defense, just look at the banks and the treasury. We need some sort of '5 year hiatus', where after serving in a senior position of government, individuals can't join a corporation that does over X revenue with the branch of government that person just left for 5 years. No more hiring for the roledex or as payback for deeds done while in government. Serve in government to serve, not for the payday afterwards
That said, it's hard to measure the effectiveness of most US aircraft because they've never been operated in truly competitive conditions (the best measure is of aircraft which the israeli's use, since israel has often fought russian proxies such as Syria with late model aircraft and "advisors". By that measure, the F15 and F16 are unparalelled. The israelis don't use the F18 iirc, which says something.
The original design came from the same competition that gave us the F-16. High manuverability, high thrust aircraft are fundamentally versatile, especially when you put advanced avionics in them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAM-87_Skybolt
Edit: Even more like the fantastic idea to cancel the wonderful TSR-2 in favour of the F-111 - a decision which was then cancelled later on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_TSR-2
""All modern aircraft have four dimensions: span, length, height and politics. TSR-2 simply got the first three right."
(Not a weapons expert by any means. So please correct me if I'm wrong)
Having seen it, is there still any reason to see the movie? Or is that the gist of it? Because from looking at Wikipedia, that looks like the gist of it.
Edit: The clip is really more of a flashback -- the rest of the film deals with the young officer trying to ensure the vehicle receives a live fire test.
Also you'll miss the fact that everyone except the guy that said what would happen got promoted and he retired prematurely.
However, he loses a lot of respectability when he says that stealth is a scam. All you have to do is ask the multitude of the F117 pilots who flew over Baghdad during the invasion, if stealth technology helped them avoid Iraqi radar.
Just because SOME radars cannot detect stealth aircraft it does not immediately follow that NO radars can detect stealth aircraft.
http://aviationweek.com/defense/commentary-do-russian-radar-...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_aircraft#Limitations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bistatic_radar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_radar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multistatic_radar
Provided that you're willing to invest a minute or so (I spent 5 min finding links) you can discover that in fact he does know what he's talking about. This is established science and not at all contentious.
Afghanistan had no serious air defence network anyway. The Iraqi air defence network was heavily outdated and under sanctions for over 10 years in 2003. The Libyan air defences hadn't been updated since the 80s when the US managed to bomb Libya with the loss of one aircraft.
The Israelis managed time and time again to overcome the Syrian air defence network. Which is, although not build to its full capacity due to Russia holding back the S300 and now heavily impacted by the civil war, more modern and better designed than anything the US encountered in her recent conflicts. And the Israelis have no stealth aircraft and used their F-15.
Stealth isn't a scam, but it's very much oversold, especially with regard to the F35. Ultimately the stealth of the F35 is not enough of an advantage to make up for the downsides of the aircraft. In any force on force engadgment the F35 will run out of missiles and run low on fuel before the enemies, and then it will be forced to run away. A condition where the vehicle is less stealthy and also where it's slower speed is a huge disadvantage, so it'll just get shot out of the sky. This has been the consistent result of many simulations and wargames with the F35 against contemporary fighter aircraft.
And if this tech isn't dated already, the Pentagon plans to still be using these jets in 2065. (http://online.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-looks-to-lower-costs...)
I don't see a strong reason the Air Force should be investing so much in fighter jets and not focusing on drone technology.
He mentions dogfights, do those even happen anymore? Why participate in a manned dogfight when you can simply send drones -- and if they are shot down, send one more, or one hundred more.
The U.S. military is always fighting the last war. In this case, they aren't even fighting the last several wars, but are still locked into Cold War, pre-drone thinking.
A: The real mission is for the US government to send money to Lockheed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxDSiwqM2nw#t=443
By that standard, the F-35 has been a trememdous success!
$200 MM is a VERY hefty price. Hell 5 of these guys will cover our education needs across the whole damn united states.
I think you need to check your numbers? $1 billion is nowhere near what the United States spends on education each year.
Simply: Lockheed define narrow criteria that only Lockheed can win and then lobby enough to ensure those criteria are applied.
Does it have to be? Here's a similar jet: the Dassault Rafale. Its also multirole. Its not nearly as good as the F-35. Is it better than the F-22 in air to air combat? Nope. Did it shot down a F-22, ever? Yes (yes - they have official combat simulations with real planes, only the missiles are not real - and those are made to sell the airplanes so there is no incentive to go easy). Does that means its better then? Nope, still not. Most of the time, it loses.
There's several points here:
- you dont have to be the best tool for the job to be the best all rounder.
- sometimes the best all rounder is better than the best tool for the job. its cheaper (imagine 3 or 4 F-22 scale programs vs 1 F-35 program), and it does the job well enough for many tasks. in fact, air to air superiority is one of the only tasks where you currently need to specialize. Turns out that the army has done this choice as well and has the F-22.
- views you can see or read of what is "better" or "worse" regarding fighter aircrafts is most of the time completely wrong and extremely misleading. Most people have extremely, extremely high financial interests in this. Billions and billions. War is a very juicy business.
One of the points of the "co designer of the F16" (mind you, id take a F15 over a F16 ANY DAY) are the "small wings" of the F35 giving it mediocre lift.
I like this one. The F-35 has better lift and better aerodynamics than the F-16 or the F-15, or the F/A-18. But its non-obvious. This engineer knows that. The general public doesn't. (note that the main reason for this, beside better design for aerodynamics is that the body of the plane provides most of the lift).
Some of the other commons points are generally either plain false, either have truth in them but pushed further than the reality.
- LETS THE INTERVIEWEE SPEAK
- listens so that she's able to accurately summarize what the guy said!
Great moment -- thanks for sharing.
If I recall correctly the F-15 was partly his baby but he only got in mid-way so couldn't make it as good as he wanted it. Then the Lightweight Fighter program was run by him and generated the YF-16 and YF-17 prototypes. The YF-16 won the competition and became the F-16. Then the Navy didn't like a single engine plane (or didn't like an air force plane) and took the YF-17 and made the F-18.
So I doubt they hated the F-15 but they definitely liked the F-16 better. I'm not sure how happy they were about the F-18 given that it was a run-around their LWF process.
> The F-35, by contrast, is being designed by some 6,000 engineers led by a rotating contingent of short-tenure managers, with no fewer than 2,000 government workers providing oversight. The sprawling JSF staff, partially a product of the design’s complexity, has also added to that complexity like a bureaucratic feedback loop, as every engineer or manager scrambles to add his or her specialty widget, subsystem or specification to the plane’s already complicated blueprints … and inexperienced leaders allow it.
For those interested in a deeper look at why the F-35 is so, well, F'd, this is a great read:
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/fd-how-the-u-s-and-its-alli...
It basically comes down to stupid design considerations forced upon the program by the various branches(mainly the Marine Corps) and how easily blinded Congress was by the notion of a (supposedly cheaper) one-size-fits-all solution.
People are interchangeable, there is no institutional knowledge, and management can solve all technical issues.
If you've read the "Boyd" biography mentioned here by other commenters, you'll recognize many of Boyd's and Sprey's criticisms of the so-called "F-X" fighter procurement program (which eventually led to the F-15) in his critique of the F-35. [1]
None of the Fighter Mafia actually "designed" any of these aircraft, but Boyd, Sprey, Christie and others did play a pivotal role in changing how the Pentagon defined and proved the specifications of the fighters it was buying. The F-X was supposed to be a larger, swing-wing, multi-role behemoth, similar to the abysmal F-111, which Boyd proved to Pentagon brass to be inferior to virtually all enemy fighters, by way of his brilliant "Energy-Maneuverability" theory. In this way, Boyd and Sprey influenced the final design of the F-15, but to a much lesser extent than the designs of the F-16 or A-10. [2]
One key point Sprey brings up in several of his other interviews on the F-35 topic (which he curiously leaves out of this one) is that, regardless of the capabilities (or lack thereof) of the F-22 or F-35, neither will ever be as successful as the historically-great fighters like the P-51, F-4, F-15, or F-16, simply because they'll never be built in sufficient numbers.
For a fighter to be great, its pilots must also be great, and to do that they must train regularly and often, something which has proven impossible with the low dispatch reliability of these complex fifth-gen fighters. Sprey notes that in WWII, the U.S. P-51 fleet triumphed over the vastly superior German fleet of ME-262s, by first developing tactics that could defeat this amazing jet (i.e., shooting them down while taking off or landing), and because there were simply more P-51s available to fight.
Sprey and Boyd were right about a few things: build them light (which helps make them fast and maneuverable), build them cheap, and build lots of them.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-15_Eagle#Or...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy%E2%80%93maneuverability_...
Almost no air-to-air combat starts out within visual range and this has been the case since the 1980s when the F-16 became available.
Part of the reason the F-16 became popular is that its cheaper to buy and operate compared to the F-4 and F-15, and even the F-16 Block 5 had an avionics package that made it quite capable in combat and achieved its first Air-to-Air kill in 1980. Smaller jets like the F-5E and the SAAB Gripen don't have nearly the same combat radius on internal fuel.
The F-35 is one of the most agile jets available when loaded for combat. Most of the claims about the F-16 are in airshow configuration and not combat loaded with drop tanks.
Until the politicians require visual confirmation of the target. Which is exactly what happened in Vietnam under LBJ. At which point Sparrows were dead weight with a lot of drag.
By 2003, the USAF made extensive use of E-3 AWACS and fighters required clearance from Joint Air Operations Center before engaging a target. The E-3 would vector the fighters for an intercept so it wouldn't start visually.
We won't really know what kind of air superiority platform the F-35 is until it's had a few run-ins with other modern fighters. Stealth capabilities and superior sensors may be more than enough to make up for lack of maneuverability. Or maybe not.
IIRC, Pierre Sprey represents one side in a political battle about aircraft design, but I hope someone here knows more about it than I do.
"The goal of generalization had become so fashionable that a generation of mathematicians had become unable to relish beauty in the particular, to enjoy the challenge of solving quantitative problems, or to appreciate the value of technique" - From the preface to Concrete Mathematics; Graham, Knuth and Patashnik
The lightweight fighter program (LWF), which spawned F-16 and F/A-18, was done for daylight dogfights, but both aircraft have picked a lot of electronics during the years and are used for laser guided precision bombing (something for which you needed an A-10 in the nineties still).
Further, AFAIK, the primary US adversary back in the seventies, the Soviet Union, was much closer technologically than what they or others are now. Russia and China are catching up though.
So a "good enough" "jack of all trades" aircraft might make a lot of sense. You might just need less aircraft in total. The US Air Force and Navy have been simplifying their inventory a lot in the past years anyway. The F-14 and A-6 are retired for example, with worse aircraft (for specific missions) used instead. You can always go in a more "hot rod" direction - but what will be the price?
General Dynamics' Harry Hillaker is the real designer of the F-16. Boyd, Riccioni, Christie and Sprey were part of the LWF mafia, while General Dynamics designed the actual F-16.
GD used a lot of resources, did a very thorough analysis and spent a huge amount of time in the wind tunnel. You can see the very visual design evolution in various stories about it. (Incidentally the LWF third place competitor Boeing design looked a lot like the GD one, as did the Vought design.)
Here is one history: http://www.codeonemagazine.com/f16_article.html?item_id=131
IMHO, the fatness-inducing lift fan space could have been ditched to make the airplane perform better. A separate less commonal version could have been created for VTOL use.
I guess this makes Boyd and Sprey co-designers in that they shaped the requirements and specifications.
http://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-Changed-ebook/d...
Oh, sure, Old Man Douglas might have drawn the outline of the DC-7's tail up in the old "lofting room", or someone said "one engine" for the F-16, or "elliptical domes" for the Titan fuel and oxidizer tanks, but after that, saying someone is THE designer of a large project is just a fib.
close combat its IR missiles anyway.
This design [0] from Burt Rutan [1] is beautiful in its simplicity. While it doesn't have the mission of objectives as the F35, I'd rather have 300 Mudfighters than a single F35.
I wonder what these projects have in common...
Very few of us can say that a design mistake on our part is the difference between life and death.
Probably not for quite awhile. Issues of lethality aside, the electronics aren't there yet. In Afghanistan, there were long waits to get downlink bandwidth to get video back from UAV's. We're nowhere near the point where we can maintain effective communications with a squadron of drones big enough to do real damage, and the "automated killer drone AI" isn't close yet either.
Yes, the Air Force needs to anticipate the future, but I think the future is a bit further away than you think. If they're planning on using these until 2065, they might start designing drone replacements in say 2045. That's only 30 years away, and probably not a bad ballpark estimate for how long it'll take to get this technology to the point where you can start really relying on it for offensive capability. It sounds like a long time from now, but the F-22 RFP process was started just about thirty years ago.
Now there's a terrifying prospect. Is this actually something we should expect to see any time soon? My understanding has been that, films aside, "AI" software is nowhere near the point where we might run a drone that can kill on it
There are better drones being developed, but they will be expensive and will depend extensively on sat links for communicating between the drone and base station. This will be problematic against a peer foe who can jam radio transmissions.
High G maneuvering to defeat missiles certainly still happens. There is a YouTube F-16 cockpit video of one flight's encounter with a SAM missile trap in the balkans. The F-16 is supremely maneuverable. Sounds like they were desperate and barely made it out. (One plane was hit, IIRC.)
EDIT: I remembered wrong. This was the video about an incident over Iraq. Also, it was due to a mistake in mission planning.
Drones would be even better at this in many ways. Possibly worse in terms of situational awareness, however, depending on how well integrated the pilot's information is.
Actually autonomous ones are as far as I know only good for static targets (effectively they are reusable cruise missiles).Close air support or deciding whether to engage an enemy airplane or not gets tricky.
There are different types of UAVs "drones" for a more buzzword-y term, for different uses. The bigger boys such as the Predator, Global Hawk, etc use satellite navigation. There is most definitely a "lag" of sorts for those types of UAVs. The Shadow and the Hunter however, are line of sight. It limits their range severely (I got one out to 166km from the control station), but they are just as dangerous, albeit smaller and with less endurance for extended missions. It doesn't matter, they are cheap and you can launch lots of them :)
I've got 480 combat flight hours from Operation Iraqi Freedom II, from 2003-2004. We CONSTANTLY were targeting moving things and never had any real issues with it. You just use the right drone for the mission at hand. The military has dozens of different types of drones, but only the bigger ones make the news on a regular basis. The Shadow is being phased out for those types of missions in favor of the MQ-1C Gray Eagle.
Now for air/air stuff, they call those UCAS (lookup the X45-B / X47-B), the tech is still fledgling enough to need another 5-10 years before it will ever become a reality. On that, there simply isn't good enough software... yet.
Manned planes are the cavalry of the 21st century. They're glamorous and dashing, but also insanely high maintenance.
On-board AI will only get better. And you only need one kill from a disposable unit to take out a manually-flown enemy.
I think there's an argument to be made that investment in new fighter jets is potentially an effort to avoid fighting the last (aerial) war.
That is, no one expects that the USA will actually get into a war with Russia, China, or one of the other "usual suspects" which has significant air-warfare capability. The existence of sufficiently advanced weaponry (on both sides) helps ensure that such a war won't happen.
It's certainly not the biggest motivator avoiding war (who needs motivation to not fight war, anyway?), but enough of these deterrents added up helps keep negotiations civil.
All that said, it's probably just the military-industrial complex at work -- why give up multi-billion dollar fighter jet contracts for much more reasonable multi-(tens? hundreds?)-million dollar drone contracts?
Also, the air superiority that these aircraft enable, allows the use of drones, and other ground advantages.
So yes, while air-to-air dog fighting is rare (although posturing certainly isn't), it's only one use for these planes.
The only thing I can think of is creative solutions to incoming missiles, but if that really is something that computers cannot currently do, I doubt that will remain the case for long.
... has become an over-used cliche, the one thing many people know about military planning, and thus it is re-used, like the last wars' stratagems, far beyond its weight or value.
Where are you getting that idea? What other countries use drone warfare? As far as I can, it was the CIA that started the whole drone strike campaign, and I'm not aware of other countries that use it consistently.
Now, I'm not aware of an autonomous drone that can shoot down an f-22 with a missile, but it seems like a solvable technical challenge, especially if you're willing to throw a trillion dollars at the problem.
So anyway, for each f-22 send up 7 drones. one for each missile, and one to survive to get the kill, as long as the 6 lost drones are cheaper than the f22, you're winning, kinda.
Furthermore, pilots are expensive and take time to replace. I doubt there are even 10,000 combat pilots in the world (wag) kill off a few thousand, and the drones are against rookies. All the while, the drone software is improving and getting even tougher to kill. And, the drones should be capable of things that that human pilots just can't accomplish - high g turns for example.
Self driving cars aren't better than the best drivers, but they're way above average drivers, eventually the robots will be better. Same with jets. why not start now?
This doesn't exactly answer your question, but it is an interesting article along these lines: http://www.economist.com/node/14299496
A few quotes:
"Countries with 'hunter-killer' drones include America, Britain and Israel."
"'Almost all' IDF [Israeli Defense Force] ground operations now have drone support."
"...Estimates that America will spend about 60% of the total [global sales of drones]."
"Following the United States, Israel ranks second in the development and possession of drones, according to those in the industry. The European leaders, trailing Israel, are roughly matched: Britain, France, Germany and Italy. Russia and Spain are not far behind, and nor, say some experts, is China... In total, more than three dozen countries operate UAVs, including Belarus, Colombia, Sri Lanka and Georgia. Some analysts say Georgian armed forces, equipped with Israeli drones, outperformed Russia in aerial intelligence during their brief war in August 2008. (Russia also buys Israeli drones.)"
"Iran builds drones, one of which was shot down over Iraq by American forces in February... Iran has supplied Hizbullah militants in Lebanon with a small fleet of drones, though their usefulness is limited."
No other country has had any kind of conflict where a drone would have provided any advantage. Hell, even our drones are not effective and cause more problems than they are worth. We just like being screwed and bamboozled by the next big thing our military services complex has to sell us.
If you have any idea of the consequences and effects of using drones in tactical operations then you would know that if any other country was using them in the way we use them we would be crying foul and trying to passive aggressively shame them for killing innocent civilians.
I'm not asking if you agree or disagree with the use of drones in wars, I'm actually asking if there is a debate going on about the use of unmanned vehicles in wars.
Some significant problems the project is experiencing:
-F-35 can't fly in poor weather because it doesn't have adequate protection against lightning strikes -Stealth coating doesn't sufficiently withstand temperature around the exhausts -Exhaust gas is too hot for amphibious ship decks for the Marine Corps variant -Rear visibility is poor, and 3D helmet designed to address that shortcoming isn't ready yet -Onboard software is severely flawed and behind schedule.
This program is already wildly over budget and is only going to continue exceeding its budget as they address the multitude of issues it has right now.
The whole point of this aircraft was that it was supposed to be cheaper and more versatile than the F-22. The unit cost is already going to be well over $100 million and that's with the assumption that our allies will buy a large number of them. Chances are several allies are going to drop out, and I suspect we are going to dramatically cut back the number we acquire as well, thereby driving up the unit cost.
On top of that, it is becoming increasing unlikely it will perform as billed. Not to mention that from day 1 the F-35 concept was ill-suited for the close air support role.
The US military would be far better off cutting its losses now and starting from scratch to develop a light strike fighter for the Air Force, a close air support attack aircraft to replace the A-10, maybe an interceptor for the Navy, and scrapping the Marine Corps variant altogether. That ridiculous STOVL requirement is a large part of why this project has gone so awry.
Do I think the F-35 is a great jet? Hard to say since it's still in LRIP. But it's reported by pilots who have flown it to be more maneuverable than F-15/16/18. Not as fast as the F-22, and not as stealthy. Longer legged than the F-18 (either version).
Where it falls down is in cost, largely due to it requiring so much commonality between the three versions. If the cost stays above $150M a copy (depends on how you calculate that, and it's a hard thing to do), it's too pricey. The F-22 would have been better for A2A, and if the line had been kept open, the Raptor's cost would have ended up below that. So if LM can get the cost down closer to the $100m mark, it'll be fine. New build F-16s are over $80M, the Silent Eagle was expected to cost North of $100m, and neither would be able to handle the role of the F-35.
Im not sure the cost is such a huge deal compared to 3 concurrent programs that make cheaper planes, due to the program cost. itd probably be about the same granted that all 3 program would have been decently successful.
comparing to 1 program doesnt work if the plane fullfill 3 roles - IMO
http://zbigniewmazurak.wordpress.com/2013/06/26/dassault-raf...
http://www.wired.com/2011/06/stealth-tech-obsolete/
It is more complicated than "LOL LONG WAVE RADAR I WIN".
"The other problem that the defender must contend with is the fact that the L-band and most parts of the S-band have radar resolution cells that are too large to provide a weapons quality track. Effectively, even if a defender can detect and track an attacking stealthy fighter, that defender may not be able to guide a missile onto that target.
That being said, both the SPY-1 and the forthcoming Raytheon Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR) operate in higher frequency portions of the S-band and are able to generate weapons quality tracks. If the Chinese system is similar—and there are indications that it is—it could generate fire-control quality guidance for the HQ-9B missiles."
Stealth provides some ability to evade however the most modern systems that are getting rolled out in the next 5 years are going to able to track a F-35 and engage it without significant hardship.
Stealth at this point is really just another layer of defense, like decoys. It'll decrease the distance at which you can truly kill a F-35. However, at 200 million each, you can afford to build a large number of missiles & mobile SAMs to take out a F-35.
The radar-absorbing paint may do something (or at least it could in theory). And long-wave radars are naturally going to bigger and more inconvenient than short-wave.
I've never really thought about it, but I think he might be right!
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jindalee_Operational_Radar_Netw...
[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20071116065249/http://defence-dat...
[1] http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military/planes-u...
Like any security measure (think of IT security), there are counter-measures. The value of security is that it raises the cost of defeating you.
The original F-16 concept included a thrust to weight ratio > 1, like the F-15's, plus 20 minutes of supercruise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercruise which we've only achieved lately with the F-22). Sufficiently strict requirements with the low weight and low(ish) cost that it e.g. sacrificed night and all-weather capability.
The Air Force wasn't interested in such a bird, but they were interested in a fighter-bomber based on it, which e.g. required serious additions to the frame and cost it the super high performance.
But in an AU perhaps the original F-16 would have turned out to be a magnificent fighter.
The USAF was really interested in a "cheap" aircraft that could replace the F-4/A7 in quantity, and function in a swing role as a bomber if it wasn't required for A2A work.
"Take it with a grain of salt" basically means "take it in a very small quantity", i.e., don't buy much into it.
If you say "large grain of salt", you're saying "take more of it", which has the opposite meaning from what you intended.
Sorry. I'll crawl back into my hole now.
"If you say "large grain of salt", you're saying "take more of it", which has the opposite meaning from what you intended."
The claim here is not the salt, the salt is the skepticism. Well, that's how I understand it anyway.
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/take-with-a-grain-of-salt...
Also small, also cheap, and the Germans built scads of them. You could really see the difference in training and experience, however, toward the end of the war, where badly trained German pilots were thoroughly outclassed by their Allied opponents.
It was designed jointly by McDonnel Douglas and Northrop and is an evolution of the earlier Northrop YF-17 which competed against the F-16 in the Lightweight Fighter Program.
The YF-17, in turn, was actually an evolution of the even earlier Northrop F-5 Freedom Fighter.
Not trying to be a pedant, honestly. The F/A-18 just has a fairly interesting design heritage, and that heritage is pretty much entirely outside of Boeing. They're just the ones that ended up with the production after industry consolidation.
You can also reduce your effective cross section to long-wave radars by splitting the hull into non electrically connected areas. If there is no electrical contact there is no resonance effect for that particular frequency. Who knows, maybe some aircraft eventually will use it.
Stealth as a generic concept is not ruined by long wave radars, the current designs might be. It's traditional arms race.
Every opposition government ever opposes whatever large military procurement is proposed: It's easy to find negatives, and there is no real downside to be negative. Occasionally the rhetoric can get so over the top that it needs action (see the Liberals cancelling the EH-101, and then having to effective re-order it at a much higher price tag for less hardware), but generally it just quietly continues.
And the overwhelming reason Canada wants the F-35 has little to do with the aircraft, and everything to do with manufacturing partnership agreements that would see many billions of that order going to facilities in Canada, invigorating the aerospace industry.
Not saying it's a good purchase, because it isn't, but I wouldn't pin it on the Conservatives.
http://febp.newamerica.net/background-analysis/education-fed...
If the "commander" plane is going to rely on satellite links, they might as well be sitting on the ground. The "commander" plane needs extensive defenses as well; pretty much similar to how AWACS aircraft are protected.
A close cousin of the very popular fire -n- forget missile and the smart bomb.
Something that must be considered is pilots that aren't risking their butts might be a little more ... aggressive with drones. And drones larger than RC planes aren't any lighter or cheaper than manned craft (so you yank out 400 pounds of life support and cockpit, and replace it with 350 pounds of radios, satellite downlinks and computers. "Eh") So this agressiveness could make mission costs somewhat higher.
Question: "How did you manage to spot the stealth fighter?"
Zoltan Dani: "To that end, we used the Soviet-made P18 meter band radar which is capable of tracking any warplane irrespective of the configuration of its fuselage. The radar started to emit and we discovered a target at a distance of 15 kilometers – something that our operators were distinctly seeing on a display. I was quick to order the launch of a missile which destroyed the target."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-18_radar
Military weapon systems are a war unto themselves: each side learning about the other's and creating new systems to remove those advantages. Basically, once the F117A became common knowledge, it was only a matter of years before modern radar systems were developed that mitigated that advantage.
I have little doubt that Russia put a lot of effort into making the S400 effective against stealth aircraft. Having a low radar profile still helps, but we won't see the advantage the F117A had over Baghdad.
That's sadly unlikely to help, as can be seen in countries where such regulations are in place. The culprits simply delay the payment or move to alternate forms of compensation (e.g. arranging for a well-compensated 'job' for a close family member...).
>We need some sort of '5 year hiatus
I was under the impression that it was already illegal whenever a conflict of interest exists, and that the laws were simply being ignored.
Before I started my current position, I spent a couple of years as a defense contractor doing entry and intermediate level IT work. Whenever I applied for a job, as a low level employee, I had to fill out questionnaires that asked dozens of questions about whether or not I had been a senior leader in a government organization that could have impacted the decision making process for government contracts. I assumed that these questions were designed to filter out any applicants that might present a conflict of interest, but I frequently hear stories about Colonels and Generals jumping right into executive positions at the same companies they negotiated government contracts with just a few months earlier. IMO, the people who are doing this AND the people who are knowingly hiring them should end up in federal prison.
Do $100K speaker fees count as "join[ing] a corporation"? It's a more direct payment than putting someone on the board.
And in reference to your previous comment, if a drone pilot makes a mistake, we lose money, not lives. Another advantage of the drones.
The fact that this terrifies so few people terrifies me.
Pretty soon, some one will ask "how many teachers could we hire" or "how many roads could we fix" for the price of "the war" ...
Public comments about the JSF program by Lockheed, military spokespersons, and congressional supporters alike have all touted the plane's stealth capabilities to an extent that makes me wonder how many actually understand the difference between the two. Given the likelihood that operational demands (particularly close air support for the Marines with the F-35B... not that CAS missions could every be very stealthy) will make the entire point moot, I really don't understand all the emphasis on it.
The F-35....not so much.
selling complicated weaponry like planes is a great way for countries to foster dependency. you would have to be pretty stupid to go to war against the US using American planes. you wouldn't be able to fly them for long without mechanical support (parts etc), engineering support.
Iran got hold of a drone. It's not quite the drone "defecting" but it's somewhat similar.
Still the only sovereign nation to give up satellite launching capability after acquiring it...
"Prior to the cancellation of Black Arrow, NASA had offered to launch British payloads for free; however, this offer was withdrawn following the decision to cancel Black Arrow."
Always liked that little bit of history :).
Nominal peacetime is when the bureaucrats try to save money with a single weapon system that "can do everything" ... but it seldom does more than one thing well. The M14 rifle is another '50s example.
Clueless German higher-ups were asking that every aircraft also be able to dive-bomb, causing design compromises and delays. Yes, they even did that with their revolutionary jet aircraft! (The fighter and the high speed bomber!)
At a certain point in the war, the utility of the fighter-bomber was very well established, the Germans even had their own name for it, Jäger-Bomber I think it was, or Jabo. (I'd recommend the Wikipedia article, but it claims the P-38 was a poor fighter (!!!)).
In general Nazi procurement was extremely subpar at this level. One might think Arthur C. Clarke's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_(short_story) was based on them.
So they started developing the Hyunmoo series. The Hyunmoo-3c has a range of 1500km, it is domestically built unlike the previous Hyunmoo missiles which were actually old Nike missiles from 1950s. It's interesting that South Korean engineers added a slot for carrying nuclear warheads (possibly had plans to develop nuclear weapons at some point in the 1970s).
Cruise missiles don't give the same power projection like a ballistic missile tipped with nuclear warhead. It can be intercepted which limits it's reach.
NK is predominantly rocket salvo and shell artillery. This may be basic tech, but its very effective militarily.
Cruise missiles are damn difficult to intercept. And for each plane with "bunker buster" dumb bombs, you can buy a salvo of very clever bunker-busting cruise missiles which don't have to bring their pilot home after.
Tying it up to something with a very, very low false positive kill rate is the hard part, but we are very close with a lot of the components.
The whole process of command and control, targeting, ROE, etc. is incredibly complex and far from easy. Drone's will do more and more, but I'm definitely not a fan of Hunter-Killers on the loose. Two of the fixed-wing losses during the opening of OIF were blue-on-blue Patriot shoot downs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aviation_shootdowns_and...
Yes, with current equipment it limits your range to somewhere beyond the orbit of the moon. Yes, we can now keep a laser and a receiver tracked on each other from 300000km away.
> And nature has a great way of jamming lasers, called clouds.
There are wavelengths that are not hampered much by clouds.
> If you were able to get a decently powered laser in a satellite
We can.
> it wouldn't be able to control too many aircraft unless it looked like a porcupine.
... but this is a problem, you'd basically be limited in total bandwidth by count of satellites. Meaning you either need to launch a lot of them, or reduce bandwidth per drone.
UAVs are great against opponents with limited electronic warfare capabilities, but wouldn't they lack credibility against China or Russia? They'd simply jam them and that'd be that, yes?
Blocking the entire RF spectrum all at the same time is possible, but unbelievably difficult. When you're hopping a random # of MHZ every few dozen microseconds, it is super tricky.
I guess that was what was behind the story of insurgents grabbing drone video feeds.
Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB126102247889095011
As I understand it, that's so you can show them to anyone quickly; if encrypted, various security issues are invoked.
It was considered to be an acceptable trade off because the greater part of their usefulness is so ephemeral. On the other hand, an adversary who routinely monitors them could figure out a lot of things about our general methods.
The crazy thing is the close air support and bomber roles are much better suited for drone aircraft so at least one of it's missions is pure BS from the start.
This is also why they require drone operators to be actual pilots despite the fact that there is zero need for that level of training. Its just a way to protect their idols.
Also, I don't know that I buy that the drone pilot has the same local/situational awareness that a pilot sitting in an A-10/Apache does.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ve69jkhqxtpppv0/IMG_0608.JPG
That's with the 130ft wings removed.
In the case of the F35, I'd love to see many of them reaching enemy countries.. Attempting to replicate it would send their aerospace industries back decades.
They had to destroy as much of that presumably staggeringly expensive equipment as they could to avoid it falling into the wrong hands.
I did not know that instead of the C4 you'd expect to see from movies, they used hot coffee to destroy most of the equipment.
If you're near Caloundra they have an open cockpit weekend coming up.
The Littoral Combat Ship is the exact same trick being played right now! It's pretty much useless as a naval war fighting platform against a serious enemy, but some thin claims that it's a multi-mission platform got it the go-ahead.
Dive bomb. There were attempts to get both the Me-262 and the Arado bomber to do this!
Guess you could always turn something like a AC-130 into a drone too.
The longer range ones really can use it to increase hit probability. Or so I've read is true for the Phoenix and AIM-120 missiles, classed as "fire and forget". and the newest Standard missile uses a AIM-120 derived head with a bigger antenna. And I'm sure still depends on mid-course corrections (for that matter, I've read the current models self-destruct if they doesn't get guidance fairly soon after launch).
The AIM-120 uses a datalink to guide the missile close to the target, after which the missile's internal radar emitter goes active, and the missile locks onto the nearest target that it finds. This is because the radar on the missile is not nearly as powerful as the radar on the aircraft. So it's not truly a "fire and forget" missile, at least if a high probability of kill is desired. I believe the Phoenix is similar.
They have it half right purchasing the Boeing P-8A Poseidon and evaluating Reaper drones.
But like the UK we don't need aircraft carriers, but it seems that's what Tony now wants the new Canberra class ships to be.
So no, I don't think drone tech is good enough to down F-35s, but I think with sufficient zerg tactics, it could deny airspace.
First it has to be directed in the right direction. Need a good radar system somewhere for that. It also has a much higher hit probability against a target, especially a distant one, if you can send it remote course corrections. Note that neither of these need to be on the launching platform, but they need to be somewhere in the local area.
If every Predator gets a 100W wideband transmitter and SOME of them get instead of weapons the equipment necessary to process the reflections and do the calcs then the others can get that target information and blammo.
If there are 100 Predators for every F35 in the combat zone and they ALL turn on their transmitters simultaneously at some kind of interval you're never going to know which one is carrying weapons and which one is command and control. So you can't do prioritized targeting and thus you're shooting blind. Yeah you can shoot down some of them but once you're out of missiles that's it.
Do we have to worry about 3rd world countries being able to muster this kind of response? No. But there are plenty of industrialized countries that could, and they could bleed us dry one $200mm plane at a time.
A hundred drones could at least take out all the airport runways, leaving it nowhere to land...
Nothing says you can't have a few dozen/hundred drones with SAMs, either.
And creating an autonomous UCAS capable of conducting air to air combat isn't going to be cheap at all. The reason we like drones now is because they have the performance characteristics of a Cessna, and they don't put pilots at risk. To compete in A2A combat, they'll need performance (and avionics) that exceed what our best fighters currently have. That will be buku $$...
If you have a "pack" of drones big enough that a single enemy combat aircraft can't take them all down at once then if an enemy aircraft were to fire on a drone in the "pack" it could automatically be designated an enemy and be hunted by the remainder?
What will you do when the enemy sends up unmanned autonomous aircraft that ignore these niceties and shoot down all your manned fighters?
I'm not dismissing the legitimate problems you raise, but we need to prepare for war, which almost by definition is the absence of rules, such as distinguishing military from civilian targets.
EDIT: Also of interest, if an autonomous fighter shoots down a civilian aircraft, is it a war crime? Mistakes happen in war that aren't crimes. And if it is, who goes to jail?
Completely off topic, but did you mean the French beaucoup to imply the phrase "Lots of money" here?
For example if we have 50 drones doing some task it's stupid to hire 50 people to manage them like pilots. Much better to hire 5 people and give them better ui (construct 360 degree view from all the drones feeds localy and send only the aggregated information.
I would guess that identifying your own teammates is much easier than distinguishing strangers who are combatant from non-combatant, and among combatants distinguishing allies from enemies.
Also, suicidal autonomous aircraft are common, in the form of missiles. If these more intelligent missiles kill the enemy, it doesn't matter if they kill each other too (beyond the financial loss). Maybe you give each a 'kill area', in which they are instructed to kill everything, and spread them out enough that they don't overlap too much.
$300k - $400k
> How much it weighs?
152 kg
> How much reinforcement the wing structure of a drone would require to carry, launch and land with this weaponry?
According to General Atomics;
"With a 1,500 lb (680 kg) payload, its wings are 'more than sufficient' to mount larger air-to-air or air-to-surface missiles."
So yes, you do need both the plane (with onboard sensor/radar) and missiles in order to hope for a kill.
The F-35 is $200M. The Global Hawk drone is about $50M already and that's without any weapons systems.
When you are designing a weapons system designed to kill people, you cannot just design something 'in a hackish fashion'. No, this shit has got to work correctly all the time.
The cheapest Predator drone cost about $5M and top flight Predators and Global Hawks cost between $20M-50M. This means flying 100 of them is not reasonable. UAVs are also not autonomous and need manned pilots. Even if you were to build 100 drones, are you going to pay for 100 extra pilots, create some kind of airport that can house 100 drones, keeping them all fueled and maintained in the desert?
Kinda naive to think that you can just use SV start up philosophies in this application.
Pick your response:
* Welcome to Hacker News, please enjoy your stay!
* If I had a nickel for every time someone tried to shoehorn start up philosophy into an unrelated field, I'd be posting from my yacht!
Agreed, and I stated EXACTLY that in another portion of the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7907637
> When you are designing a weapons system designed to kill people, you cannot just design something 'in a hackish fashion'. No, this shit has got to work correctly all the time.
No, with that part of engineering as with EVERY part of engineering: it depends. Do you want UNIT reliability or SYSTEM reliability? Does every plane have a literal 100% chance of intercepting every target it is tasked with? No, of course not. But the missiles do, you say? Again wrong. But surely SOME portion of the entire system will work ALL THE TIME! Nope, no engineer worth his salt will give you a 100% guarantee for anything as unknown as "stopping all possible threats".
Furthermore plenty of systems that are supposed to be very reliable are made up of less reliable parts. The whole Star Wars program was based on defense in depth where no one layer of system was going to stop 100% of the warheads but multiple layers acting in concert would be able to (presumably) stop them all or almost all. Hackish is fine provided that you've got substantially overlapping coverage from multiple command and control drones. No one drone has to work 100% guaranteed because even at only a 95% success rate (which is abysmal compared to the "all the time" demand you're making) with three overlapping zones gives you .05 * .05 * .05 = .0125% chance of failing. I'll take 1/8 of a chance of failure per thousand incidents as successful enough.
Again, I'm not talking about having 100 drones with 100 pilots but perhaps having 100 drones with 9 pilots for the command and control drones (one for every 10 mules) and some kind of a very rudimentary, randomized loiter algorithm for the mules.
> Kinda naive to think that you can just use SV start up philosophies in this application.
I want to say a bunch of really snarky stuff in response. I'm an outsider to SV; I grew up in MN, went to school in FL and now I live in TX. None of these places ever get accused of being even SLIGHTLY SV-ish in nature so I don't see how I deserve that kind of comment. Ultimately though you've made a lot of assumptions that don't necessarily hold. The idea that you're going to defeat the US using the same kind of procurement and whatever that the US uses is a non-starter. You don't try and beat the US at a symmetric war but you can defeat them with an asymmetric one. We're losing how many lives and how much money in Iraq and Afghanistan right now to IEDs which are what, 10 notches below the fancy shit we have? And yet all our fancy airplanes haven't saved a single soldier from an IED that I'm aware of.
I'm not necessarily saying that you absolutely 100% can use SV philosophies in war and win, but I am saying that the notion that the way the US military does it is the ONLY way to do it isn't correct either.
Anyway, so is your strategy to fire multiple missiles at a time for each target? Assuming it's possible for UAVs to engage air targets (which they cannot right now), how many are you going to shoot off for each target, at the cost of $0.5M for each missile, just because you developed an algorithm in a 'hackish' manner?
If you gave each pilot 10 drones to control, good luck trying to execute evasive maneuvers on all of them when they come under attack.
1. Performance is linear(ish) with cost
2. The US operates at a global maximum in price/performance
I disagree with both. Performance is roughly linear with cost given a certain operational parameter envelope. Things change when you change the envelope though. Dramatically. And the idea that the US has chosen the ultimate operational parameter window which cannot be improved on under any circumstances isn't believable.
I do appreciate everyone arguing with me long enough that I could distill it so succinctly. You may still disagree with me and that's OK. But at least my crazy heretical thoughts are more easily digested now.
It's important to understand the limits of radar too; it's not like in a video game where you get this god view of the airspace around you. You are always making tradeoffs in flight about where your radar is focused, it's range, and how many targets it can track while scanning. That's why the US and it's allies rely so heavily on an AWACs system.
UCAS aircraft that can drop bombs in a contested airspace are going to cost north of $50M per copy when all is said and done, and UCAS that can do A2A combat will be double that. Once you start putting high performance jet engines in drones, the costs start to rise. Same with avionics.
Today's drones are very very simple aircraft compared to high performance fighters.
I am not suggesting that you build unmanned F-15s for the $4mm each that you can build a Predator for. That's patently ludicrous I agree with you! So no fancy engines, nor fancy avionics. Also don't bother with swarm AI, have people on the ground handling targeting. Don't develop a billion dollar solution when $50k/year (roughly) works just fine.
What I was suggesting is that you build a bunch of aerial SAM launchers. Take a Predator, put something that can receive targeting info on it, arm it with air to air missiles. Deploy many of these in the sky. Then for every 10 missile mules, you put up a single command and control Predator. It has the fancy equipment to ensure that you can actually do targeting. Then put a transmitter on all Predators which can be turned on such that you can't detect which Predator is the command and control one.
Let's suppose that you could create this fleet of 11 for $4mm * 11 + $2mm * 10 + $20mm * 1 = $84mm This is very conservative in my mind because at this point we're basically paying US prices for the gear.
Again, we're not going for the fanciest, best, most high performance stuff ever built. Use old designs, don't worry about the best survivability, don't make them too rugged and thus don't drive up the cost. We're going for The Innovator's Dilemma style worse-is-better so long as it's functional enough to mule up the ordinance.
You can now afford at least 2x of these 11 unit Predator swarms for every 1x F-35 that can be deployed. An F-35 only carries 10 air to air weapons and that's when loaded with nothing but. The odds they get both command and control Predators on every engagement is statistically slim provided you're talking about at least a few dozen engagements.
That means that just playing a numbers game you're going to shoot down the F-35s and because you've got so many damn drones in the air enjoy quite a bit of air superiority. It's not exceedingly difficult to imagine that if the sky was thick with these things that the F-35s might not get all their ordinance away before being shot at making the grinding more painful.
Could the US manage such a feat of engineering discipline and fast-track development? NOT A CHANCE!! If you're thinking that this is unrealistic based on how things work in the US you're 100% correct. But to suppose that no other industrialized country in the world could embark on such a venture and succeed? If you believe that please stop reading HN because startups could never work/win against the entrenched giants who have all the advantages.
A Predator can't fly as high as an F-35 or F-22. It can't maneuver nearly as well either. Can't fly as fast. It can't be refueled in flight, so it's range is lower than the F-35. So you'd have to hope that the missile it carried could compensate for these deficiencies. However, missiles are very finicky, and have launch parameters that help them improve their odds. The military looks at it in terms of PoK (probability of kill). So to be cheap (so you can afford to have swarms) you have to give up performance. This will affect PoK.
Next you have to have robust, un-jammable commlinks. So far, no one has those. That's going to be expensive to develop. Humans can make decisions when the comms are degraded, or non-existent. AI has a long ways to go, and AI is expensive. To remain cheap, you'll have to give that up.
With you napkin/elevator calculations, you would be trading 22 Predators for each F-35. 22 Predators is $88M, and the F-35 will eventually drop close to $100m as it reaches IOC. Still, not a bad bargain if it works.
But now, since you've gone cheap and off the shelf, you've got a slow, unmaneuverable aircraft that can't detect a target (no radar), can't communicate well with it's controllers, and can't climb very high, limiting the range of its missiles.
Then, even if you outfit this Predator swarm with an UberMissile, you'll have blown your cost equation out of the water when this swarm comes up against SAMs, or a squadron of F-16s. The swarm won't even see the F-35s due to frontal aspect stealth, and they'll be able to target the Predators and kill them like baby seals. They'll be able to engage, kill, and disengage before the low performance Predators will be able to react.
The USSR also combined this control with extremely cheap aircraft (compared to Western counterparts). The idea would be that Central Europe would become a huge kill zone with swarms of Sukhoi and MIGs overwhelming the higher tech NATO fighters. This philosophy lasted until around the 80's with the introduction of the SU-27 and MIG-29 which were comparable in performance to their Western peers. The USSR was also alarmed at how easily the Israeli's dismantled the Soviet armed Syrian AF in the Bekaa Valley in 1982. This led them to the realization that the "quantity has a quality of its own" mantra had limits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_aperture_radar#Multis...
Here's the thing: technology is moving faster than the military can procure it right now. Way, way faster.
When your procurement cycle is at least 10 years and you want something to work for at least the next 40 years and all that projects take much, much longer and get much, much bigger than they need to.
The SAM sites that people started designing 10 or 20 years ago are big, sure. What about the SAM sites that you COULD design today and build in the next year or two, but which the US military would never accept without the impossible to get sign-offs.
The military is kinda like the FDA. They want to make sure that the stuff that makes it through the process is definitely, for sure, to all reasonable scrutiny, acceptable. There are a TON of really neat devices out there that are 5-10 years from being available to the general public but if you're really dying you can potentially get as a part of a clinical trial.
To judge what's available today after jumping through all the hoops for a decade as "The State of The Art" is understandable, but not entirely correct. I can't fault you for thinking that it is but I won't agree with you either.
2. There aren't even any autonomous UAVs right now, why do you think you will be able to make one that can also autonomously evade a missile?
2. Because it seems well within our capabilities to do some basic missile evasion AI, that's just a small subset of the challenge of making a fully autonomous UAV. You need to identify the missile and its trajectory, identify its flight and kill characteristics, and then identify the various actions you could take and evaluate their likelihood of successfully evading the missile. Then you carry that flight plan out. Rinse and repeat until you're no longer in danger.
This is a really hard, multi-dimensional optimization problem. The engineers at Lockheed Martin, Rockwell, etc., are not dumb. They are the opposite of dumb. They are rocket scientists, in both the colloquial and literal sense. The same holds true for us at the smaller companies. Heavy STEM educations, a lifetime of engineering and research. I've done a lot of work on next-gen battlefield stuff. It's not easy. It's not. It's control theory, filter theory, AI, computer vision, RF design, and so much more. If you can't play in at least 3-4 of those fields at a pretty high level you aren't invited to the party. I've seen far more professional, intelligent, and pragmatic engineers in that work than what I've seen pass for engineering in Silicon Valley.
You really aren't going to sit in an armchair and design up a system that'll work. OTOH, if you make something that does work, the military will beat a path to your door. Look into SBIRs, for example. I've worked on a lot of them. The door is not closed. The door is closed to half-baked schemes, but if you have an idea for putting some low cost hardware and software together, you can do something with it. I'm being more than a bit facile here; it isn't so hard to get through a Phase I and Phase II SBIR; getting your system deployed is quite a bit harder. Still, there are options. Just be prepared for the fact that they are going to take your product, stick it in a field, and shoot (literal) bullets at it. Ohh, failed the projectile test.... Yes, I take the point about swarms, but war is an extremely hostile environment (no pun intended). And as soon as you have tipped the equation towards "disposable", expect the enemy to change their systems to help you 'dispose' of them as soon as possible. Maybe your drone can operate in the theater today; what about 10 years from now? I honestly don't know, the calculus is anything but clear to me.
It is the same for military procurement.
Something else... If the drones are cheap and "disposable", then maybe upgrades can occur more frequently to keep up with current events. I don't think that trying to design weapon systems to least 40 years is the way forward.
I've spent my career doing this stuff. I'm telling you, it is not trivial. It is being worked on, but you can't just strap a missile onto a drone and call it good.
A piece of context I left out. I don't want to kill people. Yes, despite working on war machines. I ain't tossing out cheap, disposable, optimized for operational cost out there, because that means you are, eventually, killing children and other innocents. No thanks. We aren't talking 'cool robotics here'. We are talking corpses, burned bodies, melted faces, families broken, futures destroyed, blood, pain, horror. There are no words for it. I worked on this stuff because I consider the alternative to be worse, but it's ambiguous. I'll spare you the "A Few Good Men" speech, as I'm sure you get what I mean.
"Move fast and break things" is a great way to build a Facebook. Not so much for war machines, IMO. Feel free to chalk that up to trying to preserve a career, but it's not (you, ansible, didn't say that, someone else did). It's the realization that everyday, when you go to work, you are designing something to cause unbelievable misery, often for political rather than ethical reasons. It's hard to live with. I'm not denying that there is politics and all of that other stuff happening, it certainly does, but it is not the only thing going on.
Sorry, I realize this is a downer for HN, where we are supposed to be chipper, enthusiastic, and supportive, but we are talking about killing people here. It's not a situation for being 'disruptive' or whatever SV meme you might think of (again, you didn't use that term, I'm responding more to the thread at large).
Given all of that, is there room for innovation? Sure. And it is being worked on. I've worked on next-gen autonomous robots and UAVs for war. You may or may not read about it some day. But it ain't easy. Another poster brought up the IUD analogy. Sure, if you blanket the sky with fire you can take down a modern US jet. And kill everything else as 'collateral damage'. I don't want to fight war that way, and I don't think we ever should, except perhaps in extremis. Because at that point we have lost whatever it means to be human.
Sorry, I think about this stuff. A lot.
edit: a big reason for the expensive airframes and other weaponry is because we decided we don't want to carpet bomb and otherwise use non-precision weapons. Spend a million and hit the window where the target is sitting, vs 50K to drop a bunch of bombs that destroy a city block. Precision is often efficacious, to be sure, but we are doing this for moral reasons as well.
A lot of the engineers at these companies could do that just as well as I could and succeed at it too. Just because they're technically gifted doesn't mean they'll climb to management and be given enough resources to see a hare-brained project through. I know they're smart; I worked with a lot of them when we were in grad school. Many of the people in my research group went on to work for NASA, Lockheed, and especially Raytheon.
> I've seen far more professional, intelligent, and pragmatic engineers in that work than what I've seen pass for engineering in Silicon Valley.
I would tend to agree that the breadth of technological prowess necessary to succeed at defense stuff is higher than in the valley. But don't confuse the incredibly smart and talented engineers with the often less smart and talented management. Defense contractors are often risk-averse and people trying to ensure long careers can be as well.
When things move as slowly as they do in the military expectations of what can be done by folks not necessarily in the know set the pace of development more than the actual technology does. If something isn't believable it won't get funded. And without that funding the feasibility can't be proven.
I appreciate your insight and honesty about the whole situation. I think if I could get over the moral aspect of making weapons the bureaucracy involved working with/for the military would still drive me insane.
I've made a pretty decent career of tackling projects that a lot of people wouldn't want to touch. Because I have a pretty decent grasp of what's technologically achievable and I'm too stubborn to admit defeat it usually works out OK. I could tell you that I could make something like that work but even with my track record would you believe me? Highly unlikely. I can't say that I would blame you, either.
Ultimately though you're judging the ideas I'm putting forth on US military standards. Someone trying to wipe the US military out would be incredibly foolish to try to win at symmetric warfare. The F-35 is designed to try and win those kinds of battles but because things are so uneven no intelligent enemy would fight us that way. Just look at the whole Iraq/Afghanistan IED situation. Someone is going to build the aerial equivalent of IEDs at some point and when that happens you're going to want survivable airframes over fancy ones in a BIG way.
It's not so bad. Okay, it is bad, but I'm driven crazy by a lot of the stuff in the civilian world as well.
Someone, I don't think you, opined that we shouldn't be planning our war machines out a few decades. Not to be mean, but they are clearly woefully misinformed. I'll try to add some data for those not in the field.
I was just watching a youtube clip on a B-52 upgrade. A plane we plan to fly into 2040 or so, which is an 80 year life cycle. I started cackling while watching this 'modernization' as I watched a crew member pull a black rectangle out of the avionics. My gf asked me what was so funny. How to explain.
This was a DTM. I have done a lot of work with them. They are more commonly called a 'brick'. It's a tiny amount of flash memory used to move data on and off the airframe. Cost many thousands of dollars, slow, old technology - well, I'll let google tell you, I don't yack about military capabilities (https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=a1ff338...). But old, obsolete, and so expensive we kept them locked up in our SIL, with sign out procedures to actually get the chance to put your hands on one.
Replace that puppy with a USB stick! Pivot! Be agile!
Ya. Okay, so this is a device to move data around, and yes, one of the last things I was working on was a USB version of these. Oh, it was still the 'brick', but with some ports added. I also worked on previous versions that had a slot for PCMCIA cards. This is still the state of the art version, so far as I know.
Why so slow to update? Well, there is the one vendor problem, to start. The military is trying to move to open, but it is slow, and we have untold systems that are not open. It's sole source, and the lead time for orders are, interesting.
Screw that noise, I'm putting in a USB port. Sure you are. Equipment on a 1960's airframe should handle that, no problem. Okay, so we have a major development effort ahead of us, but it is not insurmountable. How many billions do you want to spend? Because it makes no sense to do this for a B-52, and not other airframes. So it needs to be robust, radiation hardened, capable of operating in dust storms at 150F, in Siberia during blizzards. It needs a self destruct capability so the crew can destroy it if they need to abandon their equipment. And so on. We aren't exactly talking 2 week sprints here.
Okay, we built it. Bolt that puppy on! No. Have you ever gone through the logistics of a retrofit? I have. So, a few of the things to consider. You have to ground each individual airframe - make time for the installation and tests. That means taking it out of service. What do you do with the crew in the meantime? Someone has to install it, someone has to test it. You need to give them training, and then test them to make sure they know their job. which means earlier some defense contractor had to author that training material, and someone else had to make sure that that material is correct. Then we have supply chain issues. Okay, so how many of these do you want me to build? At what price? Oh, ha, ha, add two zeros. Okay, for that price I will make a single line in a factory. Some of this is classified, so we are building a secure facility. Better add another zero to that price. It's built, let's start the run! Hmm, need workers, need to get them clearances, need to train them, need to do all the paperwork required by the government to prove you are handling classified materials correctly, prove that you aren't ripping them off (I honestly think we spend more money proving we aren't ripping the Government off than we save by avoiding the rip offs, but I digress). Okay, line is running. You only needed 1,000 units, you aren't paying to have these workers sit idle, so they are invited to pursue a career elsewhere. My line is mothballed. Oh, got a new order? I can maybe rehire and retrain and be ready in 6-12 months.
Okay, so we have our units. Who is going to maintain them, repair them, test them, store them. How do they get shipped to a war location? Who is going to track them?
Oh, forgot we actually have to get data on and off them. You aren't allowed to just stick a USB stick in a military computer (I hope the security reasons are clear). JMPS, the station the air crew uses to write and read data to these things, needs to be upgraded. This is a 'one size fits all' unit - they serve many different aircraft, so there are multiple data formats, multiple requirements. Which airframe do you want me to upgrade first? (insert massive politics here which don't necessarily bear much resemblance to the rest of the logistics). How fast and cheap do you want it? I can honestly give it to you fast and cheap - by using the same, obsolete protocols and formats from 40 years ago, tying you in deeper to that obsolete technology. But, I can do it faster, testing is easier. Oh, you want a new protocol? Hmm, wonder how many systems that is going to affect? Anyway, decision made, we hire some programmers, get them cleared, get that process going. Somewhere down the line we have to actually test this stuff, so at some point some aircraft will be idling on the runway while us software squirrels swarm around it, running out tests. Opps, some bugs. Can we keep this an extra two weeks? You have a war to fight? Maybe we can get some time in 2016? Awesome!
Software is written and tested, we have a 10 year installation plan, let's go! This is so friggin' agile! I mean, sure, USBs will be obsolete by the time it is fully deployed, but hey ho, we are current to the century!
Not so fast, young and foolish one. Time to rotate the air crew through training. They only have to understand 100 different systems, adding one more ain't no thing. They have to know the old system, and the new one, because it is not being rolled out all at once, and then there is the massive infrastructure for all the other airframes still using the old system. We have to interoperate. So, train air crew, either train the soldiers and marines who will be supporting this in various war zones, or wait for them to be rotated out and rotate in ones that have been trained in the states. Impose a whole friggin' logistics infrastructure over that to deal with having two incompatible systems fielded. Hire up IT folk willing to travel to IRAQ to install all the support hardware. It goes on...
I'm thinking, what, 3 sprints? Ya,right ;). Waterfall will become your best friend, and for a good reason, not obstinance and thick-headedness.
Anyway, this is a small view into how development and 'waste' goes on in the defense world. I put waste in quotes because a lot of this is unavoidable. At least, I've wracked my brain, and I don't see any easy, obvious way to stream line a lot of stuff. I was brief; the above implies a huge amount of logistics, and anything misplanned, any setback, has a ripple effect.
All of that has its frustrations, but it is also very challenging. It's a huge optimization problem. Sure, you are one piece, but your piece is inevitably trying to optimize for a very difficult environment (budget, schedule, capabilities, environmentals, you name it).
We can iterate, pivot, and throw away web apps. There was an article on Ars on how the old Android sw doesn't work because google is shutting down the servers for the obsolete capabilities. It doesn't, and cannot work that way in the military.
I don't mean any of this as a rant. I think it is a really fascinating world, and not many here have experience with it, unless they served (I didn't) or worked for a defense contractor. I do urge you all to rethink making easy potshots at government programs. I have my thoughts about the F-35, and other programs, but hey, until you've tried to run even a tiny program you really aren't in the position to make an informed judgement. I certainly don't feel competent to say "you did it wrong" to F-35 except perhaps in the most sweeping, broad things. That DTM-PCMCIA-USB thing? Real story, and a reflection of the tradeoffs of having different hardware in different systems vs one-size-fits-all. You make 10 disparate systems, well, you are just duplicating effort and wasting tax payer dollars. Try to make one system to do 10 things? Whoa, buckaroo, specialization is the way to go. Solve one problem, cheaply. Okay, I am going to use COTS (commercial off the shelf). I don't think so. It is not secure, hardened, etc. Okay, I'll pay someone to make a system. Oh, tack on 3 zeros to make the IP owned by the government? Yell at me for that. Okay, we will accept a proprietary format. Don't forget to yell at me in 5 years when the company goes bankrupt, gets acquired, or whatever. I should of foresaw that, right? Oh, we'll be agile when that time comes and just swap in a new system. How long could that take? (I refer to to the top of the post for that). When we have all that yelling done, don't forget to yell at me for not having the insight of going with secure wireless that the military just invented... Oh, you want a modernization program to replace the USB? Okay, how big is that checkbook? And don't forget to schedule some yelling time when the wireless gets jammed in the next war.
However, there is no credible threat to the US military which changes things.
The political reality of the USA right now is that we've got a huge military industrial complex, and it ain't going away anytime soon. One way or the other, we're going to be building weapon systems for air superiority and other uses.
Whether or not that is all a good idea is a discussion for another day. I think that over the last two decades, the USA could have been using more "soft power" to better accomplish our long-term strategic goals than with the precision guided munitions that seemed to be the preferred solution.
Anyway...
At this point, I'd just like to (A) see a better value for my tax dollar. And (B) I'd like to see our military prepared properly for the next war rather than the last one.
With regards to (A), on the cheap vs. expensive scale, I strongly think that we have erred on the side of expensive with regards to the F-35 (and the F-22). I think the Super Hornet (F/A-18E) is expensive enough as it is. Sure, the Navy bought it first, so of course the Air Force doesn't want it...
As far as (B) goes, with all the sabre-rattling we get from Russia and China, realistically speaking, we're not going to be another shooting war with either of them. I'd rather we have more weapon systems that can deal better with the threats we currently have, and will face next. I don't see how the F-35 can really help with that either, in part because the cost means we can't deploy them in the numbers we really ought to.
I realize that automation right now is not up to what a pilot can do, but it is rapidly improving. I'd rather we have a base platform that can accept upgrades easily as they become available, and that can be deployed in numbers to be effective.
1. We should make a drone have the same flight performance capabilities as a fighter jet, which will make it cost more money.
2. We should spend even more money to create an AI system with the exact same capabilities as a trained fighter pilot. Probably not an easy feat.
I'm also not advocating for a completely autonomous drone, just saying that automatically flying a plane to evade a missile doesn't seem terribly difficult, as far as AI problems go, and the amounts of money thrown at these sorts of things are absurdly large.
If it costs $1mm apiece I am less convinced.
How much money is spent engineering to ensure that There Can Be No Failures (tm) of the first flight versus me accidentally destroying the first dozen $1mm drones? Which represents a false economy?
Remember that a drone doesn't have a pilot on-board so if it goes down in flames we're only out the money, not human life.
I appreciate your passion for the subject man, but I feel like you're purposefully taking stuff out of context and generally ignoring a lot of what I write. I've said nothing about space. And I've mentioned several times that I'm not talking about making things that would pass US military muster! The way the US military conducts business is not the ONLY way to conduct business. It's been fairly successful so far but it does not immediately follow that it's the only way.
We lost in Vietnam because it was a war of attrition that our military was completely unprepared to adapt to. We said that we won but in the end it was us that left, not the enemy.
Of course the second invasion succeeded, because the US Congress by then was on the other side and had defunded the South, as I recall ammo was so low an infantryman had 1 grenade and less than 100 rounds.
Side note: the cost of outfitting the North with 3 complete armored/mechanized armies (first used up piecemeal, second in that first invasion failure) is now credited with helping to bankrupt the USSR.
