Comments by "TheThirdMan" (@thethirdman225) on "F-35 or Gripen for the RCAF…Or Perhaps Something Else?" video.

In a networked environment, stealth isn’t that important. Network Centric Warfare is where it’s at and is the reason western air forces have held their position for so long. Read about the Bekaa Valley Air Battle of 1982. That’s the basic model that’s still in use today, stealth or not. That’s why the primary targets of all fighter screens are force multipliers, like tankers and AWACS & AEW&C aircraft. If you dominate the electric battlespace, you’re hard to beat, regardless of your level of stealth. With the appropriate jamming, your enemy will be blind and unable to communicate anyway. All of these modern types are designed to operate primarily in a networked environment. The F-35 simply isn’t enough bang-for-buck.
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@humptydumpy8029 The F-35 doesn’t give enough bang-for-buck and all that SA is nice but rather unnecessary in a well balanced and properly networked force. There are lots of aircraft that have excellent sensor fusion and there are some which are better in some aspects than the F-35. The fact is that the F-35 is very unlikely to be used as anything other than a bomb truck for the vast majority of its career and a lot of that grunt work can be done by much cheaper types, including turboprops. I would much rather have a much larger, better balanced force of cheaper and more reliable types than a fleet of F-35s for the same price.
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@humptydumpy8029 Oh, so it’s personal, is it?
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@humptydumpy8029 Read ”Capabilty based planning and the death of military strategy” by a Pentagon strategist and combat veteran called Col. Mike Pietrucha. I can tell you that, while US forces of the Cold War were configured to fight Soviet forces, the current strategy is next to non-existent, relying instead on technology to prevail. There is no defined enemy and despite the claim that it can challenge peer of near-peer adversaries, the USAF is mostly configured for tactical bombing with low sortie rate. You don’t win wars that way.
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@humptydumpy8029 The report into the loss of an F-35 at Elgin AFB last year put the cost at $176 million. That’s incredibly expensive.
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@humptydumpy8029 "I would argue that technology will definitely win fights and that having numerous examples of very advanced fighters is the way to do it." I would disagree. Historically, there are no examples of a war winning weapon, with the possible exception of the atomic bomb. That is the basic tenet behind the article I referred you to. One of the problems that Pietrucha doesn't go into is the way funds are distributed. Higher technology levels cost so much money that there needs to be a balance achieved between what a country can afford and what it needs, based on its strategic situation. No aircraft can be in two places at once. The problem with the F-35 is that too much of the project was handed over to the contractor, who kept stuffing new features (which weren't necessarily asked for) into the system, without getting the initial bugs of of the basic aircraft. This is why we ended up with 20 million lines of code. The laws of bug propagation say that the more complex the software, the more bugs it has and the more bugs will propagate. At the moment it is running at less than 50% dispatch reliability with no expectation that it will improve. Geeks have to be kept on a tight leash. Conversely, instead of turning the geeks loose, the money would be better spent on training. In the incident I referred to earlier - the hull loss at Eglin last year - the MP ("Mishap Pilot"...) had flown four hops in the last month for a total of 5.9 hours. His requirement to remain current is 30 hours per month. This is true t a greater or lesser degree right across the F-35 fleet and governments have gone very quiet on the specifics of sortie rates. Technology is only useful if it assists. It can't be allowed to take control and it must never get in the way of operational reliability. Finally, technology is almost never the deciding factor - at least, not in the case of individual aircraft. Historically, when technology was allowed to decide the strategy, things did not turn out well. The case of the F-4 Phantom II relying solely on missiles finding itself in turn-and-burn fights with North Vietnamese MiG-17's is a classic example. The Maginot Line is another. "So while yes the f35 is still quite expensive and an f16 or something like would be much cheaper an f16 is not useful enough to make that trade off worth it when considering the capabilities the f35 brings." And yet it continues to sell well, even to more advanced air forces. It remains an extremely useful aircraft. "And it should be kept in mind up to the Korean War the strategy for dealing with the soviets was also not developed and here today we are in the early stages of escalation where the us are still firmly on top and don’t need to be rushing into a new war with a defined goal against a defined enemy." That doesn't mean you don't plan. Relying on technology is a really bad idea when you fail to examine the strategic scenarios you are likely to find yourself in. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. I would also seriously question your comment that US is certainly on top at the moment. In what regard? In which theatre? I can tell you now that if war broke out over the South China Sea, the US would seriously struggle. They are simply not configured for a conflict like that. While an out of date aircraft can't be expected to compete in 1 v 1 competition with the latest types, that doesn't mean they can't do it under any circumstances or should not do it at all. There are times when you can use almost anything you can strap a missile onto. Nor does it mean that pilots don't need to continually hone their skills - which is exactly what has been assumed by the designers and builders of the F-35. They just assumed technology would take up the slack. Strategy should decide the technological research path, not the other way around. War winning weapons are the stuff of fantasy. They attract all the attention but are rarely a factor. Take some of the German "Big Cats" of WWII. People will always say, "If the Germans had had more of these, they would have won the war!" I see that all the time. Same for things like the Me-262. "Only the spirit of attack, borne in a brave heart, can bring success to any fighter aircraft, no matter how highly developed it may be." -Adolf Galland.
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@humptydumpy8029 "no you just have no idea what your talking about the usaf buying turboprops?!" Sure. they certainly looked at it. It makes an awful lot of sense for CAS and COIN conflicts. The Pentagon ran a program to identify a smaller and simpler CAS aircraft than say, the A-10 and at a lower cost. They looked at a number of different types, including the A-29 (Super Tucano) and AT-6 (Beechcraft). They did look at the jet-powered Scorpion but it was eliminated early on. The problem they ran into was the "all fast jet" mentality of the USAF top brass. "If you were smarter you would know anything that isn’t stealthy is not survivable in a modern conflict" You should read the reports on how well they fared. Turboprops were very survivable in the CAS environment, certainly more so than fast jets at at about a tenth of the cost. "You lock your self in to buying lower cost models and your left with something that is near useless in a real fight and would have to be left behind." The best aircraft is the one which can be there when it's needed. Right now, the F-35, in particular, has a dispatch reliability rate that is so low that it can fly only a few missions per week. From first class facilities. Maintained by specialists. In air conditioned hangars. If you don't have that, you're going to struggle. Interestingly, the current thinking in the Pentagon is that the F-35 is not a success and they are already looking at what the next project should be. Stealth is taking a back seat. It probably won't be removed altogether but the compromises for stealth - an idea that was really intended to defeat a Cold War adversary - are really too great. The other thing they have made very clear is that they will never use the same purchasing model again. I would rather have a well-balanced force which is both flexible and reliable in austere environments and which can be relied upon to fly more than one sortie in a week. Preferably several per day. I want technology that is relevant and works. I don't want a wonder weapon. "What would be expensive is developing and maintaining an entirely new fighter for the sole niche of doing things the f35 is to good for which wouldn’t be much of anything in an actual fight." The whole F-35 project should really be abandoned. The US government has already reduced the fleet buy from about 4,000 to about 2,400. Let's look at that figure carefully because it's not what it seems. A third - say 800 aircraft - will be mothballed, which is perfectly normal practice. That leaves about 1,600 and with a dispatch reliability rate of (optimistically) 50%, that leaves about 800 across all three services. I seriously doubt the US will ever need to field more than 1,000 F-35 pilots. That's nowhere near enough. But that's what happens when you spend too much on one type. It's called "putting all your eggs in one basket".
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@humptydumpy8029 ”that’s not an actual thing you can’t lock someone by listening to their radar” You bet you can. Absolutely. Anti-radiation missiles have existed since the early 1960s for Wild Weasel missions. The Soviets developed radiation seeker heads for some of their air-to-air weaponry which is still very much in use with the Russian Air Force and their client states. It’s also why the US developed the AN/APG-77 as a so-called “stealthy radar”. Anything that emits any kind of energy can be locked onto. That is also why the Soviets and, later on, the Russians, developed IRST to such a degree. It’s still better than anything in the West 40 years later (with incremental upgrades along the way).
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