6th-gen fighter disaster on the horizon

6th Gen Fighter in the future?

We have more talk of 6th gen fighter aircraft coming. You may now mark on your calendar (by year) the funding that will be put into this.

Aside from the religious group over at SLD, you can go over there and get some guffaws on this latest effort, there are a lot of problems still to face for past, present and future.

5th gen funding (even though the F-35 is no 5th gen fighter), has monopolized tac-air road maps for all services interested in such a thing.

Many kinds of upgrades of current aircraft have been delayed or cancelled.

For good.

USAF claims they need to fund F-35 sustainment by ending the A-10: even if there is no moral justification.

F-22 production was cancelled, in part, because it competed with F-35 funding.

The USAF retired a bunch of F-15's, F-16s and A-10s ... to make ends meet...

...so as to feed Vaal.

And, the F-35, will likely get shot down vs. emerging (and some existing) threats.

Stealth aircraft, to date, have not proven to be affordable to operate.

This is OK IF they bring such war winning power that you only need a few of them. The F-35 is so faulty that it doesn't qualify as a credible stealth aircraft.

You get all of the big funding for stealth aircraft...with none of the operational benefit.

One of the principal reasons which justifies the additional design and maintenance expenditures on stealth aircraft is that significant economies can be produced by using all aspect stealthy penetration techniques – only the aircraft carrying bombs to strike targets need to be deployed, and a minimum of supporting aircraft are then necessary, with munitions expenditures limited to the bombs required to do the job. The SDD Joint Strike Fighter with its impaired stealth cannot use this strategy, and the operational economics are thus degraded to those of legacy aircraft, but still incurring nearly all of the cost burdens of a proper all aspect stealth design.

So, as the USMC pushes their legacy F-18s to the year 2030... and maybe even ditto with the Harrier (all though that date varies by year to year)... the taxpayer is being asked to fund another development project for a super combat aircraft.

Note that the requirement that was crafted for the F-35 and was signed off on at the beginning of the last decade, is obsolete. It assumed hundreds of F-22s to do the heavy work, and that the threat would be broken down post Cold War aircraft. It also assumed that F-35s would start to be fielded in 2007 (or just a bit later).

So, the DOD is lousy at creating a requirement.

It is lousy at communicating with vendors.

The revolving door of the military industrial congressional complex keeps the money flowing on big projects and gets out the word that they are 'too big to fail'.

Service chiefs looking for post retirment jobs sing along.

The constant is that whatever the 6th requirement is, it will be flawed. The finances will be wrong, the threat projections will be wrong (it might not be able to deal with a numberous and "good enough" threat) , the suitability in other areas will be wrong and the schedule will be the usual wink, wink.

I wish our enemies would be this easy to defeat.

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