Since LM wont give up particular F-35 arch.. they claim as their exclusive IP the AF will now pay to rebuild portions to assure a future open arch..
IMO it's more an issue of the navy making up insane price and time estimates and then everyone believing them. @Phoenix_jz did some math on FFG-62 vs FREMM and iirc the USN schedule was insane but the current schedule is pretty in line with FREMM-IT timelines
More leverage for what? We'll still need to do this song and dance all over again to get the USN a 6th Gen. I don't see how delaying or scrapping the already late program gets the USN the capabilities they need any faster than fixing the programmatics without stopping development?
The navy and our problem isnt building planes its building ships, so who knows. Theres a ton of people / companies capable of building aircraft but apparrently no one knows how to manage ship programs anymore so maybe spending some time to reorganize isnt a terrible idea. One can only hope its bleed now so that things will be better later.
There are too many problems. If we only focus on the shipbuilding industry, the US shipbuilding industry has been in obvious decline since the 1960s. But no one has thought about how to solve it. Even McNamara was able to deprive the Navy of its construction capacity and proposed a "winner takes all" procurement strategy. This is obviously an approach proposed from an economic perspective rather than an engineering perspective. The current US government can no longer implement long-term engineering projects like the "Apollo" program.
Nobody sees past the next quarterly results and you can forget it if there is even a whiff of "risk" around. It's been indoctrinated into the population to the point that people deride what SpaceX is doing, because they break stuff, and forget about the payoff.
Hahahaha, Chinese history is a very interesting record. Whenever a dynasty is about to fall, what you said will happen, such as the end of the Ming Dynasty and the Southern Song Dynasty. Hahahaha, Chinese history is a very interesting record. What you said happened every time a dynasty was about to fall, such as the end of the Ming Dynasty and the Southern Song Dynasty. These are the two periods that the Chinese despise most. For this reason, China has an idiom specifically describing it: literati ruin the country.
F-35 is just as constrained by space and distance in any other theater.
F-35i over Iran was doing exactly what it was built for.
F-16 and F-15 also use aerial refueling to attack Iran. The key issue is whether the F-35's range without aerial refueling can meet the requirements of the Western Pacific.
Supposedly, the FAXX range minimum was only +25% over Super Bug ranges, which is even less than F-35C strike range.
Its supposedly 25% more range than F/A-18E with external tanks and according to Standard Aircraft Characteristics when loaded with 1 AMRAAM, ATFLIR, 2 Sidewinders, and 2 Mk.84 2,000lb bombs and 3 480gal tanks, in hi-hi-hi profile combat radius is 660nmi which is actually very close to F-35C combat radius.
If that's the full details, I'm MUCH better with the range. I was going 25% over no-bags range. 660x1.25=825nmi, and that's "A-6 with 4x 2000lb hi-hi-hi" range.
Those F/A-18E combat radius figures are actually quite good... just go back and compare to the old F-4 Phantom SACs.
You mean like the way they licensed the use of the F-35? We should make a cheap copy of J-35, call it the F/A-18J Super Duper Hornet, and sell it for peanuts to those we won't sell the F-35 to.
This reminds me of how the A6M Zero was nothing more than a slavish copy of European and US fighters. Dream on.
You're the one living in a dream if you think the chinese did nothing with the terabytes of terabytes of data hacked from any number of US aerospace programs.
Spells copy to me.
Still not totally different either. If I've copied 30% or 60% of a paper, I've still copied it.
Thanks Josh^2 for posting this insightful and valuable interview of RADM Manazir. As the former N98, not to mention N9, he has unparalleled knowledge of intra-Navy and DoD-wide budget wars. And in his
One would hope they were funding enough to keep the team intact. Letting it disperse, only to have a new group come in and pick up the pieces years down the road, would be a completely avoidable shitshow.
I'm thinking the delays would stem more from the analysis of alternatives. "We think we can go full UCAV soon, let's wait for that." "Northrop Grumman demonstrated something interesting recently, let's look into that."
What do you think happened then? They hacked that much data and just decided "hey lets completely disregard that and build our subsystems again using our own methods?"
Then you run into the situation of always hoping for the next thing and never building. There will always be something newer/better/shinier.
Quite.
But how much? How much is home grown Chinese? How much is a Chinese development of whatever was copied? How much is a straight copy of US equipment?
