this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2024
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The US is planning for a new tank roundabout 2030. While right now it notionally is going to be an Abrams derivative, it is almost certainly going to be a completely overhauled new design and not a retrofit of existing tanks like what has been happening to Abrams.
Just something to point out to people who complain about the U.S. gifting stocks of vehicles to Ukraine. The U.S. was planning to get rid of them anyway.
The F-35 is an expensive program, and has undeniably had cost overruns, but from some of the poking around it seems the issues have also been exaggerated or different issues have been conflated, so without doing a deep dive, it is hard to say if the program is worth the bang or not.
The f-35 has no peer, from a us perspective every dollar spent being ahead is a win.
I suppose the question is really if the dollars are being spent in the most efficient way to get the result. I don't know, because that's complicated and probably needs more digging than I can do for an NCD comment. I do know that much of the discussion is muddled by the three models of F35 all essentially being their own subprograms. Which makes it hard to follow certain news articles or critiques when they jump from model to model to make their points.
If it makes you feel better, the package to modernize A-10's costs more per plane than a brand-new F-35. The F-35 has also become fairly cheap to maintain per flight hour over the past couple of years due to economies of scale. It's now comparable to the F-16 in that regard.
Also, the controls and avionics are being adopted in the upgraded F-15s that will be produced soon
I'm team anti-A-10 for sure. The only reason that thing is still around is because the big gun is so thought terminatingly cool that it short circuits peoples' ability to be rational. There's an embarrassing Congressional hearing about retiring A-10s and a Senator (McCain I think) was arguing against the data with "But if big gun plane go away, where will big gun be?"
I suspected, vaguely, that a lot of F35 costs would trend down now that the R&D was done, and there is production ramping up.
How dare you speak such heresy against big gun in an NCD thread!
NCD has been long time A-10 haters.
The f-35 project is over budget and chock full of stupid expenses.
It still remains worth every penny for the US given it is a beyond peer platform, so is the f-22.
At the end of the day being able to win without question will almost always be worth the cost even if it was more than necessary.
Stick with f22
F-22 isn't in production anymore and it would be very expensive to start up production again. Much of the capacity to produce F-22 has been taken up by other programs such as F-35 meaning that they would need new capacity.
They actually had the opportunity to produce more F-22s with the Japanese government offering to buy and put forward a lot of money to produce more, but the US didn't see the need for more of an air superiority platform
F-22 specializes in Air Superiority or clearing the skies. It wasn't made for air to ground (even though it can do it today) In Afghanistan, there wasn't a need for more air superiority
The US keeps the F-22 to itself already, but the F-35 is basically the NATO multirole fighter jet so the US has plenty of those too.
the vast majority of materiel we've sent to ukraine thus far has been old pre-modernization stock, or older, modernized stock in the case of some of the abrams i believe. It's literally just shifting some budget to procurement to get us new stuff, while shipping some of our older kit to be used in battle, which is productive. There is almost no downside in us doing this, aside from the fact that we have to ship it to ukraine, which kinda sucks.
the F35 has been incredibly expensive thus far, but produced in significant numbers and fielded for a similar amount of time as something like the f16 it will completely absolve it's development costs over time. It's also important to remember that the f-35 is quite literally the most advanced air warfare platform that exists right now, which kind of follows the price tag.
90% of the complaints about the f35 on the internet have been "it bad at dog fighting" and "it expensive" and, that's about it. As for dog fighting, it's literally not designed to dogfight, so it should be no surprise that it's not very good at it.
If the F35 ever needs to win a dogfight, we’d probably be in WW3 anyway.
if the f35 enters a dogfight, the other fighter is probably already fucked. I can't imagine that would ever be a concern of yours, as an f35 pilot, especially with all of the fancy link tech they have.
Yeah you’re thinking along the same lines I was. If the situation ever occurred that an F-35 was in close combat with an enemy aircraft, shit has gone very sideways.
Though you’re also right that with the interconnected platform of the thing, in reality the dogfighting F-35 would just have to distract the enemy for a moment while somebody dozens of miles away fires a missile.
I watched a Perun slideshow ages ago which at least touched on production / export of the F-35 and how economies of scale bring down per unit price significantly over time.
Economy of scale almost always does. Part of something to dig into is if a projected lifetime program cost accurately bakes that in. It seems intuitive that people against the program will do everything they can to minimize the effect in order to pump up the projected cost, while supporters will do the opposite and give unrealistically optimistic costs.
I don't know specifically if that has happened with F-35 discussion, but I always suspect such manipulation as a baseline.
Are you referring to the M10 Booker or the M1E3? The M10 is it's own design, while the M1E3 (which should become the M1A3 on adoption) is a refresh of the Abrams, and it's not an either/or.
If you look up The Chieftain on Youtube, he's speculating the M1E3 will focus on integrating all of the add-on modules that have become standardized of the past couple of decades. This will likely reduce the weight of the tank from a whopping 72 tons to make it possible to address future threats while keeping the overall weight low enough to cross bridges.
Some people are speculating that the M1E3 will get an auto-loader, but the couple of tons those weigh is significantly more than a hyperactive 18yo, so we'll see how that works out
I was referring to the M1E3. My point was that it has so many goals to hit that it seems likely not going to be able to be refurbishments of existing M1s, but completely new builds. Therefore existing M1s like those going to Ukraine were destined for retirement anyway. This is something to bring up for people who have been decrying the "waste" of equipment being sent there. Much of it is nearing the end of the life cycle anyway.
(And the Army assures me that the M10 is not a tank! )