"The F-22 does better air-to-groud than anybody than the F-35," Carlisle said, "and the F-35 does air-to-air better than anything in the world except the F-22."---
Cuckoo in the nest--U.S. DOD DOT&E F-35 report is out
USAFs F-35 procurement plan is not believable
4 comments:
Was Carlisle drunk when he gave that quote? It's not even coherent.
Anyway, maybe not so much stupid as 'bought.'
-mike j
To follow up on what mike j said, there were at least 2 separate seriously failed quotes in that piece. Yikes.
Either there was a major 'beverage induced'? glitch on the editor's side on this article, lol, or indeed if that was verbatim, then such a high ranking official under such influence should not have been speaking with any reporters on the side. Should have been just giving the thumbs up, saying he'll get in touch.
There are so many misleading statements, factual errors, conflicting claims and plain lies in what Carlisle say in this article that it is difficult to know where to begin.
So he the states the USAF is re-assessing the numbers of fighters it needs, but remains committed to the full buy of 1763, and will continue to operate the full compliment of F-22's. So which is it? You are assessing whether you need the full number, require less, or maybe need more? So whichever is the outcome why are you saying you are committed to taking the full amount of F-35 if you are still reviewing the number and (presumably) dont know what the outcome of said review will be?
And then of course we get to the whole delayed purchase issue. So you delay purchase of airframes because (Shoosh,... dont mention the Elephant in the room) of design and production immaturity and that either pushes out the time span of your production run or it means you need to purchase more airframes per year in later years. Problem is the USAF cant afford even the original per annum production figures and that was assuming the now ridiculously low production cost per airframe which we all know is no longer near relevant. And it gets worse. Because you have now pushed out your production to later years inflation will eat even further into your per airframe cost and there is no sign or reason to think that per airframe costs will go down, nor can you rely on production maturity to reduce costs. If you take a look at the example of contemporary airframes you can see it just doesn't happen. Look at the production cost of a Block 50/52 F-16 from the early years and look at it now, the dollars have gone up not down, sure some systems have improved or been added but it illustrates the point that the production cost has not gone down for the F-16 and neither will it for the F-35. The only example where production costs have declined is with the F/A18-E/F, but that is only because of multi year buys and close adherence to the baseline configuration. Something you simply will not get with the F-35 due to it's design immaturity and seemingly insurmountable engineering problems.
The most likely scenario, delayed airframes will spike in cost massively in the delayed years to the point where $200 million per airframe or more will not be beyond belief by which point the entire program will be halted.
Now as for Carlisle's claims about the F-35 being better than anything but the F-22 in air to air and better than anything in air to ground, this is a remarkably stupid statement. Even fans of the F-35 cannot argue against the fact that the final capability of the F-35 is at this stage simply unknown. Which means such claims are simply baseless until proven therefore should not be canvassed publicly by such a high official, particularly one who is slated to take over the Pacific command. If that is the kind of analysis he brings to such an important post, then that is worrisome.
Did anyone just see Lateline on ABC.? A Brookings Institute analyst just called into question how the US will no know how many F-35's it will need in 15 or so years given the advance of robotic aircraft. Very apt given this thread.
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