Hacker News Reader

Comment by digi59404 | Hacker News Reader

That's mis-categorizing my statement. There is no "might". The innovation that's occurred in the F-35 program has already produced fruit in many other airframes and the US Air Force has already "re-written the playbook" on what it means to have a new airframe and what revitalizing an old airframe is.

It's not about whether it may or may not - It has, that's a definitive statement.

View on HN

It sounded more as if waffling about possible future results than a description concrete present results. The F-35 has cost $4e11 so far, says a random site on the web. What are the results of its innovation, the results that definitely and already have occurred and arguably are worth $4e11?

The US air force didnt need a new airframe

The old airframes were not survivable in a contested environment, and there was no practical way to make them survivable. That's still true today.

This may be a statement that the U.S militaries post-ww2 doctrine of air superiority is no longer viable. Large Battleships once had to face a similar reality that it was impossible to make them survivable if the enemy had air superiority.

Drones are cheap, good missiles are 1/100th the price of an F-35. It's possible that aircraft will no longer be able to enter contested space without significant risks just as it was pre-ww2 where it was impractical to achieve air superiority or to destroy anti-aircraft placements.

Considering the extreme investment of the US into aircraft as a means of projecting power and winning wars against conventional militaries, there is a chance that an opponent with a much smaller military budget could "win" in a conventional fight - making the multi-trillion dollar aircraft projects pointless.

What replaces it? Loitering missile drones + a big expansion of satellite imagery?

Absolutely.

A tomahawk cruise missile isn't too far off from a one-shot fighter jet when it comes to attacking fixed, or very slow-moving targets. They also don't need a human pilot, which cost an extraordinary amount of money to train, way more than their salary.

China has already developed what is effectively an ICBM designed to sink/punch through warships from above.

In any major future conflict our satellites will be the first casualties. They won't be available for overhead imagery, communications, or navigation. So remote piloted drones will be useless. Loitering missiles will be important but only work against a limited set of targets.

For the price of the f-35 a defensible satellite installation could be placed in orbits that would be difficult to shoot down.

There is nothing stopping a satellite from maneuvering out of the way of an incoming missle, or for it deploying counter measures.

Satellites can be launched on arbitrarily large rocket boosters with an arbitrary number of in orbit assembly/refueling flights. Anti satellite missiles require that the missile can be deployed to a useful location that can’t be immediately disabled.

There is no such thing as a defensible satellite installation. The only way to make a satellite really difficult to shoot down is to put it in a high orbit, but that makes it less useful for reconnaissance. While launch costs have come down slightly, the total cost for building and launching a large military satellite remains far higher than an F-35. Even large satellites carry very little maneuvering fuel and have small thrusters which don't allow for effective evasive maneuvers. Adding more fuel and larger thrusters would drastically increase costs and reduce the mass available for useful payloads. And that's not even the biggest problem. Satellites lack the sensors necessary to detect when they are under attack. It's just not practical to load them up with multiple radars and IRST sensors that would be necessary to detect an incoming antisatellite weapon.

So in short your idea won't work in the real world.

Nothing, we don't replace it because we don't need it

It's a tremendous waste of money

Contested is the point. Contested by other jets, I'd say no. All other air forces with modern fighters are still using Gen 4 fighters at best. The true threat comes from anti-aircraft weapons. To the point developers of FCAS are worried about man-held missiles. These missiles can take down legacy as well as 5th gen fighters. That's also why saturation is a thing, overwhelming the enmy with numbers. At 100 mil a piece, that startegy might be a tad expensve with the F-35. Hence drones. Whether rones work or not has to be seen.

my bestguess is, that n a conventional conflict between industrilized states the air campaigns will be over after the first three major engangements or so. Because by then replacing the losses would ruin everyone.

China has two Gen5 fighters in serial production right now. And show me a manpad that can take down a Gen 5 fighter at 30K feet. No manpad is energetic enough to do so.

Who said at 30k feet? At low levels, that's what people are planning for, yes.

Most flights aren't conducted at low levels, unless you're fighting 3rd world insurgents. And again, which manpads are you claiming can down a Gen 5 aircraft?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com