Lockheed Martin just assembled the 1,000th F-35, making it one of the most widely produced and successful modern fighters ever. Here’s a pretty good video busting various myths about the F-35.
“There are more F-35s in the world today than there are all other stealth aircraft ever built by all nations combined.”
“There are more F-35s on the deck of the USS Tripoli in this single picture than there are stealth fighters in all of Russia.” Eh, supposedly Russia has managed to finally get 20 Su-57s into service, which matches the 20 plane test deployment of the F-35Bs to the Tripoli. But it’s Russia, so several shakers of salt are in order.
“The F-35 lightning II is the seventh most widely operated fighter on the planet. This program began with nine nations involved in its development, but today its list of buyers has stretched all the way to 17.”
“In the past last few years, F-35s have accumulated some 773,000 hours in the sky spread out across 469,000 sorties.”
The F-35 had a troubled development cycle, but pilots love the finished product.
They “make older fourth generation fighters significantly more capable just by flying nearby, thanks to their incredible degree of sensor fusion and the data they can securely transmit to other aircraft flying in the vicinity.”
Myth #1: “All they do is crash.” “This is an excellent example of a combination of recency and availability biases. F-35s seem as though they crash often because there are so many of them in the sky on on any given day.”
“The truth is, the F-35 is actually the safest modern fighter ever developed. If you go back and look at the crash data of the F-35 during its first 12 years of service, as compared to the A-10, F-15, F-16 or F-22, you’ll find that the F-35 has a significantly better track record.”
“By this point in the A-10 service life, 9% of its airframes had already been lost in accidents. By this point in the F-16’s, that number was 13%. But today, the F-35’s loss rate is about 1%.”
Myth #2: “The F-35 is too expensive top operate.” “There really used to be something to this. As recently as 2016, it was reported that F-35s cost an average average of about $67,000 per hour to operate.”
The Air Force and Lockheed Martin have been driving this number down. By “2023, that operating cost had been reduced by more than 80%, down to right around $28,000 per hour. That’s only a little bit more than an F-15.”
Myth #3: “The F-35 can’t dogfight.” “First of all it probably shouldn’t. It was designed to operate like a sniper.”
“Most of the claims that say it can’t dogfight stem from a 2015 report published by War is Boring about an F-35a squaring off in a duel against a block 40 F-16d, and in that fight the F-16 definitely came out on top.” The problem is, the F-35 in that match was literally the second F-35 ever built.
“It didn’t have the vast majority of combat systems F-35s fly with today, including the helmet and electro-optical targeting system that allows F-35 pilots to target enemy aircraft without having to point the nose of the jet directly at them, as well as the F-35’s radar absorbance skin that would limit the F-16’s ability to get a radar lock on its opponent.”
“And to make matters even worse, that particular F-35 was flying with software restrictions on board that prevented the pilot from pushing the airframe too hard, limiting it to under 7g maneuvers, a restriction the F-16 obviously didn’t have.”
“The F-35 was forced to fly with both wings tied behind its back and it ended up losing against one of the most prolific dogfighters in history.”
“Most pilots say they’d still rather avoid that by taking out the enemy before they ever even know it’s.”
Myth #4: “The U.S. has already spent more than $1.7 trillion on the F-35.” That’s only the projected cost over the entire lifetime of the program.
Myth #5: “The F-35 has abysmal readiness rates.” There’s some truth to this, as readiness rates sit at 55%. But a big reason is the F-35 repair depot infrastructure hasn’t been fully built out yet. That’s supposed to be finished in 2027. “At which point the F-35’s readiness rates are expected to jump across the force to just about comparable with the F-15 and F-16.”
It’s not all roses: The F-35 has significant delays and cost overruns for the Tech Refresh 3 upgrade. “That will provide a 37-fold increase in onboard computing power 20 times the onboard data storage, and new double redundant display processors with five times the power to give the pilots far more situational awareness than ever before.”
“And Tech Refresh 3 is really just an appetizer that will lead to the Block 4 upgrade, which will be such a massive massive increase in capability that I have long argued the Block 4 F-35 deserves its own designation.”
“This new version of the F-35 will have a newer, even more advanced onboard radar that’s rumored to use Gallium Nitride transmit and receive modules that will dethrone the F-35’s current AN/AGP-81 radar as the most advanced and powerful radar ever affixed to a fighter.”
Plus new weapons and a bump from four to six internal weapons slots.
“Air Force secretary Frank Kendall has already stated plainly that in the future Block 4 F-35s will be flying with their own AI enabled drone wingmen, just like the sixth generation fighters in development today, Meaning the F-35 really will be a bridge to the sixth generation of fighter.” As in everything related to AI, the devil is in the details.
Like other modern fighter development programs, the F-35 has had its teething problems, but there’s no nation in the world that wants to face one in combat…
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“Myth #2: “The F-35 is too expensive top operate.” “There really used to be something to this. As recently as 2016, it was reported that F-35s cost an average average of about $67,000 per hour to operate.”
The Air Force and Lockheed Martin have been driving this number down. By “2023, that operating cost had been reduced by more than 80%, down to right around $28,000 per hour. That’s only a little bit more than an F-15.”
These two claims are mathematically contradictory. $ 28,000 is an 80% reduction from $ 140,000, not $ 67,000. An 80% reduction from $ 67,000 is $ 13,400.
The latest, non classified, DoD estimate of the F-35A’s operating cost is $ 44,000 per hour. DoD, Lockheed-Martin, and RTX play games with these numbers to confuse the Congress and the public. They often quote current operating costs per hour in 2016 or 2020 dollars, but these discrepancies are well beyond that inflation factor fudge.
You can’t trust any accounting coming out of the Pentagon. It’s that joke about the accountant asking “What do you want the numbers to be…?”, only in real life with real money.
At the rate they’re going, the sixth-generation fighters are all going to be priced in imaginary numbers.
As to the benefits of the F-35? No idea; not an airman, zero experience. About all I can do is look on from the side at the budget numbers and choke.
The way they’re doing business, you’d think they thought we had an infinite money machine somewhere out there. I’d love to know what the actual cost/benefit ratios will be, if the F-35 ever sees peer combat with someone that knows what the hell they’re doing. As it is, I keep thinking that the whole of modern warfare is about to be shivved in the back by the growth of AI and drones, and we won’t see it coming.
I always expected that the drones were going to have an impact, and that some little country like Singapore would pull a David-and-Goliath act out of their ass. Did not expect it to be Russia and Ukraine; the growth and impact of drones there is exactly what I thought would happen eventually after I saw my first DJI Christmas toy demonstrated for me. The routine way you’re seeing all these things being used is a game-changer, and I don’t see much in the way of effective countermeasures coming in.
Imagine, if you will, a set of suicide DJI drones hooked up to an AI pilot that’s been optimized for slipping itself into an F-35 inlet during landing… Scratch one multi-million dollar aircraft for literal pennies on the dollar. Further imagine the next step in the defense/offense see-saw: Taking over the defenses of that F-35 forward operating airfield and using the defender’s own anti-drone guns to do the same damn thing…
Network warfare, AI, and drones are going to do more to change the nature of warfare than anything else, and it’ll probably happen a lot faster than we expect. It would not surprise me one damn bit if all the hardware we have now is effectively countered, if not totally obsolete, by about 2050.
Part of the problem involves the USAF’s manpower shortage, which in 2024 is projected to be 2,000 pilots. At best there may be 1,500 trainees put into rotation this year. Much of a fighter aircraft’s capability involves flying in formation, which requires a level of coordination that must be developed over time.
Readiness rates will not improve significantly is the near term.
Yeah, they’re in the “find out” phase of “Fuck around and find out” with regards to implementing DEI in the armed forces.
Little secret for y’all: The vast majority of combat arms and combat-oriented jobs are voluntarily filled mostly by those we term “whites”. The blacks and browns generally don’t want those jobs because the lifestyle’s a bitch, and ohbytheway, post-military employment sucks. So… You drive away whitey? You don’t get those slots filled, and what does show up is the dregs.
The Democrats are, yet again, destroying the military. They do this; they’ve done it after every war, and they usually do it because of some stupid social scheme they come up with. This time, it’s DEI and “anti-white supremacy”. After WWII, it was the Doolittle Board that gutted the pre-war military culture and put in place a bunch of ill-conceived “reforms” that turned the Army into what lost the war in Korea.
Same thing is happening right now. Do not expect good things if they commit the Army to ground combat any time soon.
in your last sentence you correctly state no one wants to face “one” in combat. but where the F-35 shines is in groups. imagine facing a pair that can communicate that well and almost guarantee the first shot. frightening.
While its debut was before my time, my impression was that the F-111 was always sold as a multi-role aircraft that could do high-speed, low level penetration rather than a pure fighter. Indeed, the F-111 role as a carrier-based aircraft was scrapped early on, and the first flight of the F-14 was only three years after delivery of the first F-111s.
F-111 was a different beast than the F-35, entirely.
If you’ve ever been up close and personal with one, you take one look at it and go “This… This was supposed to be a fighter…?” Those bastards were huge.
MacNamara had a lot to answer for, and the entire F-111 debacle should be high up on that list. His entire tenure at any job in any role is usually seen as a disaster of “knowing the price of everything, and the value of nothing…” He was the prototypical MBA, and his coterie of like-minded fools did more damage than they ever did good.
The trick with doing the sorts of things that they tried doing is in knowing what numbers are really important, as opposed to those you think are important. The majority of the bad decisions they made were based on carefully reasoned, yet horribly chosen metrics that did not represent reality or common sense. The sorts of decisions made by detached “experts” who really don’t know a damn thing about the issues they’re deciding on.
“Myth #2: “The F-35 is too expensive top operate.” “There really used to be something to this. As recently as 2016, it was reported that F-35s cost an average average of about $67,000 per hour to operate.”
The Air Force and Lockheed Martin have been driving this number down. By “2023, that operating cost had been reduced by more than 80%, down to right around $28,000 per hour. That’s only a little bit more than an F-15.”
These two claims are mathematically contradictory. $ 28,000 is an 80% reduction from $ 140,000, not $ 67,000. An 80% reduction from $ 67,000 is $ 13,400.
The latest, non classified, DoD estimate of the F-35A’s operating cost is $ 44,000 per hour. DoD, Lockheed-Martin, and RTX play games with these numbers to confuse the Congress and the public. They often quote current operating costs per hour in 2016 or 2020 dollars, but these discrepancies are well beyond that inflation factor fudge.
You can’t trust any accounting coming out of the Pentagon. It’s that joke about the accountant asking “What do you want the numbers to be…?”, only in real life with real money.
At the rate they’re going, the sixth-generation fighters are all going to be priced in imaginary numbers.
As to the benefits of the F-35? No idea; not an airman, zero experience. About all I can do is look on from the side at the budget numbers and choke.
The way they’re doing business, you’d think they thought we had an infinite money machine somewhere out there. I’d love to know what the actual cost/benefit ratios will be, if the F-35 ever sees peer combat with someone that knows what the hell they’re doing. As it is, I keep thinking that the whole of modern warfare is about to be shivved in the back by the growth of AI and drones, and we won’t see it coming.
I always expected that the drones were going to have an impact, and that some little country like Singapore would pull a David-and-Goliath act out of their ass. Did not expect it to be Russia and Ukraine; the growth and impact of drones there is exactly what I thought would happen eventually after I saw my first DJI Christmas toy demonstrated for me. The routine way you’re seeing all these things being used is a game-changer, and I don’t see much in the way of effective countermeasures coming in.
Imagine, if you will, a set of suicide DJI drones hooked up to an AI pilot that’s been optimized for slipping itself into an F-35 inlet during landing… Scratch one multi-million dollar aircraft for literal pennies on the dollar. Further imagine the next step in the defense/offense see-saw: Taking over the defenses of that F-35 forward operating airfield and using the defender’s own anti-drone guns to do the same damn thing…
Network warfare, AI, and drones are going to do more to change the nature of warfare than anything else, and it’ll probably happen a lot faster than we expect. It would not surprise me one damn bit if all the hardware we have now is effectively countered, if not totally obsolete, by about 2050.
“[R]eadiness rates sit at 55%.”
Part of the problem involves the USAF’s manpower shortage, which in 2024 is projected to be 2,000 pilots. At best there may be 1,500 trainees put into rotation this year. Much of a fighter aircraft’s capability involves flying in formation, which requires a level of coordination that must be developed over time.
Readiness rates will not improve significantly is the near term.
Yeah, they’re in the “find out” phase of “Fuck around and find out” with regards to implementing DEI in the armed forces.
Little secret for y’all: The vast majority of combat arms and combat-oriented jobs are voluntarily filled mostly by those we term “whites”. The blacks and browns generally don’t want those jobs because the lifestyle’s a bitch, and ohbytheway, post-military employment sucks. So… You drive away whitey? You don’t get those slots filled, and what does show up is the dregs.
The Democrats are, yet again, destroying the military. They do this; they’ve done it after every war, and they usually do it because of some stupid social scheme they come up with. This time, it’s DEI and “anti-white supremacy”. After WWII, it was the Doolittle Board that gutted the pre-war military culture and put in place a bunch of ill-conceived “reforms” that turned the Army into what lost the war in Korea.
Same thing is happening right now. Do not expect good things if they commit the Army to ground combat any time soon.
in your last sentence you correctly state no one wants to face “one” in combat. but where the F-35 shines is in groups. imagine facing a pair that can communicate that well and almost guarantee the first shot. frightening.
Time will tell. But I recall the wizz kids telling us that the F-111 would be the wonder fighter of all time. It wasn’t and didn’t. ever.
While its debut was before my time, my impression was that the F-111 was always sold as a multi-role aircraft that could do high-speed, low level penetration rather than a pure fighter. Indeed, the F-111 role as a carrier-based aircraft was scrapped early on, and the first flight of the F-14 was only three years after delivery of the first F-111s.
F-111 was a different beast than the F-35, entirely.
If you’ve ever been up close and personal with one, you take one look at it and go “This… This was supposed to be a fighter…?” Those bastards were huge.
MacNamara had a lot to answer for, and the entire F-111 debacle should be high up on that list. His entire tenure at any job in any role is usually seen as a disaster of “knowing the price of everything, and the value of nothing…” He was the prototypical MBA, and his coterie of like-minded fools did more damage than they ever did good.
The trick with doing the sorts of things that they tried doing is in knowing what numbers are really important, as opposed to those you think are important. The majority of the bad decisions they made were based on carefully reasoned, yet horribly chosen metrics that did not represent reality or common sense. The sorts of decisions made by detached “experts” who really don’t know a damn thing about the issues they’re deciding on.
“Most pilots say they’d still rather avoid that by taking out the enemy before they ever even know it’s.”
Did you deliberately leave off the “there”, on the grounds that the enemy pilots got shot down before they got to “there”? :-)
I’d like to attribute it to cleverness, but I think it’s just a typo…