For sales to NATO: you have to buy a plane that can carry the US bomb if you don't have one yourself (despite the fact that nukes will probably never be launched from aircrafts if at all).
For sales against competition, i don't have a lot of data, but you can check the Swiss 2022 competition between the F16, F18, Rafale, Gripen and F35, public data is scarce but basically, the Rafale and F18 would have been better on most points except VTOL and stealth. The choice however was probably economic (as while VTOL is nice, Swiss short airports are still longer than carriers, and stealth isn't that much of a factor in defense, especially in the Alps): they bought planes for less than half the price NATO countries did, and 60% of the money will be spent locally: basically 20% of the cost Germany and other NATO countries paid.
"if at all": that's deterrence. I don't think any nuke-able aircraft small-country customer intent is to launch, but you gotta have the ability to.
"from aircrafts": when you have no submarines/silos and carting ground launch platforms around is impractical for your country, aircraft is the only remaining option to display deterrence factors.
stealth isn't that much of a factor in defense, especially in the Alps
I know that mountains can help planes evade radar and missiles.
But any fighters used in a defense role (against Russia presumably) are definitely going to need to contend with (Russia's apparently rather capable) air to air missiles.
I think they might well need to deal with SAM as well. Sx00 batteries are portable and presumably an invading Russian force would be bringing them along for the ride with ground forces. So I don't know; stealth seems like one of the most important things these days, if you're planning on engaging anybody with modern air to air missiles.
I'm confident that DCS and War Thunder pilots would disagree to that
The sales pipeline started being agreed when the plane was still a concept, and it's almost exclusively a feature of American foreign policy: the US government worked hard, over almost 40 years, to ensure a significant part of design and production costs (and risks resulting from such) would be absorbed by allies through guaranteed sales. NATO countries have been under huge continuous and sustained pressure to buy it and to standardize their systems around it. Quite a few European governments found themselves struggling to publicly justify their choices in this matter, because in the end it mostly boiled down to "the Americans told us to buy it or else". The F-35 project simply would not be allowed to fail in the market.
As far as I know, no other weapon ever enjoyed such massive and forceful support by so many US administrations throughout the decades.
So, it’s SAP but for national defence
Yes, the plane has a lot of bugs. It's got complicated software and hardware. You can't compare it to the relatively simple older designs that didn't deal with stealth.
Yes they don't need to test dogfights because war isn't a video game. When the enemy sees the f35 it is after it already sent the missile in your direction. You don't need to dogfight if you're an invisible ghost that can kill from a distance.
The f16 had a ton of bugs such as flipping over when south of the equator. It's a much better machine now and the f35 has all the makings to be a similar leap forward.
In the simulator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4541685
The page that comment links to lists some (minor) problems found on the real plane too though.
Easy, desire to please American politicians to fetch political support from the USA and strengthen your position as military ally. Ideally, you will be looking so scary that you wouldn’t have to actually use the plane.
I’d say this is the main intent. But not only because of the political aspects.
AFAIK the plane is intended to be used like an ultra-mobile target aquisition and launch platform designed to engage targets Really Far Away and then return to base (any base since it’s NATO compatible). It’s not really supposed to engage in Top Gun -style dogfighting.
So the main question is the capability of the radar and the missiles you carry, not necessarily the air frame itself. And as I understand those are fit for purpose.
Ofc if you are launching missiles far away for defensive purposes surely you could do it a lot cheaper, and that I would see as the main point of critique.
I’m not saying the issues are not issues, but as a non-expert-paying-customer (my country bought 64 of them I think) as long as you get airborn, acquire target lock and can launch missile, you are more or less using the offering as promised.
The overwhelming USA sphere of influence over its "allies". I don't really see a NATO member buying new fighter jets from China or Russia instead without that causing a big ruckus.
I highly recommend reading contemporary reporting on what are considered wildly successful aircraft (like the teen series F-14/15/16).
Hint: Just change one number and they're indistinguishable from reporting on the F-35.
but yeah all fighters have bugs, often a lot of them
We measure them in terms of lethality and reliability.
Even if you just consider military airframes, the MiG-21 has been built 11000 times, and is/was used by more than 50 operators world-wide, all of which have paid for the privilege.
Then there's the C-130, with 2500 units produced and operated by 70 countries.
The first American Fighter jet would be the F-4 Phantom II, with 5000 units built, and used extensively abroad.
The F-16 has 4600 units built up to now and is used by more than 25 countries.
(I'm ignoring the P-51 with its 15000 units here because they were mostly used by the US and rarely sold abroad).
tl;dr: The F-35 is not the most commercially successful airframe in the world, in fact, it does not even come close.
Super Hornet and Viper both dwarf this number by 10x and in every operational theatre in the world are exactly as competent as JSF. They currently are selling far more in every market than F35b, which is the most sold f35 to everyone's suprise.
No market is seeking out f35 specifically for nato congruence/stealth. (Though, The SVTOL variant is a pleasant market-friendly surprise for Lockheed. Turns out, many nations operate sub-fleet carriers that can handle harriers, ospreys, f35b.)
Recall that the JSF was drafted in the 90s, and an operational prototype existed in 2002.
The JFS program can be both impressive and way too expensive at the same time. It doesn't need to be setting records to justify it's existance.
It’s also STOVL, not SVTOL. You slapped an S in front of VTOL instead of thinking about what the acronym really means.
*From f35.com - Designed to operate from conventional runways, the F-35A is the most common variant operated by the United States Air Force and most international allied customers.
Corruption to pass trials. Corruption to get sales?
No matter how much waste, a trillion dollars is bound to create something with some value?
It's junk, in the sense that we could have gotten a much better airframe for less sad money.
A lack of actual proven fight-testing.
1) Lack of competent, forceful oversight from the program office. DOT&E reports about the F-35 program have, for years, given the program office recommendations that it has failed to follow.
2) A prime contractor (Lockheed-Martin) that restricts access to its data. The F-35 program had to sue LM in federal court to get access to the necessary data to make the Joint Simulation Environment (JSE) fully functional. In the end, the case was settled, but only after six years of battle. The report linked in the parent article describes how maintainers are not allowed access to servicing procedures that they have on other aircraft. I have seen this personally in flight test. Even something like a gear swing requires an LM certified Field Services Engineer to conduct.
3) A completely broken software release process. For many years in developmental flight test, we received software builds that were just entirely broken, as in, the jet would not start with that software loaded. The C2D2 process was advertised as fixing this, but really it was just a new name for the same old fly-fix-fly process. The parent report details entire versions that were skipped in the IOT&E process because they were so buggy. The program could have turned JSE into the final stop for new software builds before hitting the fleet, but it chose to pivot entirely into training instead.
I could keep going. A decade working in a program like this gives you a long list of things to talk about. But I'll stop here for now.
[0] https://news.lockheedmartin.com/2018-04-12-F-35-Completes-Mo...
Let’s not beat around the bush. Protection money
It's exactly what I was thinking about: Having a pilot onboard is overhead and its a limiting factor for the flight envelope as you have to keep it alive. Besides, it's not invisible despite calling it that. It's visible in the visible spectrum and hearable in the human hearing range, which means that you can build detection and tracking systems in those wavelengths instead of pretending that its invisible because its hard to detect at radar wavelengths.
Why just not drop any manned vehicles and go for the remote control + AI? What is the logic? Sunken cost fallacy? Military industrial complex needs it?
The only thing I can think of is the political implications of downing plane with a soldier on board.
That’s not a gotcha you seem to believe it is, it’s like the first thing you learn about stealth technology and has been apparent to anyone following military news to any extent in the past forty plus years. That you somehow think it’s something that went unnoticed and the thousands of people working on this every day has been “pretending” after reading some Twitter posts is absurd and funny.
I’m happy that you’re feeling smart and superior but that’s not the point, the point is signal collection and processing came a long way, and maybe low radar cross-section isn’t that big of a deal anymore. At least enough to justify spending huge sums on a plane that keeps having issue and falling short.
There have absolutely been programs to reduce the visual signatures of aircrafts. Yehudi lights, COMPASS GHOST, BoP, etc. Don't get your information on anything from Musk.
When the F-35 program was started in late 1980s-early 1990s, neither reliable remote control nor AI existed (I'm not even sure supersonic-reliable remote control exists now). Now, if there exists research programs utilizing unmanned fighter jets, they're likely classified and we won't know about them for quite some time.
It is just like regular camouflage. You cant just throw on a camo jacket and walk around Walmart and be “invisible”. But in the woods, with the right camo, and the right technique, you can move very “stealthily” and if it allows you to get in a position to kill your enemy before they can see and kill you, that is the point.
Second, is an issue with AI I didn’t see anyone bring up. Related to my first point, stealth is about minimizing signatures and that that includes sending/receiving signals. Situations where an aircraft is operating in a highly contested environment means it may not be able to communicate reliably or safely and maintain stealth (they do have MADL but I am sure it can’t work 100% and maintain stealth perfectly). You would have to delegate complete shooting authority to the onboard AI. That is very difficult for many reasons, just one being accountability (who is responsible if an AI commits a war crime?).
We didn't wait Musk to know planes weren't literally invisible or silent lmao, maybe don't take your military analysis from a man child with 0 experience in the domain.
They either fly high enough that you neither hear nor see them, or low/fast enough that you're dead long before you're even aware something is coming.
Also we already have unmanned aircrafts, a lot of them. Internet army experts will tell you f35 are useless because they're not invisible (duh) meanwhile in eastern Europe people are getting killed by 70+ years old tanks and other ww2 era surplus
Flying high might make it invisible for human observers but the idea is that it’s not invisible in that wavelength, therefore it must be possible to create devices that can detect it.
Also, this is a brand new machine that is still not ready. Just write it off, liquidate any useful work that might have been done on it and go all in drones. What’s the point of insisting on a job not done when already looks obsolete?
Most anti aircraft radar works by sending out radar pulses and measuring the return. Visual spectrum light is scattered significantly by the atmosphere. It is a physics problem and visual range is just not as good of a medium as HF, UHF, VHF etc radar. Which there are multiple over-the-horizon radars with ranges in the hundreds of miles. And that is before we add in clouds, fog, smoke, snow, or you know, darkness, where radio waves easily penetrate. Visual detection needs far more contrast than radio wave detection. Optical detection is just not well suited.
As for using sound to detect and track an object coming at you at faster than the speed of sound, I think it encapsulates this entire comment’s level of thought and insight.
We might be getting close to advanced AI for a lot of domains, but are we ready to have one making independent decisions with bombs?
I’m not a military expert but I’d much prefer having a human making decisions rather than AI for at least the next decade. I’m not sure that remote connectivity is reliable and high bandwidth enough everywhere for a drone fighter jet
Sure. It's just that radar lets you see tens or hundreds of miles away, and visual doesn't. And sound lets you hear where something is only at the speed of sound, which is less useful for something that can fly faster than the speed of sound.
So developing a weapons-quality track from visual and sound data is problematic. That means that, while not invisible, it's "invisible enough".
In the meantime, Aircraft+"Ai-driven" drone is a great idea (look up to "nEUROn" if you want an idea of a combat drone capability)
Having a pilot onboard is overhead and its a limiting
factor for the flight envelope as you have to keep it alive.
There are still plenty of cases where you want human pilots present. There's a lot of realtime decision making by pilots when it comes to identifying, selecting, and firing upon targets.
Remotely-piloted drones rely on seamless drone-to-base communications so they can be, you know, remotely piloted. These communications can be denied by an enemy. As far as autonomous drones that can act on their own without a datalink go, let's just say I think the current SOTA in automonous anything shows it's going to be a long time until we're there.
Also a few of the "obvious" advantages of unmanned craft aren't as relevant as one might think....
Drones can obviously be smaller and more manuverable than manned fighters because they don't have to carry that extra weight (pilot, ejector seat, life support, etc) and because they don't need to worry about g-force restrictions as much. However, the sort of close range high-G dogfighting maneuvering seen in movies is vanishingly rare. It's all about BVR (beyond visual range) missile launches.
Additionally, attack aircraft need to carry missiles and bombs. The missiles and bombs need to be a certain size because they need to carry X kilograms of explosive, Y kilograms of fuel, and Z kilograms of guidance electronics. If you want to put 2, 4, 6, 8 of these on a drone, and give the drone itself some kind of large-enough usable flight range, guess what -- it starts approaching the size and cost of a manned fighter pretty quickly.
As far as optical detection of stealth fighters goes...
(deep breath)
Sure, in some cases.
Probably not in ways that are as useful as you hope. First, there are these things called "clouds" and "nighttime" that are going to put a damper on the visual thing, no matter how good the camera and how smart the AI.
Also I want to point out the scale of modern aerial combat. Air to air missiles and surface to air missiles have ranges up to hundreds of miles.
There is probably a role for some kind of sufficiently smart visual spectrum... something... as part of future sensor networks, augmenting radar. Especially in parts of the world (deserts) where you typically have clear skies.
And as far as sound goes? Since Musk mentioned that too?
I'm just going to point to some basic laws of physics here. Gonna be hard to hear things coming in useful amounts of time if they're going near the speed of sound, and impossible to hear them coming if they're going faster than the speed of sound. There's also some significant lag involved that you don't have with EM spectrum stuff. So even with smart enough analysis the best you're going to be able to do is sort of guess that some stealthy fighters are in an approximate area, assuming you control the ground and have a sufficient number of acoustic sensors scattered all about the place and smart enough sensors. Again, this could be part of some kind of wide-spectrum sensor network fusing lots of different data, maybe, but it's not some kind of "gotcha" that invalidates current stealth hardware.