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Reply With QuoteBecause the Allies need planes too.
I think the F-35 is a damn good aircraft, matched only by the F-22.
What I do not understand, is why develope F-35?
F-22s currently costs around 130-200Million a piece, and that is with 380 jets.
I am sure, if F-22s were ordered in numbers of 1,000-2,000s, it's price would drop enough to match the F-35's price.
Sure, F-35 can fill in other roles better, such as naval, air support, etc. But can't the F-22 be adapted for similar purposes?
We have seen light weight, ground based fighters being transformed into a heavy weight naval fighter before, in the YF-17 to F-18.
Doesn't this make more sense, cost wise, than to build an entirely new bird?
Don't get me wrong, I love the F-35 and its sexy curves, but I just don't see why it is here.
Because the Allies need planes too.
Chimo
I could not disagree more.Originally Posted by avon1944
Our generation's McNamara was most definitely Donald Henry Rumsfeld.
The same guy that casually dismissed General Eric Shinseki's no-brainer observation that it would take several hundred thousand troops to secure post-war Iraq.
Gates on the other hand, has proven to be a superb SecDef. He's made the tough decisions that need to be made, swung the axe on the programs and senior leadership that needed to be axed.
Even the Obama Administration thought enough of him to keep him on the job.
But the F-22 cannot replace all the aircraft that the f-35 does. And you would have an Air Force that has 1 tactical airplane.
That falls into the realm of "Myth that won't die".We have seen light weight, ground based fighters being transformed into a heavy weight naval fighter before, in the YF-17 to F-18.
The F-18 did not share a single essential dimension or primary structure with the YF-17. It was a completely new aircraft.
Want to see a shining example of a ground based fighter turned into a naval fighter? Look no further than the F-111.
And good luck designing that VTOL F-22. In addition what do you do years down the line when something grounds the entire fleet of F-22s? That zeros out your nations air power.
And its not as uncommon as you think. The F-15 fleet gets grounded, F-16 does the same. All do after a major accident for safety reasons.
I think there's no getting around that Gates was the one who drove a stake in its heart and is then nailing the coffin shut.
Their jobs were on the line.Not what the COS said before Congress not to long ago. They say they have enough.
CQ Politics | Top Air Force General Calls Current F-22 Plan ?High Risk?
What this sounds like to me is that there was a "judgement call" made at a level above the ACC.Gen. John D.W. Corley, the four-star chief of Air Combat Command at Langley Air Force Base, Va., wrote a letter to Sen. Saxby Chambliss , R-Ga., about the impact of Obama and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates ’ decision to limit the number of F-22s in the U.S. inventory to 187.
“In my opinion, a fleet of 187 F-22s puts execution of our current national military strategy at high risk in the near to mid term,” Corley wrote in the June 9 correspondence. “To my knowledge, there are no studies that demonstrate that 187 F-22s are adequate to support our national military strategy.”
I was not aware that anything had been carried through. Would appreciate links to an article.One of the first things that Obama did was contract reform. Part of the plan is to eliminate Cost+ and no bid contracts.
From a cost reduction stand point, it seems to me that the current contracting system and purchasing strategies are fundamentally problematic, from the phase at which requirements are formed all the way onto the annual battle for Congressional appropriations. Cost+ contracts and no bid contracts are not the fundamental problem. Just eliminating them could even increase costs due to the extra administrative costs involved in competing contracts.That will help. Give them time. Its been a mess since the 1980s, takes more than 6 months to clean it up.
It seems that reforming procurement effectively would require a Goldwater-Nichols level effort. There seems to be neither the vision nor the political will at this point to even put it on the agenda during this President's first term. For example, Aviation Week recently had an op-ed criticizing the piece-meal way in which effects on the defense industrial base are (not) incorporated into purchasing decisions. These are not good signs.
By necessity, extensive studies will need to proceed such actions and procurement probably needs to be reviewed in conjunction with war fighting strategy. The next opportunity is the QDR. I guess we will see.
Last edited by citanon; 26 Jul 09, at 20:27.
The F-18 did have the misfortune to share the YF-17's "prototype" fuel capacity for some reason. :(
But, it didn't. Take several hundred thousand troops, that is. Rumsfeld said he was way off, and he was. He seriously lowballed it, but Shinseki seriously highballed it.
I enjoy being wrong too much to change my mind.
But, it did.
Otherwise you get a chaotic, bloody and wasteful aftermath in the short-term and a drawn-out protracted even more bloody insurgency in the long-term.
Perhaps Shinseki overestimated, but I don't believe that subsequent events even slightly justify characterizing it as a "highball" estimate, and certainly not "seriously".
To be sure, there were other extremely serious mistakes made, (several of which can be laid at the feet of Rumsfeld and his cronies) but with sufficient numbers of troops, the effects could have been muted.
In any case, the subject here is Donald Rumsfeld, not Eric Shinseki.
F-4U Corsair, Seafire, Mig29K, SU-33 it can be done an done effectively.
AG,
can you really deny the US would have been far better off with Shinseki's highball? in the end, with US allies included, it was almost "several hundred thousand troops". tactical/operational military planning is, at its core, conservative-- you always assume the enemy is intelligent, has capabilities you don't know about, etc, and you factor that in to your own calculations with plenty of leeway.But, it didn't. Take several hundred thousand troops, that is. Rumsfeld said he was way off, and he was. He seriously lowballed it, but Shinseki seriously highballed it.
rumsfeld's mistake was to look at US overwhelming strategic advantage and press for that to be included tactically/operationally, ie he assumed the enemy was stupid and on the verge of breaking down, thus allowing the US to get away with fighting the war on the cheap. didn't quite work out that way.
The human mind cannot grasp the causes of phenomena in the aggregate. But the need to find these causes is inherent in man’s soul. And the human intellect, without investigating the multiplicity and complexity of the conditions of phenomena, any one of which taken separately may seem to be the cause, snatches at the first, the most intelligible approximation to a cause, and says: “This is the cause!"
-Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace
I think he decision to disband the Iraqi Army and de-Baathify the government was a significant factor in how things played out. If the Iraqi Army was kept in tact and Baath Party workers kept their jobs, Iraq might have been more stable even with significantly lower troop numbers.
More on the supposed "studies" cited by Gates:
David Fulghum blog post.
Suspect Reports Form Basis for F-22 Cuts
Posted by David A. Fulghum at 7/15/2009 8:30 AM CDT
Some senior officials at the Pentagon are apparently exaggerating the factual underpinnings of “studies” that Defense Secretary Rober Gates and others have used as justification for stopping F-22 production at 187 aircraft, according to Air Force Magazine’s John Tirpak, a friend and former Aviation Week editor.
He uncovered in conversations with Pentagon top spokesman Geoff Morrell that the study – presented in Congressional testimony as definitive analysis – was actually a melding of two “work products” that were little more than briefings.
JCS vice chairman, Gen. James Cartwright, told Congress last week that a study the JSC and Air Force partnered on recommended 187 Raptors instead of the 243 that the Air Force stated was a minimum.
“ ‘What I think General Cartwright was referring to … is two different work products’ – one by the PA&E shop and one by the Air Force – ‘and not so much a study,’ “ Tirpak quotes Morrell as saying. The spokesman went on to confirm that they didn’t amount to formal studies.
Despite assurances by Cartwright to SASC chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich) that the studies would be provided, Morrell says they have not been dispatched to Capitol Hill. Also missing in the mail is a response to the 2007 demand – to be provided within a year – for a comprehensive tacair plan that would specifically explain how the number of F-22s had been determined, according to various members of Congress.
The only name on that list that truly deserves to be there is the Seafire and that's a 65+ year old piston aircraft.
F4U Corsair was a naval fighter from start to finish, with a side trip to land bases whilst her carrier problems were solved.
The MiG-29K and Su-33 are both unproven in sustained real-world carrier ops, particularly the MiG.
Exactly.
Rumsfeld was most definitely this generation's McNamara: A guy that wanted numbers to be crunched, pennies to be pinched and beans to be lovingly counted...in other words, run a gigantic high-stakes military operation like a business, on the cheap...a time-honored recipe for disaster.
Those are some of the "other mistakes" I mentioned, but those Iraqi army troops and policemen would have needed a lot of oversight...hence the need for far more troops than originally programmed.
What do the Mig-29K, F-14, F/A-18, A-4, F-4, F-8, A-7, A-6 all have in common? None of them were born proven designs. It took real world carrier ops to prove them. Saying the Mig 29K is not a ground based jet come naval fighter when the Indians have accepted them as such is a poor argument in my view.
Russian designers are very good. The Su-33 has been flying from carriers since 1995. There is no reason to believe the Mig-29 will be any less successful. if the US wanted to,it could make an F-22N.
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