Who said anything about grounding them?

Saw one at the Chicago air show this summer. They're loud as hell and sounds like nothing else, which diminishes the stealth factor. It sounds like a cross between a passenger jet and a roaring waterfall. Cool for air shows, bad for sneaking up on the enemy.

Beat me to it...

Sooo.....what exactly?  
108 stealth trainer aircraft?

I guess we’ll save money on the simulator time but seems we’d be stepping over the billions of dollars to save thousands

when traveling at .91 of the speed of sound, the acoustic signature is really a non issue.  A ground target will first hear an F35 well after its munition is delivered.  And in A2A it doesn't matter at all.

Earned Value Mother Fuckers!

I am going through this stupidity right now.

Take DoD procurement, mix in DOE procurement, with a touch of NNSA and then a nice fortune 100 with their own tool set.

Fuck yo tax dollars, yo!

Shush. LockMart must be fed.

Depending on the spread of models you could well put them in training units for all of the services and then put a couple of non-deployable jets into each wing for currency and then not care about low O maintenance on them.

Earned Value is the dumbest, most wasteful "tool" that's been forced on the Acq community in the past 20 years...Contractors can massage their data to look like rockstars despite failure being apparent to all.

VADM Winter is the Program Executive Officer for F-35.  It's a Joint PEO and the leadership rotates between the three participating services.

The PEO oversees the development, fielding, and sustainment costs for his programs given the funding provided by the services.  If the USAF wants those 108 aircraft brought up to the latest specification, the service can make that happen by putting more money into the program or recouping the cost somewhere else, such as slowing procurement of future F-35As.

What will it cost per plane to get them up to snuff vs building a new plane?

How many trainers do you need?

Take the rest and upgrade them, if it's cheaper than building a new one.  If you need 300 total combat capable planes isn't it better to build 250 plus fix 50, than to build 300 and park 50 in the parts hanger (unless you're employed by lockmart)

Billion here, billion there, pretty soon we're talking real money.

So the other 123 are good to go then?  Better than the zero 5th gen fighters Russia and China have ready.  

I heard that F35 pilots are also avid road cyclists and carry .40 cal pistols.  They also like beans in their chili.

How about we train pilots with them?

How many of these things do we already have? 

How many are ready to fight a war if say Lil' Kim decides tomorrow that he's all done dicking around?

We dropped more ordnance in Vietnam than we did in World War II.

Don't tell me we don't need air power.

Scrap them all and by a metric crap ton of Super Hornets swarm the enemy like bees.

Wait a minute why make something that just flies around in the air? If it can't do the job it was meant to do why make more.  

Bring the F4, F14 and others from the bone yard and retro fit them, hell buy some MiG's and retrofit those to fill the roll until a suitable replacement comes in.  

Oh nevermind, we don't have the man power to fly anymore than what we have, schools are pumping dumb entitled to safe space kids these days.

We have way more fighters than could even possibly be deployed and used effectively in NK.

you're joking, right?


Sound isn't part of the stealthiness. if you close enough to hear them, they've been close enough to show up on radar a long time prior.

LOL, wut?

Sound?

You know that their prey never gets close enough to hear them, right?

OK, then let's say it's China, or Russia, or Iran or Merry Ole England...

Of all the money that has been spent on F-35s so far, how many do we have that could actually go off and start defending America with bombs and missiles? Does this 108 fighters represent half of the delivered fleet? A quarter of the delivered fleet? A tenth of the delivered fleet? What size piece of the pie are we talking about?

there's a bunch of fail in your reasoning. What you posted is very true.  However it was mostly due to stupid ROE and a lot of ordnance was dropped on empty jungle and worthless targets.
Had the military been allowed to fight the war completely and without micromanagement, the ordnance dropped might have been less, but more effective.

McNamara was an asshole of the highest order and killed a lot of U.S. servicemen.

I'm no expert but that doesn't mean I can't have an opinion,   and the experts are free to rip it apart if they wish.

To me the F-35 was designed to bow to the false god of radar stealth.  

I say false god because radar stealth has already been defeated, to some extent, without resorting to VERY high technology to do it.

Remember when an F-117 got shot down in Serbia?  They did that by networking their radar sites.  And that was back in 1999.

Radar stealth is a defeatable technology.    And as ways to overcome radar stealthing are continually developed and improved upon by our adversaries, at the same time ways to improve thermal detection systems are also under continual development.

You might be able to make the plane absorb nearly all radar signals hitting it but you can't hide the megajoules of heat coming out of the back end of it.  With the right detectors the plane shines like a star in the night sky.

The F-35's airframe is bulked up by necessity for the purpose of carrying weapons in internal storage,  becasue the weapons are not stealthy to radar.    Launch those weapons and the airframe stays the same size...bulked up.  

The bulkier airframe MUST be adding a drag and weight penalty.  Adding the supportive systems for storing and launching weapons from internal storage must also
add a drag, weight, and complexity penalty.

The stealth profiling of the aircraft's exterior surfaces MIGHT compromise aerodynamic efficiency.  Not sure about that but if optimized aerodynamic surfaces were also optimized stealth surfaces then all aircraft would be naturally stealthy, wouldn't they?

What we ended up with in the case of the F-35 is a plane meant to replace the F-16 which requires a much larger engine (43,000 pounds thrust) in order to
achieve the same range of speeds that the F-16 manages with considerably less power.   (27,000 pounds)

I realize the F-35 is a bigger plane, with a maximum weight of something in the 70,000 pound class, while the F-16 (latest model used by the USAF) has a MTOW
of 37,500 pounds.   But tlhe F-16 it has a ferry range of more than 2000 miles as compared to the F-35's ferry range of about 1350 miles.

Speed: F-35 listed as mach 1.6. (~1200 MPH),   F-16 listed as 1500 MPH (mach 2 at altitude)

All figures I quote are from the USAF's online fact sheets.


I just can't help but think that the F-35's design is compromised for the purpose of being stealthy when that stealth technology is heading toward obsolescence.  The days of radar stealth being important are most likely numbered,  and thermal detection systems are going to become the standard for finding enemy aircraft in flight.   So when the bulked-up draggy airframe fails to provide the benefits it was designed to,  with radar stealth no longer being effective,  then you're stuck with a big bulky bomb truck that's cranking out however much heat can be generated by an engine that puts out up to 43,000 pounds of thrust.

And the missiles and bombs that they so want to hide inside the stealthy fuselage?  Well, maybe they themselves could be made somewhat stealthy,  and besides, the moment you drop or launch them from EXTERNAL hardpoints,  all their weight and drag penalty suddenly goes away.    But the empty weapons bays in the F-35 are
just as bulky empty as they are loaded.

I know that the great advantage of the F-35 is its situational awareness package.   But it seems to me that the airframe is seriously compromised all for the benefit of radar stealth,  when radar stealth is on the path to obsolescence.

So, to our resident aviation experts,  please clear up any misconceptions or errors I've made and give me more reasons to believe that the F-35 doesn't have
the compromises I believe it does.   Tell me that it's more aerodynamically efficient, that it can haul more payload farther per ton of fuel, etc.

Eisenhower was a great man.

You do realize that things change.
They are not grounded.
It will cost too much to fix them at this point in time because they want the money spent on new F-35's.
In 20 years from now someone will come up with the bright idea to "upgrade those 108 F-35's to augment the fleet".  

The F-16, despite being first built in 1976, is, with upgrades, still an incredibly capable platform.

I suspect the rest are not gtg, just not included in this report (different branch or different reason for grounding)

I've been saying this for years and I'm not in the "know".  All one has to do is look at how we are using and developing combat capable drones for the last decade.  It don't take a mental giant to see where things are going when a "Pilot" can smoke Haji's from thousands of miles away and be home for dinner with his family at night.  That's would be a huge incentive for fighters not to mention the performance improvement from eliminating the fragile human from the airframe.

The problem is securing the communications and/or creating AI capable of doing the mission.  Any form of networking will always be vulnerable to hack.  So I'm guessing autonomous AI is where it will end up.  Which is kind of scary in it's self.

Hell they would look great outside of the local VFW

A solution space?

Earned Value?

What kind of mushrooms do you have to consume to espouse that nonsense?

https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/us-air-force-must-retrofit-108-f-35as-434241/
Twenty-six of those 108 aircraft will require a software-only upgrade, according to Harris.
In addition to software modifications, 19 aircraft will also require new signal processor cards which the service says will take an average of three days to install and test.
The service must install 18 aircraft with a newer helmet mounted display system, in addition to the processor cards and software, which will take 15 days to install.

“The remaining forty-five aircraft will require significant hardware modifications in the form of a Tech Refresh 2 modification,” Harris states.
“This modification consists of twenty-six major components and takes approximately 30 days per aircraft to install and checkout.”

Linebacker II ended the war on America's terms.

Democrats in congress surrendered that victory in 1975.

I am having this debate right now with my Program Lead.

The enemy always gets a vote

That is an interesting use of the word victory.

Autonomous, or with Quantum encryption

I was semi-serious

But how many wars have been won by fighter jets? Randy Quaid in Independence Day doesn't count.

How fucked up is a program where it's cheaper to let 26 warplanes (which cost $148 million each) not be capable of fighting a war than it is to upgrade their software?

Yes, Dilly Dilly!

We could execute a LB II equivalent against a similar enemy with conventional GLCMs.  

Strategic targets are rarely dynamically targeted.

We wouldn't have to execute LB II if I could execute my SRAM-only option...

To paraphrase Enemy at the Gates...

"The B-52 with the SRAMs shoots...when that B-52 gets killed, the follow on B-52 with more SRAMs shoots"...rinse-repeat until there's nothing left that needs to eat a SRAM

Why use a plane when you can use a truck?  Or a converted Ohio?

Psssh.  Billions, ha!

Trillions are where it's at these days.  Trillions are the new Billions!

https://breakingdefense.com/2012/03/f-35-total-costs-soar-to-1-5-trillion-lockheed-defends-program/

...and that article is from 2012.