I’ll stop soon. Because I doubt the program will live much longer.
According to Lockheed Executives, the F-35 is now (once upgraded) fully capable.
PARIS AIR SHOW — Lockheed Martin believes it has completed the software updates necessary for newly upgraded F-35 Joint Strike Fighters to be ready for combat, company executives said today, with the official sign-off in the hands of the US government.
After intense effort, “we believe we have reached that point” where the software for the upgrade known as TR-3 is stable enough to support new combat capabilities, J.R. McDonald, Lockheed’s vice president of business development for the F-35 program, said in a briefing with reporters here.
Lockheed officially rolled out the first F-35 for testing in 2006, started making them in production in 2008, delivered the first planes to the Air Force and Marines in 2012 and 2015, and if I remember correctly the first few sold were for testing only and were not forward compatible with anything. If they survived testing, they’re surplus – they can’t even be used for parts because the parts are not guaranteed to be compatible. Imagine if you had an old PC/XT and someone was trying to install an 8tb SATA drive in it. It’s not even worth asking, right? This is the huge problem with concurrent development: multiple sources do their own thing and produce stuff that they only guarantee is compatible with the latest, greatest version.
If you’ve done any computer building, you may have heard of the Sinclair Effect – there was a computer company called Sinclair, once upon a time, which announced that they had a really great new computer coming in 4 months, at more or less the same price as the current model. Naturally everybody stopped buying Sinclair computers and waited for the new one. Except the new one had a problem on the motherboard and that had to be debugged, resolved, and then the new computers made. 8 months later, there was still no new Sinclair computer and, in the meantime, all the customers had gone away with their money and bought other computers. 8 months in computer years quickly started to mean that when the new Sinclair came out, it was going to be slower than its competitors. If I recall correctly, Sinclair tried to do a quick upgrade to a faster CPU, which only added a month delay to the schedule, but the company had run out of money and went into Chapter 11. The customers did not give a shit at all because Sinclair didn’t have their money and nobody heard their dying screams.
That’s not how the DoD buys 5th-generation sky-dominators. The aircraft company says “We’ll build you something awesome for $20 billion” and the DoD says “OK!” and they basically buy a jet fighter based on a powerpoint presentation. Nowadays, I’m sure there are cool AI renderings and stuff to make it feel like they are actually buying something that exists.
[This hearkens back to some of the 1st generation Wonder Woman comics, where her jet was invisible but people would still see her butt screaming around in the air with no plane]
Anyhow, the point of this is that, after selling F-35s for 17 years, Lockheed Martin is now ready to sell fully functional out-of-the-box just-add-ammo F-35s. Never mind that by now the Russians and Chinese have recalibrated their radar, infrared sensors and data fusion systems so that the F-35 is stealthy, sure, just not so stealthy anymore. Basically, it’s quintessential Sinclair Effect: the F-35 would have been the best thing in since the F-22 except it was 17 years behind its own time. Now, it’s just another over-complicated hangar queen, with a measly 650nm range (compared to in the 1000nm range for other aircraft). The guys who fly them against any advanced targets really get my sympathy, because they’re going to have to wonder if that new air defense system has their number, or not. (“Haha, don’t fire until you see their afterburner, me lads!”) They did fine against civilians in Gaza but that may be because the civilians in Gaza have nothing to shoot back. To me, that’s the big flaw with all these stupid aircraft – they’re intended to dominate the skies against their kin, which also barely exist. Think back to the last fighter-on-fighter shootdown in 2012 – an FA-18 Gerontocrat shot down an SU-22 Methuselah. According to Google’s AI, which is certainly right, that’s actually the first instance of an FA-18 actually shooting down anything. If you can stack up all the money that FA-18 cost for all the planes it didn’t ever shoot down, it’d be impressive.
Fortunately for everyone, I’m not in charge of the DoD, but if I were, I’d have inexpensive bomb sled and machine gun platforms with high loiter times, kevlar composite airframes, integrated night vision, and those would be the “loiter and bomb infantry support” aircraft. Lots of them. The Air Force would have a cool “bomb sled stealth drone” (lots of them) and a smallish number of air superiority dogfighters with heavy AI assist built into them. And the navy would have “loiter and survey and occasionally fire an air to ground missile” aircraft. Lots of them. The whole idea of the F-35 is freakin’ stupid – it’s trying to be the swiss army knife of aircraft and instead it’s mediocre in all of its roles except hangar queening.
The next big F-35 news item is that apparently they are done thinking about it and now: [nati]
India Will Not Buy F-35 Fighter Jets from the United States
The government of India really made it clear, too, they don’t like the US arbitrary tariffs being applied to them (“hey what happened to our favored nation status?”) they now say they want to build something domestic, having experience with the French Mirage, and they’re moving a bit closer to Russia for military ties, etc.
In February, which is yesterday in political terms, Trump said we were going to sell billions of dollars of F-35s to India. Part of the sticking point is that India is buying Russian-made heavy transport helicopters and aircraft, and Turkish-made off-license Russian anti-air missiles. You know, the stuff that has been dying like flies in Ukraine? My guess is that the war in Ukraine has not made any of the weapons sellers look good, except the drone herders. The cost/effectiveness ratios of 1980s cold war US/Warsaw Pact estimated combat have gone completely out the window.
I sympathise with the combat jet fighters, that proud arrogant minority of utter dicks. They’re up there with the F-1 racers, eagle eyed, computer-like reflexes, intensely studied, amazingly fit, etc., but the days when a combat pilot straps on a jet and blasts forth to do battle like a knight errant; those are gone. The days when battleships raise steam and churn out to sea, their massive guns ready to lob shells 20 miles or more; those are gone, too. Main battle tanks will be OK as long as someone can build one that is far ahead of the rest. Remember the Abrams tank was designed in the 70s. It’s now fully functional. [I got to watch one run a torture track when I was in high school, and its gearbox broke while the entire high school wargaming club – 5 of us – watched openmouthed]
What we are seeing in Ukraine is a form of warfare as new and interesting as the blitzkrieg was when it was new and interesting. It’s not, anymore, because Ukrainian drone-tactics would immediately turn columns of tanks into columns of fireworks. Mechanized warfare – a spearhead of main battle tanks followed by APCs full of infantry with support weapons – well, that’s over, too. American APCs are better than Russian ones but, seriously, none of them are good enough to handle a mine being dropped on them from the sky.
If the US military still had visionary leadership that it has never really had, each of the services would be developing mission-specific drones, and preparing to decommission their expensive state of the art vs state of the art gear. The way to fight an enemy you’re on military par with is to negotiate. Since we have the great negotiatior on board, I guess we have it all covered.
I was telling a friend some stories about things that happened to me as a kid in the summers in Paris. Would that be interesting to you? There are no F-35-level disasters except for the time I ate a bad ham sandwich and got the shits in the Louvre. I guess its mostly fond reminiscences.
i’d love to hear about france.
My morning caffeine hasn’t kicked in well enough yet to disambiguate between nanometers and nautical miles. You gave me a wild double-take.
Who knows, maybe some of the foreign customers for the F35 SuperTurkey will reconsider? Switzerland got hit with 39% tariffs just yesterday, so it’s likely their order wil go in the shredder (unless the situation changes again, it all depends on Alzheimer Don’s Brainfart Situation). Germany was also making similar noises, at least a while ago.
After all, if the NATO countries want to up mil spending to 5% (which they won’t) only kit that actually exists & works should be considered, right?
And do share your French Reminiscences if you wish, c’ est bien vôtre chez-vous ici.
I’ve read elsewhere (?? New Yorker-Dexter Filkins??) that intra agency communications is a very big problem. So bad that an F2 pilot can not talk directly to an F16 pilot flying next to him. I would appreciate your take on this.
It was Osborne Computer, not Sinclair. Funny how easily we forget…..
Sounds suspiciously similar to the Osborne effect
@1
They Dont Wear Pants In The Southern Part of France
This might interest you: This Plane Is Bigger than a 747. It Can Fly for Months on Its Own.
Reginald Selkirk @8… well, also, a cheaky plug for Canadian/UK chums who have flown here in Scotland… with environmental instruments not bombs. Also solar but unlike most HALE flies in troposphere, with unlimited airtime in polar regions.
“That’s not how the DoD buys 5th-generation sky-dominators. The aircraft company says “We’ll build you something awesome for $20 billion” and the DoD says “OK!” and they basically buy a jet fighter based on a powerpoint presentation.”
There were competitive flyoffs for both the ATF and JSF programs with multiple physical aircraft. I’m not saying these were well-run competitions, but they definitely weren’t just PowerPoints!
“Think back to the last fighter-on-fighter shootdown in 2012 – an FA-18 Gerontocrat shot down an SU-22 Methuselah. According to Google’s AI, which is certainly right, that’s actually the first instance of an FA-18 actually shooting down anything.”
Google’s AI is (shockingly) not right. There were at least a couple of air-to-air kills in the 1991 Gulf War.
Whether it was the Sinclair effect in computers or not Sinclair did make computers, but Sinclair himself was an inventor not a businessman. See also the C5, which was to be found in front of shops being used as an elaborate sandwich board for years after they were seen driving anywhere.
And yes French reminiscences sound interesting.
I think the main problem the military-industrial complex has at the moment is that it is being globally demonstrated that their established methods of warfare are over, and that the thing that has displaced them is different, effective, and most disastrously of all, cheap. I’m in my mid fifties, and I wonder if I’ll live to see a time when the armed forces of the world stop preparing for war as it used to be fought and get the memo to start preparing for war as it’s likely to be fought. I kind of doubt it. Changing the thinking of such a huge monolith as the MIC is going to be like turning a supertanker. By the time they’ve realised they can stop bothering to try to design the next F-35, there’ll likely have been another paradigm shift and even the stuff they should be thinking about now will be obsolete, let alone the kind of thing they’ll actually have at an advanced stage of development.
It’ll be interesting to watch, either way.
The primary purpose of the military-industrial complex is to transfer money from taxpayers to shareholders, lest it end up getting spent on something useful like schools or hospitals. Producing stuff that’s just about good enough to kill poor people who can’t shoot back is a side-effect. Actually producing effective kit to fight wars against a peer adversary is way down the priority list. Nobody even really wants to think about that sort of thing.
It has occurred to me to ask, will tariffs aid the F35’s demise? Some parts are built or serviced in other countries. The last 10 years before I retired I worked on repairing company built test equipment, both for the factory and customers. For more than a year I had part of an ITS700 waiting for approval from AIR ITALIA for the estimate I had to fill out customs forms to return it. I never had to do that for boardS for ALL NIPPON AIRWAYS.
I am reminded of the quote from Heller:
The F35 is just a fancy way of not growing alfalfa. It is an object incredibly fit for it’s purpose: absorbing vast amounts of public money. Any other things that it might, or might not, do are simply irrelevant against that singular purpose. The program will never truly be complete, no matter what the boffins announce, until it starts to be less effective at that primary function. Of course, the same kinds of folks who brought us this wonder of modern tactical accountancy will be nurturing it’s successor(s) already. Rest assured, no humble swarm of drones will replace the F35, some other king-of-the-sky with squishy meatsack onboard will ascend to take the crown.
I used to follow the War Nerd (problematic, I know, but we were all 15 once). and one of their points always stuck with me “You don’t make general by flying drones.” has been an operational philosophy of the USAF since time immemorial. It remains to be seen if the obvious superiority of unmanned aircraft will pierce that core belief within my lifetime.
The flipflopping will definitely affect things. I expect weapons systems are exempted. But the suppliers will face hikes in the cost of titanium and whatnot.
Jane Goodall