Is the F-35 really so good?

[Nikel]

I enjoy a lot listening to retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges' opinions on Ukraine War, and check regularly for new videos that may appear. I usually agree with him.

But this statement from minute 6...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KxBMw5j6Bo


Hope this thread is not considered as politics, it is just a military performance question

[FrancoisX5]

Even in the last Top Gun movie they complain abut that airplane.

[TempestII]

Even in the last Top Gun movie they complain abut that airplane.

Mild Top Gun 2 spoilers below.

It was very much a "Hollywood" excuse. GPS jamming wouldn't stop an F-35. AFAIK, it isn't yet cleared to carry the GBUs that are used in the film but AGM-154Cs could potentially do the job.

https://www.f-16.net/forum/viewtopic.ph ... 02#p469102

Top Gun is great fun to watch but it's probably closer to Ace Combat's realism levels than real life. The only bird that might be able to do Pugachev's cobra featured in either Top Gun film is the Su-57. Neither the F-14 nor Super Hornet can.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_maneuver

[Gunner98]

The entire problem in Top Gun could have been solved with a B-2 and a GBU-57... but then we wouldn't have a fun movie to watch and Jennifer Connelly to ogle at

[Nikel]

Well, it seems I will have to watch the movie to have un idea of the F-35


To continue with the fun. Has Tom Cruise switched to a Ka-52? Or is it just that the Russians are crazy?

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/YBhN7Jhu6RA


Another shot in the same place, this time the trainer took control

https://twitter.com/loogunda/status/1530927325109436416

[ClaudeJ]

Heye there,

re the F-35, I couldn't recommend enough to listen to what Billie Fly have to say and make your own mind.

NY Times: "Inside America’s Dysfunctional Trillion-Dollar Fighter-Jet Program"
Forbes: "The U.S. Air Force Just Admitted the F-35 Stealth Fighter Has Failed"
The Hill: "The F-35 May Be Unsalvageable"

Are these headlines fair criticisms of the Joint Strike Fighter or simply sensation? How are we supposed to know what, and who, to believe these days?

On this episode, retired Royal Canadian Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and former test pilot Billie Flynn leverages his 5,000+ flight hours in the F-16 Viper, F/A-18 Hornet, Eurofighter Typhoon, and every model of the F-35 Lightning II to offer a nuanced opinion of whether this controversial $1.6T weapon system is worth it, and how “bad” the development setbacks really are given this hyperconnected world in which we live.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUGND1LkUMI

[PaulWRoberts]

To continue with the fun. Has Tom Cruise switched to a Ka-52? Or is it just that the Russians are crazy?

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/YBhN7Jhu6RA

It looks like someone's first week in the DCS sim...

[BobTank63]

Even in the last Top Gun movie they complain abut that airplane.

They actually wanted to use the F-35 at first for the film, but the Navy said no so they had to use the Super Hornet.

Actually, if the movie was released in 2020 as planned, they could've just said none were available and it would've been fine. The F-35C was only approved for IOC in 2019.

[Demetrious]

I enjoy a lot listening to retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges' opinions on Ukraine War, and check regularly for new videos that may appear. I usually agree with him.

But this statement from minute 6...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KxBMw5j6Bo


Hope this thread is not considered as politics, it is just a military performance question

Is it actually that good? The short answer is "yes."

The slightly longer answer is "yes, because stealth is frighteningly powerful."

Surface to Air missile systems form the backbone of air defense for pretty much every nation that isn't the United States so it's not just a question of "US vs. Russia and/or China doctrine" but one that's relevant to pretty much everyone else who's buying the airframe as well. To offensively employ airpower, you have to kick in the door of the enemy's Integrated Air Defense System and blow up his radars and missile launchers. It's pretty essential.

Now, consider how you orchestrate such an assault. First you need AWACS (to keep track of his fighter planes, as those are part of an IADS too,) then you need standoff jammers (both sensors and comms) both to defend your airborne assets and to help your missiles break through. Then you need air-launched decoys, to stimulate his defenses and make him waste missiles, then you need designated Wild Weasel shooters with anti-radiation missiles to peg at those SAMs, and you need to coordinate this with cruise missiles coming in low on the deck to present their layered defenses with a multi-axis attack. With all these planes in the air you're likely going to want a separate aircraft in the AO to serve as a flying command post to keep everything sorted out, or at least a redundant communications relay so you can ensure ground control back in CONUS or w/e can keep all these plates spinning without interruption. Oh, you're going to want point jamming support too, that can follow the missiles in as far as possible to support their attack; so add some more aircraft lugging MALD-J. Oh, and Combat Air Patrol to protect everyone. Lessee you'll need a HAVCAP, TARCAP, BARCAP, and of course RESCAP to protect the rescue choppers on standby to pick up anyone that gets shot down and did I mention the partridge in the pear tree?

Or you could employ F-35s that skip 90% of all the above because their stealth characteristics let them get hilariously close to threat radars before they're detected, all on their own. You don't need the kind of vast aerial Dance Of Death to kick in the front door. And because the thing is being mass produced for deployment as a standard front-line multirole fighter, it's not a niche capability like the B-2 that has to be carefully used in niche roles that throw open the airspace for conventional fighters. You can just roll in hard and light'em up, and once every serious air threat above the SHORAD envelope is a smoking crater, you take those same fighters, slap on their hardpoints and let them start trucking in three times the boom they could cram into their internal bays.

Now consider that the F-35B exists, which can operate from (modified) helicopter carriers, which is the only kind of carrier almost every military on Earth actually has. It's not just that the B model allows nations to jump from "we have an ASW and limited amphibious landing capability" to "we have twelve supersonic multirole fighters we can send anywhere in the world," but that the F-35's stealth allows a mere twelve fighters to actually accomplish something compared to what twelve fighters would usually be capable of if they came knocking at the shoreline of any moderately prosperous European country that can afford SAMs (i.e. little to nothing.)

There's other things to say about it, of course, such as the amount of sensors and computers and networking crammed into the machine and all that, but those technologies were going to be developed with or without the F-35 because they're simply the way of the future, and everyone knows it. The paradigm-shifting feature unique to the F-35 is all about the stealth, and bringing it into the field en-masse. The fact that it's a multi-role fighter, rather than something like an "F"-117 Nighthawk, helps too, because stealth is not magical nor perfect and even with its benefits angry people will still manage to shoot at you more often than you'd like, at which time the ability to pull 9G's as you beam an incoming SAM is very useful, and the radar signature reduction against the incoming active-radar guided missile even more so. Stealth is also useful after you've been detected and are shooting it out with people (see also: F-22.) (Note also that anyone who has assets like air-launched decoys and airborne jammers will of course use them to support their F-35s because overmatch is always good; it's just that the F-35 can get things done without those assets in situations where they'd be mandatory for non-stealthed platforms to survive.)

Now add all this up and apply it to the specific scenario the good General was weighing - that is, the United States up against a Russian IADS in eastern Ukraine. To this fight they would bring the full suite of weapons, technology and assets they have developed over decades precisely to defeat this exact system using legacy conventional fighter aircraft, a feat roughly akin to riding an elephant across a shooting range without getting shot. And then they would put the full weight of that technology behind lots of fully-stealthed multirole assets which can already get into standoff missile range without their help, and can supercruise sprint and make 9G break turns and all that other high speed low drag stuff.

So yes, the F-35 is indeed good, but it's also being backed up by an extensive arsenal and system of systems that it was also designed to integrate with to accomplish the same task. I stress this point so you understand that there is considerable leeway for varying assessments of the F-35 platform's capabilities as a whole without impacting the fundamental conclusion that "this Tool, designed to do The Thing, is in fact, good at doing That Thing." And since The Thing in question is oft considered to be the overwhelmingly most important Thing for the US and/or NATO to worry about, there is a tendency among some commentators (professional or otherwise) to regard things like the debate on the F-35's CAS capability as little more than an Air Force conspiracy to annoy Apache crews.

[Nikel]

And that was an answer, thank you Demetrious for the detailed explanation!

The only problem I see, is that it is untested in a real war vs a IADS.

I read that the only combat actions of the F-35 have been vs the Taliban, ISIS and Iranian drones (Israel, video in the link below, though not much to see).

https://www.idf.il/%D7%90%D7%AA%D7%A8%D ... 99%D7%A8//

Nothing comparable, I guess, with the Russian Air Defences.


Will it happen in Ukraine? A situation still developing, so who knows.

In the meantime the last scenario uploaded by Kennetho has several F-35 squadrons to do what you describe. If only could run it in my computer

https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... 1#p5002751

[BDukes]

The only problem I see, is that it is untested in a real war vs a IADS.

Yeah well, thats what glasses are for. US, UK and Israel haven't exactly been facing a bunch of scrubs in Syria. Russia's experience prior to Ukraine was participating in Syria.

M

[Rob322]

The only problem I see, is that it is untested in a real war vs a IADS.

We've faced off with a number of IADS though in our history, beginning with Vietnam, which was pretty-much Soviet operated. We also saw it in the Gulf War. And we've learned a whole lot from the Israeli experiences over the last 50-60 years. So while the F-35 hasn't been tested against an IADS, the organization has and we've developed tactics and trained our pilots and commanders to deal with it (and likely incorporated the lessons learned into designs like the F-35). I'd argue that's probably more important of a test than of an individual weapons platform.

I forget who in the USAF said it but remember reading him saying that while an IADS may've increased the attrition rate, or required a greater sortie rate, or both, there never has been an IADS that's been able to keep us from getting to wherever we want to get to.