F-35 is built for the wrong war

themafia

It's a camel designed by committee. On paper it looks cool. In practice it was /never/ the right plane. The contractors knew and didn't care.

the__alchemist

Article hits on this: F-35 is probably the best SEAD plane ever made. And best VTOL. And can do the full mission set of a multirole fighter, although not as exceptional in those roles.

softwaredoug

Increased defense spending actually makes the US less, not more, safe. Everyone we're going to fight is prepared for an asymmetric, cheap war. We're vulnerable in how much they can make us spend to wage that war. A million dollar patriot missile to shoot down a cheap drone, etc.

tpurves

The insight here is, that in current warfare, quantity is the quality that matters. And with quantity, cost of replacement needs to be low, platforms expendable, cheap to maintain and resupply. It, and it's support infrastructure, need to not easily be detected and targeted by drones while on the ground. F35 is not these things. It's powerful but brittle, and like many US platforms, too much value packed into too few platforms. Not enough sustain in prolonged modern conflict. A one-punch military.

JumpCrisscross

"Just as it took the brutal reality of naval warfare in the Pacific to shift the Navy’s love from the battleship to the aircraft carrier, it may take the catastrophic failure for limitations of exquisite tactical aircraft to overwhelm the forces keeping them drinking up most of the trough. The corrective is not to abandon the F-35 but to redefine its role. A smaller fleet should be reserved for the missions that truly require its unique capabilities — penetrating advanced air defenses, gathering intelligence in contested environments, and orchestrating distributed networks of unmanned systems. The marginal procurement dollar should shift toward platforms that are cheaper to build, easier to replace, less dependent on vulnerable forward infrastructure, and expendable in ways that manned fighters are not. The lesson of the Iran campaign is that the F-35 performed superbly in exactly the kind of fight it was built for. The lesson for force designers is that the next war may not be that fight. The future of airpower belongs to a larger orchestra, many of its instruments unmanned, inexpensive, and replaceable. Prudence demands that the United States start building it now."

PowerElectronix

The F-35 is the best stealth aircraft you can have in a war against china. But it alone is not going to win that war. I wouldn't say it's the wrong jet for that war just because of that. If you put the f-35 along all the rest of the us military, the war can be won and the f-35 plays a critical role in that win.

zitterbewegung

The premise that it is built for the "wrong war" is two fold. Design by committee didn't help the aircraft and made cost overruns and timelines worse but, the bigger premise or problem doesn't take to account that we still have other aircraft that fulfills other roles. Also, the collaborative combat aircraft is being developed with the F22 and F35. Arguably though the collaborative combat aircraft is a bigger challenge than the F35 program as a whole and it is still in development whether it can be completed. We could downsize the F35 fleet or provide it in military aid but, I don't we can truly say wrong war it will still be available when a different war occurs and Aircraft have a long shelf life.

varjag

Somewhat ridiculous piece. Ukraine, 4 years after, still operates a significant number of jets it entered the war with. This is despite hundreds of attempts to eliminate them on the ground with airstrikes, drones, cruise and ballistic missiles. And naturally F-35s on that theatre would have been a game changer making mass strikes on Moscow possible. For all the dysfunctions of American military industrial complex it remains a fighter without peers (unless you count F-22) or serious AD threat.

nalekberov

Is there a “right” war?

slibhb

He keeps citing China but the US isn't at war with China. For the wars that the US is fighting, i.e. against Iran and similarly equipped adversaries, the f-35 seems to be performing well.

morning-coffee

The F-35 was specified when the Joint Strike Fighter program began in 1995, with the development contract awarded in 2001, and the first flight in 2006 or thereabouts. Of course it was built for a different war... the use of drones didn't proliferate until after the 2010s and really more since the 2020s with Russia/Ukraine. So, thanks Captain Obvious and arm-chair quarterback, for the insightful article.

freediddy

I think ultimately the real weapon of mass destruction will be long-range drones the size of a DJI drone, each holding a small but extremely powerful explosive. And then send millions of them, with specific single targets. Each AI controlled to target single weakpoints in buildings, bridges, or even specific people. You can't stop a million of them even with EMPs because you can just end a million more. You can destroy entire cities with a technology like this. If each drone costs $10,000 and you send a million of them that's only $10 billion for a war and complete destruction of your enemy.

munk-a

The A10 Warthog is still in service due to the outsized volume of some incredibly wrong voices being able to shout down modern understandings of warfare. The role of CAS as an extension of the ground troops themselves controlled by infantrymen with tooling to automate that job is the future but the military industrial complex moves slowly.

fooker

The primary purpose of something like the F-35 program is not producing a bunch of jets that we can use to win wars. Similar to how NASA's purpose is not to make large rockets that send things to orbit for cheap. It is to investigate new technologies (i.e. how do we control a thousand drones) and preserve domain knowledge in a large number of engineers spanning multiple generations. If all these engineers go work at $BIG_TECH optimizing ad revenue for watching short videos, we'll have to rediscover basics the next time. When we have to fight the next serious war, we are not going to primarily use F-35 jets built twenty years ago, it's going to be something built on a similar platform in larger numbers to specifically address challenges of that era. If it can not be made cheap enough, whatever contractors involved are going to be nationalized. All major wars between comparable powers were fought with technology hot off the assembly lines, not billion dollar prototype models developed twenty years ago to bomb caves in deserts. If you look at it from this angle, all the idiosyncrasies make sense. There's of course the inefficiency of defense contractors skimming off profits at multiple layers, but if you find a solution to that while preserving productivity, you'd win the economics nobel tomorrow.

shevy-java

I think cheap missiles and drones changed a lot of things. One could see this in Ukraine; more recently in Iran. USA is primarily focusing on heavy impact and expensive wars. This may be a more effective strategy, but it does not seem to be very realistic. I can't help but feel that this is especially much the case with regard to Iran, because the USA, despite what the orange bolo is saying, does not seem to be that eager to intensify the war (e. g. no ground invasion - and that's very telling if you remember the Iraq or Afghanistan invasion).

metalman

Huh?The F35 has flown.more missions against the Palistinians than perhaps ANY aircraft that has ever been use in war, and the F35 is central to commiting genocide on the Palistinian people, and there is very very little they can do about it, so by the logic of obsenity, does war have another?, it plays the "tune" in the keys of screams and horror.

lanthissa

theres a lot of things to critique about the us, but the f35 isn't one of them. Over the past few years we have seen it operate with impunity over multiple countries. It astounding to me that in the 12 day war and the iran conflict there hasn't been issues from maintance alone. We dont know how well the F35 holds up against patriots or s400's, but what we do know for certain is that against virtually everything else it unstopable. More so when you realize the us has 600 and is making another 200 a year, and in a real war, you would lose some but theres rough parity between the number of s400 systems that exist, and the number of f35s that exist, and all those s400's will never be in teh same war or same place.

nextstep

Writers of history or historical fiction often wonder how did average people in militaristic, fascist societies from the past view their society? I think it’s obvious from the present-day US: they were amused. They were entertained by it. Human suffering, a necessary feature of such cultures, is trivialized by draping the death machine behind the veneer of fun, exciting game!

xd1936

Opponents of the Dragon Tank point to it's 10-Million-Dollar fangs and 35-Million-Dollar prehensile tail and say this is somewhat excessive... But developing new technology is essential to maintaining America's military advantage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxJLUZWPEb8 (Re-Upload: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8__8--YAm4 )

bawolff

In the intro: > Meanwhile, modern conflict, from Ukraine’s drone war to naval engagements in the Red Sea to Iran’s own mass missile and drone salvos, increasingly favors systems that can be produced at scale and replaced when lost. In the conclusion: > The lesson of the Iran campaign is that the F-35 performed superbly in exactly the kind of fight it was built for. The lesson for force designers is that the next war may not be that fight. What a weird article. It starts out by saying f-35 is not fit for modern war. Concludes by saying it works perfectly in modern war. The middle part talks about combining f-35 with drones to get the best of both worlds, but isn't that what people already are doing? Iran war allegedly had lots of drones on both sides. And of course blowing up iran is going to be totally different from some hypothetical war with china. Will the f-35 work well in a conflict with china? I have no idea but the article didn't really make any convincing arguments about it.