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Comment by dodobirdlord | Hacker News Reader

The F-35/s future role is as a sensor platform and networking hub for a group of lighter-weight, cheaper, and more expendable drones. Eventually the F-35 will also be unmanned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kratos_XQ-58_Valkyrie

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That thing should be called Valkryie II. The Valkyrie was a much more impressive aircraft, an almost legend that is too often forgotten.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_XB-70_Valkyrie

The Valkyrie was a legend. Looks like it inspired the concord.

Isn’t a Global Hawk, Triton, or similar with high altitude loiter capabilities and StarLink support not a more pragmatic option for such a role? They’re also unmanned. If carrier support is required, there’s the X-47B/X-47C vehicle.

Platforms should go high and slow (but faster when necessary, when in range of bad times). Ordinance should go fast, very fast, with no people onboard.

UAVs like the Global Hawk or Triton aren't large enough to be fast enough to be useful against enemy fighters. As for StarLink, all relevant LEO satellites are coming down in the early stages of any open combat between the US and a near-peer adversary. To contest air superiority requires a platform that goes very fast and can see very far. To fight enemy fighters or to strike ground targets in places without air superiority a stealth fighter large enough to be fast and to carry a long-range sensing and jamming suite is needed.

My point is that fighters are obsolete. Sensor platforms get you the target, long range ordinance kills the target. Dog fights are dead like the SR71, which was obsoleted by orbital surveillance. See from afar, kill from afar, and stop trying to put a human onboard.

That's what Lockheed-Martin has been saying, but I'm pretty sure the F-35 is still deployed along-side an AWACS. And with more and better satellite imagery & communication. I just don't see why we need this extremely capable and expensive flying network router.

AWACS can be shot down by near-peer adversaries. And satellites travel in known orbits and have no capacity to evade. It's well known at this point that nations that can make current-generation fighter jets can also shoot down satellites.

Making a fighter jet is way harder than hitting a satellite with a few grams worth of kinetic projectile (or, more accurately, letting the satellite run into a field them).

I wouldn't bet on any nation not being able to pull that off. In fact I can think of some teams of university students who could probably hit a Starlink satellite if you gave them some funding.

Any nuclear armed adversary could knock out a whole hemisphere of starlinks with a single missile.

The AWACS for an F-35 in terms of providing an air picture is less necessary. They are still command and control and provide services which may not be radar related. They have lots of people that can process data and taskings. So don't let the idea that they are being used with an AWACS mean they require an AWACS.

And for the space discussion, nothing is as real time as a fighter's sensors airborne, it's pretty bad how long some data can take to reach a platform that can use that data. The military has a problem right now with distributing data real time, they are working to solve that problem. You can find a lot of articles on the ABMS. https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2336618/adva...

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