An interesting note here is that B-52's are still in operation.
~God knows there are enough parts for them laying around Davis Monthan...

Matter of fact I recently re-read Dale Brown's "Flight of the Old Dog" and I can't help wondering just how much of what was in there is a practical reality these days.

Modern computers are far more compact and capable than they ever were before

This includes the computers used in missiles, glide bombs, and so on

Consider the Tomohawk missile - which can travel thousands of miles and arrive within three or four feet of exactly where it was intended to go...

And the T-Hawk is now OLD technology


I'm picturing BATMAN running up the stairs yelling "Alfred! Alfred! You gotta see this..."

But... The F-35. Damn...

It seems like a helluvva let down, ya know it?


I bet it wasn't at Groom Lake ten minutes before someone said "Get that sorry piece of crap out of here, we have better things to do."


NOTE: "Streaming video"
As in gun cams that can report an instant combat vid of what is actually happening - you gotta be kidding me! With GPS and other sat uplinks, somebody fell down real hard on the job.

Another $700 ashtray problem. A civilian contractor could put a bird in the air that does all of that.

If the military procurement system wasn't so jacked, we could have had STAR WARS operational


WE SOLD last generation E-2C Hawkeyes to Japan many years ago. Do you know what the first thing they did to them was?

THEY TRASHED the onboard computers, and replaced them with units a tenth of the size that were a hundred times faster and more capable. By now they have flying servers up there...

*Someone told me they had Intell Pentiums in them, originally

The situation is silly, the biggest problem that we have is defence contractors and government agencies tripping over their own balls...

They have lost the big picture, they don't realise what they are trying to do. Nor do they seem to have any notion of urgency or cost effectiveness, so I see it.

This all amounts to them being ineffective.

There is a delay time in the design and development of military weapons platforms of about 20 years. The B-52 was originally conceived by Boeing in about 1936, it began to be tested in the late fifties, and became operational in the sixties.

More progressive nations bring things online much quicker, and we ought to do the same.


I'm not saying we might be left behind in warfighting - but it seems to me we are definitley dragging our heals to no good purpose.

The supply and aqcuisition system seems to be the ugliest part of the "SLOWNESS" problem, and that should be addressed.


Only two words are needed to express what it means when you are too late:
"YOU LOST"



Now I bet somebody wants to beat up what I said - go for it.

 

I'm afraid it's going to boil down to the loss of air superiority. Unless we hold onto some of that old tech and use it for more than target practice.

If Iran were to get the latest MIG's, and we are stuck with the F-35, the middle east will end up looking very different in the near future.

 

Can you imagine US Air Force, Army Navy and Marine inventories being replaced by Airbus?

Or advanced strike fighters being purchased from Mikoyan Guereyevitch or Sukhoi?

As far as that goes - I doubt the F-35 has a prayer against an SU-37



With vectored thrust, forward assist canards, and what must be an incredibly strong airframe that thing can pull off mid air reverses in flight that are jaw dropping...

Contrasting that, the F-22 Raptor is capable of some very similar drastic maneuvers, as shown in this next video:



I grabbed this video on the fly (no pun intended) but at the start of it what we are seeing as it turns out to the runway is in fact vectored thrust exhaust...

This vid doesn't really give the whole flight envelope picture, but I noticed that a follow on vid after the above one finished was titled "F-22 -vs- SU-47" and shows it

The SU-47 was the follow on to the S-35 project:



Note the radical forward swept wing shape

~ I wish the cram-hole who edited that video had not ruined it by overlaying a stupid music track though...

Static? Before you click on the start arrow - that's the SU-47, and it is one wicked bastard of an airplane.

But it does not appear to be nearly as 'stealthy' as the Raptor

I wonder just how many Rubles per copy they cost...

 

The Russians produce some VERY sexy fighters.................But they lack reliable engines and advanced avionics.
I would still put the F-22 Raptor far above anything that might come out from MiG or Sukhoi.

We need to build more Raptors.

 

The problem as I see it is, one size does not fit all. The JSF tries to make it happen, so instead of excelling in one thing, we get to fail in everything.

 

Meat in cockpits is an expensive limiting factor. We don't ride missiles or artillery projectiles and the sooner "locally manned" fighters are out of business the sooner we can field greater quantities of less expensive and much more expendable ordnance delivery vehicles. No pilot onboard means no CSAR disasters like that depicted in the movie "Bat 21". No pilot onboard means no human G constraints on flight maneuvers. The objective of fighters is to put ordnance on target.

 

No pilot on board also means lack of judgement calls that are used in the other 90% of the cases where a fighter is out and about doing it's thing.

A Russian bomber invades our airspace, what's a drone going to do? Do you trust some kid looking through a camera 1500 miles away to make the right call?

 

"Some kid"? The Air Force uses rated officers

https://afreserve.com/jobs/officer-positions/pilot/remotely-piloted-aircraft-rpa-pilot

and there is nothing you cannot see through quality vision systems you can see with the Mark 1 eyeball, which eyeball relies on VFR conditions to see much of anything!

Remote manning of air defense assets playing Cold War-style ADIZ tag incidentally means if a foreign asset wants to play chicken the US asset is expendable while the primitive "locally manned" foreign asset crew has to worry about dying.

 

I was thinking more in terms of escalation. The Russians won't back down from a remote control drone, and the international press about a drone killing a human when it could have all been avoided is a story line we don't need. There's already enough who don't like us.

Close air support is bad enough with a live pilot, someone playing a video game back home isn't something I want to add into the mix.

 

The Air Force doesn't want to do BAS (the list of airframes it got rid is impressive and it wants to off A-10) so the ideal solution would be for the Army to tear up the Key West agreement and do its own BAS. (CAS is a long obsolete term.)
Since remote-manned systems don't run afoul of the Key West agreement it's no surprise Army is has plans to expand their use.

Here's the Army view. Fascinating stuff:

https://fas.org/irp/program/collect/uas-army.pdf

UAS systems are constantly evolving.

Fast jets can't loiter at low speeds for BAS of course so F-35 can only ever be a fast missile truck. UAS will only improve while manned aircraft CAN'T get much better because they are too expensive to design and produce. UAS can fly slow enough to work targets and the Army can use their own controllers.

Even during the Cold War bomber chicken had little serious military value after most delivery switched to missiles (it was fun genital waving for both sides) and the Russians of today aren't suicidal. The argument they'd not back down for a drone is speculation and once inside US ADIZ they would be fair game for AAMs with NO warning as they always were. Those AAMs could come from beyond visual range with no need for the mutual eyeballing ritual, but the tiny rump of the Russian air force aren't insane. They want to fly and pretend they have a mission so they get funded like anyone else.

 

Reliance on "high tech" above everything else sounds like a recipe for disaster...............I want a pilot in the cockpit, not mindless drones.
Just wait until some kid in a basement below Red Square, or Beijing hacks your drones, and they fall from the sky with all their "tech"............or are sent back against us.

 

I remember back in the early 70's while skiing at Hunter Mt. in New York seeing Phantoms flying below our elevation through the valley while we were on the chairlift. It was absolutely breathtaking, and I always wondered where they were based out of. Stewart in Newburgh? Maybe someone here knows.

 

Problem with a drone is that a pilot onsite can make a better evaluation of the situation, and likely will pick up on changes to the scenario unless the drone has full 360 by 360 threatview - which might be an improvement.

Imagine if instead of a fuselage and wings limiting your local view you had a VR platform with a spherical projection of everything top, bottom, and sides in hi-resolution. But I doubt it can be practical for some time still.

The optical array would probably need three or four cameras on top, and the same on the bottom view overlapping frames. Make that six each...

 

The F33 reminds me of an old saying."Jack of all trades.Master of none".
Good luck.Have fun.Be safe.
Leo

 

The thing that killed the A-7 over the F-18 was twin engine reliability or at least back up power in case an engine was lost in flight. But the F-35 is a single engine aircraft, and therefore a redact of that very same philosophy or paradigm. Watch this video of an F-22 literally SHREDDING AIR:



The maneuverability of the '22 is comparable to an SU-35+ and has that "extra engine" RTB advantage. Whereas the F-35 lacks it entirely - so who are they kidding?

If that was me up in the air, I would vote for survivability

If the 35 gets an engine shot out or fodded, it's just going to go down. No question - it has no reserve. It will have been JUNKED
Yeager was RIGHT!

But we don't know what is being tested now. I just hope the armed forces are not serious about the F-35. I pray to God for all of our sakes that it is a campaign of "Disinformation"


If not - then presumably the very same thing that made the Vietnam conflict un-winnable is now taking place in Pentagon Procurement. A bunch of no-nothing clerks, politicians, and bureaucrats sticking their fingers into a decision making process where they do not belong...

"One step for tenure, one giant leap backwards for defense!"
(To paraphrase Neil Armstrong)

I'm biting back real hard, but GET RID OF THE IDIOTS!!!

And what a beautiful and lithe airplane...

I just have to admire it when engineering and art merge