New contender for costliest paper weight in history…
Yes, they more or less are are, to radar. The thumbnail is of an infrared image. If you’re close up enough to do this and prepared they can still be shot down.
The trick is just getting that to happen. Consider how many F-35s right above them the Iranians haven’t shot down.
Aircraft aren’t uniformly hot like that in a FLIR image either. So, take that how you want.
Not to say there haven’t been hits, the US confirmed it, it just certainly didn’t look like this.
I’m wondering if the F-35 isn’t like the AI bubble, a con by companies to swindle public money
Just the F-35s? The entire defense industry is about swindling public money. That’s why they spend hundreds of millions per year on lobbying and political influence in the US.
The defense budget is very overblown, but some is actually needed for not getting ragged around.
The USS Gerald R. Ford was officially taken out by a “laundry fire”, and to make matters worse, Iran is claiming to have struck the USS Abraham Lincoln, forcing that carrier to also withdraw.
In a country of misinformation like the USA who knows what to believe.
There’s a LOT of angry US troops who were minding their business keeping the peace when suddenly, Trump illegally told them to go to War - no Congress, no balance of powers.
Maybe Iranians did it. Maybe US soldiers elected to accidentally cause a accident forcing their battleships to leave.
I have to keep correcting this. There’s nothing illegal (in US law) about the executive branch unilaterally attacking another country. Congress has been shifting authority over to the Executive for decades, and presidents have been doing it for the last few decades at least. (See Obama’s drone strikes)
The president is required by law to notify Congress within 90 days and request additional funding.
It’s Immoral and a tremendously bad idea to let any one person decide to kill hundreds of people, but in this case it’s not illegal.
Well at least we know Wonder Woman wasn’t flying that fucking thing
I mean, no stealth aircraft is truly invisible, or the pilots and maintenance men wouldn’t be able to see them either. These days, machine vision has improved to the point that if a human can see them, a properly-trained computer likely can too. Set up a network of drones with cameras, and anything less than perfect optical camouflage is going to be of limited value. Radar isn’t the only thing you have to worry about anymore.
This is known as “optronics” in military applications, FWIW. I don’t know if anyone is using it for target discovery yet, but optronic guidance to a known target is a thing.
Radar is nice in that it and works under all kinds of conditions (like through clouds) and can have very long range, but there definitely are other sensors that are making their way onto the battlefield. Passive audio sensors have been a huge success in Ukraine, for example. Sending out a radar pulse also draws all the wrong kind of attention.
6th gen fighters probably won’t bother with anything except hiding at this rate, and the battlefield might be so transparent by then nobody will make a 7th. The “blue skies” will just be where various unmanned projectiles pass through.
I think most people know Stealth to mean invisible to Radar, not to the human eye. The F35 is obviously going to be seeable once you have human eyes on it. The idea is targeting systems and long range equipment would not pick it up. But Iran has proved that to be false it seems.
No, the engineers knew it would be visible like anything else, because they’re not completely stupid. A lot of stuff still relies on radar, though, and other frequencies and tools can have limitations, like in range or “does-it-work-in-rain”. Consider how many F-35s made it over Iran safe and sound.
Presumably they’re as sneaky as possible in other ways as well, although at some point it’s still a jet plane.
I think you missed the comment I replied to
Yeah, sorry, that’s wasn’t very clear. I think I was in too many parallel discussions about this at once.
What I mean is just that the designers absolutely did know other sensors could and would be used for targeting. It’s jut a question of how much that lowers survivability, exactly. The amount of traffic over Iran indicates it’s still good, because radar is still the main game in town.
Yeah, stealth is relative until we get StarTrek cloaking devices :)
an anti-establishment, working class perspective
It’s interesting to see the proliferation of these “anti-imperialist” propaganda mills seemingly imitating the successful model of grift made famous by the alt right. They’ve nothing to say about socialism, but spend all their energy on emotional appeals to get people focusing on how bad the bad guys are based on the most attention-grabbing news headlines they can find or invent. It’s so carefully designed to provoke dissent, distrust, and polarization with only the barest pretense of being about anything more substantial or constructive.
This one doesn’t have much to do with Canada. Even those of us who aren’t professional military analysts should probably find better sources to inform our opinions on the martial capabilities of different kinds of ridiculously expensive airplanes.
What better reason to buy Gripen instead.
They’re not even the same role. I know nations are making that trade. I think replacing a multirole jet with an interceptor says more about your priorities changing than the weapon platforms themselves. With the threat of a Russian invasion it makes sense to switch priorities to affordable interceptors.
Yeah, so about that stealth…
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a29307410/radar-tracking-f-35/
And that’s not new news, that was in 2018.
