Great, Switzerland is about to buy 36 of these and are being hoodwinked into thinking they are getting them at a bargain price. Somehow the F35 went from the most expensive compared to its previous generation competitors to the cheapest. There are accounting shenanigans going on here.
I also don't get the point of having a stealth aircraft. We are neutral as in this will be used for defense in the most extreme case and that is it. So it will fly in Swiss airspace hiding from Swiss ground troops? If we have enemies on our soil we have bigger problems than a stealth aircraft would solve.
Stealth lets you operate much more surviveably in contested airspace. If you're a small nation and your threat model includes a bigger one and you're rich enough to afford it the short takeoff versions are pretty attractive.
Do you think military planes or even personal carriers are always at 100%? 90%? 80%? How long do you think it takes to overhaul an one of their engines?
It looks like the F-22 had something around 50% mission ready.[1] Not to mention a Hurricane messed their training place up pretty bad (as well as my beach house).
A classmate in college was in the Airforce and it took something like 10 hours to software upgrade an F-22 and it was likely to fail the first time.
If you look at the requirements set by the Whitehouse in 2019 it said the goal was 80% for F-22, F-35, F-15, and F-16. I presume the F-35, along with the others, was able to meet it.
Just remembered a supercar maker also has a retry mechanism in their assembly line for flashing their roms. Shouldnt occupants of such vehicles be afraid of the fickle computers?
The main difference between the supercar makers and Toyota is that Toyota has enough scale to justify automating the retries and implement an inventory system that lets them flash the ECUs before they get to the line and then pair the right ECU up with the right car.
Bigger automakers don't magically have smarter engineers or access to magical materials and chips (despite what internet comments may lead you to believe). They just have to do some things differently because of the scale they operate at.
The importance of redundancy and backup alternatives in any major project:
"It is worth remembering too, of course, that the F-35 enterprise almost had an alternative engine to the F135. However, the General Electric/Rolls-Royce F136 turbofan was deemed to be an unnecessary expense and was eventually canceled in 2011, when the project was over 80 percent complete. With the benefit of hindsight, it can well be imagined that an alternative source of engines would be very valuable right now."
Perhaps that would have just made it even more expensive, like these projects that want to abstract away the database just inches the customer wants to switch from SQL Server to Oracle.
It's concerning because the 15% is primarily driven by an unexpected flaw in the engine.
As estimated in the article, the hoped for engine-less rate (driven purely by maintenance cycles) would be ~5%.
Also as noted in linked to articles, the mission capable rates (MCR) had increased from 62 percent in FY2019 to 76% in FY20202, and that was a big deal. At 76%, the F-35 had the highest MCR in the USAF fleet (the legacy airfames were all sitting around 70%). With the engine problems, we can estimate that it's could be knocked back down to ~60-65% (though obviously there are probably ways to shuffle engines around to reduce the impact somewhat), bringing it back to the bottom of the pack (well, F-22 is below it at like 50%... but whatever).
More and more i am convinced the United State military would be completely incapable of handling a prolonged conflict with a peer enemy. Of course an actual peer enemy conflict would almost certainly escalate to a nuclear war if either side thought they were about to lose.
Bombers flying towards the political capital = launch the nukes.
Navy sunk and the enemy is setting up a blockade = maybe we'll go be north Korea instead of giving up existence here.
Both sides burn through all their high tech armaments and don't have enough to really keep fighting = truce for 3 years so we can build more shit for the next war.
Depends on the country. A blockade for some countries would be basically death due to food imports being absolutely necessary. So they would probably start with lobbing nukes at the blockade which would likely escalate to nukes getting dropped on cities. If China for instance couldn't beat the US Navy and the Navy started blockading, a nuclear response on a carrier group starts looking attractive.
A country like US that can (for now) basically feed itself might have different lose conditions, though an effective blockade on a country like the US seems like it would require most of the world refusing to trade in any case.
There is also the egos of the various leaders at play. All it takes for example is a US president that decides he wont be the one who lost WW3 and decides that the other side will blink and let him/her get away with a first strike. For countries with unstable leadership this might even work! If you can take out for example Putin right off the bat, would whoever is next in charge want to get revenge for him if the Americans/Chinese/whoever reach out to the successor and offer them a sweetheart deal? after all accepting the deal means the world wont end....
