The Commanche and the Albatross

[Aesop]

The Marines have this mindless passion now, recently, for vertical takeoff airplanes, ever since they got the British Harrier.

Yeah, I don't get it either. A mild digression:

The "S/VTOL obsession" has to do with owning a mission set that includes "seize and defend advanced naval bases", as well as expeditionary ops in third-world shitholes where convenient pre-built foot-thick 10,000' long runways and hardstands are rather scarce. This prospect apparently scares the Air Force and makes Naval aviators queasy when the landing surface isn't pitching and rolling, whereas Army rotary-wing and Marine aviators in general seem to do just fine with it. S/VTOL is only a luxury if air support is too. The Marines, being ground-focused, think it's a pretty good idea, going back to about the 1930s.

The Marines have also never actually applied their Harriers this way, and they can't. They won't be able to with the F-35, either. V/STOL aircraft are too complex and maintenance-intensive to actually operate that way. A nice little site with fuel bladders and ammo doesn't help you much when you're code three for HUD and ECS. Battle damage? Forget about it.

With current and near-future technology, designing a jet that is both a modern, competitive fighter and can take off and land from dirt is a fool's errand. Even the Russians gave up on that one, and crappy runways are what they expect.

For other fun adventures in making aircraft that take off and land like helicopters but fly like airplanes, see also: V-22 Osprey.

If by "Recently" he means "back when I could get an erection without a pill, and chicks without spending money", then yes, he's right.
Actually, he's an aeronautical engineer, so cancel the second part.
The Marines started operating AV-8As in 1971. When the douche-canoe you're picking apart had hair some color other than white, and before the Alzheimer's kicked in.
No small part of the rationale was the then-vogue idea (by one of the loopier CNOs in memory, and a surface warfare guy to boot) of bringing back light carriers, because someone had the audacity to note the expense of maintaining a fleet of supercarriers.
Say, BTW, how many supercarriers did SecDef say were we going to mothball as recently as a year ago?

The point of V/STOL is to be able to land, re-fuel, and re-arm much closer to a fight.
Not to try and run an entire wing maintenance shop under a shady tree.
Less straw, more man, please.

The Marines haven't used their Harriers that way because there's been no need. The only two conflicts that lasted more than a few weeks, or hours, featured nations which actually had conventional airfields. Middle East oil money brings some few advantages.
Africa, SEAsia, most of the Pacific, and most places south of Brownsville...not so much.

Refresh my memory: how many RAF conventional fighters flew in the Falklands War?

And the V-22 Osprey still does a vastly better job that the 1956-era CH-46s it's replacing, the last new one of which was acquired when Nixon was president, and AV-8s were brand new, in 1971.
Total number of 40-year old aircraft, let alone helicopters, flown by anyone else which also conveniently fit inside an aircraft carrier or gator freighter: 0.


The F-35 is the USAF's Golden Pig.
Own that. We all feel bad for you, but your guys ("Top. Men.") are the ones pushing it, hence the original article arguing that they should stop doing that, ASAP.
Nobody liable to fly them wants them, and they remain a giant four-legged gold-plated POS, and every day that the program lives, the military dies a little more.

But just because they do everything wrong, doesn't mean everything they're trying to replace is equally bad.

[Greg]

Sigh. I don't *like* Sprey, I find him a little too doctrinaire and full of himself. But if you're going to criticize the man, at least keep all the facts in order.

Upon re-watching, it seems pretty clear to me that this guy's mad that the F-35 is supposed to replace his baby, and puts that before all other considerations like common sense and coherence. You may wonder why I'm about to spend a whole lot of words picking this guy's statements apart when I think the F-35 needs to go away. Well, it's because he's wrong, and on the Internet. Also, he stepped on my dong.

You should be more careful where you put your dong.

That whole high-low mix idea was an Air Force PR concoction to make up an excuse -this was actually from the seventies, can you believe this, it shows you how long dumb ideas persist-

He never does get around to explaining what about this is a bad idea.

It's an interview, with an interviewer who is trying to keep him on topic... so you can't blame him too much for not digressing as far as you'd like. But my take on it is that the 'high' end of a hi/lo mix becomes an excuse to have a wishlist-gratifying gold-plating wankfest, whereas the 'low' end becomes the useful aircraft you buy after the money runs out. Which is indeed pretty much how it works out, except for the Navy where the 'low' end is a gold-plating wankfest too, just what you're gold-plating is smaller.

The grownups might want to stop with the hi/lo wish fulfillment games, and just go straight to buying the shit that's useful.

it was in the seventies, the Air Force, the apple of its eye was the F-15: Two-engine, great big fighter for its day, close to 50,000 pounds, super-big radar, all the bells and whistles the Air Force could think of. Which is exactly what they wanted: Big expensive airplane.

He would notice the F-15's radar, wouldn't he? Probably because it's awesome and the F-16's was a bad joke, but anyway.

When you realize that the F-16's radar was deliberately nerfed to make the F-15 look better and not threaten the F-15 buy, it kind of changes things there.

A big fighter for its day? Let's take a look at some contemporary loaded weights off of everyone's favorite source for Internet arguments, Wikipedia:

F-16: 26,500 lb
MiG-23: 34,612 lb
MiG-29: 38,581 lb
F-4: 41,500 lb
F-15: 44,500 lb
MiG-27: 44,800 lb
Su-27: 51,650 lb
F-14: 61,000 lb
MiG-25: 80,952 lb
F-111: 82,800 lb

Well, damn. Compared to an F-16, just about everything short of a Cessna 172 looks unreasonably heavy. But even though Sprey's rounding skills suck, among its contemporaries, the F-15 is resoundingly median for its day in terms of weight.

You forgot the F-105, etc. Try looking for things that were expected to be good at ACM and check again. Cherry pick less. Oh and Russian fighters got XBOXHUEG because that was the only way they could get any range. Russian fighter aircraft size always is range-dependent, otherwise their tradition is to make them as small as possible.

I like how he talks about "all the bells and whistles the Air Force could think of," implying it was overburdened with unnecessary junk, when one of the main points of building the F-15 was to make the thing the ultimate air-to-air fighter and nothing else. "Not a pound for air to ground," etc.

Do you know who SAID 'not a pound for air to ground'? His faction. I believe those may actually be his words. Design of the F-15 was a tug of war between people who wanted to pile shit on, and people who wanted to take it off. At least on this, his position is consistent and yours is, well you're not even wrong.

Colonel Boyd and I and Colonel Riccioni had worked on it, had gotten disgusted with it because it'd gotten too loaded up with junk. And so we went off and as kind of bureaucratic guerillas underground started the F-16. Which was gonna be less than half the size, half the cost, and much hotter. It was gonna just wax the F-15 by virtue of being smaller and hotter, and designed specifically for that mission, and not designed to carry a bunch of junk. A bunch of complex electronic stuff that had no relevance to combat.

God, what a chodesmith.

Think about the PK of BVR missiles in Viet Nam. Our most effective planes there, air to air, barely even HAD radar. When you realize the only reason the F-15 is as large as it is, is to be able to fit a meter-wide radar aerial, he might have a point. The big radar on the F-15 sure is useful for the air-to-ground modes of the F-15E, though.

Soooooo... what? What was unnecessary on the F-15? Fuel? What electronic junk? Radar? Could it be... TEWS? All things that the F-16 has since been modified to have a fraction of so it's worth at least one quarter of a shit? There's no getting around the fact that it's only got one engine, though.

Well, you made a dinky single-engine jet fighter with the world's smallest cockpit resulting in a serious interface bottleneck, and avionics too overburdened with keeping the lawn dart in the air for the five minutes of fuel it has to do anything, at least besides making sharp turns. Oh, but as soon as you put an ECM pod on it to make up for that deficiency, it can't do its vaunted 9G dogfighting. Well, at least you succeeded in making it relatively cheap so we can use them as half-assed Wild Weasels without incurring a noticeable loss when they get shot down or simply run out of gas. Way to wax the F-15, Sprey.

Yeah I've always found him to be a little doctrinaire. F-15 almost certainly didn't need to be as big as it was. F-14 had a reason to be as compromised (as much of a whale) as it was, to carry a radar (and missiles) that big. F-15, with the tech of the day, not so much. And even now, PK of AMRAAM in actual combat, against an opponent that actually has RWRs or isn't a very rudely surprised friendly, is horribly low. When he talks about the big radar not getting you much (on anything that isn't specifically designed to hunt bombers and cruise missiles for a living), much as I hate to admit it he's got a point.

He never gets back to it, but the high-low concept meant you'd buy as many F-15s as you could afford and pad their numbers with F-16s to put enough jets in the air to deal with the massive swarms of Russian fighters. I'm sure he took the notion that his baby was meant to be a bullet sponge for the F-15 a bit personally. Well, it only hurts because it's true.

See above regarding wishlists and wankfests.

The Marines have this mindless passion now, recently, for vertical takeoff airplanes, ever since they got the British Harrier.

Yeah, I don't get it either.

I have to agree.

The "S/VTOL obsession" has to do with owning a mission set that includes "seize and defend advanced naval bases", as well as expeditionary ops in third-world shitholes where convenient pre-built foot-thick 10,000' long runways and hardstands are rather scarce. This prospect apparently scares the Air Force and makes Naval aviators queasy when the landing surface isn't pitching and rolling, whereas Army rotary-wing and Marine aviators in general seem to do just fine with it. S/VTOL is only a luxury if air support is too. The Marines, being ground-focused, think it's a pretty good idea, going back to about the 1930s.

The Marines have also never actually applied their Harriers this way, and they can't. They won't be able to with the F-35, either. V/STOL aircraft are too complex and maintenance-intensive to actually operate that way. A nice little site with fuel bladders and ammo doesn't help you much when you're code three for HUD and ECS. Battle damage? Forget about it.

Marines do like their air support, and there's a reason why they were the world pioneers in dive bombing. But I don't think they've been VTOL fans since the 30's. VTOL capability is a nice to have that lets you do some things you otherwise couldn't. But it costs, too. STOL costs less, compromises less. If you absolutely HAVE to have your VTOL, hey you know helicopters exist. It's probably not a good idea to completely fuck yourself over your unbreakable attachment to a fetish that is primarily of theoretical value.

With current and near-future technology, designing a jet that is both a modern, competitive fighter and can take off and land from dirt is a fool's errand. Even the Russians gave up on that one, and crappy runways are what they expect.

Roads sometimes exist. There are modern fighters designed to operate from them.

For other fun adventures in making aircraft that take off and land like helicopters but fly like airplanes, see also: V-22 Osprey.

Yeah it's tough.

In dogfighting, it's hopeless. You can guarantee that a 1950s designed MiG-21 of French Mirage would just hopelessly whip the F-35.

The real reason it's hopeless in the case of the V/STOL version is its pathetic armament when stealthy. When helmet-mounted cueing systems/HUDS and HOBS-capable missiles are all the rage, the F-35 has, bar none, the best HMCS. Which it can then use to defeat maybe four enemies if it hasn't already expended all its weapons, at which point it's defenseless if it does not have a gun pod mounted and/or it's as unmaneuverable as he says.

He's quite right about the dogfighting thing. Your counter is to offer a technological counter. Except that you can have those same technologies on some other plane that costs say 1/4 (as of now, but the trend for F-35 isn't looking good) as much *and* can dogfight. The maneuvering ability is a plus. So why F-35 again?

We didn't take HOBS seriously until Germany reunified and we got to play with MiG-29s, where we realized it didn't matter how good you are at turn-and-burn if the other guy only has to turn his head instead of his whole airplane to kill you.

That was a bit of a wakeup call. But the HOBS/HMS combination has limits, and when everyone has them then being able to maneuver is a nice way to differentiate yourself. And it's still no justification for an expensive airplane....

(Bunch of CAS stuff snipped.)

Remember it's an interview, and everything is squeezed down to sound bites. You're not going to get a long detailed argument. This all kind of hinges on your definition of CAS, so things are going to get messy and meta.

Sure if you're talking (as Bill Whittle put it) 'God button' CAS, as in somebody on the ground points at something (anything stationary) and presses a button and a minute later that thing blows apart... yeah sure anybody can drop a JDAM. Bomb trucks are cheap.

When things are a little more messy and fluid... Sure modern radars are great at picking out vehicles no matter the camoflage. Not so good at IFF, though. He's got a point, in a more traditional CAS scenario going lower and slower is better and that's a problem with more than just F-35, though not being able to go low and slow enough to be effective would seem to be a valid criticism. (Haven't we had that discussion enough already elsewhere?)

Every Battle of Britain radar would see the F-35 and the F-22 and the B-2. I'm not talking here as an antiquarian because unfortunately, the Russians picked up on this and have been building exactly those radars because World War Two. They never stopped building low-frequency, low-wavelength radars. And they've modernized them to an extraordinary extent, they've built some really amazing mobile versions of them now that are hard to find when they're camoflaged and can be erected in 40 minutes, can see every stealth airplane in the world, and they sell them to anybody who's got cash.

Which is why the entire US inventory of F-117s and B-2s were lost in Desert Storm.

This is Alex Jones level taintlickery.

No, you're simply not right. He is correct, they never stopped building VHF (and HF) radars. Used them for long range air search. But they always had limitations. AFTER Desert Storm, the Russians have certainly continued to build VHF radars but they've also put a lot of effort into working around the limitations. They've made them nicely portable, especially.

Here's something I found that doesn't seem too incoherent.
http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-Rus-Low-Band-Radars.html

Should probably throw this in somewhere, too.
http://defenseissues.wordpress.com/2013 ... -the-f-35/

The point is to spend money. That is the the mission of the airplane, is for the US Congress to send money to Lockheed. That's the real mission of the airplane.

Sadly, this is 100% correct.

Yes and Lockheed's partners/subcontractors.

And I guarantee you by the time all the failings of the F-35 have come to light...

Predictions are just part of the reasons I referenced Alex Jones. But I do find it realistic that we will never buy more than 500 airplanes as the international buyers drop out.

Not sure why you have a problem with predictions. Testable predictions are *the* main way you can tell if someone was/is full of shit or not.

I suspect one of the European fighters would've won. Not that they're very good, they're just not as bad as the F-35. The Gripen or the Eurofighter, as they have won in other countries...

The Gripen is more comparable to the F-16/F-35 than the Eurofighter, which is more along the lines of the F-15/F-22. But of course they won in Europe; they're built there, all with local military-industrial complexes and (in the case of the Eurofighter) an almost-as-huge international clusterfuck of interests.

Yeah you'd think he'd have more love for Gripen than Eurofighter. Actually if the Marines could deal with the VTOL fetish they might like Gripen.

The hooker would be the people doing the competition would have to understand that stealth is a shaky business, it's a scam

Which is apparently why they go to such lengths to emphasize that the Eurofighter is ACKSHOOLAY OONSTYBLE ON PUHPUSS. Because 40-year-old design theory is suddenly revolutionary when they do it, and beats stealth.

What the hell are you talking about now? No insult, I just haven't any clue at all what this is supposed to mean, and how it has anything to do with the content of the interview.

What did the Yugoslavs do to shoot down the F-117? They were well aware they were being invaded by stealth airplanes, and they figured out how to shoot it down.

Or as Russian customers the Serbs bought the Russian's best guess on how to defeat our oldest stealth technology and got lucky once. Once.

It's a pretty good demonstration of a main counter to 'stealth'. Use longer wavelength radars for detection, and cueing for your other systems. Practice will only make perfect. Serbs aren't idiots but they really did *not* have particularly good gear. (IIRC they shot down the F-117 with a missile whose best days were the Yom Kippur war.) 'Not idiots' with better gear and more practice can be expected to do better.

That's what everyone's gonna do who thinks they might be bombed by a stealthy airplane.

See previous comment about Desert Storm and reapply it to Southern/Northern Watch, OEF, OIF, and Odyssey Dawn.

Oh sure, he sounds legit, but he's just some old douchecanoe.

Maybe he needed to add 'anyone who's not an idiot'. ANYTHING works against idiots. And I don't like him either, but whether you like someone or not has precious little to do with whether he's right or not.

The F-16 was designed to "smoke the F-15"? He clearly can't meet a design goal either, then!

Absolutely -- after the close and into a turning fight. Just like a Scooter could give a Turkey fits once in close contact.

Yeah that was kind of the point. When you look at the PK of BVR missiles.... he might be on to something there.

In a turning fight without any real-world combat configuration (i.e. ECM/NAV/targeting pods mounted, and/or CFTs on export versions to give them something approaching a useful fuel load) and minimal external fuel, after the F-16 has somehow closed to knife fighting range against an F-15E... sure.

But only then.

When one is trying to bomb something, and the other is trying to keep that something from being bombed... it's really not that hard for it to happen.

[blackeagle603]

heh, you guy all talking about fighter radars like they actually ever work, or if working are even turned on during the close to a fight. All that because of the supposition that fighters operate in a vacuum withput airborne command and control from an E2 or AWACS. Sure the fighter platform matters but ask the Syrians about the difference between running an airbattle without Airborne command and control vs running it with an E2. Bekka Valley turkey shoot... Something like 80 fighter losses to 6 drone/decoy losses.

At least when I was in (granted, a generation ago) a good part of the reason Tomcats and Hornets would tend to wax the Egos and Lawn Darts was the difference in the way we'd run AIC's (Air Intercept Control) vs the AWACS at Red Flag. i.e. In ways our "old, less capable" system was capable of that the newer AWACS radars was incapable of due to their 100% reliance on synthetic video.

I guess all the raw video options are gone from the E2 by now -- hard to imagine running an AIC without it (especially after the merge). I'm just a radar RX Luddite I guess.

[Langenator]

Found the article:

F’d: How the U.S. and Its Allies Got Stuck with the World’s Worst New Warplane by David Axe.

I'm not sure what angle Axe comes into the fray from, but he makes it pretty clear that the Marines' requirement for V/STOL - and thus the design of the F-35 fuselage to accommodate the lift fan - is a major source of the F-35's underwhelming performance. I'm not an engineer of any sort, certainly not a aerospace one, so I can't really judge that one the merits.

From a political perspective, I think you can blame three parties for the mess: Congress, for forcing the services to try to stuff all their requirements into a single airframe; Lockheed, for aiding and abetting this; and the Depts. of the Navy (including the Marines) and Air Force for not having the spine to tell Congress, "No, we can't reconcile this into a single airframe."

Just guessing, but I think the Navy and AF could probably have come up with a plane that worked for both of them, but that would have left the Marines on the outside looking in, unless the Marines were willing to give up the V/STOL requirement. If the Marines weren't willing to give up the requirement, they would have been in a bind, because they would have probably been the only customer for the plane, and their buy wouldn't be big enough to justify the R&D costs. (This problem isn't unique to Marine planes - it applies to things like the new amtrac that ultimately got cut. The Army has a similar problem with unique equipment for the 82nd Airborne (i.e., the XM-8 light tank))

[NVGdude]

Found the article:

Just guessing, but I think the Navy and AF could probably have come up with a plane that worked for both of them,

They did, it was called the F-22. The USN could have had a "Navalized" version. Lockheed offered. Beefed up undercarriage, and somewhat larger folding wings. Not as capable as a USN version, but still way ahead of the JSF.

But that cost too much, so instead we are spending 10X as much on the JSF.

[Langenator]

Well, I'm one of those folks who thinks the AF made a mistake in selecting the F-22 over the YF-23 (faster, longer range...sound like things that would be useful in the Pacific?) Plus it was cooler looking.

Not sure how well the wings would have folded.

[Vonz90]

Well, I'm one of those folks who thinks the AF made a mistake in selecting the F-22 over the YF-23 (faster, longer range...sound like things that would be useful in the Pacific?) Plus it was cooler looking.

Not sure how well the wings would have folded.

I've heard that the Navy/MC preferred the McDonald-Douglas JSF proposal but the AF very specifically did not want it. Supposedly, the AF knew the Boeing concept was a no-go, so by eliminating MD-D at the concept stage they knew they would end up with Lockheed, which is what they wanted all along.

Also, there were parts of the DOD who wanted a Boeing/MD-D merger, so there are those who think the elimination of the MD-D proposal was used as leverage to force the later merger to happen.

I don't know about the merger thing, but the Navy has preferred MD-D for a long time while the AF has been high on Lockheed for a long time. So that games were played would not surprise me.

[Aesop]

Well, I'm one of those folks who thinks the AF made a mistake in selecting the F-22 over the YF-23 (faster, longer range...sound like things that would be useful in the Pacific?) Plus it was cooler looking.

Not sure how well the wings would have folded.

It was by all accounts the better airplane.
But Lockheed moved production to Sen. Sam Nunn's home state (the then reigning military appropriations committee chairman) and along with doubtless the usual complement of Lockheed palm-greasing, the fix was in.
That's the only way to actually explain selecting the less-capable aircraft in a head-to-head competition.

The -23 would've adapted well to folding wings, being a Northrop-Grumman product, and Grumman especially having some small measure of experience with the concept.

Now N-G is somewhat on the ropes as far as manned systems continuing production of significance, and the consequences of the repeated choice of Lockheed to do anything that isn't a spy plane or a trash hauler is becoming manifest.

[NVGdude]

Apparently the USAF nickname for the Boeing JSF entry was "Monica".

Yeah.

As someone once said, Boeing built an aircraft so ugly even the Air Force wouldn't buy it.

[Langenator]

Well, I'm one of those folks who thinks the AF made a mistake in selecting the F-22 over the YF-23 (faster, longer range...sound like things that would be useful in the Pacific?) Plus it was cooler looking.

Not sure how well the wings would have folded.

It was by all accounts the better airplane.
But Lockheed moved production to Sen. Sam Nunn's home state (the then reigning military appropriations committee chairman) and along with doubtless the usual complement of Lockheed palm-greasing, the fix was in.
That's the only way to actually explain selecting the less-capable aircraft in a head-to-head competition.

The -23 would've adapted well to folding wings, being a Northrop-Grumman product, and Grumman especially having some small measure of experience with the concept.

Now N-G is somewhat on the ropes as far as manned systems continuing production of significance, and the consequences of the repeated choice of Lockheed to do anything that isn't a spy plane or a trash hauler is becoming manifest.

There's an article out there - google "Regret F-23" and you should find it - that says the F-22 was chosen because the F-22 had better "program management" or some such, which up front (I think) translates too "less programmatically risky", but between the lines probably means "We like this better for Reasons, so we're putting our finger on the scale"

Which makes sense.