F-35 at Farnborough Airshow

[Marco]

As most buyers in the military typically want full software and source code, along with full manufacturing info for the planes, they would have to make one per country, and hope they are not going to get a "spare" copy from another country with upgraded software.

Only Israel is getting any significant access, everyone else is getting a black box with a million hidden kill switches. Looking at it unkindly, the F-35 and its international manufacturing program was a bit of a Trojan horse.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was designed to slow down drone development among "allies", who are now politically pot committed to making the F35 investment look good. The age of fighters is over, these things are dinosaurs only seemingly useful because most of their enemies are dinosaurs from an even earlier age.

[dannyf]

If planes still fought with just guns, the Russians would win. I do NOT want to get stuck into a dogfight with the likes of that.

Then you are assuming that you can take out your enemies BVR. The medium range A2A missiles don't have a great kill probability with the likes of Su27/30: 60% at best.

Think about it from a money perspective: a F35 will cost you $110+ million a piece (50% more for the stovl version), about 3x - 4x of the Su30 and 4 - 5x of the Su27.

Assuming a 50/50 chance in a dog fight with those aircraft (a generous assumption for the F35), and assuming full stealth with missiles on the external pylons, one F35 has a less than 50% chance of taking care of 3 Flankers, and less than 20% vs. 4 Flankers.

Again, without actual performance in a war, or preferably several wars, it is hard to know how well the new hardware will do vs. the old one. All the assertions, even if from the "official" military sources, should be taken with a grain of salt.

[dannyf]

With the layered defences available these days (ERAM, SM-2, ESSM (quad pack, thank you very much, a small task force can unleash quite the quantity of those!), CIWS), getting anti-ship missiles through is rather hard indeed,

Against saturation attacks from supersonic anti-ship (cruise and / or ballistic)  missiles?

I think you have more confidence than the military planners,

Today's carries have gone through only asymmetrical warfare in the sense it is heavily one sided where the opponents have no way to attack back, and no air combat capabilities. The carriers have not gone through a real war setting. How those billion dollar ships hold up in a battle of the equals where the opposing side can bunch back is unknown.

It has to be fairly stressful to plan a US vs. Russia, or a US vs. China, or a US vs. Russia + China type of war where the US navy has to fight both land and sea based enemies from 1000km or more away. How good would a F35 be in those cases?

Overconfidence in any hardware can only get you killed faster.

At one point they thought nukes were appropriate for air defence!

They may be right.

[TerraHertz]

Google F-35 turkey
Start with
1/6 F-35 JOINT STRIKE FIGHTER IS A LEMON
Military expert Pierre Sprey, the founder and designer of the F-16 & A-10 Warthog airplanes, explains why the f-35 will not cut it on the modern battlefield.


/watch?v=g4doIA3T9ps   The F-35 Is an Airplane Build For a Dumb Idea
/watch?v=idVY2KumIcA    F-35 stealth fighter jet 'one of worst planes we've ever designed'
/watch?v=5zKaWc_43UI  F-35 fighter jet beaten by F-16 from 1970s
/watch?v=Z_vXqtCkVy8   RUSSIAN RADAR CAN NOW SEE F-22 AND F-35 Says top US Aircraft designer

Personally I think it's great that the US military system has fallen so far into corrupt incompetence. Every war the US ever started was begun with a lie, and it's just been getting worse and worse. Time they received a damned good thrashing. Which is exactly what they are going to get, if the US people don't get a grip on their government and arrest and gaol all the warmongering psychopaths.

The F-35 is also a useful measure of the Australian government's corruption and insanity. So long as our government still has even one F-35 on order, we can know they should all be shot for treason; for betrayal of the nation. Meanwhile look up TAFE chaos. We can't even run our crucial education systems properly, but we can afford these obscenely expensive utter lemons? Which will make us sitting ducks for regional military forces with enough sense to build or buy functional planes, or more practical missile systems. Nuts.

I hope you realize that in any _serious_ war (which will be the US and any NATO nit-wits stupid enough to go along with the US, vs Russia, China, and practically the entire rest of the world) will _immediately_ go nuclear. Because it will be started by the USA, and Russia makes no secret that they will use nukes to defend their land, and China and Russia now have a mutual defense pact.

There will also be a lot of things that never saw hot combat before. The large range of supersonic very smart anti-ship missiles for one, that all sane analysts (and US wargaming)  know will eliminate virtually all NATO surface naval forces within the first few hours of conflict. All on the Russian, Chinese and Indian side it seems. Sunburn, Yakhont, Brahmos... Russia licensed the technology to India, set up a factory there, and so now they are commonly available to all non-NATO navies. There was an Indonesian navy ship docked in Sydney some years ago, with rows of them along the sides when I walked past in in Garden Island.
There are also submarine smart drone nuclear weapons, so there go major coastal cities. Also tsunami-building phased deep ocean nukes, for wiping out coastal areas in a completely unstoppable way.

Everyone who thinks the next war is going to be glamorous and heroic, is in for a rude shock. Or an unpleasantly messy death more likely. If you _do_ survive the initial conflict, you'll get to see the radioactive death of the entire biosphere and human civilization, as all the nuclear power plants and radioactive waste stores that were damaged in the war leak their nuclear poisons beyond any hope of control. Do you even understand the word 'epigenetics', or know what a knife edge between cumulative genetic errors and error correction by fitness/survival, our entire living planet rests on? There's a reason why life didn't begin on Earth until the background radiation of the original star-formed materials had died way, way down. Billions of years that took.  So go ahead, have a nuclear war and wreck all the nuke plants, lets do _that_ all over again.

Why does it have to be me that posts this stuff? Are the rest of you so completely media brainwashed that these things have never occurred to you?

Those of you drooling over shiny military hardware, why don't you watch something more mature? Here:
/watch?v=s86-Z-CbaHA   The Banach–Tarski Paradox

The stupidity of military weaponry is an uncountable infinity.

[TerraHertz]

Oh, and it's beautifully ironic, that one of the countries supposed to be manufacturing F-35 parts (engines I seem to recall) is Turkey. Which, now that Erdogan figured out it was the USA who sponsored the recent coup attempt that nearly killed him, is walking away from the USA.

The Russians don't like Edogan at all either. But they are pragmatists.

[wraper]

Overpriced flying turkey. That's how it should be able fly to be proud of:

[Halvmand]

TerraHertz: I agree. Unless the US turn down the volume a little, 3rd world war may not be to far away.

The reason I don't like the F35 is because of the pro forma competition we had here in Denmark. From the start the F35 was the winner. Both Saab and Rafale left the competition before even making an offer because they knew that our politicians only had their noses up the US ass.
I have no doubt that there is an effort being made to lessen media attention regarding that "competition". The only outlet that report on the matter is a dedicated website (http://nytkampfly.dk/). And for a little country like Denmark, this is the weapons deal of the century. I would really like if the public got just a minimum of info.

But okay. I know that if you are a politician, you're most likely a lying piece of s**t to, so no surprises there.

[dannyf]

From the start the F35 was the winner.

Another fair competition that's rigged.

Like the "honest politicians", or the "free press" we have,

[xrunner]

Another USA bashing thread - Yea! 

[boffin]

From the start the F35 was the winner.

Another fair competition that's rigged.

Like the "honest politicians", or the "free press" we have,

like the 767 v A330 refueling tanker contract?

[David Hess]

Another fair competition that's rigged.

If the competition was fair, then they were doing it wrong.