The Path to Sophie's Choice

FTA: " ...the F-35 is obviously a superior plane with which to go into combat. One wants, alongside the few F-22s that would be in the air, the F-35 to control the skies in initial encounters. "The F-35 loses its stealthy advantage if it is asked to carry weapons externally." While the gist of the article is that Obama screwed our defense capabilities in countering the real and emerging threats from Russia and especially China, forcing the Air Force to consider upgrading its aging air superiority fighter, the F-15, designed and built in the 1970s, the issue cited above relative to the F-35 begs the question, why can't external weapons (e.g., missiles, guns, canon, bombs, radar pods) be made stealthy, much like the aircraft that carries them?

Some of the numbers are in error, clearly. The author says that the "unit cost" of either the F-35 or the F15EX is "$80 billion". That is impossible. That is either $80 million, which is certainly too low for a unit cost, or it is NOT unit cost, it is for some quantity of aircraft. Second point, the author casually mentions, "But, despite the recurrent dream of reviving F-22 production, that is no longer practicable—the line is stone cold dead and, under any foreseeable budget, beyond revival." The reason that this is true is that Obama in a fit of anti-American unnecessary destructiveness, ordered all the tooling for the F-22 to be destroyed. If the tooling had been stored, putting the F-22 back in production could have been relatively affordable - IMO, that is why Obama had it destroyed. To aid America's enemies? You decide. Actions speak louder than words. And of our very, very few Raptors, they have such poor parts availability, that 17 aircraft were unflyable and couldn't be flown away from the hurricane that hit Tyndall AFB. I haven't heard how many of those damaged aircraft were repairable, but given their rarity, I would assume that almost any damage would be repaired rather than scrapping the airframe. But losing/seriously damaging about 10% of your fleet of your most capable aircraft due to their inability to fly away from a storm, is just terrible. A relative flies the F-35 and says it is amazingly capable, and the pilots and the whole combat system is still learning how to apply it's amazing new capabilities to war fighting on a different level. But, the point is probably correct that a mix of stealthy and non-stealthy, but capable of heavier weapons loads, aircraft should exist. But the days of 'steel rain' or 'carpet bombing' are pretty much over. When he was flying against ISIS, he would take up two JDAMs and killed two targets. In the old days, a flight of 5 or 10 aircraft would have dropped a dozen bombs or more from each aircraft, and perhaps not destroyed the targets. Smart bombs makes the importance of large bomb loads lower. Our F-15s are 40 year old and older, they are worn out and all the electronics are long obsolete. If the airframe is still conceptually useful, it needs entirely new avionics. Recovering from Obama/Democrat sabotage of the US military takes decades.

#2, good recap. And, this would be a good point for Trump to ask Biden. FTA: "Obama... ordered all the tooling for the F-22 to be destroyed. If the tooling had been stored, putting the F-22 back in production could have been relatively affordable - IMO, that is why Obama had it destroyed." I presume there was ZERO good justification for this other than it was built in a State he wanted to punish.

Unlike any other platform, the F-22 combines stealth with speed. Others here may be able to opine better but I've been told by those who fly that stealth is nice but when it's lost and the missiles start flying you simply want to be the fastest thing in the sky. New programs are scarce these days, so the defense-industrial complex scrambles to jam as much beyond-cutting-edge technology as possible onto any new platforms, the result being a weapons system that everyone oohs and ahs over but the quantities are pathetically low. For example, the Navy's DDG-1000 was supposed to cost $3B for the first ship with reduced costs for each follow-on toward a total of 32 vessels. Instead, we (the taxpayers) will spend almost $30B for a total of 3 ships (including, for shame, the USS Lyndon B Johnson). And at any given time, 1/3 of the fleet is deployed, 1/3 is in training, and 1/3 is in maintenance. So, for $30B we get 1 additional destroyer patrolling the South China Sea - once all the bugs are worked out of it. With regard to the Air Force's fighter dilemma, if they thought the F-22 was expensive, if they thought the F-35 was expensive, just wait until the no-fooling NGAD numbers start coming out.

#1, you are correct about Obama. However, external carriage weapons will never be stealthy unless the weapon literally conforms totally to the external shape of the airframe. Any corners from separate weapons and their attachment racks create 'corner mirrors' which reflect the radar directly back to the transmitter. Stealth systems partially absorb but mostly reflect radar away from the transmitter, not back at it. This requires that there be no inside corners at 90 degrees, but smoothly flowing contours, and non-90 degree corners. Even the small edges of hatches with a 1/16" - 1/8" gap will act as a linear corner mirror and reflect a huge amount back to the radar unit. An example is a 'radar target' which is used on some sailboat masts to make the small boat appear on ship's radars, since the normal radar image is weak from a small fiberglass hull. A 18" device of sheet aluminum with three sheets of aluminum intersecting at 90 degrees to each other makes a 'corner mirror' which reflects the radar very effectively back at the transmitter. If you are familiar with a Cartesian coordinate system, imagine making each plane of a sheet of 18" square aluminum. You will have eight inside 3D corners, each will reflect back well. This is how a optical reflector (bicycle, rear of a car, etc) works to reflect so brightly, a bunch of tiny inside corners, kicks light directly back. That extreme brightness of a bicycle reflector is like the radar return from any inside corner on an aircraft. Any normal bomb rack, or the bombs, or missiles with their fins all have lots of these surfaces which will do the same and cause great reflections. Internal carriage is the only solution for stealth until a weapon can somehow transform into a smooth bump on the surface of the plane and then re-shape itself at launch into the wings and body it needs to fly. Perhaps possible some day. Definitely not now.

#3, Obama was punishing the country, not just a state. He wanted us weaker, not stronger.

It is an absolutely necessary need to decide which model you prefer and go with whole hog with that version. This has two great advantages to having several different versions of fighters or bombers or any defense mechanism. The first advantage is that the larger numbers produce of one model drives costs down per weapon. The second advantage may not be considered good by choosy people, including me. The second advantage is that the enemy only has to find the soft spot for one weapon system, that otherwise might have been covered by another weapon, saving the enemy money and making the war much shorter.

And the F15 doesn't need a raincoat to fly or try to kill its pilots through anoxia. Buy more F35s? The Chinese and Russians would love it -- "Boy, those Americanskis sure got themselves a stealthy plane. Too bad they can't make the hangars stealthy too."

My son worked on the F22, and he knew its capabilities. In one exercise he was involved in, he said the Raptors carried out their mission and no one on the "enemy" side even knew they were there and gone. That's how good they are. I consider it a criminal act to shut down their production. At the time, government said the F35 could do what the F22 could do at a cheaper cost. How did that work out? They ended up even more expensive and not comparable. As a side note, I had some republican neighbors who decided to "give Obama, a black man, a chance"! And how did THAT work out?

Non-facts and distortions don't make a convincing argument, #8. You must listen CNN and MSNBC a lot. They always emphasize any development problems on military hardware because they hate to see perfectly good vote-buying money going to defense systems. F-35 coatings can be damaged by impact with rain, but not massively and they are dramatically more easily repaired than previous generations of stealthy coatings. Much less work to touch up the coatings on an F-35 than an F-22 for instance. The O2 system issue is not at all unique to the F-35, and has been solved with a software change. The F-35B that my relative flies never gave him any issues, I believe it was the USAF A-models. There have been similar issues with various aircraft "oxygen concentrator" type of O2 systems, a relatively new technology compared to the old liquid and compressed oxygen type of O2 systems. The T-45 trainer has had similar O2 problems, different cause, more a teething problem of a new design of O2 systems than anything on the F-35 in general. New aircraft have development issues, ALWAYS. You work through them, you don't toss out the aircraft.