Originally Posted By: dkryan
And all of the giddiness over it's purported "cutting edge" stealth and technology is out the window when the Chinese or any other adversary swarm it with non stealth fighters at a 15 to 1 ratio.
F-35: over-priced underperformance.
And how, exactly, would you swarm it?
I mean this seriously...to swarm it, you need to have 1. knowledge of where the F-35s are flying, 2. fighters with sufficient range to get there and 3. enough fighters in the air to continue to defend the rest of your country at the same 15:1 ratio.
Stealth obviates condition 1. above and conditions 2. and 3. are simple math problems...that turn out to be impossible to satisfy given the size of most adversary nations.
Let's take a simple look at this: A US carrier is operating 300 miles from an adversary nation. They wish to strike the carrier, but know that the F-35s are flying. So, they send up their fighters to engage the F-35s before their attack planes shoot some form of anti-ship missile.
So, first question: where is the carrier? Let's say, for sake of discussion, that it's known within 300 miles (this is very unlikely, but let's give the bad guys some hope...). So, to engage a stealth airplane, you have to acquire it visually. A pilot with Chuck Yeager 20/10 vision can see a fighter at 20 miles...so, our adversary nation has to get 15 fighters within 20 miles of every F-35, right? Now, they're covering a 300 mile unknown area...and the F-35s fly in section (2 airplanes)...so, you've got to get 30 airplanes in the air every +/- 20 miles, or 30 airplanes in 8 spots along your unknown engagement area...so, you, adversary nation, are launching 240 airplanes to try and strike the carrier...
Now, at 300 miles from your coast, the only fighters you've got that can fly that far, engage in a serious all-aspect dogfight, and fly back are the newer models, like the SU-27. The older MiGs and interceptors don't have the combat radius or the weapons to be able to shoot the F-35...so, we're talking about a greater number of airplanes than any nation, save China and Russia, have in inventory for an attack.
The same problem exists in the reverse: defend your coast. If you wanted that 15:1 advantage, you would have to have those same 30 airplanes every 40 miles...and over several hundred miles of coast, you run out of airplanes quickly...
It's the principle of force concentration. Because the stealth airplane arrives quickly, and undetected, positioning sufficient forces to be able to intercept in overwhelming numbers becomes impossible.
The F-35 can hold any number of targets in the country at risk, because no country has enough fighters to put up a wall...all of the air defense systems in the world depend on radar to move their fighters in response to an attack...and those fighters are assumed to be equal in capability to the attackers.
Long range stealth fighters (not the F-117, that was an attack airplane) change the entire game.
Is the F-35 late? sure, and over budget, too...but that doesn't mean that it won't change the game once it's on board our carriers...It's not ideal for the close air support mission that has dominated our recent conflicts...but against a high-end adversary, in a hypothetical future conflict, it is far, far more capable than the airplanes that it is replacing...it truly will change the game of power projection.
