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GIVEN CURRENT WARS, F-35s ARE BETTER CHOICE THAN MORE F-22As
On Sat, 14 Jun 2008 20:16:45 -0700, tankfixer
wrote: In 1930 Germany was a semi stable democracy that was no danger to her neighbors. No one really believe she would be a danger again. Over the next ten years she build up her airforce and army to the point that by 1940 she had taken Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Back then a fighter or tank could be designed and produced in under a year. To suggest that any country can do that now is absurd. Not at all. Remember the Boeing Bird of Prey demonstrator? They did that plane in roughly a year. And going full scale development without a lot of change orders from Wright Patterson, they'd have been able to do in less than another year. Here's something for you to factor into your assessment. Back in 1960, Herman Kahn, of Hudson Institute, (Sort of an East Coast RAND Corporation) wrote a neat little book called On Thermonuclear War. One of the things that he noted, that I've always kept in mind, is that by 1960, the primary business of the Aircraft Industry wasn't designing and building airplanes-- it was research and development. Lots of paper studies, loads of really cool artwork, but if you really wanted to screw things up, tell em to build what they designed. You can, design airplanes fast. What it takes is shops where a designer can design, build and test a plane, (I've got Kelly Johnson's rules for operating a Skunk Works someplace and he is emphatic on the point) and then the builders need to be able to sell them so that they can build more planes. An aeronautical engineer these days gets to work on maybe one project, and because of an insanely long, twenty plus years long product development cycle, his experience stops there. And he doesn't get to design more than that because the business is R&D, not building and selling airplanes. The Air Force doesn't work that way, because Stewart Symington made the decision that the atomic bomb made the ability to maintain and expand aircraft manufacture in wartime, irrelevant. According to him and to subsequent generations of Air Force Generals, we go with what we have, and hopefully we win before we run out of goodies. The real world has pretty much invalidated that assumption. Unfortunately, we don't have the technological defense in depth that we once had, because of around sixty years of Merge & RIF as Air Force policy. What that means is that we buy boutique airplanes that are so expensive that we don't dare hazard them and if we do, we can't replace them when they're lost. And we can't in a timely way, replace aircraft that are irrelevant to our current situation because either conditions are changed or the situation estimate on which their specifications are based were found to be in error. The original B-17 was a coast defense weapon. By the time that the Air Force really got going over Germany, that plane was in the E model, was a virtually different airplane and was in expanded mass production. We can't do that anymore. We also can't supplement or replace planes that aren't relevant to our situation with new ones, and when we get a bad design, we're stuck with it, rather than shifting it off to some secondary job and replacing it with a better one, not least of which because our designer's bench is very, very short staffed. In the old days, when Donovan Berlin hit his slump, guys like Lee Atwood and Ed Heinemann and Kelly Johnson could pick up. And that kind of technological defense in depth is lost to us. So, in the meantime, we're stuck. And that's scary. If the F-22 and the F-35 turn out to be either bad or not what we need, what do we replace them with? Our current situation has us stuck going to war flying the Brewster Buffalo rather than using the Wildcat and developing the Hellcat. Its not just the individual platforms that are of concern here. We've got to change the way that we do business and get back to where we're in the business of designing and building and flying airplanes, not doing R&D and substituting paper studies for real world experience. Rumor has it that Boeing's Phantom Works is designing a new bomber as a private initiative to compete with something that Northrop's working on now. I hope that we encourage them and basically encourage everybody to get back to building and flying airplanes. Right now, the only place you see any activity like that is in the Drone & UAV business because the Air Force never got to set that end of the market in concrete. Hopefully what they're doing will spread to the manned aircraft game. In the meantime. I think that we can design and build combat capable aircraft in a year and that's a good time frame to aim for. It imposes some dicipline on the designers and forces them to look at flight hardware rather than paper studies and cool artwork. BTW, speaking of cool artwork, does anybody know where I can get an image of what the guys at Wright Patterson said that Burton's Blitzfighter was supposed to look like? -- "Implications leading to ramifications leading to shenanigans"-- Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, USN. |
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