GreenPlease wrote:
Kill the F-35, restart F-22 production (it's not like the Saturn V where we literally threw out the plans), and all the sudden you have a lot of spare money floating around. Yes, I know what the F-35 is capable of but, IMO, that's a weapon platform that never made sense from the beginning. The only time you'd need to use the F-35 is in a direct conflict with a near-pier state such as Russia or China which would never remain non-nuclear. Further, in such a conflict attempting to gain air superiority while providing CAS risks air superiority. Better to have a much larger fleet of planes such as the F-22 denying your enemy CAS. Even Iran is a poor use case as we'd just progressively chip away at their air defenses before launching a large ground operation.
High/low is the way to go.
I suppose this is probably all a bit of a moot point considering how quickly laser weapon systems are evolving. It's not inconceivable that a future strategy might consist of heavy bombers flying in formation deliberately over enemy territory in an attempt to draw fire from enemy AA. One bomber would be equipped with a laser defense system capable of targeting incoming SAMs. An otherwise identical bomber would be equipped munitions such as the AGM-88 HARM. The idea would be to both deplete and destroy enemy air defenses. It wouldn't take much for such a system to shred enemy fighters as well: most of them have aluminum airframes. 100kw applied to a small section of the wing for a couple of seconds would cause mechanical failure.
I was never a fan of the F-35 concept, but we are way too far down that road now. Plus, killing the F-35 and restarting F-22 production would not save all that much money. It would cost hundreds of millions to restart production due to a variety of factors, like rehiring and retraining workers, long lead items, finding and qualifying new parts to replace those not made anymore, etc. Not to mention that in order for the F-22 to take on the F-35’s ground attack role, you would need to integrate an EO/IR sensor on the F-22, which would be very difficult because it involves putting another aperture in a stealthy shape. Lastly, we would seriously piss off all of our allies who are buying the F-35, which is not insignificant.
As for lasers, those may some day be tactically relevant, but there are still lots of hurdles. A solid state 100kw laser takes up some serious space (and generates a veritable shitload of heat), as does the optics and the beam control. And, you have to dwell on the same part of an airplane for a not insignificant amount of time at tactically relevant ranges in order to heat it up enough to causes mechanical failure; if the airplane you’re targeting maneuvers and your aim point is no longer visible to the laser, you have to start over. I think lasers are probably more suited to killing SAMs than fighters, at least for the immediate future.
___________________________________________________
Taco cat spelled backwards is....taco cat.