Test Pilot: the F-35 Can't Dogfight 843
schwit1 sends this report from the War Is Boring column:
A test pilot has some very, very bad news about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The pricey new stealth jet can't turn or climb fast enough to hit an enemy plane during a dogfight or to dodge the enemy's own gunfire, the pilot reported following a day of mock air battles back in January. And to add insult to injury, the JSF flier discovered he couldn't even comfortably move his head inside the radar-evading jet's cramped cockpit. "The helmet was too large for the space inside the canopy to adequately see behind the aircraft." That allowed the F-16 to sneak up on him. The test pilot's report is the latest evidence of fundamental problems with the design of the F-35 — which, at a total program cost of more than a trillion dollars, is history's most expensive weapon. Your tax dollars at work.
Drone It (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only that, but no artificial limit to g. No pilot to keep conscious.
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Informative)
The F-35's wings are too small for the mass of the plane. It can't pull enough G's to black out a pilot.
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Funny)
It was built to fly in the dense atmosphere of Venus. Or maybe it's actually a submarine (like 007's Lotus). It will pull lots of g's when it hits the water. Remember, it's a secret weapon.
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Here [wikia.com] are the real specs.
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Insightful)
I actually just made it up. Of course it can black out a pilot. I just wanted to see what score I would get.
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps, though to be fair, much of this can be worked around (for how much? Tons o cash, eh?)
It's fairly standard that smaller/slower aircraft are very often more agile than the bigger boys - you just have to find the aircraft's strengths and play to those. For instance, the tiny T-35/F5 can commonly out-maneuver an F-15... at lower altitudes. At higher altitudes, the F-15 handles itself better in the thinner air of the upper stratosphere.
The F-16 is more than agile in lower altitudes, because it was built to be a combination air/air air/ground fighter, which leads me to believe that maybe these dogfights were conducted at lower altitudes... I am also curious (haven't looked) as to what the flight/fight profile of the F-35 is in the first place. if it's Air Superiority, then that usually means higher altitudes where there may be a better advantage. Anything else appears to be a whole lot of incompetence in design.
All that said, they had to know there were going to be compromises when doing the whole stealth (maneuverability) and STOL/VTOL (engine power) thing.
Or, best bet may be to scrap the damn thing and hold a competition for an aircraft that's worth a damn, and this time make the entrants build a working prototype *first*, without any governmental money up front... like they did in the old days.
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Informative)
Waitaminute, Congressman. Why would I fund your campaign, if you're not going to vote to give the public's money to me? I thought we had a deal: you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Drone It (Score:4, Interesting)
that's the GDP of Australia you're talking about, I think it's a bit of a world changer for about twenty three million 'Roos.
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Interesting)
Current planes are much superior at fighting World War 2, where dogfighting at speed was the norm.
For future wars it's not quite so clear. The last time we engaged in any real dogfights was Vietnam. The Iraqis, who had the planes to dogfight us in the first war, fled to Iran because they figured they'd die of massed missile fire before they got into cannon range.
The theory behind F-35 is that it's virtually impossible to detect, and we have the electronic warfare capabilities to detect anything anyone else actually has. That means that F-35 should be able to fly around at Mach 1.6 with being targeted by the enemy (who don't even know where it is), while firing off it's missiles whenever an enemy aircraft gets into range. It's more a submarine or cloaked starship then a fighter craft. If it works it'll revolutionize aerial warfare and instantly make every Air Force in the world obsolete. Especially the one belonging to Vladimir Putin.
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Interesting)
Especially the one belonging to Vladimir Putin.
I wonder how the same dogfight test would play out against the Sukhoi PAK FA, the somewhat comparable new Russian stealth fighter. The F-35 seems to have a maximum g-load of 9g, while the PAK-FA has one of over 9g. The thrust/weight ratio of the PAK FA also is higher, at 1.02 to 1.36 depending on configuration and fuel load, compared to the F-35s of 0.87 to 1.07. (At least as far as the "official/unclassified" specifications seem to go)
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Informative)
That's pretty much the same sentiment they had just before the Vietnam war. And then took a big bloody nose from the inferior Migs. The worst thing about the F-35 though is it's a single engine fighter. In war redundancy is everything. When the engine on the 35 gets damaged the only option is to pull the ejection handle and hope for the best. That's a hell of an expensive lawn dart. If you want to see an example of how bad it can be just look at the F-16. It's nickname IS lawn dart. When the F-15 loses an engine they turn around and go back to base. That's how you live to fight another day. After the debacle with the F-22 and the F-105 I can't believe they bought another single engine fighter.
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Insightful)
And the F-16 is such a terrible design that it only sold 4,500 units to 24 countries. Much worse then the twin-engine F-18 sales of 1,480 to 8 countries.
Moreover it's hard to do twin engine VTOL, and the Marines insisted. They probably should not have been humored (or should have been humored by being allowed to by their own, special, Marine Corps plane), but once that decision was made twin engines went out the window.
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Good luck detecting it at 30,000 feet with your eyeballs. Particularly in bad weather.
If the electronic warfare suite they have works like they're planning, then they'll have blown you up before you get into position.
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Informative)
It sounds to me like our current crop of F16 fighters are superior. Why do we have a $1 trillion plane?
There are plenty of reasons, good and bad. I'll assume you are asking a serious question, and give you the short version of the most often cited answers:
Good reasons include:
Debatable reasons include:
Bad reasons include:
There were also plenty of f***ups in assumptions the program made that were only really recognizable in hindsight, like the fact that trying to mesh the Marines' requirement for a V/STOL aircraft with the traditional designs for the Air Force and Navy hobbled the plane's performance for all three constituencies.
I know a lot of people are very critical of the F-35, and rightfully should be. But it's not as bad as it may sound - I think it will eventually turn into a decent (but never great) aircraft with a long service life. It's out there flying around today, but will take probably 10 more years to get to where everyone hoped it would be in terms of capabilities. Nonetheless, you will almost certainly still see F-35s flying around under US colors in 2050, so in the long run it will work out OK.
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Interesting)
The idea was better stuff, quicker and cheaper. It turned out - like some of the lessons Boeing learned with the 787 - that agile development may work great at Facebook but it's a train wreck when applied to aerospace, military systems and gigantic procurements. Oops.
One of the basic ideas of agile dev is to get a partially-working system in the field ASAP. Doing so lets you figure out much sooner (10% into a project) that the design requirements are wrong, and that you need to rethink what you're doing. In this case, the loop wasn't closed - there were plenty of early signs that it was going wrong, but the project just kept going forward without reevaluating the basic requirements (VTOL being the most obvious case).
I don't think that means agile dev won't work for aerospace generally. It's more an indication that the organizations involved (governments and military contractors) are too heavy to handle an agile process: imagine trying to go back to congress once a month to get the requirements updated based on dev feedback. Smaller, independent companies like SpaceX can manage a much faster, cheaper cycle on the space side, and I think it's possible for a new military aero supplier to do the same.
There were also plenty of f***ups in assumptions the program made that were only really recognizable in hindsight, like the fact that trying to mesh the Marines' requirement for a V/STOL aircraft with the traditional designs for the Air Force and Navy hobbled the plane's performance for all three constituencies.
That wasn't only seen in hindsight. It's obvious that adding complicated, heavy components to something that's supposed to be fast and reliable is going to create problems. It was more of a "let's see how well we can apply modern materials and design to make this work" kind of thing... Initial tests showed it was possible, but a bit further into the program it was clear that it was still too much of a tradeoff to be worthwhile.
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I have a car, but the new Mazda has a 10hp more powerful engine. Should I sell my Mazda 3 for $5000 and buy a new Mazda 3 for $21,000?
It's a fair question in the context of Mazdas. It is a much less clear answer in the context of should I buy a F-16 for $100 million that gets me a 20% chance of being shot down in an engagement vs. a F-35 that gives me a 5% chance of being shot down for $350 million.
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Interesting)
The main problem is the Marines wanting a replacement for the Harrier, something that can do STOL/STOVL operations, and that is completely under their control. The JSF was already under development, and the contractors said they could figure out how to make it fit the Marine requirements. What we got was a fighter that can't dogfight, a strike aircraft with a pitifully small payload, and the political impossibility of starting over from scratch.
One of the lessons that came out of this and the Zumwalt-class destroyer programs is that the military should stop trying to cram every feature into a program. While the proliferation of designs led to unwieldy logistics in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, the attempts to simplify everything have resulted in a reduced overall capability and the need to extend the lifetimes of planes the new projects were meant to replace. The F-15 and F-16 will still be around for decades, and may form a larger part of the tactical strike platforms than the USAF would like to admit. The same will probably be the case with the F/A-18E against the Navy's F-35C.
Dedicated designs are the most efficient. Some of them turn out to be spectacular at other jobs. The F-15 was designed with the adage "not a pound for air-to-ground" and yet from it was developed the F-15E Strike Eagle, an extremely effective air-to-ground platform. Hopefully the military is listening when it goes trying to build its next platform, a replacement for the B-1, B-2, and B-52 expected to come online between 2035 and 2045.
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Informative)
It did a whole hell of lot more than just lead to unwieldy logistics.
It made managing training more costly and complex. If you have, say, a class of four ships with a unique sonar, you only need a couple of dozen new bodies a year max. But you still need a complete school suite with all the requisite simulators, instructors, and maintenance and support personnel. That raises costs considerably. When I was a 98/0 instructor to support 16 crews with 5 techs each, we maintained an office of 12 people (the number was set by the number of training specialties required, and one guy can know and do so much) just to run four classes a year of 6-8 students. And that was at the tail end of initial manning - when we still needed new or converted techs by the gross lot. Class numbers and sizes went down shortly after I left.
The same is true for advanced training, unless you're lucky enough that the schools are located on the same base as the vessels. While that was true when I was a 98/0 tech... When I was an 88/2 tech, we initially had no advanced training on the OAG MK2/1 because there was no trainer in Charleston - the nearest was at the basic trainer near Norfolk. The program was nearly a decade old before they could get funding to convert an 88/1 (MK2/0) trainer to 88/2 (MK2/1).
It vastly complicated manning for much the same reason... There were only about 200 88/2 techsat any given time, so all it took was a handful of guys unexpectedly getting out, or deciding to stay in, or becoming ineligible for sea duty, or losing their clearance or whatever to royally screw up the whole pipeline.
I actually got to see both ends of that bell curve.
After I graduated from 98/0 school here at Bangor, I ended up filling a warm body billet for a year (my expensive training going to waste) because 98/0 (a community of only sixty or so at the time) was running overmanned by about fifty percent. (My class of twelve alone would have overmanned the community for a year or two until enough boats reached the stage of construction where they needed bodies.) I ended up being converted to 88/2 and sent to Charleston.
After my sea tour, I converted back from 88/2 to 98/0 and was on shore duty when the Navy desperately tried to get me to convert back. Their numbers had been wrong two years running, and average crew size had dropped to 5.8 - and the minimum to run a normal watch rotation without doubling up was 6. They'd started short cycling guys, and sending them on back-to-backs... but you can only do that so long before morale goes to hell in a handbasket, and more guys get out and your problem just gets worse. Norfolk was empty of spare bodies, Charleston was empty of spare bodies, King's Bay was empty of spare bodies... Little ol' me sitting up here at Bangor was literally the last warm body available. (But I ended up being medically ineligible for sea duty anyhow, and stayed out here.)
It also compromises combat capabilities and planning... when I was in SUBLANT, they had 88/1 (C3) boats and 88/2 (C4B) boats, and the two missiles had different ranges, different numbers and sizes of warheads, and the missile capabilities were different. There wasn't always a spare boat of the right kind available, and you couldn't swap them one-for-one. It didn't matter which way you swapped, some capability was compromised either way.
And that's just the SSBN force and doesn't even begin to address logistics problems, or the other support problems, or the maintenance problems, or... well, you get the picture. Multiply that by SSN's, FF's, DD's, and cruisers of a dozen different types and the problems I didn't even touch on and you have a hellaciously complex and expensive mess.
The Navy shifted to having more common platforms starting with Ticonderoga's and Burke's for a lot of very good reasons.
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Insightful)
I am also curious (haven't looked) as to what the flight/fight profile of the F-35 is in the first place.
It's a replacement for everything. In theory, it can do the job of the A-10, F-16, F/A-18, and Harrier Jump Jet (to name a few)
In practice, so many competing priorities means compromises.
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Informative)
That's crazy.
So, tank-buster/ground attack, fighter jet, carrier launched fighter jet, and close air support.
There is simply no way in hell to replace the A-10, in terms of armament of hardening. Because the A-10 is ridiculous in terms of those things (and I mean that in the most awesome sense of the word, because it's legendary for survivability and that huge canon).
It can't replace the F-16, because it's not nearly as good at the same role, and can't beat it in the air.
If the F/A-18 is also a fighter I'd be curious to see if the F-35 can even touch that.
And a VTOL close air support aircraft, which is armed to the teeth and can do many tasks ... well, at this point I'm skeptical.
I'd be curious if there is a single aircraft this F-35 is supposed to replace, which it can actually best in that category.
If it is inferior in the specific features of the stuff it's replacing, it's pretty much a terrible aircraft.
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The problem with the A-10 is that AA missiles have improved a lot and are improving further. It does not seem viable to build a successor to the A-10 with even more armour.
Re:Drone It (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think the A-10 (or even a replacement) is meant to go head to head with the best AA systems that the enemy has to offer. It is meant to loiter around behind the front until called in for close air support. I am guessing that some kind of air defense suppression unit would precede the A-10 type aircraft so that it could operate and do its job.
I understand that AA systems are much more mobile and have higher performance than when the A-10 was designed so maybe a replacement that has higher performance or is harder for modern AA to target would be in order. But to say that close in air support aircraft are obsolete seems a pretty brash thing to say.
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Informative)
The F-35 comes in three variants, A for Air Force, B for Marines, and C for Navy. They are all variations on the same theme. The A is the base model. The B is pretty much the same as A but swaps out one of it's fuel tanks for a lift fan. The C is bigger version of A with folding wings, bigger wings are needed to have lower take off and landing speeds for carriers. Sharing a common platform save megabucks on all the radars, radios, FLIRs, fancy electronics, and the massive amount of software that needs to be written. It also gives them all a common engine, cockpit, and ejection system, which makes keeping spares on hand easier.
The F-35B replaces the Harrier because the Harrier is ancient and being better than it is a low bar to meet.
The F-35A replaces the F-16 by having stealth and a useful range. The F-16 was designed as a point defence fighter to defend against the Soviets over Germany, short range meant that it could be small, light, and manoeuvrable. Here are the typical combat ranges for the various fighters: F15C: 1,967 km, F-35A: 1,135 km, F-22: 760 km, F-18: 740 km, F-16: 550 km. The secret to the F-16's manoeuvrability is that they ditched a lot of fuel weight. The problem is the Soviet Union collapsed and the point defence mission disappeared. The F-16 found a new lease on life when the strapped an external fuel tank and targeting pod on it to give it enough range to be a bomb truck, but the extra weight of that fuel makes it shit for manoeuvrability. So the F-16 can either have range and shit manoeuvrability, or great manoeuvrability and a useless range. The F-35A has both, plus stealth, plus better infrared/optical sensors so it doesn't need a targeting pod.
The F-18A/C has the same problems as the F-16. So it is being replaced by two fighters, the F-18E/F Super Hornet for air superiority, and the F-35C for attack missions.
The A-10 is basically a plane without a mission. It was designed in the days before precision weapons when the only way to hit tanks was to strafe them WWII style. That means low and slow, which means it needed to be armoured against AA. Great, except the Soviets simply upped the AA from 23mm to 30mm, introduced their version of the Stinger called Igla, and added more armour to the roof of their tanks. By the late 80s the A-10 was a death trap, fly low and Soviet AA will kill it, fly medium and Igla will kill it, fly at normal hight and you can't aim. And even if you could aim it's questionable if the GAU could still disable most recent Soviet tanks. The final nail in the coffin is the Soviet Union collapsing. There are no hordes of tanks for the A-10 to kill so what good is it? Against even a moderate air defence network it can't survive, which is why it had to be pulled off attacks against Republican Guard in the Second Gulf War, too many were shot down. Against a unsophisticated enemy like an insurgency it is too expensive, if the enemy can't shoot you down send a drone. The done is more accurate, cheaper, longer loiter time, and can provide video feeds to ground commanders. During the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq the A-10 only provided something like 18% of the CAS missions, far less than the F-16s or F-18s. The USAF used the A-10s because they have them, but they don't want them.
The F-35 can replace all of those planes because one was hopelessly out dated. One had already lost its mission to the remaining two. The final two work okay, so the F-35 was designed as a upgraded version of them with better range, better sensors, and stealth.
Re: Drone It (Score:4, Interesting)
You mean "Oft times better than a master of one"?
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Insightful)
Originally, the F22 was to fill the air superiority role (and it does that better than any fighter ever made), and the F35 was the mish-mash of other roles. Everyone following this stuff knew the F35 wouldn't be great at any one particular role, but for dogfighting it was always a joke - and really, that was OK, as the F22 had its back if needed. But we stopped buying F22s way too soon, we don't have enough, and the huge R&D costs weren't spread across enough planes.
The F35 always seemed like the result of no clear charter for it's role: "just do everything". It's not a bad plane for the requirements as presented: for a jack-iof-all-trades plane it's great at nothing, but it's really as good as you could reasonably expect given the lack of a specific role.
The Air Force also has a problem that we've spent too long dropping bombs on opponents with no real air power. We should be using actual bombers for that role: far cheaper per bomb, but fighter pilots run the place. As a result, we get fighters trying to be bombers on top of everything else, and no plans to replace the aging bomber fleet anytime soon (admittedly, a B52 is fine vs an opponent who can't shoot back, but even the B1 is getting old vs an opponent who can).
Re: (Score:3)
the brief was for a JSF. Jack of all trades, master of none. Supercruise (supersonic without going afterburner), stealth, out-turn everything else with a jet engine, and STOVL. It can do NONE of these apart from an unladen STOVL. For a laden STO it needs a RAMP. It can't even HOVER with a full weapons load.
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Maybe they could just ask the enemy to fly to a better altitude before starting the dogfight?
Re:Drone It (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only that, but no artificial limit to g. No pilot to keep conscious.
You now need to write a drone AI that you trust with lethal weaponry or a remote control system that's unjammable.
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Insightful)
Contrary to popular belief, G-limits are not generally due to pilot endurance but airframe load limits. They also aren't simple knockdown values. Saying an aircraft can 'pull 9g's' doesn't really mean a lot. Under what conditions? At what altitude? At what speed? With what stores? At what fuel state? What are the roll limits? A F-16 can pull a lot of Gs under specific conditions, conditions generally not met in combat.
A clean F-16 can blackout a pilot. A F-16 with a combat load, generally, can not. Same for all the F-teens. That lady saying 'Over-G' isn't telling you you're about to black out, she's telling you you're breaking the airplane and you need to stop.
Could you design an unmanned aircraft that can sustain 15g? Sure, but why? G load is the result of a lot of variables, so more G doesn't nessecairly translate into 'more maneuverable'. These days higher g loads don't necessarily net you anything and cost you a bundle in airframe weight. That means gas, guns or sensors you're leaving on the ground to make MGTW.
Missiles should be pulling the g, not the aircraft.
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Insightful)
Drones with weapons aren't autonomous.
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Funny)
They see themselves as terrible assassins, not righteous heroes fighting a murderous enemy.
See, that's the problem -- as long as they see themselves in either role, it won't work. Perhaps if they were isolated at youth, taught to fight each other, and then misled into thinking it was just a really good video game or simulation of some sort. I bet they could make a movie out of that.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Enders Game?
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Whoosh!
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Funny)
See, that's the problem -- as long as they see themselves in either role, it won't work. Perhaps if they were isolated at youth, taught to fight each other, and then misled into thinking it was just a really good video game or simulation of some sort. I bet they could make a movie out of that.
No, it would suck as a movie, Hollywood would completely miss the point of the story. Better if it was a book. Or even a series of books - you could even narrate it from different points of view.
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Insightful)
Drone pilots don't seem to have much of a conscience either.
BUNK!
Drone piolots have no doubt done somethings history won't look kindly on but so has basically every fighting man using whatever technology and tactics. Sure maybe some just do it for the pay check or lack of other options but most of the people that enlist in our volunteer armed services have some conviction about defending the nation.
They are fed probably ten times as much propaganda about the enemy as the rest of us and yet 9999 times of 10000 or more they continue to treat the enemy humanely and frequently place themselves in grater danger to do so. Drone pilots might not face that personal danger and not facing that choice probably makes them better not worse when it comes to "doing the right thing". Suppose all the drone missions were instead flowing with manned aircraft, with pilots always wonder when they might be surprised by some AA device left over from previous conflicts. Do think they would make more or fewer errors?
Militaries kill people and break things, its what they do on a very very fundamental level. Whatever the mission is that is ultimately how it will be effected if you employ the military to do it. Sometimes that is the right thing. I'll be the first to say the middle east aint our fight, and we should bring both the troops and the drones home. Please though lets put the blame for those casualties where it belongs. On the people giving the orders and overseeing the programs. Not on our pilots, sailors and soldiers who really are just following orders.
If your CO handed you a photo of a nondescript building and said "Intel says a terrorist cell is hiding out here, hit it with a hellfire" What would you do? You would probably do what most of us would take them at their word and follow the order. When you read next week in the Time about how the CIA fucked up again and the place was full of civilians you'd feel guilty and not re-enlist when the time come, a problem the Air Force currently is having.
I hope you take some responsibility for it when you next visit the ballot box and cast your vote for someone who will stop doing this crap.
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Insightful)
The same could be said of pretty much every advancement. Guys with clubs are cowards because the barehanded guys don't have a chance. Guys with swords are cowards because the guys with clubs don't stand a chance. Guys with arrows are cowards because the guys with swords across the field don't stand a chance. So on and so forth.
Of the factors driving reluctance to engage in harming other people, I don't think giving the other guy a sporting chance to kill you is a good factor. As others have pointed out, without your own life on the line you may have the opportunity to be more careful about how you proceed. If you are in imminent danger of getting killed, you may be more likely to make hasty judgment calls, collateral civilian damage be damned.
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Informative)
Drone pilots more removed from the action than infantry? Hell yes.
More removed then the rest of the Air Force? Hell no.
The way a drone strike works is a drone loiters on station for weeks on end. During this time the drone's pilots figure out who is in the house when, so they can avoid blowing it up when the local equivalent of the Girl Scouts are in the living room. Which means drone pilots know when their target takes the trash out, whether the teenage daughter has a boyfriend who sneaks in sometimes, etc. This makes for attacks that are much easier on the civilian population then normal bombing, because you can skip the night when the girl and her boyfriend are enjoying themselves, but it makes for very stressed out drone pilots.
OTOH, an F-16 would only be able to loiter on target for a half-hour at a time, and the pilot would be spending his time there focussing on the attack, so he has no fucking idea that the terrorist mastermind he's about to attack has a daughter up to hijinks. He'll drop the bomb, write on his paperwork that the building was totaly destroyed, and dance the Dance of Successful Combat Missions.
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Insightful)
Cowards. But thats become the American way.
So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak.
â" Sun Tzu, The Art of War
The art of using troops is this:
â¦â¦When ten to the enemyâ(TM)s one, surround him;
â¦â¦When five times his strength, attack him;
â¦â¦If double his strength, divide him;
â¦â¦If equally matched you may engage him;
â¦â¦If weaker numerically, be capable of withdrawing;
â¦â¦And if in all respects unequal, be capable of eluding him,
â¦â¦â¦.for a small force is but booty for one more powerful.â
â" Sun Tzu, the Art of War
There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all Hell. -- William Tecumseh Sherman
I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country. -- Patton
The American Military has advantages, it uses them. It is not cowardly to use one's military advantages. If I have a gun that shoots a mile and yours only shoots a half a mile, why should I close to a half a mile, I should stay out of your range and kill you when you are easy prey and can't shoot back.
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This makes for attacks that are much easier on the civilian population then normal bombing, because you can skip the night when the girl and her boyfriend are enjoying themselves, but it makes for very stressed out drone pilots.
Why?
Because they know they just made a fairly normal teenage girl a homeless orphan. If they have kids they probably sympathize with the poor guy who is being deceived by his daughter even if his day job is terrorist mastermind.
Fighter pilots and bomber pilots don't actually need to dehumanize the enemy. They simply never bother to learn that enemy is, in fact, human. Those people are lines on a targeting screen that are only occasionally even human shaped (most of the time they're tank-shaped, or house-shaped,
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Interesting)
Drone pilots don't seem to have much of a conscience either. They are far removed from the action, the consequences, less involved.
Drone pilots suffer at least as much from PTSD as regular pilots. However, their work environment is tailored to ensure that their kill performance is excellent. If a pilot who is in a plane does not take a shot, it seems to be considered more of a judgement call based on what they saw, whereas if a drone pilot fails to take a shot, all the video evidence is there to go through in the debriefing. Those who fail to perform or who want to leave the assignment are threatened with dishonourable discharge.
Do not judge them as people without conscience. They are victims too.
Re:Drone It (Score:4, Insightful)
They are far removed from the action, the consequences, less involved.
What an odd thing to tell yourself. On the contrary, the drone often watches the target for hours before the strike, and then sticks around after the strike doing damage estimations. You're trying to tell me that that's "far removed" compared to an F18 dropping a bomb from high altitude at near supersonic speed and being basically out of visual range by the time the thing impacts?
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Depends on the base. Fort Knox, which all of the movies have you believe is lock down tight secure, has a public highway going right through the middle of it. When I used to serve there, I sometimes went through this trailer park called Radcliff to get to the mall in the hillbilly city of Elizabethtown. No checkpoints anywhere along the way, just plain open road, with lots of deer and tick filled bushes.
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yeah but GP was talking about soldier housing. The housing at Fort Knox is located just off of that public highway.
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Grand Ma and Grand Pa likely don't live on a military base, nor does the kids that go to College.
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OK, just in the past SIX YEARS, there have been, to my immediate recollection, THREE fatal shootings on mainland US Navy yards:
November 2009: Fort Hood
September 2013: Washington
March 2014: Norfolk, WV - the World's LARGEST Naval base.
NOT ONLY were those shootings on apparently SECURE installations, they were on installations where apparently only base police were permitted to carry ANY type of firearms. Yet, the perpetrators were able to DRIVE through the gates unchecked and wander the bases with their weap
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March 2014: Norfolk, WV - the World's LARGEST Naval base.
West Virginia doesn't even have access to the ocean or even a very large river, much less a deep water port sufficient for a Naval base.
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It's not as easy to sneak onto a military base (where, you know, base housing is located) as the TV/movies would have you believe. You do know that, right?
Grandparents included, I bet they don't all live on base. Aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews etc, you can't keep them all under armed guard all the time. Any relatives who live overseas get big giant targets painted on them. Oh and this info was all recently leaked. It shouldn't be too hard to find them.
Its ugly but thats how you have to fight against an opponent who acts like this. Its basic Sun Tzu; in response to an enemy who takes shelter in an impregnable position you attack something (outside of that pos
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Yes, actually it is as easy to get onto a military base as TV/movies would have you believe. As long as the base includes housing, your worst cast scenario for "sneaking on base" is "steal a car with a base sticker and drive right in". Usually it's easier than that in CONUS.
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that the US always is fighting the last war. After 9/11, a lot of money has been spent to deal with asymmetrical warfare, essentially fighting Vietnam but in desert country. Drones are useful, because (if intel is correct), they can do relatively pinpoint strikes without videos of civilian death tolls hitting Al Jazeera the next day (again, assuming intel was right, and the place was an ammo stash and not a madrasa full of little ones.) In reality, the only way to fight a war like ISIS is to do what was done to Germany -- level all cities (and all buildings in the city) that even are rumored to have insurgents. Without the commitment to do actual, yucky warfare that completely breaks all resistance... half-ass measures just creates emboldened enemies (think "Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!".)
I really wonder if the US could fight a war against an organized country without a major sea change. The circus about military contracts was a major blow to readiness. First it was no-bid contracts... then contracts only given to HUBs that had relatively little to no experience. There is something humiliating about basic things like shower heads not being grounded, causing fatal electrocution and batteries with cracks in them repaired with Loctite.
The last time a "full-ass" conflict was done... was under George Bush Sr, when he dealt with Iraq invading an ally. The US came in, cleaned house, re-established Kuwait, and left without damaging Saddam so much that Iran or other outsiders felt they had a free invitation to invade the now-weakend Iraq. Of course, his son destroyed the country resulting in a power vacuum and the crap we have today.
The US also has the weakness that propaganda works on the people, but not the other way round. ISIS's sole reason they exist is because of YouTube and CNN. If their gory videos didn't make it out of the region, other nations wouldn't be recognizing ISIS's flag as a sovereign country, and they wouldn't be getting recruits worldwide from disaffected people. You get some FX artists good at moulage work, grab some kids and babies, make a video about a missile hit with all the damage done, and US people will be protesting in the streets for surrender, peace at any cost. No political official in the US has the cajones to stop the press from showing videos (even faked) 24/7. Losing the propaganda game lost Afghanistan and Iraq.
Who knows... maybe true war between nations has become obsolete... but that was said before World War 1, and it only took a month for uneasy neighbors to become dire enemies, and in the age of the Internet, it might just take only seconds to minutes before all hell breaks loose globally.
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I honestly don't think a real "organized" war of that kind is likely to ever happen again. We have long since passed the point where the major actors are just too big and powerful to risk war with eachother, so they engage in little more than proxy wars against eachother's minor interests.
Even that doesn't really seem to describe the present day since the major powers major interests are so aligned they don't even proxy war with eachother so much as with the fallout from the decades worth of mess they made
Re:Drone It (Score:5, Insightful)
That may be a valid concern, however that's orthogonal to the point about whether a pilot needs to be inside a craft or not.
Points can be made about how susceptible it would be to jamming attacks and such. However as it stands the statement that drones have no conscience is about as useful as saying a bullet has no conscience.
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Re:Drone It (Score:5, Interesting)
We're not "at $1 trillion." The $1 trillion figure is the total program cost, through 2038, including all development, procurement, training, operations, upgrades and repairs. Between now and 2038, by simply extrapolating 2015 figures, (which is a conservative approach) the US will create about $385 trillion of wealth and the Federal government will collect $71 trillion in tax revenue. Spending 0.2% of that product on a powerful weapon is entirely reasonable.
As for the F-35; it's a stealth multirole fighter with VTOL. Dog fighting was never the top priority. Using the F-16 to disparage new designs, as was done with the Eurofighter and the F-22, is now a traditional tactic of pentagon critics and should be dismissed as the bullshit that it is.
The story is a hit piece from an anonymous source written by a peacenik named David Axe that advocates, among other stupid things, abolishing the US Air Force.
Pork barrels versus real weapons (Score:3)
The project known as F-35 (Score:3)
...Most recently, there have been concerns over its computer systems' vulnerability, and Chinese hackers have possibly stolen classified data related to the project....
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There hasn't been a dog fight between aircraft since Air-to-Air missiles such as the sidewinder appeared (IIRC it was around Vietnam that the last dog fight occurred). With the F-35 the air-force made a tactical decision that missile technology had made dog fighting a thing of the past.
Missile tech is so good these days that fighters can kill each other without ever seeing the other plane. And the missiles are so good they are very difficult to evade once locked in.
just let it go (Score:5, Insightful)
We have tools built decades earlier that was better. Why cant we just let this go, a trillion dollars is a lot of friggen money, dont keep adding to it. If the vendor cannot come through on their promises cut them and go with someone who will.
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Yeah no kidding.
By all appearances the Boeing X-32 was way superior anyway.... perhaps they should re-visit that...
Re:just let it go (Score:5, Interesting)
Welcome to Sunk Cost.
Sucks, but breaking that addiction is incredibly hard... doubly so when egos are just as much on the line as money.
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This goes both ways, though. Ignore the eleventy-trillion number for a moment. The only important thing is the cost-benefit analysis going forward: is it cheaper to start fresh, modify an existing airframe/frames, or fix problems with the F35?
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Big giant scam ... (Score:5, Insightful)
This damned plane has been a big scam from the beginning.
It was going to be all things to all people, but in reality it was a way to get other countries to pay for the R&D of a huge wishlist of things which was never going to come true.
As someone who lives in one of the countries who got suckered into the F-35, this program has been nothing but lies and bullshit since it was announced.
This was the military listing a huge wishlist of things, including a pony, they were going to do.
Instead, it's underperforming, not up to the claims, over budget, years behind schedule, and still a crappy replacement for the things it was supposed to be doing.
Everything about the F-35 has been a pile of lies of bullshit since it was announced. And it seems like everybody (except the people selling it and the people who got conned into signing up for it) has know this for that entire time.
I hope everybody says "piss off" and walks away from the contract.
This plane is proving what people have been saying for the last decade -- that it was never going to live up to the promises made.
As a supposed air-superiority platform, this is an utter failure. I bet they don't even have the VTOL version working yet.
Re:Big giant scam ... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not going to argue with most of your points.
But the VTOL version is working: VTOL land test [youtube.com], VTOL sea test [youtube.com], and VTOL Ramp Test [telegraph.co.uk]
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In fact, only one of those three videos is even VTOL, and it's the one where the plane lifts vertically, hovers, and lands vertically without ever moving horizontally to any significant degree. The other two videos aren't VTOL, one is carrier-based STOVL -- short takeoff and vertical landing -- and since it's carrier based and so landing on a moving target, it isn't act
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As someone who lives in one of the countries who got suckered into the F-35, this program has been nothing but lies and bullshit since it was announced.
As an American I apologize to you. The F-35 should never have been built, the money should have gone to continued production of the F-22.
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I'm afraid the selection process was at fault. Although on the surface there was much debate it was actually decided by presenting a series of scale models to unnamed members of the legislature. They took the models and spun around in circles making airplane noises, "neeer, neeer, pop, pop, pop, vrrneeer". The one that felt the most like something a superhero and GI-Joe would fly was clearly the right choice at any price.
Not to say it's unnecessary (Score:4, Insightful)
But how many US pilots have been in an actual dogfight since, say WWII. Most wars these days are no longer in the air, no large nations are fighting each other and ISIS doesn't have the capacity to fly an F16-like aircraft. Even during the Cold War, the most action was recon missions in enemy airspace which went largely unnoticed.
Sure, the F35 is a boondoggle but are these jets really necessary? The F16 seems to be holding up fine and the Russians, the only non-allied force with similar capabilities is flying mostly rust that is older than the F16 program.
Re:Not to say it's unnecessary (Score:5, Informative)
"But how many US pilots have been in an actual dogfight since, say WWII"
I partially agree, but this is the mentality that cost a lot of American pilots their lives in Vietnam. Even the latest American jets had a hard time dog-fighting against the obsolete MIG-17. The F-4 Phantom originally didn't have a gun, because the pervasive thinking was that air combat would be fought with beyond-visual-range (BVR) missiles. This mindset started to change once the missiles (such as the AIM-4 Falcon) were shown to have serious reliability issues......and visual identity of the target was required anyway, to avoid friendly-fire incidents. By the time you get close enough to a plane to make sure it's in fact hostile, a BVR missile loses it's threat potential, and it comes down to the skill of the pilot.
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"But how many US pilots have been in an actual dogfight since, say WWII"
John McCain. You might have heard of him. He ran for president a while back.
The project has been a success (Score:5, Insightful)
Not much of a plane tho.
This is why we can't have nice things (Score:5, Insightful)
And the US spends $1000 Billion+ on a plane, designed to kill. Imagine [azlyrics.com], if you can, a world without war, it's easy if you try.
Re:This is why we can't have nice things (Score:4, Insightful)
Imagine, if you can, a world without war, it's easy if you try.
Yes. Then I could conquer the whole stupid planet with just a butter knife.
--Dogbert.
Re:This is why we can't have nice things (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you please stop with this $xxx can end world hunger nonsense ?
First of all, people don't eat money. So if there are 10 people and food for 9, you can give as much money as you want and it won't change the fact that one of them won't eat.
Ok, so let's be a little smarter and use this money to better manage our agriculture. Now we have enough rations for everyone. World hunger ended... or is it ?
Not yet, because we also have to prevent local chieftains from diverting this food supply and use it to assert their power. Basically, it means some kind of a police force is needed to make sure food really goes to who is hungry. Now we have food going to people in need. Word hunger ends... for now.
Because, you see, in third world countries, birth rate is sky high, balanced by high mortality. Lower the mortality rate and you get exponential growth, which mean more demand for food, making the "food for everyone" program harder to maintain. So we need to either hope for a rapid transition or use drastic measures like China did with the one child policy.
As for war, it may be the most effective way to limit world hunger : war kills and dead people don't need to eat. A nightmarish reasoning that is hopefully flawed but I think not more so than your pipe dream.
The F-35 can't dogfight (Score:4, Funny)
That's okay, AFAIK we're not at war against dogs.
Is Dogfighting really that important? (Score:3)
If a war were to break up, is Dogfighting really "the" efficient way to take care of fighter? With all new modern weaponry (AAM, SAM, laser etc.) I'm not completely sure if this feature is still relevant in modern time.
I mean, the british may had the most advanced battleship of its time during WW2, they still got utterly destroyed by aircraft carrier.
No Source, No Story - complete bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
The article summary said "can't turn or climb fast enough" but the article itself showcases the pilot complaining about nose-rate only - i.e. turn rate. As anyone who knows anything about Air Combat Maneuvering can tell you, turn rate is the LEAST important aspect of maneuverability. Roll rate is far, far more important, as every aerodynamic maneuver aside from a loop begins with a roll. Aircraft with superior roll rate can shake better-turning fighters through maneuvers like the rolling scissors. [wikipedia.org] Unsurprisingly, its through tactics like these that the F4F Wildcat held its own against the Japanese Zero, and when the Wildcat was up-engined to become the F6F Hellcat it dominated the Zero flat-out. The US Navy would later adopt the F4F Phantom, a fighter that eschewed turn-rate entirely in favor of absolutely insane thrust (the jet set several world speed records.) They were told this plane could not dogfight - and then pilots like Duke Cunningham defeated nimble little MiG-17s in close combat.
Once upon a time a group of industry experts who thought the Japanese had it right formed a clique named the "Lightweight Fighter Mafia," and their efforts eventually produced the F-16. Pleased with their accomplishment, they spent their time since then spewing BS about every single aircraft to come after it, including the F-18. To this day you hear people claiming the F-18 is a "turkey" and "can't dogfight" and that the navalized F-16 was passed over by the Navy due to sheer inter-service rivalry and pigheadedness. That this bullshit flies in the face of actual pilot accounts [defence.pk] doesn't seem to slow them down a whit. The F-22 had its turn on the bullseye, and now it's the F-35s turn.
In light of the decades-old pattern of "sneer at the new expensive jet" popular amongst industry professionals and armchair warriors alike, a complete failure of the article to quote any opinion on the F-35s vertical maneuvering ability (the go-to counter to turnfighter tactics) and the simple fact that the source is completely undisclosed, I'm calling bullshit on this one - and on everyone who decided to sling out a pithy comment without doing a five-second bullshit check. I thought
War is Boring is shit (Score:5, Interesting)
First, it's a strike fighter, why the fuck are people getting so worked up about dog-fighting? You know that these planes are not yet rated for their full flight envelope, or you would if Axe did his job. You would also know that the F-35 has more than twice the range of the F-16. Imagine that, a strike fighter that carrier more weight in fuel than point defence fighter. It's almost like dog-fighting wasn't the primary design goal. You know what else can't dogfight? The A-10 that guys like Axe are always furiously masturbating over.
Second, this isn't the 1970s. Sure dogfights may happen, but a hell of a lot less than BVR attacks and SAMs. And before anyone starts talking about Vietnam, go look at the numbers for that war. The little blurb you got about F-4 Phantom from watching Top Gun is wrong. For every plane lost in a dogfight, two were lost to AA missiles, and five were lost to SAMs, in the fucking 70s. Lord knows the world hasn't had any other conflicts since then from which to draw lessons.
Third, it's the most expensive plane program in history at $1T? No shit, the program is to build and maintain almost 3,000 fighters over 50 years. In fact is "almost" as expensive as the $3T to keep doing what we are doing: pumping out a half dozen different air frames with no common supply chain so that each one can be good at exactly one mission. But if you still think it is too expensive, I have to ask, compared to what? The F-22? Not even close. The Eurofighter? Lol. Russia's latest vaporware? Sure if they ever build more than some prototypes. Some last generation platform with no stealth? Sure that will make a great strike platform against an air defence system in contested air space. The money you save on a "cheap" F-16 Block 60s at $70 million vs an F-35A at ~$85-90 million, won't even cover the cost of all the extra shit you have to attach to it to F-16 to get the same performance.
These endless hack jobs on the F-35 project need to stop. This isn't 2008, we have over 100 of these things flying already. They are a mostly known quantity, and they greatly out perform the systems they are going to replace.
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Optimists prefer to focus on the fact that, in order to preserve the oh-so-sexy-low-radar-signature design, the system only holds 200 rounds, so nobody expects much of it even when the pilot is able to use it.
Re:Dogfights?! What year is it?! (Score:4, Informative)
And quick bombing raids without additional air support are supposed to be the JSF's forte IIRC.
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*Most* air-air fights (what few still occur) are done at distance with missiles.
However, many air-air combat aircraft are pressed into air-ground roles, and even otherwise, having a gun handy is very useful when you run out of missiles.
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However, many air-air combat aircraft are pressed into air-ground roles
This wouldn't be necessary if the Air Force wasn't obsessed with retiring the A-10. But then again, maintinaing an already existing airframe is much less profitable than government contract for R&D and production runs for a new airframe, and any general worth his stars would jump at the chance to leave his mark by helming the procurement of a major weapons system.
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But for every situation where the A-10 has done "well", there have been cheaper, more easily maintained options, with better time-on-station. Also, with better night operations capabilities etc. In a situation like Syria, the A-10 would have been outmatched, and the syrian conflict hasn't exactly involved state-of-the-art anti-air assets.
Most of the love for the A-10 is just wanking over the gun, and that just gets in the way of reasonable decisions.
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The days of air-to-air combat are long gone. And where air-to-air combat is still needed, long range missiles take care of it.
That's what they said fifty years ago. (When things like the nuclear-warhead AIR-2 Genie or AIM-26 Falcon were considered a good idea.) Turned out they were wrong. (Which is one reason the US did so lousy in the early stages of the air war over Vietnam ... because we weren't teaching pilots to dog fight. Later corrected by e.g. Top Gun.)
Re:Dogfights?! What year is it?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, the reality is, like shock and awe, you can't just pretend you don't have to cover certain parts of warfare.
So, bombing the shit out of stuff and thinking people will become demoralized and welcome you with open arms ... utterly useless if you can't put boots on the ground. For the same reason that bombing ISIS only goes so far.
And, likewise, if you can't maintain air superiority in an up close and personal manner, you can't do the roles like close air ground support. So if you do have boots on the ground, you can't keep them safe if you get your ass kicked.
People can pretend this will never be needed again. That doesn't mean if you ever found yourself in an actual war you wouldn't.
So, if the people you're up against have things which can beat you down in a dogfight, you could quickly find yourself realizing you're ill equipped for a given situation.
Somewhere along the line they decided to make the Swiss-Army knife of aircraft, which it turns out is terribly suited to most of its applications.
Which is moot, because the plane is so late and over budget it should never go into production .. in which case it's years of wasted money and effort to come up with a solution which doesn't work.
Which, sadly, was what people said from the beginning.
Yes dogfights still happen (Score:5, Informative)
When was the last time you've ever heard of a dogfight?
1999 in the Balkans [wikipedia.org] though there may be ones I'm not aware of that are more recent.
The days of air-to-air combat are long gone.
There is no evidence to support this assertion.
And where air-to-air combat is still needed, long range missiles take care of it.
They thought the same thing in Vietnam [wikipedia.org] and they were wrong.
Re:Dogfights?! What year is it?! (Score:4, Informative)
WTF?! When was the last time you've ever heard of a dogfight?
That's what they said when they built the Phantom with no cannon. That's why they had to hurriedly retrofit cannon for Vietnam, when Phantoms started getting into dogfights.
As for long-range missiles, they've been the panacea for decades, but then the military impose rules of engagement requiring positive ID of the bad guy before you shoot, and suddenly you're not at long range any more.
Re:Dogfights?! What year is it?! (Score:4, Interesting)
When was the last time you've ever heard of a dogfight?
In pretty much every war every war where both opponents had air capability, including the first Gulf war and the Balkan war. In the first Gulf war air-to-air combat usually happened after the pilots could get visual confirmation that the target is not a friendly. If you are in visual range you are pretty much in a dog fight. Pierre Sprey, the man who brought us the F16 and the A10, has the best description of the F-35:
"A turkey. Cannot run, cannot hide and cannot fight" [youtube.com]
If you read the article, you will notice that the F-35 failed a test that was stacked in its favor - The F-35 did not carry any load, while the F16 was saddled with two external tanks.
Re:Centered tags? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously slashdot? What is this crap?
They are slowly fucking up the front page design, one annoying step after another.
Inspired by the stealth design of the F-35 ('Operation Boiled Frog'), the Lockheed-Dice production team are hoping to fly under the radar by sneakily changing the front page one element at a time, so that in 6 months time the site will look exactly like Beta. However, as in the case of the F-35, the final product will be superficially flashy, but less functional than the previous design.