“Amid all these challenges, To justify his decision, Air Force Chief Brown compared the F-35 to a Ferrari.
“You don’t drive your Ferrari to work every day, you only drive it on Sundays. This is our ‘high end’ fighter, we want to make sure we don’t use it all for the low-end fight,” he said in a press conference on February 17.”
I’ve read it’s Gen-5 stealth will last only 5-8 years as detection technology catches up.We have expensive multi-tasker that doesn’t do any single task at an excellent level, but “pretty good” level for now.
This is why I support taking the A-10 back to the drawing board and updating it. Not reinventing it, but just bringing it into the 21st century of technology. Keep it strictly the ground support beast that it is and the boots on the ground love. Transfer it over to the Army/Marines if the Air Force hates it’s mission so much.
Russia’s military budget $65 billion
China’s $174 billion
U.S. $732 billion
They can name it the "Buffalo 2".
Zeros over Hawaii came as a surprise to defense analysts, along with everything else since then.
Since I joined the US Air Force in 1976, I have read articles in the popular press about how our major weapons systems were inferior, badly made, infrastructurally unsound, and failures when compared to Soviet/Russian and now Chinese systems. This continued my entire military career, and even to this day.
The M1 Tank, the Bradly fighting vehicle, the f-15, 16 and 18 fighters, the C-17 aircraft, the Apache, Blackhawk and Osprey helicopters—and so many more—all were said to be abject failures who would not complete a single combat mission and would in fact get their crews killed or captured.
I’m not saying many of the criticisms are wrong, it is good to be skeptical until results are proved one or the other. Flaws need to be pointed out so they can be addressed.
But I also remember how these “Lousy” systems did in Desert Storm and suddenly all the bad press disappeared.
I think it is a good thing for the Air Force to start thinking hard about air superiority against a formidable enemy, and not just concentrate on aircraft used to strafe and bomb terrorists who have no aircraft of their own to fight back.
So a Pentagon Air Force General says that we need a new fighter aircraft, why am I not surprised? And who’s fault is it that we bought a Ferrari when we needed a Chevy and why do I feel the next fighter program will be another “Flying Edsel”? Oh yeah, business as usual in the Pentagon Procurement Circus.
I’m no expert on any of this military stuff, but I do know touch screens. To bring a touch screen into a combat situation is insanity. Aren’t pilots wearing gloves?
“Oh crap, I thought that app launched...”
The boondoggle that came out of the “non-competition” between F-22 and F-35 for multiservice fighter “savings” is now... a complete joke. The pricetag was and is outrageous.
There is NO way we need yet another fighter. The chi-coms stole all of our tech, so no we need to up the ante again— and stick it to the US taxpayers. For exactly... what?
Yapping and yapping how great the F-35 is and now this jacka@@ says it is outmoded? What the HELL?
This is the Cheney mil-industrial war monger money scum at work. This is beyond ridiculous. Check how many F-35s with useful service life are in service now... all services.
Yes, because if we need money, the Federal Reserve can just print it.
IMO it is far better to have many TIE-fighters (F16, Warthos, etc) and very few Death Stars(F35). Even if the Death Star has massive capability, one lucky shot from a camel jocky on the ground and boom, a billion USD makes a large hole in the sand. And while a lucky shot from a camel jocky on the ground may also bring down a TIE fighter, the hole in the sand is not near as expensive. And since there usually are more than one TIE fighters around the action, the camel jocky has will soon be counting virgins.
First, I strongly recommend a study of the process that turned the F-35 into a fiasco so that it is not replicated with the new aircraft.
THEN I recommend those most responsible be properly punished.
Then, MAYBE, we get a new aircraft.
At this point, I might recommend going to a partnership with the Soviets, er, Russians on the PAK-FA. Give them Western sensors, avionics, and engines. They might work pretty well.
Amid all these challenges, To justify his decision, Air Force Chief [of Staff General Charles Q.] Brown compared the F-35 to a Ferrari.
“You don’t drive your Ferrari to work every day, you only drive it on Sundays. This is our ‘high end’ fighter, we want to make sure we don’t use it all for the low-end fight,” he said in a press conference on February 17.
Unbelievable!! USAF leadership has really gone downhill.
Boeing is producing the F15EX Multi role fighter with all new modern avionics. It also carries a hella external payload. I think the air force has already ordered 144 of them.
I have worked on the industrial side of the military/industrial complex for about 33 years. EVERY new weapon is promised to replace every old weapon of similar type in an effort to get it funded. The new weapon can’t just be an better or updated item that will replace some narrowly defined device. To get it funded, it has to be a super weapon that will do away with the need for all other weapons in that class. Like Charlie Brown and Lucy’s football stunt, Congress falls for this line every time. The littoral combat ships are a good example. They were very expensive, and, as it turns out, a total waste of resources. But to get them funded, the navy promised that they would do away with the need for a huge swath of other equipment as they would do the job better and cheaper. My project ended up canceled because of this as the relatively small helicopter on the littoral combat ships could not tow our sensor, regardless of what the navy had promised. They promised that if this ship was funded it would do away with the need for the much larger helicopter that was actually required to tow our probe. The claim was ridiculous on its face, but Congressmen are not technically inclined and accepted the navy’s assertions.
Stealth is great. But you hardly need stealth for the majority of AF missions. There will always be a need for agile, fast brawlers and slow flying, heavily armed ground defense planes. You don’t need to spend a few hundred million per copy for those missions. And, you increase the danger to all that investment by using it in an environment that is not ideal for it. (Evidence the fact that the AF is trying mightily to get a few propeller driven planes funded for low intensity conflicts. So far, because the planes do not promise enough, they haven’t bought many.)
Oh, brother, the last thing we need is for the code to be BLM or queered up. And generally speaking, universities only have experience in software with thousands of lines of code, not millions.
November Sierra Sierra.
Personally I think that the F16 is one of the best warplanes the world has ever seen. It’s also one of the coolest looking. I remember back in 1980 when I was in tech school at Sheppard there was a poster of several jets and their turning radius. And the F16 had the best of them all.
Last year the Air Force was saying that it was planning to replace the F-22’s in 10 years.
F-35 formally known as F-111