Comment Re:Drone It (Score 1) 843
a) None of those are stealth.
The F-22 is (in fact it has better stealth than the JSF) and so is the B-2 (also has better stealth than the JSF, but you called it out in your other reply so we'll let that one slide).
The others don't need stealth to fulfill their respective roles.
Dangit, missed two of them, not one.
"Need to fulfill a role" is heavily dependent on the role. With F-35 as ground attack craft you can send the ground attack craft in before the B-2s and F-22s are quite finished turning the local air defense system into mincemeat. OTOH, it probably can't take A-10-style low-level missions even after the local air defense is gone because it's more vulnerable to gunfire and it goes too fast.
So the Air Force probably will simply redefine the roles so that A-10s are obsolete and F-35 is the only possible answer.
c) They're all old designs that don't look good on a budget request.
Depends on what you mean by "doesn't look good on a budget request". As a taxpayer, they sure as Hell look good to me. They're much cheaper than JSFs and each is much more capable at the specific job it's intended to do. Those "old designs" have all the bugs worked out of them and are reliable as can be. And when one does break down, it costs peanuts to repair or replace it. If the folks in charge of the budget don't think that looks good, we need to fire them immediately.
And who in DC have the taxpayers elected who actually wants to keep government efficient?
The Republicans (and their allies in the Conservative movement) talk a good game, but when it comes to military spending literally the only time they've willingly cut it is that time they realized a useless artillery system was being designed in a black guy's district.
The Democrats hate military spending in theory because it crowds out their social spending priorities, but love it in practice because Boeing/Lockheed/etc. are smart enough to throw a certain amount of the work the union's way.
Which means if I'm a USAF Two-Star, and I want to make Lieutenant General, my proposed budget includes $0 for older aircraft that cost very little money, and as much as I can get away with in a brand-new type.
d) Particularly a $1 Trillion request.
We could buy so many of those things for $1 Trillion that we wouldn't have pilots to fly them all. So we'd buy a few less than that and train enough pilots to fly them. The result would be a force so large that we could run dozens of simultaneous sorties 24/7/365 and overwhelm anyone anywhere with omnipresent force.
That's one potential strategy. But lots of pilots means lots of potential casualties, and this is no longer the country that lost 26k at the Muese River in WWI. The whole US Military has been going towards relatively few, very well-trained, very low-casualty operations since 'Nam. And even 'Nam (for all the Baby Boomers bitching about it) was extremely low casualty compared to the Bulge, Okinawa or the Overland Campaign. Call the modern model the warrior-monk model.
Congress loves spending lots of money per warrior-monk, but really really really hates it when any of them dies because the American people do not fucking know how to deal with the death of anyone under 65.
Thus we'll get thousands of warrior-monks piloting ridiculously expensive F-35s, rather then 10-15k piloting much cheaper (and in some ways, that do not cost lots of money, superior) older airframes.
So we'll have a very expensive plane that does nothing particularly well, but we'll have a lot of them, and against almost any opponent we're likely to face it will be literally invincible because getting through stealth (even the Gen 1 Stealth of the F-117) is a lot harder then it looks in a Navy white paper.
Actually, getting through stealth isn't that bad when using low-frequency ground based radar. Getting through it in the air is a challenge. That's why the advanced stealth of the F-22 and the B-2 are a much better fit for early combat: they'll have vastly better survivability than the JSF. For later in the campaign - when the enemy no longer has effective anti-air defenses - there's no reason to fly significant amounts of costly aircraft sorties. At that point, you want to fly legions of cheap, effective aircraft in and pin down the enemy so they can't so much as glance out from under the rocks they're hiding under without JDAMs raining down on them from all directions.
Which is technically true, if your military has the base level of competence of a Western military, and the equipment of the super-expensive warrior-monks in US Service.
In practice it took 15 years of F-117 flying before anybody we actually fought managed to take one of the damn things down. It's the only combat loss of the type, and it was remarkable enough that the Serb Colonel who pulled off the kill has his own wikipedia page.
So I suspect that F-35 will get used in lots of situations where the local air defense system isn't quite dead yet without losing dozens of aircraft. There will be a lot of them, beating their stealth requires some very specialized knowledge that isn;lt common, and advanced equipment which is also not common, all from an Air Defense system that is under attack by B-2s and F-22s.