What's going on in India?

[Smitty-48]

HM F-35B Sea Panther operating off of HMS QE

The RN packing more capability into one ship than it had in the entire task force in 1982, by orders of magnitude.

And they go from Harrier, the most unsafe jet in the world, to fully automated STOVL point and click landing.



The Brits have gone from not being able to shut the airport down at Port Stanley in 1982, to being able to completely shut Buenos Aires down naow.

[Smitty-48]

I would actually go so far as to assert that HMS Queen Elizabeth with F-35B Sea Panther, could arguably close with and destroy the combined air and naval forces of South America writ large, never mind Argentina.

It puts the Royal Navy in the big leagues with the American Expeditionary Strike Groups, in one fell swoop.

Despite being vastly smaller, due to technological over match, UK Forces haven't been this powerful in real terms, since 1945.

[Smitty-48]

HMS Queen Elizabeth and the Sea Panthers, by the way, are in the South China Sea with the US Navy, enforcing freedom of navigation against Chinese Communist aggression, America empowering allies to roll in the big leagues with the US Navy for the win.

This is why they call it the Joint Strike Fighter, Joint being the part where it is totally seamless operations between America and her most stalwart allies.

[C-Mag]

[StCapps]

Pissin' the night away..... Pissin' the night away.....

[StCapps]

Kathleen Wynne's Clone Knows.

[Smitty-48]

When I was a young fit thoroughbred I was a lightweight, six pints put me under the table.

Now that I am a grizzled old man, I can drink a whole bottle of whiskey in one sitting without even missing a beat.

[Speaker to Animals]

The F-35 was billed as a fighter jet that could do almost everything the U.S. military desired, serving the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy – and even Britain’s Royal Air Force and Royal Navy – all in one aircraft design. It’s supposed to replace and improve upon several current – and aging – aircraft types with widely different missions. It’s marketed as a cost-effective, powerful multi-role fighter airplane significantly better than anything potential adversaries could build in the next two decades. But it’s turned out to be none of those things.The Conversation

Officially begun in 2001, with roots extending back to the late 1980s, the F-35 program is nearly a decade behind schedule, and has failed to meet many of its original design requirements. It’s also become the most expensive defense program in world history, at around US$1.5 trillion before the fighter is phased out in 2070.

The unit cost per airplane, above $100 million, is roughly twice what was promised early on. Even after President Trump lambasted the cost of the program in February, the price per plane dropped just $7 million – less than 7 percent.

And yet, the U.S. is still throwing huge sums of money at the project. Essentially, the Pentagon has declared the F-35 “too big to fail.” As a retired member of the U.S. Air Force and current university professor of finance who has been involved in and studied military aviation and acquisitions, I find the F-35 to be one of the greatest boondoggles in recent military purchasing history.

This part is fucking devastating:

The company building the F-35 has made grand claims. Lockheed Martin said the plane would be far better than current aircraft – “four times more effective” in air-to-air combat, “eight times more effective” in air-to-ground combat and “three times more effective” in recognizing and suppressing an enemy’s air defenses. It would, in fact, be “second only to the F-22 in air superiority.” In addition, the F-35 was to have better range and require less logistics support than current military aircraft. The Pentagon is still calling the F-35 “the most affordable, lethal, supportable, and survivable aircraft ever to be used.”

But that’s not how the plane has turned out. In January 2015, mock combat testing pitted the F-35 against an F-16, one of the fighters it is slated to replace. The F-35A was flown “clean” with empty weapon bays and without any drag-inducing and heavy externally mounted weapons or fuel tanks. The F-16D, a heavier and somewhat less capable training version of the mainstay F-16C, was further encumbered with two 370-gallon external wing-mounted fuel tanks.

In spite of its significant advantages, the F-35A’s test pilot noted that the F-35A was less maneuverable and markedly inferior to the F-16D in a visual-range dogfight.

Fucking insane:

In other radar frequencies, the F-35 is not so stealthy, making it vulnerable to being tracked and shot down using current – and even obsolete – weapons. As far back as 1999 the same type of stealth technology was not able to prevent a U.S. Air Force F-117 flying over Kosovo from being located, tracked and shot down using an out-of-date Soviet radar and surface-to-air missile system. In the nearly two decades since, that incident has been studied in depth not only by the U.S., but also by potential adversaries seeking weaknesses in passive radar stealth aircraft.

So even fucking mongrels apparently can shoot it down.

Other analysts weigh in on this dumpster fire:

Lockheed Martin and the Pentagon say the F-35’s superiority over its rivals lies in its ability to remain undetected, giving it “first look, first shot, first kill.” Hugh Harkins, a highly respected author on military combat aircraft, called that claim “a marketing and publicity gimmick” in his book on Russia’s Sukhoi Su-35S, a potential opponent of the F-35. He also wrote, “In real terms an aircraft in the class of the F-35 cannot compete with the Su-35S for out and out performance such as speed, climb, altitude, and maneuverability.”

Other critics have been even harsher. Pierre Sprey, a cofounding member of the so-called “fighter mafia” at the Pentagon and a co-designer of the F-16, calls the F-35 an “inherently a terrible airplane” that is the product of “an exceptionally dumb piece of Air Force PR spin.” He has said the F-35 would likely lose a close-in combat encounter to a well-flown MiG-21, a 1950s Soviet fighter design. Robert Dorr, an Air Force veteran, career diplomat and military air combat historian, wrote in his book “Air Power Abandoned,” “The F-35 demonstrates repeatedly that it can’t live up to promises made for it. … It’s that bad.”

That one is full of links to other references if you click through to the article.

How did the F-35 go from its conception as the most technologically advanced, do-it-all military aircraft in the world to a virtual turkey? Over the decades-long effort to meet a real military need for better aircraft, the F-35 program is the result of the merging or combination of several other separate and diverse projects into a set of requirements for an airplane that is trying to be everything to everybody.

In combat the difference between winning and losing is often not very great. With second place all too often meaning death, the Pentagon seeks to provide warriors with the best possible equipment. The best tools are those that are tailor-made to address specific missions and types of combat. Seeking to accomplish more tasks with less money, defense planners looked for ways to economize.

So it's basically the Justin Trudeau of aircraft.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... e-fighter/

[Speaker to Animals]

From now on it is known as the F-35 Trudeau. LMFAO

[Smitty-48]

From now on you are known as Winslow Wheeler Mother Jones Peak Liberal, who knew?