• Frank [he/him, he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Yeah. Most of our stuff dates from the late cold war. The US has never made a successful radar guided SPAAG successfully and relies on jury-rigging Stinger MANPADS for everything. All of our APCs suck. Neither the Army nor the Marines want Abrahms but congress keeps buying them to keep the factories open. The F-35 is supposed to control a bunch of drones that afaik don't exist. It supposedly has the radar signature of a honeybee but who knows what that's worth in a near-peer combat environment. The F114 or whatever stealth fighter was sneaky as hell, except it took the same path every night so the Serbs(?) Just waited along it's route and shoved a cheap anti-aircraft missile up it's jet exhaust. And my understanding is that the F-35s supply chain is a dysfunctional bureaucratic mess, so each one is functionally irreplacable due to parts shortage even ignoring the up front cost.

    If the F-35 isn't as invisible as advertised the US's is going to have real trouble in any remotely conventional war. War nerds also seem unreasonably confident in the US's ability to shoot down every single hypersonic anti-ship missile 100% of the time without letting a single one get through to kill or disable an aircraft carrier.

    • Dull_Juice [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      The US has never made a successful radar guided SPAAG successfully and relies on jury-rigging Stinger MANPADS for everything.

      Explains why their SPAAG options suck in Wargame: Red Dragon. Makes me wonder about the CIWS on naval ships.

      If the F-35 isn’t as invisible as advertised the US’s is going to have real trouble in any remotely conventional war.

      Yeah, pretty sure it was Venezuela that used a Chinese Radar to spot and yell at an F-35 violating their airspace. There's probably other instances as well, but that leads me to believe on top of its myriad of other issues like the auto ordering spare part supply chain issue its DOA.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        CIWS seems to work great on low and slow stuff like mortar rounds and various cheap rockets but that's a very different thing from stopping hypersonic missiles that can maneuver right up until impact.

        If it turns out that th F-35 isn't invisible to the radar wavelengths used by our designated enemies i will give up and admit we're living in a Peter Sellers dark comedy.

        • DefinitelyNotAPhone [he/him]
          ·
          1 year ago

          Didn't China and Russia both design their most recent radar systems specifically around avoiding using the wavelengths that stealth planes operate within?

          • Dull_Juice [he/him]
            ·
            1 year ago

            I know Russia and China have been working on it, and in an article I found on the Venezuelan thing I saw this comment:

            F-22 can be detected by advanced radar systems, particularly those with long wavelengths, meaning it is far from unthinkable that the JY-27 did so

        • Dull_Juice [he/him]
          ·
          1 year ago

          Apparently it was the F-22 actually, which is apparently supposed to be stealthier than the F-35.

        • a_party_german [comrade/them]
          ·
          1 year ago

          If it turns out that th F-35 isn’t invisible to the radar wavelengths used by our designated enemies i will give up and admit we’re living in a Peter Sellers dark comedy.

          Funny how you correctly diagnose all the insanities of American propaganda in your posts above and then imply that the F-35 will be "invisible" in any way. At best, it's "low-ovservable" in a few scenarios and wavelengths, like when going up against 70s radar technology, but of course that such a rare scenario these days and the F-35 is just such a piece of dog shit in general that I wouldn't really quote any favorable quality of this MIC abomination.

          But yeah, I liked your comment about American SPAAG - makes me want to read up the insane testing antics they employed with the Sergeant York SPAAG (M247 I believe?)