Weapons No One Can Afford ( DD(X)cancelled // F-35 facing dire straits)

StrategyPage ^ | May 14, 2006

[Little Ray]

Don't think you can make 10,000 UAVs for half a billion, much less nuclear ones. And folks would get VERRRRRY curious when you tried to make 10,000 compact nuke warheads...

Besides, there has been an answer to massed aircraft attacks for decades - nuclear SAMs. And even if the nuke doesn't get all of 'em, the EMP will do wonders for their control systems.

[Doohickey]

TOOEX ping to the Steely-Eyed Killers of the Deep.

[DesScorp]

DDX killed....good. No surprise the F-35 may be headed for death too. Oh, and the P-8 will never see service. Look for new-build P-3s in the future. The Army's M-8 rifle bit the dust too.

The Navy got it right with Super Hornet and the aircraft carrier design tweaks....build on what you already have. It's more affordable. Now their surface ship program managers are going to have to learn the same lessons. The Air Force certainly hasn't learned them. They'll go from a high of 800 F-15s to 274 F-22s.

[WOSG]

"Don't think you can make 10,000 UAVs for half a billion, much less nuclear ones. "

DoD? No way. They have to overengineer it into an F-15 equivalent.

Private companies? Sure. $50,000 a pop sounds like a pretty fair price for a small unmanned plane with a bunch of electronics.

Nuke part? I agree. Putting nukes on an unmanned vehicle sounds ... whacked.

[spetznaz]

The Air Force certainly hasn't learned them. They'll go from a high of 800 F-15s to 274 F-22s.

Last I heard it was 183 Raptors.

[timer]

Yes, Gen Billy Mitchell was court-martialed for thinking "outside the box" and proving the pig-headed navy brass wrong. The demise of the DDX is much the same story : NASA has to do it faster, better and CHEAPER, why not the navy as well? It is nature's way of evolution : the same task with less resources = greater efficiency or be removed from the gene pool. Ike warned of the military-industrial complex and here it is in the DDX, and congress rightly shut it down, as they did other boondoggles like the SSC.

[Southack]

"DDX (apparently) cancelled ping! Weird, and abrupt, development, considering just some months ago the navy had decided to give the project a go-ahead. Some recent FR threads on the DD(X):"

The DDX was a technical solution (long range **inert** projectile delivery) looking for a problem that doesn't exist (delivering ordnance on target anywhere in the world is **NOT** an issue for U.S. military forces today).

In other words, a cool ego project for the brass/Senate...but hardly something that helps fight terrorists or defend Taiwan/Israel from a blitz.

Likewise, the F35 is freaking **MANNED**!

We've got the F22. We've got the B-2. We've got the B-1 and B-52. We've got F-15's and F-18's and F-16's.

What can the above not do that the F35 could?!

So there again, the F35 is a technical solution looking for a problem that we don't have. We already hvae global air superiority. The F35 gives us nothing that we don't already have.

...And the F35 looks positively antiquated going up against future swarms of thousands of enemy UCAVs.

So the F35 gives us nothing today and is obsolete tomorrow.

Ditto for the whole Eurofighter/JSF nonsense.

Kill those boondoggles; kill them all.

[Little Ray]

Depends on what you want your UAV to do...

And putting a nuke on a unmanned vehicle ain't whacked - its a cruise missile!

Mass attacks are whacked. Put enough stuff in one place and its worth a nuke.

[Oztrich Boy]

For half a billion you could retrofit the USS Intrepid, install an supercomputer, and load it with ten thousand armed UCAVs. You'd have an unstoppable robot swarm with global reach.

Never mind the UCAV, even a Predator B runs at 7 megabucks.

But as it is as large as and weights about the same as a Grummna F6F Hellcat, you are not going to get many more than a hundred on the Intrepid anyway. That's $700 million.

Don't think you can get the ship retrofitted for negative $200 million.

[PAR35]

could you cite another post or reiterate?

You mean you don't want to sift through my 10,000 plus posts to look for it?

Without getting too deeply into supporting info, I'll summarize my points:

It is badly needed by the Marines to replace the aging and always dangerous to operate Harrier fleet.

Dropping it now will leave our allies in a bind, and show us to be an unreliable partner. The Royal Navy is counting on the plane to replace its carrier aircraft. A number of other countries have contributed to development and are customers for the air force variant of the plane.

While the Air Force need is not as great as that of the Marines, there is a need for a new multirole aircraft for that service to carry them to the time when the missions will be carried out by unmanned aircraft.

The Navy may have the least need (or desire) for the plane. They have never been keen on multi-service platforms, and I believe they are still planning to reduce the carrier fleet.

Finally, the plane is needed to maintain industrial capacity, unless folks want the next generation of planes to come with a 'Made in China' sticker.

[Rokke]

"(delivering ordnance on target anywhere in the world is **NOT** an issue for U.S. military forces today)."

Good point.

"What can the above not do that the F35 could?!"

Remain maintanable for another 30 years and integrate into current and future theaterwide data and battle management systems.

[strategofr]

"While the Air Force need is not as great as that of the Marines, there is a need for a new multirole aircraft for that service to carry them to the time when the missions will be carried out by unmanned aircraft."

Thanks for the explanation. Perhaps it is time to jump ahead to the unmanned aircraft and skip this plane.

[PAR35]

We've got the F22. We've got the B-2. We've got the B-1 and B-52. We've got F-15's and F-18's and F-16's.
What can the above not do that the F35 could?!

Short take off/vertical landing.

Do you have any more easy to answer questions?

[PAR35]

Reading your comments, I can't help but think of the Battle of Jutland.

I was thinking more of the HMS Hood, but the battle of Jutland does fit.

[razorback-bert]

Short take off/vertical landing.

The Osprey covers that.

[burzum]

Likewise, the F35 is freaking **MANNED**!

Isn't the F-22 already limited so that its turns don't knock out the pilots? I agree with you on the UAV idea. Enemy aircraft against a programmed UAV would be like playing against a chess computer on the hardest setting. Every slight mistake from an optimal battle plan against a much more maneuverable UAV would be death for enemy pilots.

A stealth UAV fighter is a very interesting idea. Without the need for life support systems and the willingness to easily perform *suicide* missions if necessary would make it an incredibly lethal aircraft.

The next 30 years of weapon systems are going to be very interesting. U(Aeronautical, Underwater, Nautical, etc.)V's are going to keep programmers busy trying to optimize them. Would you like to have a dogfight if you knew Deep Blue was in the other cockpit?

[DesScorp]

" Last I heard it was 183 Raptors."

See, that's even worse.

Back in the mid 80's, I read a lot of the military aviation magazines. One prominent writer (maybe Bill Sweetman) wrote:

We could build a fighter with the electronics of the Starship Enterprise, but what good will it do us if we can only afford two of them?

We've finally gotten to the point where we've priced ourselves out of warplanes in effective numbers.

[thinkthenpost]

I won't be pointing to the F/A- 18 E/F and something to hang my hat on, with the exception of the name the Super Hornet shares virtually nothing with the Hornet, and you get the benefit of losing at least one airframe from the mission profile on every sortie because it is tasked as the buddy tanker.

[doorgunner69]

Perhaps it is time to jump ahead to the unmanned aircraft and skip this plane.

I think close air support with no one in the cockpit will be a hard sell to Marine grunts.

[TruthNtegrity]

I have friends who are probably facing job loss over this cut.

I can't believe it. I've worked on the some of the design elements of equipment intended for the DD(X). WOW!