Does anyone knows what's the argument to use manned planes over drones anyway?
Turkey, which is kicked out if the F-35 program for political reasons, demonstrated huge success in battle through it's home grown drone programs.
F-35's were supposed to be the stealth weapons who were to be able to penetrate Russia made air defences etc, but Turkey proved in Syria that relatively cheap drones can do just that. Before the Turkish drones, only Israel was able to hit a Russian made air defence system and that was done when it wasn't operational at that moment. During the conflicts between Azerbaijan-Armenia, Syria, Libya the Turkish made drones hunted down multiple such system and provided very impressive footage of the action.
Again, Turkish drones are suspected to be used in first ever AI based attacks, where for the first time machines decided who to kill and who to spare[0].
Though Turkey has a sizeable engineering capacity, it's not a rich country. Budgets used to develop these drones are nowhere near the F-35 or similar projects. One wonders, what's the argument to invest so much in planes when there's low hanging fruits in the drones business.
It seems to me, the 5th gen plane projects are like trying to breed the next gen horses instead of developing the automobiles.
I think we have neither the AI nor the war proof reliable communication to really steer something like a warplane remotely, in a first-world war scenario.
The US could fly its drones with pilots comfortably sat in mainland US because the Taliban had no weapons able to shoot drones down. There was no dog fighting, no anti-satellite weaponry deployed etc.
Another reason is that warplanes are saturated with expensive kit like crazy. Yes the pilot is a major constructional constraint, but the main reason drones are so much cheaper right now is that they just aren’t designed as equally versatile platforms. If you wanted a full-fledged F35 drone replacement, I’m not sure it would be that much cheaper.
A different axis of the question, which came into play in the Azerbaijan-Armenia war recently, is whether we want few super-capable machines or much much more simpler ones. I think the jury is still out, but to me this is the interesting area of development.
There's also a lot of confusion due to the overloaded use of the term 'drone'
Drone could mean remotely piloted $4M Predator firing $140,000 a piece Hellfire missiles
But drone could also mean mass-produced, battery operated quadcopters delivering small scale explosives over the distance of a few kilometers or less (or perform recon). Sometimes deployed in swarms, flying low. Not necessarily remote controlled
Those are two very different military capabilities. The important impact of the kamikaze-drones is that it strongly favors the side with the stronger and more vertically integrated manufacturing base
Dogfights are pretty rare these days. Most air combat between planes revolves about launching & dodging air to air missiles that are fired from beyond visual range, and dealing with surface to air missiles while doing so. Shooting planes down with an actual gun in an actual dog fight is mostly reserved for countries that don't have modern planes (i.e. anything newer than half a century).
Fighter planes do have a few remaining roles. They are delivery vehicles for cheaper missiles and bombs to take out smaller ground targets or lighting up targets for missiles/bombs that are launched from far away. The longer range missiles (e.g. cruise missiles) are more expensive. An additional role would be reconnaissance even though most of that is probably done by satellites and drones these days. Then there is the job of escorting bigger, more vulnerable planes like bombers or just generally patrolling areas of interest (which could be done by drones as well). And finally there's the psychological warfare factor where flying them over the enemy has a demoralizing effect.
Basically a missile is an autonomous drone that happens to destroy on impact. Missiles have a few advantages over fighters: they are much faster and maneuverable. And they are disposable by their very nature which means they can go where no pilot would go except when very desperate. And a few disadvantages that mainly boil down to cost and range. The cost is high because they are 1 time use only. The range is limited by fuel and size. Which is why using fighter planes as a launch platform is common.
Autonomous planes aren't particularly hard. It's mostly the price performance that needs attention. Cheap, autonomous drones already exist. Making them bigger and beefing up their abilities is just a matter of time. That's all there's to it. At some point their abilities encompass most of what fighter planes currently do.
> Autonomous planes aren't particularly hard. It's mostly the price performance that needs attention. Cheap, autonomous drones already exist. Making them bigger and beefing up their abilities is just a matter of time. That's all there's to it. At some point their abilities encompass most of what fighter planes currently do.
Currently the allure of drones is that they are very cheap and can perform some missions as well as their big expensive brothers.
If you make a drone that is equally capable as a modern crewed jet, you bear most of the cost anyway. You’ll save something by excluding the pilot, but have to pay for extra (stealth) communication, infrastructure etc.
Maybe we’ll go away from that, have many types of cheap drones that are specialised and disposable. That’s not the case now.
Bear in mind our perception is skewed by the fact that the last N wars were all fought against at least one country far behind in military technology. But NATO et al are really prepping against a war against an equal. Having a cheap plastic drone with a bomb attached at the bottom won’t do.
Both world wars were preceded by several decades of tensions and also proxy wars between the power blocks. Since nukes are involved this time around, it's in all side's interest to not escalate to a hot war. But missing preparation for the worst case scenario was what went wrong for many participants in previous hot wars.
I've heard the communication argument but I'm not convinced since the F-35 itself is sold as the "connected platform" which is supposed to be constantly communicating with the base and the troops on the ground and have complete situation awareness thanks to that integrated communications.
If F-35 can stay connected, so can the drones.
Drones also have the inherent advantage to do manoeuvres way beyond of what human can do or withstand, they don't carry the human and the devices that are made to keep it alive and in control.
F-35 is also know for not flying that well, it's not really a dog fight machine and the scenarios where the plane is supposed to excel are stealth operation, remote intelligence gathering, launching missiles way before visual contact etc anyway. I don't see why drones can't do any of that.
I’m not sure you can push that much two-way bandwidth without compromising stealth; it’s one way to push information to the jet, or exchange little nuggets or he other way, but actually steering the thing remotely would make you totally visible to any radar.
Plus, if you could disable an enemy airforce by destroying the infrastructure, that’s an uncomfortably simple way to ground them. An F35 can operate successfully in total radio silence if need be.
I believe there's no fundamental reason to have drones communicate %100 of the time and receive high fidelity inputs, even consumer drones are quite capable to fly without precise controls from the pilot.
These days, a sub 1000$ consumer drone can follow targets, execute pre-determined tasks, navigate around obstacles and fly back home safely when the communication is lost.
Right, but it's not doing all this while trying to dodge SAM missiles, avoid radars, push the envelope of what it's capable aerodynamically, continuously evaluate a dynamic situation, identify the actual goal (it could be moving, hiding etc.), yada yada yada. Also, losing an aircraft, crewed or not, is further liability - ideally you want to scramble the debris before the enemy can get to it to recover whatever intelligence remains.
The months and years that military pilots spend in training is not just "driving license", but how to best operate a sophisticated destruction machine.
Comparing military jets to the capabilities of commercial drones is massively missing the point of the actual challenges of airborne warfare.
These probably aren't unsolvable problems, I'm not saying we can never replace crewed jets with drones, there are just fundamental reasons why this isn't happening right now.
Of course, drones are not a drop-in replacement for fighter jets with pilots but IMHO drones are inherently superior on most aspects and the shortcomings are solvable problems.
A bit like, Archers having some advantages over rifles but overall rifles being vay superior making archers irrelevant.
Firearms took over bows in Europe around 16th century. But they have been around for far longer, as early as 13th century, possibly much earlier too. Even when firearms took over, they were in many ways inferior to bows. The crucial difference was that they required less skill to operate, so much easier from a general logistical point of view. Training longbowmen in medieval England was a whole massive social project.
So even being the long-term solution doesn't make something the right solution right now, the time gap until it takes over can be very long, and even once it is the right solution, it might not be due to actual technical superiority (at least not initially) but rather wider strategic considerations.
And just to stem the thought, this wasn't because people in the past were stoopid, humans have always devoted a huge amount of skill, cunning and attention to warmongering. Technological progress in military technology was always rapid (if likely slower than today), we just don't see it that way, since one bow kinda looks the same as another to us - but could be an enormous advantage.
Interesting last point. Could be weighted by how each country values their servicemen, ie. culturally, (at the risk of making this political) one american soldier KIA > thousands of iraqis; makes sense that the US would lean towards safety for pilots. Contrasted with say a WW2 russia "defend the motherland" mentality where losses are acceptable.
Interesting, wasn't that one of the objectives of the F-35? Penetrate (or come close enough) enemy airspace, then orchestrate a squadron of smaller, simpler unmanned aircraft and weapons that are sent in through other means with no particular expectation of returning after combat?
Possibly, I haven’t seen that past any conceptual stage (I’m an amateur btw, nothing to do with defence).
The point stands that the shepherd is a lot more complex than the sheep. F-35 is so packed with sensors: multi purpose radar, IR sensors, I believe there are radio receivers throughout the airframe, turning the whole thing into a phased array receiver. It has sophisticated software and hardware to orchestrate it all. You can configure it to shoot down enemy planes, fight air defences, bomb targets, I’m guessing shoot at ships etc. It can do it all while maintaining stealth and remaining in the air for hours (with aerial refuelling).
This is much fancier than any drone can do right now.
> Though Turkey has a sizeable engineering capacity, it's not a rich country.
Well, to add a small clarification to this, you probably mean not rich compared to the US. Turkey, even with its current economic crisis, is still a top 20 world economy, a member of OECD and last I checked, just a couple steps behind Korea in GDP. You mostly don’t get to train and retain engineers capable of a world-leading drone program without some accumulated wealth.
Korea has a significantly higher per capita GDP and Turkey is in a full blown currency crisis. In terms of societal capacity the two economies aren't comparable.
Not to contradict you to the economic stability but Turkey is capable of having both an economic crisis and the economic and educational and manufacturing capacity to deploy innovative UAV. In fact, it's military spending might be propping up many parts of the economy.
Iran is an economic basketcase. You think they have no capacity for research and development? Israel doesn't agree.
The Netherlands has an annual budget of 300 billion but the military gets less than 2% of that.
Ofcourse should global security ever deteriorate the EU can potentially field an army as large and advanced as any in the world. The cold war was not won by the US alone. But every cent spent on missiles can't go to healthcare or education.
To be clear, by a couple steps I meant couple steps in the world top economies list. I wasn’t implying comparable GDP, though Turkey shouldn’t be too far on that either.
The "investment" is the whole point of the F-35 program. Any military capability it provides is a distant second. We are lucky that it can (often) take off and land at all.
F-35 has subcontracts let in every state, making it organizationally impossible to de-fund. Another similar program is SLS.
This is definitional for "the military industrial complex" -the most vivid example I have ever seen is manufacturers plates on the (now upgraded) Buenos Aires subway. The cars were made by an Argentinian airforce factory.
It's also one of the principle theses of "monopoly capital" by Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran
The question of usability is highly dependent on how far up a ladder of escalation a given conflict goes up to.
I imagine weapon systems like the F35 are intended for a higher level of conflict and deterrent than the new lower hybrid-war conflicts we're seeing taking place right now. In those cheap home-grown drones can be useful but must rely on satellites and other infrastructure which at a higher level of escalation would be under attack.
I'm certain they've done quite a bit of homework on these choices.
What I find interesting is how something like the F35 is more meant for asymmetrical warfare. If a real war were to break out I imagine something like the A35 Warthog and other such aircraft being rapidly manufactured and delivered to battlegrounds.
Well, I’m located here in Poland and from our perspective it would seem “they” have already done their homework. They’re using a strategy in which the US/NATO doesn’t even get to use those super-weapons because no open war has even been declared (and probably won’t be). Instead it’s this state of emergency, refugee stand-offs, strategic natural-gas pipeline construction, infiltration, proxies and media manipulation etc. A hybrid-war. However, even just the fact that your opponent is not willing to escalate from words/espionage up to actual violence based on the strange high-tech wizardry you might/might-not have is a pretty good outcome.
The Maginot Line is an interesting example. Sure, it functions as the defining joke of WW2 - they just walked around it. But one can imagine other side purposes for building such infrastructure before a war. For instance, just forcing your enemy to declare war against your neighbors (to pass through their territory) could already be seen as a pretty good payoff/deterrent. Or maybe having a large labor force capable of building similar infrastructure based on the experience from building that Maginot line might have been seen as valuable. Hell, maybe it was more about “jobs” and keeping the populace “loyal”. Again - I don’t know the details of the Maginot Line or that history but what I’m getting at is that there are so many unknown factors and results that might be at work behind the curtain that it’s very hard to say.
Coming back to the F35 I’m just wondering how they measure the expertise and loyalty of the people who have to know how to design, manufacture and build these things. Engineers are theoretically free to work where they like - so it is of strategic importance to keep them happy and keep them occupied and making progress. Maybe this could be something happening that we don’t know about? A significant amount of money has been pumped into the project, but that money doesn’t just disappear. It goes into a huge strategically crucial supply chain. It might just be worth the political loss off face to keep that healthy and operative.
The Maginot Line worked exactly as (ultimately, but not initially[*] --- the plan changed mid-construction) intended. The intent was to force Germany through Belgium.
Note that the role of a fortification is not only to help defend against an attack, but also to try to discourage an attack against it in the first place (instead forcing the enemy to attack through a different point; makes the attacks more predictable, which translates to higher concentrations of defensive forces --- bonus points if there are natural choke points or such).
Ultimately, Germany was left with two options for an advance, so France had to guess which one. What happened was that France guessed wrong (IIRC, they didn't at all expect a German armored assault through the rough terrain & forests near Ardennes), and the rest, as they say, is history.
[*] The initial plan was to fortify the Belgian border, too, but this was adapted to a "France helping Belgium defend against Germany" plan, after Belgium's protests that it would simply get "sacrificed" if the Maginot line was fully reinforced in the north. I've a sneaking suspicion that France wasn't quite ready to honor this quasi-defensive-plan, but that's a different topic.
Despite their success with modern drone technology, they are insistent on trying to buy flying junk like the F35 and now the F16. Clearly their military brass is full of boneheads as well. Seems like a universal attribute or a job requirement.
And separate from the technical merits of how bad the F35 and F16 is the only country that has placed arms embargoes on Turkey is the US. And the US openly arms terrorists in northern Syria with weaponry to bomb and attack Turkey. And their military STILL want to buy F16s from the US. Either they are real real dumb or financially incentivized. To paraphrase and mangle Hanlons razor don’t ascribe to stupidity what can be explained by corruption.
Maybe they want to buy a few so to improve the relations with US and NATO? Many believe that Turkey bought S-400 for political reasons(to fix the problems with Russia after downing a Russian warplane back in 2015) and not to really use them.
Historically, Turkey's primary rival is Russia.
Whatever the reason is, I don't like the "If the people in power must know what are they doing" mentality. Many times they don't or do it for way different reasons than the apparent one.
Turkey is also developing its own fighter, with support from the UK.
The only open enemy of Turkey is the US. The US has been covertly arming terrorists against Turkey since Kissinger. Since Obama they have been openly arming terrorists against Turkey. Russia may not be an ally but Turkeys enemy has always been the US since Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
> It seems to me, the 5th gen plane projects are like trying to breed the next gen horses instead of developing the automobiles.
Absolutely not. This isn't an either/or prospect. The USAF employs plenty of drones and DoD and DARPA fund plenty of development of newer and better drones, while also funding manned aircraft improvements.
And AOL had 1.5 Million paying Dial-up subscribers by 2015[0]. Just because someone does something doesn't really imply that they are utilising their resources the best way possible.
> Does anyone knows what's the argument to use manned planes over drones anyway?
Several reasons,
Up until now as far as I am aware there has never been a drone used in an air to air combat role in an actual conflict. There is research happening on this but it appears no one has a combat ready system. The fact appears to be that the technology is just not there yet to allow unmanned aircraft to perform an air combat role. It might not even be a technology but a cost thing, drones are cheap because they lack all the technology required for that role, they are essentially light attack aircraft, they are less like an F-16 and more like a Super Tucano, subsonic with very limited payload and no radar. The primary costs of a figher jet are related to the capabilities required for the air to air combat role, maneuverability, super sonic speed, a large radar, stealth capabilities, and missile and radar warning systems. If you tried to build drone with these characteristics you would end up with a price tag similar to a modern jet.
They are incredibly susceptible to electronic warfare [1][2].
> Turkey, which is kicked out if the F-35 program for political reasons, demonstrated huge success in battle through it's home grown drone programs.
While true you have to take into account that in all these conflicts the drones operated in a virtually uncontested airspace. The air forces of Armenia, Syria, and Libya were comprised of a few strike aircraft. The Armenian air force had available 12 Su-25[3], the Syrian insurgents targeted by Turkey had no air force, and I could not find any sources but I would bet Haftar's air-force could not have more than 20 fighter jets. The effectiveness of drones against a peer with the capability to run 24/7 air superiority missions is still questionable. Certainly a large drone force like Turkeys is a significant force multiplier that can incur outweigh costs and casualties to an opponent but not in itself sufficient to fight against an opponent with a modern air force.
In all these cases the deciding factor was not the fact the aircraft were unmanned but the fact there were aircraft with precision weapons. If Azerbaijan had 50 F-16s or A-10s the result would have likely been the same albeit at a much higher cost. Unmanned aircraft in my opinion up until now don't present a radically new proposition they merely make large scale air strike capabilities available to states that could otherwise not afford them.
> F-35's were supposed to be the stealth weapons who were to be able to penetrate Russia made air defences etc, but Turkey proved in Syria that relatively cheap drones can do just that. Before the Turkish drones, only Israel was able to hit a Russian made air defence system and that was done when it wasn't operational at that moment. During the conflicts between Azerbaijan-Armenia, Syria, Libya the Turkish made drones hunted down multiple such system and provided very impressive footage of the action.
The US air force has flown suppression of enemy air defense missions in almost all the conflicts it fought since Vietnam always against Russian made air defenses[4]. The role of the F-35 is not a new one it's just they needed an new airplane for that role[5].
> It seems to me, the 5th gen plane projects are like trying to breed the next gen horses instead of developing the automobiles.
I guess you are referring to all the loyal wingman projects that are around. I think they are being conservative given that a bet on the wrong horse would be catastrophic for them. Their approach gives them all the benefits with very little risk, they get an expendable platform, with long endurance, the characteristics of a drone, along with increased situational awareness, immediacy, and a guarantee that a successful electronic attack won't result in the complete annihilation of their force.
I’m still crossing my fingers half our budget for this plane was diverted to secret research - perhaps into something rather tic-tac shaped… was the blackbird and nighthawk development reported in the open like the F35? or were they developed within black budgets diverted from other, apparently wasteful projects?
disclaimer: I get all my info from “Independence Day”
The hammer and the documentation associated with proving that they weren't spending excess money on the hammer and providing a chain of responsibility if that hammer breaks. Plus cost-plus contracting encourages companies to find clever ways to spend more money on everything since their profits are a fixed percentage of their costs. Seriously, yes it is actually that screwed up, that money is going into salaries for stupid makework and profits rather than black budgets.
Not discount your assertion, but wasn't the $20K cost of the hammer due to the material it was made from? Something about having to work in a spark free environment?
Yeah, it is. Hence "fighter jet program". Why use the cost of just one jet when you can use the cost of the entire program? Never ruin a "good" joke by being moderate.
Secret research doesn't need to be diverted from bloated budgets of open programs. Classified programs are just a line item in appropriations bills with a code name and no explanation of what it's for. Small oversight committees, rather than all of Congress and anyone with working Internet who can download the public budget, get to the see the budget details. The only reason to do something like you're suggesting is if you're trying to hide from the oversight committees, and the only reason to do that is if you're trying to do something illegal.
In practice, historically when the US government wanted to do things that are illegal, think Iran Contra, they just relied on private funding to bypass Congress, not stealing from other line items. Or they just lied (e.g. sending troops into Cambodia but not admitting it).
It seems every fighter has had its share of scandals, though the local press of course doesn't report of a lot of it.
The lift fan space in the B variant has forced a "fat" design on all the three variants, with resulting aerodynamic penalties.
To me, it seems it would have been relatively easy to just design a new airframe ignoring any commonality in airframe, because - the airframe is not the expensive part. Maybe it was in the fifties still. Instead use all the systems like the engine, avionics, sensors, software etc where the cost anyway is nowadays. Even aerodynamic design can be done with computers nowadays so you don't need so much calendar time in costly wind tunnels.
Pretty sure I heard a USAF general make a similar argument for the way ahead / 6th gen aircraft development: that airframes need to be iterated faster, with sensor and weapon packages being much more plug-and-play. So we should be able to stuff the same AESA + Distributed Aperture Sensors in a single seat/single engine fighter, a tandem-seat strikefighter, and a side-by-side seat penetration bomber. You replace the airframes as your materials science improves and your desired flight envelopes/mission profiles change. You replace the internals as your electrical & software engineering improves. Alternate between the two, like Intels old "Tick/Tock" cycle. Far better than doing clean-sheet designs that need to debug EVERYTHING new simultaneously.
SaaB have been putting this philosophy into production planes for close to a decade, and it's been talked about a lot within the eurofighter consortium.
We don't hear much about how say India or Israel does thing but both have a record of performing significant modifications/improvement to existing airframes.
F-35 has a few very strong points. For instance it has best available radar and other sensors, so for a country that does not have dedicated AWACS plane, it can serve as (not so) poor man AWACS. Being somewhat stealth and being able to carry JASSM/JASSM-ER missiles it is useful for the not so great army that want to attack the opponent on the opponent's territory (not really US army use case...).
F-35 sounds like a good solution for, say, Poland, since Polish F-35 (Harpias) maneuvering unnoticed near Belorussian border will be able to attack Russian forces, supply lines all the way to the Smolensk Gate (50-mile-wide territory between the Dzwina and Dnieper rivers), which is a main attack direction for Russian army.
Similarly, planes operating in the middle of Poland can attack targets in Kaliningrad - another crucial strategic ability for Polish defense.
Note, that dogfight capabilities (in which F-35 is worst than F-16) does not matter here, Polish or Finnish army will always avoid confronting Russian air forces in the direct air strike, as they will be outnumber by Russians.
Strangely, it seems that F-35 is much more useful for other armies than US army so no surprise US army wants something different.
Another thing is that F-16 Viper has sensors almost at the level of F-35, can carry JASSM missiles, but it is way, way, cheaper to buy and maintain...
> Similarly, planes operating in the middle of Poland can attack targets in Kaliningrad - another crucial strategic ability for Polish defense.
If that happens, i.e. a NATO country directly attacking Russia, then a nuclear war starts. I'd put China in the same basket, also Pakistan if it gets attacked by India or vice-versa. Proxy-wars (to use your example Poland attacking Belarus) are of course more complicated.
I assume the Polish attack on Russian or Belarusian forces would come in reaction to a Russian or Belarusian attack, in which case NATO should already have come to the aid of Poland. Things can get muddled in the light of the alternative ways of "waging war" which Belarus seems to be engaged in - e.g. inviting thousands of migrants with promises of an easy passage into the EU, providing them with simple armaments [1] and positioning them on the Polish border with no way of retreat back in to Belarus - which has led to both NATO as well as Russian forces to converge on the scene [2], a situation in which the question of "who fired the first shot" is hard to answer.
But Ukraine is right on the border of Poland. And what we saw in Ukraine is by the time Paris, London and Berlin notice something is amiss, Russia has already achieved their goals. And the fear-of-triggering-WW3 goes both ways.
I can believe Poland would want to be well equipped, so they can hold out for a few days so their allies have time to mobilise.
NATO is a defense alliance. If RF will directly attack a NATO country, then a nuclear war will begin. When a NATO country attacks another country, NATO will not be involved.
In case of a shooting war all those F-35 would get destroyed by cruise missiles before they could take off. The only reason for Poland getting F-35 is trying to please the US and to participate in NATO missions.
In case of a shooting war all those F-35 would get destroyed by cruise missiles before they could take off.
Possibly, but aircraft in their sealed revetments are a difficult target.
Also, an attack of that nature would would certainly trigger Section 5 of the Collective Defense, and then US resupply. I suspect most NATO members who buy the very expensive F-35 do so in the belief (or hope) that the US will replace these aircraft immediately, from US squadrons, if necessary.
Exactly, the main threat model is the Russian aggression via hybrid warfare (anything below the classic war, which would trigger article 5) or full fledge offence. In both cases F-35 sucks, Poland is too close to Russia. I'd be much better to spend the money on drones, satellites.
I'll bite... how long can an F-35 maneuver unnoticed near the border? And if they have weapons that can hit Kaliningrad usefully from the middle of Poland, what benefit do these weapons derive from the F-35?
TLDR: I think you meant to say "US military" instead of "US army".
Read on if you are interested why it matters.
The US Army is a branch of the USA military. The US Army is not a costumer of the F-35. The F-35 is a joint project between the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps. That's 3 other branches.
Now one can say that this is a silly interjection and I should just see "US military" every time I see the word "US army" in the GP comment.
But, in the case when we are trying to understand the F-35 project understanding the crazy force structure of the US military is a must. Why? Because that structure left an indelible mark on the airplane!
Very roughly: The Air Force is the folks with the airplanes, the Navy is the one with the ships and the Marine Corps are the troops on the ship. But turns out in modern warfare you can't do naval warfare without having proper air cover, so the US Navy also got airplanes. And historically the marines were left in the lurch one too many times so they insist on having their own transportation, so they have ships, and also airplanes. (Very rough explanation, bear with me.)
You can see that the branches are somewhat converging, will we end up with 3 carbon copies of the same thing? The legislators asked the same question and put in the law limits on each branch. There are experts on what the particular limits are and etc etc, what matters to us in terms of F-35 that the Marine Corps can't have ships bigger than X. So they can't just buy a conventional aircraft carrier. Therefore the marine's airplanes have to take off vertically.
This means that when this 3 branches joined forces to build an airplane together the airplane had to be designed such that it can serve all 3 of them. So the F-35 has to have a variant which can take off vertically. And many says that capability made the whole thing waay too complicated and the boondoggle it is. And it's not a real physical "we need otherwise we cannot fight" thing. It's a legal loophole.
What started out as a comment seemingly focusing on pedantry became a very insightful comment about the (very interesting and frustrating) history of the three F-35 variants. Glad to have read, thank you!
Was curious the F35 design is like the PakFa where it's stealth from the front but the exhaust is not like an F22. I don't know offhand if the F22 design is for thermal reasons more than thrust vectoring.
B2 I think is definitely thermal since it's inside/above the wing.
In my country we've had doubts about it for decades but in order not to offend America it was considered politically prudent to buy quite literally any crap the US makes at whatever cost. It's not like we're ever going to war anyway.
Buying US hand me down weapons at inflated prices is basically paying for the US SaaS subscription fee: Security as a service.
It was the same in Romania when joining NATO. They bought a bunch of retired F-16s at inflated prices which pissed off the Romanian taxpayers and the Frech and Swedish governments, since for that kind of money, the Romanian air force could have bought more modern and brand new Dassault or SAAB fighters while also supporting the local EU economy, but instead, they spent the money to buy themselves tickets at the US-ally table (possible corruption and bribes involved as well, but that's pretty much the norm in all defense related purchases)
These are the planes that the military builds when in peacetime controlled by vested interests.
In a real war there would be a much sharper focus on building planes that can fight and win. But that what the enemies of the US are already doing and it’ll be too late for the US when it needs the right planes.
The US is focused on building complex overly technology focused boondoggle machines that take far to long to design and build and cost too much and underperform.
> In a real war there would be a much sharper focus on building planes that can fight and win. But that what the enemies of the US are already doing and it’ll be too late for the US when it needs the right planes.
I think this is partly because if you are not currently at war then you don't know who or when you will be at war with and what exactly the threats will look like so you end up designing for a range of scenarios. If you're currently in the midst of a big war than the requirements are clearer (but certainly not clear!)
Realistically the US is never going to fight a war with an equal adversary.
When they did WW3 simulations in the cold war it always ended with mushroom clouds.
> This new fighter would not replace the F-35, but would instead be used in place of 4th generation fighters like the F-16 Fighting Falcon.
But wasn't the F-35 already meant to replace the F-16? As well as the F-15, F-18, A-10 and a whole slew of other planes? I guess this means they finally figured out that was unrealistic.
> The Air Force has already begun purchasing a slew of new old fighters in the 4th generation F-15EX, which will replace aging F-15 Eagles in the branch’s inventory.
So they're buying new F-15s now? That's a plane from the 1970s, right? That sounds like a testament of good those designs were, and how little has effectively improved in the 40+ years since then. I mean, obviously this new F-15 will have all the best new high-tech computer, radar, targeting gear that will probably also end up in the F-35, but the airframe is apparently still a solid design, as long as you don't need stealth and VTOL.
Any country still investing in airplanes that hold pilots are wasting there money and should get their shit up to date. The days have been long gone that any pilot would be able to judge if their target is a yay or nay. The distances vastly overreach the capabilities of even the best person's eyes, and the added cost and complexity of putting a human in a jet are not worth it.
Tell that to Switzerland. They actually think they purchased 32 F-35s for 6 Billion. I see this more as a bribe to the US to keep them out of our affairs. The planes are just icing...
End cost will be way higher and what does a neutral country need stealth for? Whom is the country going to hide from? It's own citizens which happen to be the military? The military said them selves it is for air policing.
I wonder how many nations need long range for defence? Of course offensive wars such as invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are different, but most uses for defence should happen relatively near to border.
Defence is not that different from offence. An offensive task such as destroying enemy artillery behind their borders or their service routes is an effective way to defend. If the enemy has nothing to attack with, then defending is a lot easier.
I think that would make sense for some missions like air superiority but not others like a deep strike into enemy territory. For the former we already have AWACs that perform nearly that role while also being big flying radars. For the later I think something like the F-35 might actually be the best solution, though with a number of robotic subordinates.
Are manned fighter jets obsolete by now? Surely we can produce drones that are just as capable, if not more so, and they would be vastly, order-of-magnitude cheaper than the planes that have to protect squishy human beings.
Being cheaper means you can have more of them, which then could mean you don't even need to worry about the expensive stealth features. So what if the enemy detects one and shoots it down? The four other drones can carry on with the mission.
The drones have a big problem in that they can be knocked out of communications with the ground support infrastructure using fairly cheap portable ECM equipment so have a limited scope for usage limited to friendly skies or roles that is being filled efficiently by current-gen missiles as it is.
The days when manned bombers played any role in the first strike against an capable foe ended decades ago, today's fighters are used when you need on the spot decision making whether it is to interdict errant civilian planes or provide close air support to infantry.
>The drones have a big problem in that they can be knocked out of communications with the ground support infrastructure using fairly cheap portable ECM equipment
What about autonomous drones? Can't you have AI piloted drones with ML models trained on thousands of hours of combat missions, where you just punch in the mission objective and the acceptable outcome/casualty levels, and it can decide for itself how to carry it out if communication is lost?
That feels terrifying but it does sound like where the future is going.
yes for missions that does not change underway or where the objectives don't contain loosely defined objectives with moral ambiguity, and for the vast amount of those you don't really need anything beyond and 80ies computer system running relatively conventional procedural code, which is why they have been performed using cruise missiles or artillery for decades.
The problem is that the missions flown requires a lot more judgement then modern machine learning is capable of providing, or that we are likely to entrust solely to an computer anytime soon.
Yes the skynet scenario is increasingly likely but it's also something military planners are aware of especially doing periods of diplomatic tensions like the ones we are under now where you really don't want an trigger happy automated defence system in charge of fully armed missiles.
There is also the issue that all we know is that the next war will have it's own entirely new politically defined strategic constraints, where the most effective tactical strategy is might be blocked out due to long term diplomatic/political consequences.
The drones have a big problem in that they can be knocked out of communications with the ground support infrastructure using fairly cheap portable ECM equipment
I am nowhere near an expert on this subject, but it seems to me that drones could be very resistant to ground-based jamming. All their antennas and communications can be above the plane, perhaps relayed via another drone or aircraft flying very high overhead.
Honest question: how do modern manned fighters fare when attacked with said ECM? Sure, they keep flying, but my impression was that a lot of the advantage of e.g. the F35 comes from communications and information flow.
» Being cheaper means you can have more of them, which then could mean you don't even need to worry about the expensive stealth features. So what if the enemy detects one and shoots it down? The four other drones can carry on with the mission.
I have zero military experience but I have two thoughts:
1. Military leaders are resistant to change. From what I've read, the establishment of the US Air Force as its own branch was highly resisted by leadership.
2. I'm not sure if this covers all the bases. I'd imagine new technologies like drones would complement, not replace existing manual(?) fighter jets. What if they have larger payloads? We'd need time to make them smaller, no? Perhaps there is a limit to how small a "conventional" weapon can get and you can't just nuke everything and everyone and hope nobody fights back?
Yeah current situation is kinda similar to 1900s where dandy officers supported cool pricey things that had very limited place(horses) over more modern but mass produced and not so sexy things (machine guns and modern artillery).
Fundamentally almost no one reading this (myself included) knows jack shit about the actual performance of the F-35 in combat, how good drone technology is etc.
I really doubt it's the human pilot that makes a fighter jet expensive (e.g. a drone of the same capabilities probably wouldn't be any cheaper to produce and maintain).
OTH combining human-piloted planes with cheap "companion drones" for scouting, distraction and as weapon carriers sounds much more useful.
No, we cannot produce anything even close to as capable (and versatile). There is obviously work being done in this direction, but what I've seen has at best been able to augment parts of the operation envelopes.
But why not? Which technologies are lacking? We can make remote controlled drones now, so it seems (to me) that a remote controlled F-35 is feasible today. And once you take the pilot out, designing a pilot-less fighter plane should be simpler than one with a human inside: no need for a cockpit, ejector seat, etc, no human limitations on manoeuvrability, and so on.
Sure, there are some benefits to that for sure. But you'd still have a qualified "pilot", only somewhere else. With access to the same data as would be available in the cockpit, in order to be able to make the correct decisions as the situation changes (from both a tactical and safety perspective). And you need to ensure this with the same kind of confidence, reliability and integrity as you would in a real cockpit. And you would be able to lug this around the globe quite easily. The whole keep-the-aircrew-alive safety case goes away, but you still have the don't-crash-into-things case left.
If you want a more autonomous system I'm not sure there's even a way forward for that at this moment (i.e. if you want to fly in civilian airspace). Airspace is much more heavily regulated than e.g. carspace where companies are allowed to put pretty much anything on the road.
A question to ask is: As long the west (the US) only goes to war with nations whose military is vastly inferior (like Iraq or Afghanistan). Then why do we need the F-35?
An F-16 will do just as well against someone armed with an AK-47.
1. The lack of war against our international rivals is in fact a huge success, indicating our powerful military is an effective deterrent. If we didn't have the F-35 we'd all be speaking Russian right now /s
2. Preparing for the last war is a perpetual problem for the military. That's how we ended up in Afghanistan with high-speed air superiority fighters, but no IED-proof vehicles. We should counter this known bias by buying stuff that would have been completely useless in our last major wars /s
In both examples the second sentence is exaggerated for comic effect: Nobody really believes Russia would have invaded the USA if not for the F-35. And nobody thinks the F-35 is a forward-thinking design; it's the greatest plane of the Cold War, delivered 30 years late.
My point about Ukraine was that the "non-advanced” militaries can mysteriously acquire very hi-tech anti-aircraft systems.
Like the Donbass "rebels" who shot down MH-17 out of the sky with a Buk missile which they weren't "supposed to" have (and have no capacity to produce, obviously).
On the other hand, Russia's "vacationing" tank drivers are going to be dodging US-made Javelins should they decide to make a detour through Ukraine.
The point being, if a weapon exists, you might as well assume your opponent on the battlefield has it, no matter how much they are tech-wise.
Not the OP, but it would have been interesting to see how well a plane like the F-35 handles ground-to-air missiles. My bet would be on the missiles, but maybe that's just a subjective take on my part (certainly not based on any concrete facts as I'm not an expert in this domain), but I'm thinking that if the Serbs of the 1990s managed to bring down a F-117 then the Russian technology of today (in theory much better up-to-date compared to what the Serbs had) should be quite a match for this plane.
Israel handily destroys syrian pantsir systems with f-16s or loitering munitions, and turkish made drones 'damaged' two pantsir systems in the 2020 nagorno karabakh war.
I don't think we've seen the results for longer range systems like the S-300 but I'm not sure russia wants to see the results either.
Western Europe has an ongoing security issues with Russia and China is pushing things in the Pacific. The best result is of course that there is no war, but there certainly are enough antagonists around. And then there are the sales to allies/third parties who have situations within their middle-power domain that need credible modern air support.
1) For posturing. One reason others might not want to fight the US is the presence of a large and very well equipped force that apparently trains for just such an eventuality.
2) The military-industrial complex is how the US economy stays ahead and yet pretends to be capitalist and free-market. If you pump domestic technology companies with trillions of dollars of tax money in the name of defence, they might just produce something valuable (say like the internet).
Most countries have militaries not for the fight they want to fight, but to discourage all likely aggressors from attacking. The US is very unusual in how much active use they get out of their hardware. Still, if they only made hardware for the wars they want to fight that would leave them wide open for attacks from larger powers like China.
They probably could have also mentioned the power grids that were not designed to last as long as they have and certainly not designed to scale to everyone having EV's. That will have to be addressed sooner than later. Then there is the topic of methane gas distribution and water distribution. Some cities have aging pipes or worse have lead components in their drinking water pipes. This gets tricky because the budgeting for some of this is partially local and partially federal with a smattering of multi-agency bureaucracy. There is also an aging PSTN telco network that probably should have been replaced by a much more modern and high capacity network to support modern data protocols and rural internet connectivity.
You can also take a look at our country's airports. They are all worn out. I spent a lot of time in airports and they are all aging. There's been work to rehab some of the insides but many of them are too small, and what money there is to spend has been spent building new and ridiculous security barriers. Things like parking, shuttles, and baggage handling have not been invested in.
Same with our roads. I drive up and down I95 and the roads are full of road snakes and patches.
"If you were to go back to the year 2000 and somebody said, ‘I can build an airplane that is stealthy and has vertical takeoff and landing capabilities and can go supersonic,’ most people in the industry would have said that’s impossible"
How anyone thought they get a cheaper plane which at the time was "impossible" is beyond me.
TLDR: F-35 is too expensive to maintain and operate, therefore the USAF wants a 4.5Gen Fighter (non stealth, but with updated electronics) to replace the older F-16 that will be retired soon.
This is similar to the strategy that the russians did with the unveiling of their 'Checkmate' light weight fighter last month.
So the USAF wants more funds to build yet another fighter. (it has already a 6gen fighter in development).
I feel it is going to be another waste of money. It wont be much better than an updated FA-18 or an F-15EX with more advanced electronics.
The best thing it can do is to accelerate the development of the 6gen fighter, and mass produce a cheaper 'non-stealth' version of it as the cheaper version, but with the same electronics.
The best way to do cost saving by scaling up production of the same internal components/avionics.
The real problem is government procurement program structures.
There's an insane number of layers/middlemen who need to get their "fair share". Congress isn't measured in budget but measured in "rah rah factor" and military know this thusly feed into it.
NASA during the shuttle era was no different. The shuttle was an absolutely terrible design of compromises given towards different military branches to gain funding.
While painful, the best thing was Bush defunding the shuttle program and pushing it towards privatization. I'll be the first to admit, if SpaceX wasn't around, this would probably be a dubious move and no better than NASA contracting it directly (looking at you Starliner).
Basically we want a "SpaceX of military fighter jets", which sadly can't exist.
It's a make-work project, designed to renew for. ever. The US spends more on defense than the next 10 countries combined, it's absolutely not necessary even on a technical level.
Well those pesky contractors on the east coast have to make their living. I remember working in SF on a salary I thought was extremely good when a defence contractor firm approached me with a nearly 2x offer.
I often wonder how much of that cost is the military’s social systems, which other countries expense outside of their military. Namely healthcare and retirement.
Not at all. Radars are advancing too and what today is a stealth fighter might not be in 10 years. If the fighter has poor handling characteristics it could be useless in much less time than predicted.
Yes but modern beyond visual range missile might do the same to current stealth platforms so one could argue that fighter jets as a whole is becoming obsolete for a lot of the missions that defines the air force as a separate branch.
Where you still want a pilot in the loop is in A-10 territory where the role is to fly low and slow and work directly with local infantry commanders, and this means sustaining some level of damage mostly from "primitive" optically tracked weapons rather then last-gen long range radar tracked missiles.
I.E. what you want is an cheap to operate, replace and train for plane that can be deployed in large numbers from forward bases. a role currently filled by army operated drones who is extremely vulnerable to "electronic warfare" in a way that a piloted plane wont be.
And where you are fighting. A fighter to defend your own airspace has very different requirements from a strike aircraft that can take out enemy air defenses.
Sounds like we need the SpaceX version of military hardware. If Elon Musk was even remotely interested in killing people I'm sure we could have it in 5 years.
> This new fighter would not replace the F-35, but would instead be used in place of 4th generation fighters like the F-16 Fighting Falcon.
Wasn't the whole point of the F-35 to be exactly this F-16 replacement? E.g. the F-22 was supposed to replace the F-15 as specialized air-superiority fighter, while the F-35 would replace the F-16 and F-18 as cheap all-purpose fighter). Now the F-22 is no longer produced and the F-35 is so expensive that the search for a cheaper alternative begins, and the cycle can start anew...
Suddenly the much more pragmatic Su-57 design doesn't look so silly anymore.
Whatever one thinks about F35 capabilities, it's a massive successful export program that's ensnared / locked in dependencies all over the world. Of course that's dramatically undermined the second a F-35 gets shot down with Russian/PRC missile tech. Which will then be proliferated everywhere. Who knows the entire platform could have been "cracked" already and majority of operators (read western world) are sitting on duds. There's something to be said about diversity, especially in defense.
An air force general had this to say about the F-35 a few years ago[1]:
"If I do not keep that F-22 fleet viable, the F-35 fleet frankly will be irrelevant. The F-35 is not built as an air superiority platform. It needs the F-22"
"the price of operating the aircraft. Thanks to state-of-the-art stealth technology and radar-absorbent coating that needs frequent touch-ups, the F-35 costs around $44,000 per hour of flight"
- that is absolutely crazy, especially during times of non-war when these machines are essentially up there for patrol and training.
Hmm. Why don't they have some planes for training (when stealth isn't required) that don't have the special coating on them/maintained (and that might be applied in times of need)?
I don't have an official answer but I can chime in a little. The military do have training aircraft but will always keep armed aircraft in the skies to protect the country from domestic threats. Every single week one of them is called down to intercept a general aviation aircraft that didn't read NOTAMs and violated a TFR. We only hear about those because the communication is on ATC frequencies. I'm sure there are many other things they do that we don't hear about.
I don't get how your answer applies to the specific question of why not have some of them without maintained stealth coating. That's different from armed and has nothing to do with check-ups on general aviation and commercial planes violating airspace restrictions, or having set up their transponders wrongly, or failed in the air. How is working stealth relevant for that?
Russians are well-known of selling half-baked low quality junk to it's partners. Also Russian economy is same as of Spain, they lack both know-how, technology and expertise in developing of high-end weapons. Soviet Union days are long gone and it's successor Russia is a mafia-run state. That article is just a Russian propaganda of some mockup that Russia can't make.
People were saying the same doing soviet days, it seems to be some kind of jingoistic fantasy that have never really played out in the real world i.e. every time nato/us supplied forces encounter competently operated Russian kit they have had to fight it out based on numbers and logistics rather then depend on the technological inferiority of the opposing forces weapons.
The same goes for say French, Swedish or Indian planes who does tend to hold up a lot better in real world conditions then the derision they get from the pentagon propagandist doing procurement suggests.
The truth is that the technologies involved is so mature that any largish economy can put out reasonable effective platforms the reason nobody else then the US is making stealth have more to do with the limitations of stealth then the fact that it requires secret knowledge only possessed by the US.
The image of the enemy has to be self-contradictory: it has to be both scary and fearsome ― to justify the defence spending ― but also feeble and laughable ― again, yo justify the defence spending: the intended mindset is "the victory is inevitable", not "let's just surrender immediately". You can see it everywhere, everywhen, it's a universal propaganda tactics since the dawn of mankind, rediscovered independently and I'd say even subconsciously.
And it's applicable even in non-military spending: a month ago some US newspaper (Bloomberg? WP? Don't recall exactly) managed, in the same article, accuse Russia both of a) it sells to much gas to Europe too cheap to make it dependent on Russia; b) Russia doesn't sell Europe enough of gas, it should ramp up the sales immediately. Yes, in different paragraphs, but it still kinda funny when you notice it. Or that one time when Biden simultaneously called everyone to double down on transfer to green energy, battling the climate change, and also demanded from OPEC to increase oil output and then even released 50 million barrels of oil from the reserves, because expensive oil is bad for economy, you know.
> accuse Russia both of a) it sells to much gas to Europe too cheap to make it dependent on Russia; b) Russia doesn't sell Europe enough of gas, it should ramp up the sales immediately
a) RF increased its share in EU market for natural gas too much. Everybody worried that RF can decrease supply rapidly to skyrocket price.
b) RF decreased supply of natural gas rapidly to skyrocket price.
Well, RF (30% of market share) did not decrease the supply, it was the demand that rose "unexpectedly". Well, why did the US not rescue the EU with additional supplies of LNG, for example? The gas terminals were built several years pretty much for this reason, to be able to buy LNG from the US and Qatar to diversify the supplies. Why did Norway with its 35% market share not increase the supply via its pipelines? Nope, it is Russia that must increase the supply, apparently to the level of having about 50% of market share, but that would be fine this time because... reasons?
Also, RF resisted until the very last from switching from the long-term contracts to the spot contracts, it was forced to do so by the court decision in 2019, sued by Poland that argued that the spot market price is fairer (it also got $2 billion refunded to the boot). Two years later, this November, Poland tried to sue again, arguing now that the spot market price is unfair, and Gazprom should only take the previously negotiated price, and refund whatever was overpaid to it (about $5 billion IIRC).
I understand that all this is pretty much how haggling looks like when the hagglers are nation-states who have to sell the deals to their population somehow: selective reporting, overstating some circumstances, understating other, selective application of arguments, etc. But the end result is still exorbitant heating/electrical bills and cold houses all over the country but you also get to feel outraged at the other side, as a bonus.
Natural gas flows at the westernmost point of the Yamal pipeline — a strategically important 2,000-kilometer pipeline that runs across four countries: Russia, Belarus, Poland and Germany — dropped to 20 million cubic meters per day in mid-August, according to ICIS. This was down from 49 mcm per day at the end of July, and a sharp fall from its typical rate of 81 mcm per day.
Pipeline exports of natural gas from Russia’s state-backed monopoly Gazprom to continental Europe have dropped roughly one-fifth in 2021 on pre-pandemic levels despite a sharp rebound in demand and low stockpiles of the important fuel. The imbalance has helped send prices in Europe to the highest levels since 2008, increasing energy costs for homes and businesses.
I cannot feel outraged that Russia wants to sell its natural resources at the highest price.
But according to media propaganda Putin should literally be giving it away for free.
Russia is using oil and gas for making € and as a geopolitical tool. As every sovereign country does.
It's their gas for crying out loud they can do with it whatever they want!
Russia is a mafia run state, true, and they're severely behind in many areas.
However, they have very capable military hardware, and in many types of it, quantity has a quality of its own. It doesn't matter much that an M1 Abrams is technically superior than a T-14 Armata if for the same budget you can get three times more Armatas.
That, and ease of maintenance and support, is among the reasons why Russian military hardware is very popular and sells extremely well, even if it might not be the best objectively compared to the competition.
And sometimes it is better, like the S-400 SAM which is objectively better than the Patriot, or some types of missiles ( e.g. BrahMos). Or BMPs/BTRs that are even popular with very US friendly Gulf states which don't care about budgets.
Regarding Spain, they have literally developed a (small) aircraft carrier, frigates, supply ships, submarines that were successfully sold abroad. Airbus Military is based in Spain, and they're working on a future stealth 6 gen fighter with Dassault Aviation, Thales and Indra ( which are fully Spanish).
Don't shit on smaller countries just because they don't have the same budget as the US.
1. T-14 Armata never entered into serial production, Russia lacks resources to actually make it into product, they just built cardboard prototype and left it there. Abrams is being produced like hot cakes. It's just Russia's claim that T-14 is superior but there is 0 proof.
2. Maintenance and support of junk is still junk
3. It's Russia's claim that S-400 SAM is better, but nobody knows the truth, in fact S-300 only proved itself in battle by shooting down civilian aircraft over Ukraine when Russia invaded it, killing innocent children in the air.
4. BMP/BTR lack sufficient armor to the point that soldiers prefer to go marching on their own foot because it is basically death trap to be inside BMP/BTR APC.
Yes, Spain is doing way better than shithole Russia, after all Russian people is being ruled by Tzar Putin and they like it.
Did you misread 3/4 of what i said and add a bunch of outright wrong statements? I never claimed the Armata is superior, and it doesn't matter. Swap Armata for the T-90, T-80 or heck T-72, the same logic applies. Lower quality arms of certain types, such as tanks, at sufficient numbers can easily overwhelm even much better equipment.
Easy maintenance of not great hardware is better than complex maintenance of magnificent hardware. Just ask the Germans, Americans and Russians during WW2. The Sherman tank was a piece of shit on paper, but was easy to maintain, and could be produced in huge numbers. The Tiger sounds scary on paper, but it didn't matter since there weren't enough of them, and the few that existed broke down easily.
S-400 is probably better. The Patriot system is old, and doesn't even have 360 field of fire. Turkey went as far as getting kicked out of the F-35 programme over the S-400, so it's not only the Russians' word. Furthermore, it's an improvement over the earlier S-300, which is widely deployed and understood, and is generally a good and well liked system. (And note: it wasn't an S-300 that was used to shoot down the civilian airliner in Ukraine, it was a Buk, which is a mobile AA system, unlike the S series, which is (mostly) static for defense of specific areas).
BTR isn't supposed to protect from more than small arms fire, being a light armoured vehicle and all. BMPs aren't APCs, but IFV. Do you have a source on your ridiculous claim that infantry prefer to march on foot? BMPs were used in Yemen and I've heard of no such thing.
Spain is doing decently, and so is Russia. ( In terms of armament, in terms of civil liberties and all that stuff Russia is far behind).
Ignoring that it's a new aircraft on a new carrier, the only thing close to a hypothesis at the moment is that an operator fucked up which could happen with any aircraft.
to be fair this was not the fault of the F-35 but rather most likely due to a rain cover that was supposed to be removed before flight. So human error rather than mechanical.
Turkey, which is kicked out if the F-35 program for political reasons, demonstrated huge success in battle through it's home grown drone programs.
F-35's were supposed to be the stealth weapons who were to be able to penetrate Russia made air defences etc, but Turkey proved in Syria that relatively cheap drones can do just that. Before the Turkish drones, only Israel was able to hit a Russian made air defence system and that was done when it wasn't operational at that moment. During the conflicts between Azerbaijan-Armenia, Syria, Libya the Turkish made drones hunted down multiple such system and provided very impressive footage of the action.
Again, Turkish drones are suspected to be used in first ever AI based attacks, where for the first time machines decided who to kill and who to spare[0].
Though Turkey has a sizeable engineering capacity, it's not a rich country. Budgets used to develop these drones are nowhere near the F-35 or similar projects. One wonders, what's the argument to invest so much in planes when there's low hanging fruits in the drones business.
It seems to me, the 5th gen plane projects are like trying to breed the next gen horses instead of developing the automobiles.
[0]: https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a36559508/...