« Homeward Bound | Main | The Need for Darko » More Than Meets The Eye08 Jul 2007 11:41 am
I saw Transformers last night and I'm happy to report that the US Air Force has finally found a legitimate rationale for its pricey white elephant of an air superiority fighter: They're ideal in case you need to call in an airstrike against an invading group of alien robots. Well worth the hundreds of millions per plane that they cost. Comments (16)
If the US Air Force already owns F-15s and F-16s, there's nothing that awesome about the F-22 that should override one's basic prudential wariness of overly expensive air superiority fighters. Unless, that is, you just want to own the best plane available. 
I'm just surprised that they were able to keep two V-22's in the air long enough to film the opening scene.
The lesson of the B1-B was clearly learned. Make sure your program has parts built in every state. This makes programs untouchable by Congress critters that (rightfully) worry about jobs in their states. I am not sure what the solution is. Promote competition? Promote a robust and diverse economy? Breakup the enormous military contractors or encourage them to break themselves up? Promote Fair Trade and not Free Trade? Public financing of elections? It's not clear we don't need some number of F-22s. The F-15/16/18 are largely products of the late sixties and seventies. It's not clear that if we skip 40 years that we would be able to build the F-22/23/24 35/36/37 when we need them. I think Boeing found at one point they needed to create another large aircraft just so that their junior engineers had something to learn their craft on. It's possible that if each company and their employees didn't consider a program stoppage to mean the end of their company and careers that they wouldn't find such stoppages as hard as they do. It may be that encouraging more different types of aircraft (or these sorts of projects) and require they be built on faster timelines would actually be a better thing. I don't know. If the US Air Force already owns F-15s and F-16s, there's nothing that awesome about the F-22 that should override one's basic prudential wariness of overly expensive air superiority fighters. Unless, that is, you just want to own the best plane available. According to the military analysts at FARK.com, in dogfights an F-22 can and has pwned at least 4 F-15s without the F-15s getting off a shot. Similar for supposed encounters between F-15s and the Eurofighter. I don't know. I've never had a course in mulitary strategy, but I do recognize that Matt has had one such course. So I defer, of course, to Matt's expertise on the subject.
I'm with Gabriel - the Ospreys in the opening scene where probably a better example of the military-industrial complex at its worst. Now if only they'd managed to get a missile shield into the plot...
For what one of those things costs per copy, they should actually be Starscream. We're buying air superiority fighters at mech prices :-/ Why didn't we buy the F-20, anyway?
According to the military analysts at FARK.com, in dogfights an F-22 can and has pwned at least 4 F-15s without the F-15s getting off a shot. Similar for supposed encounters between F-15s and the Eurofighter. F-22's have some massive bugs in the system that may or may not be solvable. They design also assumes a bunch of things: American dominance in space regarding satellites is an immutable fact of life, AWAC's are going to stay invulnerable, dogfighting is dead and fighter combat is now about being able to detect the enemy fighter at the greatest distance and pull the trigger. I think these are all poor assumptions and some of them even if taken as givens put it at a disadvantage to the SU-47. I'd think it was a colossal waste of money one way or the other, developed countries have pretty much written off warring with each other as an expensive and wasteful pursuit and have turned their militant attentions to weaker nations which can be much more easily exploited for fun and profit. These wars don't require fighters.
Oh, and if you really want to keep options open for fighter development, your "break glass in event of emergency" should probably be a program that promotes and rewards sucessful prototypes without buying a bunch of the things. The problem with building them is that the Air Force has to find missions for them even when they are incredibly counter-productive (see Afghanistan and Iraq).
The F-22 reminds me of the Tiger tank of WW2 vintage. It took nine T-34s to be sure of killing a Tiger out on the steppes. The big problem for the Germans was that they only produced 2,027 Tigers while the Soviets produced 22,559 T-34/85s.
Maybe more like the Tiger II, over-engineered, prone to breakdowns, and designed to fight a war that had already been lost.
I just saw it. What a fucking horrid movie. And to hell with apologists for it like Dana Stevens and Ezra Klein.
Oh, and if you really want to keep options open for fighter development, your "break glass in event of emergency" should probably be a program that promotes and rewards sucessful prototypes without buying a bunch of the things. The problem with building them is that the Air Force has to find missions for them even when they are incredibly counter-productive (see Afghanistan and Iraq). I agree with that. I was trying to say something like that by saying build more different kinds of aircraft, but smaller numbers of each.
> Oh, and if you really want to keep options Except that one of our main problems is that we don't build enough copies of anything anymore, and thus never come down the learning curve. This is clearly affecting the F-22 and C-130J programs among others. Of course the contractors don't mind because they keep raising the price per copy ($200 million per F-22? Kelly Johnson would have hung his head in shame) and they also like dragging out the programs and charging the DoD time-and-materials fees during the "development" program. Cranky
I see the F-22 as emblematic of our entire approach to the military. We have an incredibly advanced, lethal force that can destroy any conventional set-piece opponent in short order. But it's technological prowess is absurdly expensive, which results in several serious drawbacks: 1) the force itself is pretty small, and cannot be enlarged quickly because it takes a ton of money to produce the technologically-advanced weaponry and a lot of time to train new personnel to use it; 2) the small force size means that while we can destroy conventional opposing forces, we cannot occupy and hold territory for any appreciable period of time; and 3) the small size makes the force even more vulnerable to guerilla war opponents than other, less technically-advanced conventional forces that can put far more people on the ground than we can.
It's absurdly expensive, which has been true of everything the air force has ever wanted for years (is it cheaper even than the B2 - apples and oranges I know). Maybe there'll be some trickle-down technological benefit to have come of the program that'll reach us in 40-years time or something - a stealth fridge maybe. As a plane geek though, I can really appreciate the thing. It looks just gorgeous.
Stealth fridge! Egads! It's hard enough to find the jam when I know where the fridge is!
Comments closed July 22, 2007. |
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Heads in the Sand
also see: Live Free or Die Hard for the vital necessity of the F-35 for destroying Maryland highway overpasses.
Posted by right | July 8, 2007 1:18 PM