..to this post.
I have heard from people involved in studying the F-35. This is the gist of it: John Boyd, who was one of the gurus of air combat[1] apparently did a hell of a lot of work in quantifying the performance of fighter and attack aircraft. As I understand it, an analyst can plug in the performance numbers for a proposed airplane and then out will come its known equivalents.
Apparently, if you do that for an F-35, what you get is an A-7. Which wasn't designed for air combat.
A second point, which has been lost in the uproar over the dogginess of the F-35: The F-35 will end up costing almost as much as the F-22, probably $200 million a copy or more. That level of cost has two disadvantages. First off, they cost so much that the inclination will be to not use them. You can see that play out in the employment of Air Force bombers, where it is the half-century old B-52s that do the heavy lifting when it comes to dropping shit on hostiles.[2], while the B-1s and B-2s play lesser roles.[3] The B-2 and the B-52 are instructive on this point. The Air Force built over 700 B-52s, almost 80 of which, all B-52Hs, are still in service. The Air Force could only afford to build 20 B-2s, all of which have to be pampered in air-conditioned hangars if they aren't actually flying about.
Second, if we do use them in combat, we will have so few of them that any combat losses will be crippling. Elsewhere, I've read that naval fighter squadrons will have between two and four fewer F-35s than they now have F-18s. The Navy's public rationale is that F-35s will be more capable, so they'll need fewer. The real reason is probably that the Navy won't be able to afford to buy enough.
This dynamic has played out on a smaller scale. The Navy developed the Mk-50 torpedo because the Mk-46 arguably couldn't do the job against modern (1970s/80s) Russian subs. But the Mk-50 ended up costing so much that the Navy couldn't buy enough of them, so they had to develop a new and cheaper torpedo that was sort of a kitbash of a Mk-46 and Mk-50 (and probably was also in-between its parents in capabilities). The Army's replacement for the M-16/M-4 rifle became so costly that the program was axed.
It is a supposedly Russian saying that "quantity has a quality of its own". For an adversary who is willing to take a punch (like China), they need only bring more airplanes to the fight than the United States's F-22/35s are able to deal with. Our potential adversaries are not stupid people, they can do the arithmetic as well as anyone else. And in such a situation, either we risk losing a large number of our expensive stealth fighters (and losing the fight) or withdraw without fighting the point.
Because hoping that things will turn out differently is not a plan. Neither is sending out pilots to be pointlessly slaughtered.
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[1] Fighter guys seem to speak his name with the same sort of reverence that gun people have for John Moses Browning.
[2] The last B-52 was delivered to the Air Force in 1963.
[3] Going by Air Force plans, the B-52 will survive the B-1.
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5 comments:
Seems like that 50-state military mega-project scam is now a clear and present danger to our security.
Too bad it's too lucrative to give up.
Sometimes I feel like bin Laden wasted 19 of his soldiers... like shooting at the Hindenburg when it was already in flames. But I guess he was just in a hurry.
Bin Laden won. His attack was mounted for little cost, and in response, we've spent trillions of dollars on two meaningless wars. His goal was to bleed us fiscally and militarily, as the Mujaheddin did to the Soviets, and he succeeded.
The B1's actually are used as much as the B-52's nowadays. If flown from Diego Garcia they can carry more bombs than a B-52 or if one of the bomb bays is instead filled with a fuel tank, they can loiter longer (while carrying about 25% fewer bombs than a B-52). The reason they will be withdrawn early is because of the swing wings -- it turns out that swing wings look good on paper but aren't that robust in practice, same reason the F-14's were retired. That's also why half the B-1's are currently in storage, it's an attempt to extend the life of the fleet while the B-3 is developed by keeping half of them out of the daily stress rotation.
The B-2 could have been built in quantity for a fairly affordable price -- the majority of its price tag is the development costs for what was, at the time, an exotic technology (composites) but once the technology was developed they could have mass-produced the bombers for around $750M apiece. The problem is that once you do that, you have a bomber that can't fly as far as a B-52 or as fast as a B-1, that carries less than half as many bombs, and that has no ability to sling cruise missiles under its wings due to its composite construction and (deliberate) lack of hard points (which would show up glaringly on a radar screen). As a conventional bomber it sucks.
The Air Farce is currently proposing a B-3 that is supposed to be as stealthy as a B2, carry as much as a B1, and as cheap to procure and operate as a B-52. Good luck with that one! A 747 costs around $350M apiece and they're saying this exotic beast is going to only cost around $500M apiece? Nuh-uh. Not happenin!
If they bring the B-3 in for less than three billion a copy, I'll be shocked. AF cost projections are always based on spreading the development cost over hundreds (if not thousands) of airframes, but the costs then are so high that they can't get the money to build them in the desired numbers.
Which is why they ended up with 20 B-2s at abut two billion per.
The B2's could have still been built in quantity for around $750M apiece, the problem is that we just didn't need them. There were more than enough B-52's and B-1's in the inventory to handle any conventional bombing roles against targets whose air defenses had been degraded, and the B-52 in particular is much cheaper to operate because virtually every maintenance component is a commercial airliner component (mostly Boeing 707 components). The B2 is not as capable as a bomber as the B1 or B52 so it made no sense to retire them with plenty of life still left in their airframes in favor of a fleet of B2's.
Regarding quantity having its own quality, if China ever wanted to take out one of our carrier groups, sending a few thousand MiG-21's against a carrier group in the Taiwan Straits would probably do the job. Our carriers would run out of missiles long before the Chinese ran out of MiG-21's. Then toss in their handful of advanced fighters to mop up and sink the survivors, and there ya go...
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