Lockheed Martin and the Pentagon say the F-35’s superiority over its rivals lies in its ability to remain undetected, giving it “first look, first shot, first kill.”

Hugh Harkins, a highly respected author on military combat aircraft, called that claim “a marketing and publicity gimmick” in his book on Russia’s Sukhoi Su-35S, a potential opponent of the F-35. He also wrote, “In real terms an aircraft in the class of the F-35 cannot compete with the Su-35S for out and out performance such as speed, climb, altitude, and maneuverability.”

Other critics have been even harsher. Pierre Sprey, a cofounding member of the so-called “fighter mafia” at the Pentagon and a co-designer of the F-16, calls the F-35 an “inherently a terrible airplane” that is the product of “an exceptionally dumb piece of Air Force PR spin.” He has said the F-35 would likely lose a close-in combat encounter to a well-flown MiG-21, a 1950s Soviet fighter design.

Robert Dorr, an Air Force veteran, career diplomat and military air combat historian, wrote in his book “Air Power Abandoned,” “The F-35 demonstrates repeatedly that it can’t live up to promises made for it. … It’s that bad.”

The development of the F-35 has been a mess by any measurement. There are numerous reasons, but they all come back to what F-35 critics would call the jet's original sin: the Pentagon's attempt to make a one-size-fits-all warplane, a Joint Strike Fighter.

History is littered with illustrations of multi-mission aircraft that never quite measured up. Take Germany's WWII Junkers Ju-88, or the 1970s Panavia Tornado, or even the original F/A-18. Today the Hornet is a mainstay of the American military, but when it debuted it lacked the range and payload of the A-7 Corsair and acceleration and climb performance of the F-4 Phantom it was meant to replace.

Yeah, the F/A-18 was trash when it first came out and it took YEARS and multiple changes/fixes to allow it to fully outperform the decades old aircraft it was designed to beat when it was released.

The F35 is not the best at anything it does, it is designed to fully be mediocre at all roles in order to allow it to be a single solution aircraft. That may change with more money, time, and data retrieved from hours spent in actual combat, but as it stands it is what it was designed to be. A jack of all trades and master of none, not something I would want to be flying in a role where I could encounter a master of that role.

As @ChaosEngine says, it is far beyond time that we move to a design where the pilot is not in the plane. There is no reason at this time that we cannot field a plane that could successfully perform it's role with the pilot in a secure location nearby. Such planes could be built cheaper, could perform in g-forces that humans cannot withstand, and would be expendable in a way that current planes are not. However, this would mean that our corporate welfare system for huge defense contractors would take a massive hit. We can't have that, can we?

The last couple of decades I've really begun to see the military as corporate welfare. We have a force capable of crushing, literally crushing any non nuclear power nation 20 times over. We can never use that force against a significant nuclear power nation like Russia or China lest we risk WWW3, the war that will REALLY end all wars (by humanity at least). Our tech is also pretty much useless against a guerrilla force because they can melt across borders and into the local population.

Our outdated technology still would destroy any of the nations other than Russia or China. We have shit mothballed and decaying that would do so. We have a fucking stockpile of main battle tanks that we will never use, but we keep building them and storing them because, apparently, if you let the people go who know how to make them you can never replace that knowledge.

All the while, we let people get mired in school debt, credit debt, and increase our national debt because we need to crush some unknown force. We spend a fraction of what we should be spending on space exploration and colonization. I could go on, but why bother.

If you have any doubt, just look at the F35. By the time it is all said and done, we will have close to half a trillion sunk into that fucking debacle and it STILL isn't functioning capably. Russia and China haven't got anything close to it and we don't need it against anyone else. You could take that money and give close to 2 grand to every single man, woman, and child in the country. Instead we basically are lining Lockheed Martin's pockets.

Do I have to watch it? This vid, I mean?

Star Wars is about rebels fighting a powerful empire that governs the galaxy. It glorifies taking down the establishment by a group of (well funded) gun-toting terrorists.

I suppose you could draw a parallel to the American war of independence against the British...

But in a modern context this would be like a group of domestic insurgents blowing up an aircraft carrier ("Death Star") while staging an armed rebellion against the US government (now a subsidiarity of "Gov-co," a joint venture of the Disney, Viacom, Lockheed Martin, JP Morgan Chase, and Koch Bros. companies).

Simply put, that's just not going to happen.

--------------------------

edit: Okay I just watched the above clip. That guy made even less sense than the BS that I just made up.

Um...who called you a pig? The voices in your head? Certainly not me. I don't know why you would say you can't be both though. That's just silly. ;-)


That's a pretty big 'If it can' that's already been proven to be an 'it can't'. Even IF it did everything it was supposed to, yes, it's 10 years too late and at least double an acceptable price tag, and still not ready for prime time, or even the 2am slot.
Yes, modification happens, but the idea is not to produce something that needs to be modified out of the box in order to do anything well.
No, many bombers are in use that were designed as bombers. Sorry, but that's just wrong.
Once again, the idea of the F-35 doesn't grant air superiority, neither does a few of these planes, especially if we are too afraid to lose a $200+ million plane so we just don't use them, which is the most likely outcome. It is in NO way a deterrent to full scale war with any foe we might ever use it against, like Russia. If it was some magic anti-war bullet, that might be money well spent, but is simply isn't in any way and NEVER will be, so that argument is just silly.
In 10 years, the stealth properties of this plane will be 5 years past obsolete....and it may STILL not be in the air.
There are no countries with air forces that can come close to ours, not one. I don't think there's even a group of 10 nations combined that come close to ours. We will NEVER be in a fair fight excepting a nuclear one where every one dies, and we'll still out nuke everyone else 10-1, it just won't matter.
Yes, Trump likely would take us to war, that's no reason to waste more money on unneeded weapons for a possible, unknown, unlikely future conflict with an unknown, unestimated enemy.
Still testing....and still testing....and still testing....$1.3 TRILLION later.....Still testing (and failing those tests)....still testing...still testing. Eventually it should be admitted that it's a failure, more testing won't help (it hasn't yet), and quit throwing mountains of good money after bad.
No, it doesn't. It's TASKED with all the same stuff the aging, multi types of planes do, but it can't do it. Stealth is not something new, BTW, we have many stealth planes already, better ones that work.
Again, out of the box needing to be upgraded is a fail. A massive, indisputable fail. That an engine powerful enough to move this pig like other planes already can doesn't exist should tell you something. It's aerodynamic....great....that's one part of a dozen that have to fit together.
The price tag is multiplied 10 fold because it has a pilot.
You want them to eventually pass ALL required tests...not fail them all, then change the parameters so it isn't canceled.
Nope...Warthog.
Not so far. So far, other stealth planes do what it's supposed to...better. Upgrading them is clearly a better plan.
Not true. All I hear is 'it sucks' because I don't read Lockheed Martin's press releases. When you look at test results, it sucks. When you look at price, it sucks. When you look at upkeep, it sucks ass. When you look at a fleet of them doing everything a dozen different planes today do, we're bankrupt and far less capable militarily, and that sucks.

But it seems no amount of logic and results will dissuade you from your love of this unmitigated debacle. That's your choice, but you aren't convincing anyone else to go along with you.

US$1.3 trillion for the development and testing of the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, 115 million (est) per plane when they get around to figuring out how to stop structural cracking and a way to actually get it to pass a real operational trial.

Not saying I agree that a wall is needed or would even work, but let's be realistic in saying we are more than willing to throw a fuckton of money towards projects of equally dubious natures.

What's the difference between a Democrat and a Socialist?

Well, Chris, how about you offer your definition of socialism first. There's at least a few dozen definitions, excluding all the derogatory uses as a generalising term for anything and everything not laissez-faire.

But okay, let's just take a single core issue of socialism: ownership of the means of production.

Is a Democrat intent on handing over ownership of Lockheed-Martin's factories to the people working on the factory floor every day? No?

Is a Democrat planning to hand over ownership of all AT&T property to its employees? No?

Then what the hell is Matthews even rambling about? Same for DWS: just own up to your membership of the democratic wing of the Corporate Party.

Or maybe we tackle this from 180 degrees.

As opposed to what is happening, or how likely, we may find common ground on what it is we should actually be doing.

I've already made the suggestion of electric vehicles and fission, fusion or renewables in place of coal as the road away from emissions. Specifically improving li-ion batteries as Tesla is doing is a major step. Researching sodium-oxygen batteries would be even better as they can hold 4-5 times the power and have cheaper materials and recent results have us close to making them viable, so I'd like to see gov money directed there.

For power solar and wind are currently only cost-competitive because the scale is small enough that we get away with treating coal plants like giant batteries covering our baseline. They simply aren't cost effective to scale up for base load yet, and not likely to be for another 10-20 years. We can have a lot of nuclear plants built in that time. With electric cars coming into the picture, we're also going to need that extra electric capacity. I again would strongly encourage more gov money going into French style large scale nuclear power deployment. China's already doing it, even they've had enough of their current coal literally blocking the sun in the sky on them and nuclear is part of their clean air push. We should be encouraging that and following suit out this way.

I also wasn't kidding about Lockheed-Martin's fusion research. A lot of new ideas are out there for fusion confinement plans and Lockheed has publicly declared their intentions to have a demonstration reactor in 5 years time. I'm hopeful, and if that pans out, the roll out of truly cheap and clean power will start in the next decade for the sole reason that fusion under cuts coal for price.

Part of me reason for these measures versus more drastic ones is we need to keep our economies growing because regardless of what we do the next 30 years, the oceans will continue rising that entire time and the mitigation measures we're going to gradually be spending more and more on are gonna required us to have the money to do them.

If anybody's got better suggestions I'm all ears.

@newtboy

#1 and #2, fine, if you won't go there to read it's now pasted in full for you:
Arctic tundra soils serve as potentially important but poorly understood sinks of atmospheric methane (CH4), a powerful greenhouse gas1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Numerical simulations project a net increase in methane consumption in soils in high northern latitudes as a consequence of warming in the past few decades3, 6. Advances have been made in quantifying hotspots of methane emissions in Arctic wetlands7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, but the drivers, magnitude, timing and location of methane consumption rates in High Arctic ecosystems are unclear. Here, we present measurements of rates of methane consumption in different vegetation types within the Zackenberg Valley in northeast Greenland over a full growing season. Field measurements show methane uptake in all non-water-saturated landforms studied, with seasonal averages of − 8.3 ± 3.7 μmol CH4 m−2 h−1 in dry tundra and − 3.1 ± 1.6 μmol CH4 m−2 h−1 in moist tundra. The fluxes were sensitive to temperature, with methane uptake increasing with increasing temperatures. We extrapolate our measurements and published measurements from wetlands with the help of remote-sensing land-cover classification using nine Landsat scenes. We conclude that the ice-free area of northeast Greenland acts as a net sink of atmospheric methane, and suggest that this sink will probably be enhanced under future warmer climatic conditions.

#3, regardless of if it make's sense to you, and regardless of if it means a 10C warming by 2100, the IPCC scientists collaborative summary says it anyways. If you want to claim otherwise it's you opposing the science to make things seem worse than they are, not me.

#4, To tell them those things would sound like this. The IPCC current best estimates from climate models project 2100 to be 1.5C warmer than 2000. This has already resulted in 2000 being 0.8C warmer than 1900. Summer arctic sea ice extent has retreating significantly is the biggest current impact. By 2100 it is deemed extremely unlikely that the Greenland and Antarctic iccesheets will have meaningfully reduced and there is medium confidence that the warming will actually expand Antarctic ice cover owing to increased precipitation from the region. That's the results and expectations to be passed on from the 5th report from an international collaboration of scientists. Whether that fits your world view or not doesn't matter to the scientific evidence those views are founded on and supported by.

You said the ocean's may be unfishable in 20 years, and the best support you came up with was a news article quote claiming that by 2040 most of the Arctic would be too acidic for Shell forming fish. Cherry picked by the news article that also earlier noted that was dependent on CO2 concentrations exceeding 1000ppm in 2100, and even that some forms of plankton under study actually faired better in higher acidity in some case. In a news article that also noted that the uneven distribution of acidity makes predicting the effects very challenging. If news articles count as evidence I then want to claim we'll have working fusion power to convert to in 5 years time from Lockheed Martin. I'll agree with your news post on one count, the world they talk about, where CO2 emissions continue accelerating year on year, even by 2100, is bad. It's also a bit hard to fathom with electric cars just around the corner, and if not solar and wind, fusion sometime before then too, that we'll still be using anywhere near today's emissions let alone still accelerating our use.

by 2025 it's estimated that 2/3 of people worldwide will live in a water shortage.
And you link to a blog, and a blog that provides exactly zero references to any scientific sources for the claim. Better yet, even the blog does NOT claim that the access to water will be limited because of climate change, the blog even mentions multiple times how other forms of pollution are destroying huge amounts of fresh water(again with zero attributions).

Here's the IPCC best estimates for 2100 impacts regionally:
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter14_FINAL.pdf

You'll find it's a largely mixed bag if you can be bothered to read what the actual scientists are predicting. Just bare in mind they regularly note that climate models still have a lot of challenges with accurate regional estimates. I guess your blogger isn't hindered by such problems though. If you don't want to bother I'll summarize for you and note they observe a mixed bag of increased precipitation in some regions, notably monsoons generally increasing, and other areas lowering, but it's all no higher than at medium confidences. But hey, why should uncertainty about 2100 prevent us from panicking today about more than half the world losing their drinking water in 10 years. I'll make you a deal, in ten years we can come back to this thread and see whether or not climate change has cause 2/3 of the world to lose their drinking water already or not. I'm pretty confident on this one.

Northern India/Southern China is nearly 100% dependent on glacial melt water, glaciers that have lost 50% in the last decade
Lost 50% since 2005? That'd be scary, oh wait, you heard that from the same blog you say? I've got a hunch maybe they aren't being straight with you...
Here are a pair of links I found in google scholar to scientific articles on the Himalaya's glaciers:
http://cires1.colorado.edu/~braup/himalaya/Science13Nov2009.pdf
I you can't be bothered to read:
Claims reported in the popular press that Siachin has shrunk as much as 50% are simply wrong, says Riana, whose report notes that the glacier has "not shown any remarkable retreat in the last 50 years" Which looks likely that your blogger found a popular press piece about that single glacier and then went off as though it were fact, and across the entire mountain range .

http://indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/glaciers%20and%20climate.pdf
Here's another article noting that since 1962 Himalayan glacier reduction is actually about 21%.

If you go back and read the IPCC links I gave earlier you can also find many of the regional rivers and glaciers in India/East China are very dependent on monsoons and will persist as long as monsoons do. Which the IPCC additionally notes are expected to, on the whole, actually increase through 2100 warming.

I've stated before up thread that things are warming and we are the major contribution, but merely differed from your position be also observing the best evidence science has for predictions isn't catastrophic. That is compounded by high uncertainties, notably that TOA energy levels are still not able to be predicted well. The good news there is the latest IPCC estimated temps exceed the observed trends of both temperature and TOA imbalance, so there's reason for optimism. That's obviously not license for recklessly carrying on our merry way, as I've noted a couple times already about roads away from emissions that we are going to adopt one way or another long before 2100.

"Always a welcome sight to US and allied forces on the ground"
Well, not always....

Warthog is a cool plane, but apparently it's being retired because Lockheed Martin need more money or something...

While Maher often does say things I agree with, he is in general a bit of a douche nozzle and very prone to I'll informed sweeping judgements that make him look rather silly (^ like this).

As far as what Mr. Greenwald said my response would be in so many words: "K'IN AYE DUDE!!" though if anything he doesn't go far enough.

The hegemony is subject to no boundaries, even those nations which actively reject it's institutions (Global market) are still bound and defined by it's existence so long as they share the same small patch of universe.

Wars exist to make money, in this day and age more than perhaps ever before. Every G.I. wounded, every round spent, every wound sutured, every school bombed.....someone in the club makes a profit..................

No matter how just & worthy your cause or evil your enemy, so long as one of these fuckers is bankrolling it, or their companies supplying it, you will loose in the long run. Every. Single. Time.

Unless your war is against the market and excessive privilege/wealth itself, your just screwing the rest of us over. I have big problems with Suni and Shi'ite Islam (the Sufi's seem ok) but blowing them up is very unlikely to improve the situation for anyone, doubly so at the end of a Lockheed-Martin missile!

Didn't your MoD also plan to move large parts of your armored motorpool across the Channel into Germany for "storage"? Some 6000 vehicles, if I remember correctly, including a significant number of your Challenger 2 tanks.

Love the vote of confidence, but still, it makes you scratch your head...>> ^Reefie:
Technically that way Lockheed Martin are responsible for the maintenance but ultimately it means that if the UK ever disagrees with the USA in a big way then we're stuck with our pants around our ankles.

>> ^Reefie:

>> ^Boise_Lib:
@Reefie
W - T- F!!
Who the hell Has control of your Nukes?!?!

The UK's nukes are owned and managed by the USA, they're even kept in Georgia and our ships basically go pick up their warheads when required. I believe Lockheed Martin are primarily responsible for them, and we effectively pay for their management services which includes the rental of the warheads. Technically that way Lockheed Martin are responsible for the maintenance but ultimately it means that if the UK ever disagrees with the USA in a big way then we're stuck with our pants around our ankles

I'm sure you guys will always be on our side (or else).


Seriously, what a fucked up situation.
Wonder what would happen if you tried to get them back?

>> ^Boise_Lib:

@Reefie
W - T- F!!
Who the hell Has control of your Nukes?!?!


The UK's nukes are owned and managed by the USA, they're even kept in Georgia and our ships basically go pick up their warheads when required. I believe Lockheed Martin are primarily responsible for them, and we effectively pay for their management services which includes the rental of the warheads. Technically that way Lockheed Martin are responsible for the maintenance but ultimately it means that if the UK ever disagrees with the USA in a big way then we're stuck with our pants around our ankles

Lockheed is the main contractor. They sub out some of the wings and tail section to Boeing. Pratt & Whitney make the engines. While the original order for the planes was over 200, I believe that has been cut in half (or more) since that. They usually have 3 engines per plane to make it easier to keep the plane going if an engine needs repair (there's 2 engines in the F/A 22, ones similar to the 1 engine in the Joint Strike Fighter). The F/A 22 project was the project before the Joint Strike Fighter, so a lot of the technology was shared between the projects.
>> ^Yogi:

>> ^radx:
Ria Novosti had an article about it the other day. Didn't expect the US press to pick up up so soon, to be honest.

Well who makes the F-22 Raptor? It's Lockheed Martin right? Built in conjunction with Boeing too huh...hmmm I wonder if the two largest receivers of government military contracts will get a pass in the media.
That is until the horde because too loud to ignore.