Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said the new warplanes would send a strong message about America’s commitment to remaining a global leader in military aviation.
The new fighter jet, he said, “sends a very clear, direct message to our allies that we’re not going anywhere.”
What allies? Russia and Hungary?
But more seriously, the last thing Boeing needs is another project to fuck up. Maybe once they’re able to reliably design and build a commercial airliner, this would make some modicum of sense. Thing is, drones are the future of war (inasmuch as we should even want that), not fighter jets.
If only someone had warned us about the military-industrial complex at some point. This is the most clear-cut example in recent memory, with a sprinkling of presidential narcissism on top.
Quick folo … there’s a second read on Hegseth’s quote that is actually accurate regarding “we’re not going anywhere.” Appending “good” to the end would really nail it, but it’s not explicitly needed.
I disagree on the point that fighter jets are not part of the future. Drones are definitely going to play a larger role, but they still have major limitations that would need to be covered by a human in the loop. The near future seems to be trending towards a single manned fighter accompanied by a drone complement.
I do share your concern about Boeing getting the contract. And the fact that the current administration has effectively alienated all of our former allies.
The near future seems to be trending towards a single manned fighter accompanied by a drone complement.
To do … what, though? This plane won’t be flying for a decade if history is any indication, and costs will treble by the time it’s in service and wildly out of date. You can already use an F-35 with a platoon of drones, so I’m struggling to see what problem this vanity project solves, short of shunting money Boeing’s way and having a number Trump likes.
If Musk were serious about efficiency, this would immediately be shelved.
I see it as less of a vanity project and more just the usual forward march of technology. As you pointed out, fighter jets take a long time to develop. By the time you field the damn thing, a lot of fundamental aspects of the design might be out of date. There are probably a number of things the DoD learned with the F-35, or tech that just wasn’t ready in time for that program that they’d want to put on the next jet.
There are definitely broader questions about our willingness to spend this kind of money on war and reluctance to spend even a fraction of the same cost on anything that would directly help people. It always irritates me that the “it creates jobs,” or “it advances our science and technology” justifications are never applied to improving our infrastructure.
having a number Trump likes.
Can’t believe I didn’t notice that sooner. Man, that is fucked…
With the sort of satellite surveillance already deployed and the fine resolution, what use is a “stealthier” fighter jet? You can see the fucking thing coming from orbit, so deceiving radar is very much an outdated concept.
This is a solution perfectly suited to, at best, the aughts. One teeny temporal problem with that.
I remember a bumper sticker one of my elementary school teachers had, but likely not verbatim: It will be a great day when education is fully funded and the military has to hold a bake sale.
Don’t get me wrong; historically, military advancements have been the only thing that actually trickles down. Microwave ovens, usw. And we’d not have the internet without ARPA (don’t think it was DARPA yet), but a new fighter jet to take care of already 20-year-old needs now in 2037 isn’t going to present any benefits.
This is just corporate welfare for an incompetent company.
I hate to burst the bubble on the Elon Musk school of ‘what use is stealth when everyone has cameras’ way of thinking, but even neglecting that if you are in a conflict where you are using this sort of fighter jet then your satellites have been shot down by the enemy’s air force, satellite imagery and the laws of physics just doesn’t work that way outside of sifi.
The planet Earth is just too damn big for that sort of thing. The NEO can give you a decently high res photo of a place maybe several times a day, and even that means prioritizing using said satellite to look at that one single place on Earth.
More practically you get once or twice a day, with the resolution necessary to pick out a jet being limited to the small area you picked out ahead of time, and of course the enemy knows to within a half and hour or so when that picture is going to be taken.
AI guided TV missiles have been a thing since the 70s, and still remain only really practical for targets that can’t move very much. Little real world things like size of optics, stability of optics, resolution of optics, atmospheric distortion, cloudy days, night, mountains, horizons, etc, have kept this a non-answer to an unsolved physics problem for quite some time.
This isn’t to say that the military isn’t an incredibly good way of making public money disappear or that the US has it monitory priorities in order, but rather there is very much a reason that the Inspectors General report into this very project several months ago came back with Yes, this is the most cost effective solution for the military to achieve its goal of providing credible deterrence and preventing a war in the Asia Pacific region.
Moreover I would argue that the US has never lacked the money for healthcare or schools because of the military, and that if Trump desolved and fired the entire military tomorrow it would still not spend more on schools or healthcare. Rather I would argue that the US is ideologically driven to generally avoid taxing the people with all the money who own its leaders, it by and large does not want that money bring spent on things that benefit poor people, and many of its voters would rather burn the whole thing down than accept a dime going to a black or brown person.
I was referring to geostationary satellites. You get way more than once or twice a day.
You realize that even with a laws-of-physics-perfect-theoretical camera in order for a fighter jet to be even a single solitary pixel it would need a primary mirror well over twice as wide as the SpaceX “starship”, right?
Like launching a keyhole style satellite would require a Sea Dragon just for one pixel per ten by ten meter square.
I get that space is big and most people really don’t understand scale, but there is a reason that optical spy satellites are well below the ISS in some of the lowest stable orbits for such large satellites, about a hundred and twenty times closer than geostationary to orbit.
Suffice to say no one has come close to trying this, and it would be the wrong solution to the problem as compared to just throwing 100 times the money to the NRO and letting them throw up keyholes like they were cubesats, and that still would only get you limited areas every few minutes.
All of this doesn’t effect any of the other problems, like trying to get this imaging down to data centers, doing image recognition on such a massive data stream in near real time, or that it can be completely eliminated in a half hour with a few old fighter jets and some of the anti-satellite missiles everyone down to India has whole stockpiles of.
That’s fair. This is an area where I have no expertise, just the limited knowledge from online coverage of satellites. I’d been left with the impression imagery and transmission are more advanced than they are. I’ll stop talking out of my ass now!
It’s worth noting that this project for a F22 replacement has been known to be in development for quite a while now, so this is less a Trump thing than someone at the Pentagon pulling him aside and changing the name to make it less likely he will kill it when Putin or Xi Jinping remember they can just ask him to and he will.
Here is an excellent as always Perun summery on the US, EU, etc projects as of a month ago, but basically it doesn’t matter how good the F22 is over the pasific if China just shoots down all your tankers and carriers from well out of range, so it’s high time for a pasific range capable fighter.
Shame it’s going to Boeing though.
Thank you for the context. Given the speed of military, this actually makes a lot of sense. And given Trump’s ego, of course he had to make it sound like his idea.
I see Trumps plane turning out like this:
