Forum: F-35 Variants and Missions

river_otter - your comment begins with a rather pedantic point, and proceeds to ignore this basic fact: DIRCM jammers already exist, they've been combat proven and are deployed on a wide range of combat aircraft. Currently, the technology is limited to transport aircraft and helicopters, but it is only a matter of time until it is shifted to fighter aircraft. The technology exists, it only is waiting to be deployed onto more platforms. (Which won't be trivial, but the principle has already been proven)

See this article: http://www.nrl.navy.mil/content_images/ ... arkady.pdf

Next, we're talking about a WVR dogfight, or at least within IR range. The EODAS tech will be copied by everyone out there, if it is really that successful. The F-35's EODAS advantage will drop in the future, even if that is the only thing that changes.

Spudman - Most IR sensors seem to operate only on several narrow bandwidths. If the laser can be tuned to operate on those bandwidths, then adding a filter won't help that much. Plus you'll have to consider what type of filters, etc., and anything that degrades the EODAS capability, such as filters, will help the opponents.

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jeffb wrote:

Don't get me wrong, I don't think you could whack one together over the weekend with a couple of bits of wood and your old cd player but I still think it's doable. In fact it doesn't have to be stabilized as such if the rotating mirror system covers the whole section of the sky above the unit then mounting a high speed camera would allow you to analyse and fire on aircraft (and targets on said aircraft) any time they come into alignment through the mirrors. They are already developing systems like this to defeat IR guided missiles, is it that much of stretch to see them targeting the launching aircraft as well?

By the way, if your DAS system works in the infra red region of the spectrum, it's going to be tricky filtering out an infra red laser.

It seems like your mixing some concepts together here:
* Blinding DAS
* Blinding IR guided missiles
* Receiving reflected returns from your Blinding IR to obtain tracking data

If my reading of tech rags is correct, systems that are using directed energy to 'blind' IR guided missiles are actually combination systems that are dependent on other sensors to give them threat directional information on what sector of the sky to begin 'IR painting'. Those other systems are dependent on traditional defensive hints such as missile launch heat blooms and boost phase trails etc. Only then is the paint effort of directed energy defense effective.

I think that river_otters point that you need to know where your opponent is before you can overwhelm the DAS with offensive IR beam hasn't been addressed well in responses so far. The idea that 360 degrees of sky will be completely flooded with near-continuous net of laser energy ensuring safety from DAS is hopeful but probably just that. Radar beams spread out as literal waves as they leave the transmitter and that allows a search radar to cover a lot of the sky in a single sweep, you are going to have to accept a lot of missed coverage area at medium to long range if your going to try to search a wide area with the extremely narrow laser beam. I believe the device/goal you described above was to directly strike the DAS receiver so many times that it is unable to resolve your aircraft? I think that only luck would allow one or two strikes at long range but confess that the math is beyond me.

There is also a significant conceptual difference between an aircraft and missile with regards to the effectiveness of directed energy defense/offense:
*A missile is engaged to you and only you - and has committed it's life to finding you and will die unless it can climb right into the same airspace with you. This means that you can flood the direction it is coming from with your directed energy and the missile will faithfully continue on it's route bringing it's IR receiver closer and closer to your IR transmitter. Assuming your IR transmitter has any effect on the missile IR receiver at all, that effect should continue to increase until either the missile lock breaks or it doesn't and the missile kills you in it's own special way.
* An aircraft engaging you doesn't have to obey the rules of the short lived missile and it is permitted to dwell outside of your effective directed energy range.

As others suggested, it seems only a matter of programming for the DAS to have a recognition of jamming systems at a distance. It also seems that this programming would identify your aircraft as a threat at far greater distance than the DAS would otherwise resolve your normal aircraft IR emissions. So the best defense for you would be to pull the circuit breaker on that IR jamming system to avoid an early death.

archeman wrote:

jeffb wrote:

Don't get me wrong, I don't think you could whack one together over the weekend with a couple of bits of wood and your old cd player but I still think it's doable. In fact it doesn't have to be stabilized as such if the rotating mirror system covers the whole section of the sky above the unit then mounting a high speed camera would allow you to analyse and fire on aircraft (and targets on said aircraft) any time they come into alignment through the mirrors. They are already developing systems like this to defeat IR guided missiles, is it that much of stretch to see them targeting the launching aircraft as well?

By the way, if your DAS system works in the infra red region of the spectrum, it's going to be tricky filtering out an infra red laser.

It seems like your mixing some concepts together here:
* Blinding DAS
* Blinding IR guided missiles
* Receiving reflected returns from your Blinding IR to obtain tracking data

If my reading of tech rags is correct, systems that are using directed energy to 'blind' IR guided missiles are actually combination systems that are dependent on other sensors to give them threat directional information on what sector of the sky to begin 'IR painting'. Those other systems are dependent on traditional defensive hints such as missile launch heat blooms and boost phase trails etc. Only then is the paint effort of directed energy defense effective.

I think that river_otters point that you need to know where your opponent is before you can overwhelm the DAS with offensive IR beam hasn't been addressed well in responses so far. The idea that 360 degrees of sky will be completely flooded with near-continuous net of laser energy ensuring safety from DAS is hopeful but probably just that. Radar beams spread out as literal waves as they leave the transmitter and that allows a search radar to cover a lot of the sky in a single sweep, you are going to have to accept a lot of missed coverage area at medium to long range if your going to try to search a wide area with the extremely narrow laser beam. I believe the device/goal you described above was to directly strike the DAS receiver so many times that it is unable to resolve your aircraft? I think that only luck would allow one or two strikes at long range but confess that the math is beyond me.

There is also a significant conceptual difference between an aircraft and missile with regards to the effectiveness of directed energy defense/offense:
*A missile is engaged to you and only you - and has committed it's life to finding you and will die unless it can climb right into the same airspace with you. This means that you can flood the direction it is coming from with your directed energy and the missile will faithfully continue on it's route bringing it's IR receiver closer and closer to your IR transmitter. Assuming your IR transmitter has any effect on the missile IR receiver at all, that effect should continue to increase until either the missile lock breaks or it doesn't and the missile kills you in it's own special way.
* An aircraft engaging you doesn't have to obey the rules of the short lived missile and it is permitted to dwell outside of your effective directed energy range.

As others suggested, it seems only a matter of programming for the DAS to have a recognition of jamming systems at a distance. It also seems that this programming would identify your aircraft as a threat at far greater distance than the DAS would otherwise resolve your normal aircraft IR emissions. So the best defense for you would be to pull the circuit breaker on that IR jamming system to avoid an early death.

Actually yes and no, I wasn't mixing in laser range finding as I said earlier that an aircraft would require its own DAS-like system to identify and track targets. I do mix together the concepts of blinding missile seekers and DAS apertures (and mark one eyeballs) because conceptually they are the same.

The purely speculative design that I mentioned before involved a spinning dual mirror system that could be used to image the sky above the system many times a second. By stitching those images together into a cohesive whole you could produce an image, many times a second of everything in the sensors field of view, basically a single aperture of a DAS-like system. The optics could allow for simultaneous magnified and non-magnified views and if combined with a relatively simple image recognition system, could identify and track aircraft and other objects in its view; automatically determining their range simply by comparing the resulting images with reference images. In effect a mini-das like system if you will.

By incorporating a reasonably powerful laser in the same optical system, the same optics could be used to direct the laser at objects identified as targets as the swath the mirrors cover crosses them (say on the next pass or rotation of the mirror array). You’d probably want some sort of mems based mini mirror array to ‘condition’ and minimally steer the laser to improve accuracy and laser ‘dwell’ but that technology, while quite advanced, already exists and would be available to a systems manufacturer with silicon chip manufacturing facilities.

Of course the resulting beam would strobe each target multiple times a second as the mirror system rotated each target out of its field and you would probably have to include a fairly powerful laser so as to dump enough energy into the imaging hardware at the other end to overload it or wash it out but I don’t think you’d be talking kilowatts. The real limiting factor would be processing speed and how quickly you could ‘condition’ and or ‘steer’ the laser for each successive target but I’m pretty sure that mems like technology can reliably operate in the millisecond cycle range and of course processing power is cheap and getting cheaper.

The idea of just waving the beam randomly around the local area hadn’t really occurred to me as you’d be just as likely to hurt a friendly with it as a hostile not to mention advertise to everyone near and far that you’ve got a directed energy system on your aircraft. I had imagined it more as something which was primarily designed to deal with IR missile seekers but which could be extended to consider DAS apertures and certain regions of the opposing aircraft’s canopy as IR seekers as well. I’d imagine the engineers would be sensible enough to program it to only attack targets it had a reasonable probability of being effective against which would also reduce the chances of the system being detected as a directed energy weapon until the target was too close to avoid it.

I’m not so sure about your point about aircraft not having to get as close as missiles do, they’re already in a merge after all and while a target aircraft may not wish to ‘dwell’ within effective range of a directed energy weapon that can be a little tricky when he doesn’t know there is a directed energy weapon there or what it’s effective range is.

@arkadyrenko: You seem to not understand what a laser is. IT is a beam of light that is coalesced at single frequency and is polarized in a single plane. Because of this, filters are very effective as are rotating polarized filters.

Point being that just like every other offensive/defensive system on fighters, this will join the ongoing measure/countermeasure dance that has been going on since radar was invented.

Some other ways around the IR laser are upgrading to multi-bandwidth QWIP chips, UV bands, visible light bands, etc.

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an aircraft would require its own DAS-like system to identify and track targets.

Well SpudM- I was responding to jeffb's suggested scanner, unless you two are the same creature?
That sounded like a system that was considering replacing radar scan concepts with lasers to which I was pointing out the weaknesses, given what we laymen know about those technologies.

I concur on your point about a passive system being far more effective.
I also concur on your point that it would be possible to use the search system to direct offensive laser once you have a target tracked, but vastly more effective to use a separate focus and control mirror system.

With the advent of HOBS and SDOTS© (Self Designated Over The Shoulder ) shots, EODAS like capability will most certainly be making its way onto all fighter/bombers at some point in the future. Throw in BTA, precise AAA & SAM tracking, navigation, etc and it's even more important.

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unless you two are the same creature

castlebravo wrote:

firstimpulse wrote:

It always seems that as soon as some engineer declare's his shiny new plane/weapon has made the dogfight obsolete, some loophole comes along... Wink

To think that the turning dogfight will always be the dominate form of air to air combat is to me just as bad an assumption as when people thought early BVR missiles would make the dogfight a thing of the past.

A few observations.

Haven't we in the past produced truly great fighters whose "weakness" was the turning dogfight? The P-38, P-47, and F-4 come to mind. They were at their best when explicitly "avoiding" a turning dogfight. With it's low observability and superior situational awareness, wouldn't the F-35 be in the same boat, just for different reasons? If a F-35 ever gets into a "dogfight" with the likes of a very agile, off-boresight capable teen series fighter, Eurofighter, Rafale, Mig or Sukhoi, it seems to me it has given most all its advantages away. I understand the networking / mutual support argument. However, that argument assumes the adversary has no such capability of its own. That's a stupid assumption considering the F-35 is purported to be in service through 2060. It also assumes the enemy will never be able to jam the networking function - another very dangerous assumption.

So, for those of you that want to assume that the networking mutual support advantage will always be there without fail, there is no sense in debating. Save your breath and keep believing that we are forever technically superior and the enemy cannot innovate and come up with future technical advantages of their own.

For those of you that live in the real world, I submit that with its weight, relatively small wing (higher wing loading), and limited weapons load, the F-35 will at times not only fail to dominate WVR fights if so exposed, but potentially "be dominated." This is particularly true if it gets tied up in such a fight while in the strike mode where the A2A armament is limited due to the strike payload.

One last point on this. We all assume that 5th gen A2A missiles are going to be very lethal. Since the F-35 is programed to be around 40-50 years, it's going to have to deal with 6th gen missiles as well. It's probable that these missiles will have an extremely high probability of killing their target, F-35 or otherwise. Therefore, the only way to survive against them will be to avoid detection or stay out of range. Both of these defenses are obviously long gone once you are in visual range. There is a reason the DoD is planning to buy 4,900 JASSMs. It's aircraft survivability in the 21st century.

Quote:

Haven't we in the past produced truly great fighters whose "weakness" was the turning dogfight? The P-38, P-47, and F-4 come to mind. They were at their best when explicitly "avoiding" a turning dogfight. With it's low observability and superior situational awareness, wouldn't the F-35 be in the same boat, just for different reasons? If a F-35 ever gets into a "dogfight" with the likes of a very agile, off-boresight capable teen series fighter, Eurofighter, Rafale, Mig or Sukhoi, it seems to me it has given most all its advantages away.

OK RedBird, how much maneuverability does a strike aircraft have to have to make you happy?
We keep getting reports and we can view design requirements for ourselves that show that it can turn just as well as most of the fighters you mentioned if you consider those aircraft with fuel and weapons loads. How much more agility does it need to have?
Are we as a nation not allowed to build strike aircraft because somebody out there always wants to see pure A2A designs at the exclusion of every other mission?

Please don't bring up any points about the aircraft being sold as a fighter. It is not the fault of the production team who is trying to meet actual design requirements that the marketing department is trying to sell this aircraft as a fighter. Anybody who works on a line that produces anything knows from experience that no amount of shame or reality can slow down a motivated sales and marketing staff who smells another commission bonus.

redbird87 wrote:

Haven't we in the past produced truly great fighters whose "weakness" was the turning dogfight? The P-38, P-47, and F-4 come to mind. They were at their best when explicitly "avoiding" a turning dogfight. With it's low observability and superior situational awareness, wouldn't the F-35 be in the same boat, just for different reasons? If a F-35 ever gets into a "dogfight" with the likes of a very agile, off-boresight capable teen series fighter, Eurofighter, Rafale, Mig or Sukhoi, it seems to me it has given most all its advantages away.

You seem to be under the false impression that the F-35 isn't very agile. This fallacy results in the premises based upon that assumption to be unable to stand up to scrutiny. The fact of the matter that if the F-35 finds itself in a WVR situation, not only does it have the agility to hold its own, but the ability to engage targets spherically(which is superior to typical High off boresite). Additionally, with lower radar/IR signatures, the foes will have a harder time getting/maintaining weapons lock.

Quote:

I understand the networking / mutual support argument. However, that argument assumes the adversary has no such capability of its own.

There is no assumption that a foe doesn't have networking. The problem with your assertion here is trying to compare platforms, rather than systems.
No foe can compete on a systems level.

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That's a stupid assumption considering the F-35 is purported to be in service through 2060. It also assumes the enemy will never be able to jam the networking function - another very dangerous assumption.

Jamming unknown targets with directional datalinks, is not going to shut a network down, with a high number of nodes. You'd have to have knowledge of all the node locations, and have jammers in between all of them. This is not a likely scenario.

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For those of you that live in the real world, I submit that with its weight, relatively small wing (higher wing loading), and limited weapons load, the F-35 will at times not only fail to dominate WVR fights if so exposed, but potentially "be dominated." This is particularly true if it gets tied up in such a fight while in the strike mode where the A2A armament is limited due to the strike payload.

Wing loading isn't the determining factor for agility. An F-4 has a lower wing loading than an F-16, and the latter will complete a 360 degree turn faster than the former turning 180 degrees. Body lift, drag, unstable design, etc.. all play large roles in how agile a plane is. The F-35 derives a large amount of lift from its airframe, in addition to the wing area. A similarly armed F-16/18, etc... would have similar limitations. The F-35 could avoid the enemy altogether, whereas the legacy aircraft don't have that option. There would be F-35s/22s with A2A load outs flying with the strikers, so it's really a non-issue.

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One last point on this. We all assume that 5th gen A2A missiles are going to be very lethal. Since the F-35 is programed to be around 40-50 years, it's going to have to deal with 6th gen missiles as well. It's probable that these missiles will have an extremely high probability of killing their target, F-35 or otherwise. Therefore, the only way to survive against them will be to avoid detection or stay out of range. Both of these defenses are obviously long gone once you are in visual range. There is a reason the DoD is planning to buy 4,900 JASSMs. It's aircraft survivability in the 21st century.

Legacy aircraft will be even more vulnerable in the coming decades. Until a foe has an aircraft with a smaller RCS/better avionics, the F-35 will do just fine.

Archeman - I'm not arguing any of that. I was answering the original post. I think the F-35 will be plenty maneuverable for a strike aircraft. But that's not what the original post asked. It asked why it will "dominate" in WVR combat. I simply am not convinced it will. Particularly if the enemy has 5th and eventually 6th gen A2A weapons. Hold its own WVR? Certainly. Dominate? Maybe. I hope so.

I certainly do not share Wrightwing's arrogance that it's simply impossible for any foe to ever best us in any technical realm and that the the Matrix......uh I mean network, will always be infallible. Let's look at some facts in this technical debate. The US ranks 25th among peer developed countries in high school age math. China is number 1. To assume that over the next 40-50 years this won't translate into them making significant technical breakthroughs of their own is wishful thinking. Plus, they are expert at stealing and pirating in order to close the gap of any head start we develop. Likewise, we are horrible at safeguarding our technical advantages.

Finally, our ability to simply outspend them is going to go away over the next 20 years. If you can do simple math and basic analysis, just take the current $16 trillion deficit, our demographic trends (life expectancy), and the velocity of growth of the major federal entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Obamacare). You will see we are simply going broke. Bill Gross, perhaps one of the top two or three minds in the world at understanding debt markets estimates our true deficit at over $75 trillion counting deferred entitlement obligations. That's ah....what they call real money.

All this adds up to at least the "possibility" that we will be caught in some, if not all aspects of aerospace technology well before the F-35's expected service life is over. To discount that possibility due to the arrogant assumption that we will always be the most advanced is just ignorant.

Again, I hope we remain comfortably more advanced technologically, but I refuse to drink the kool-aid that causes some members of this forum to act as if our advantages are an American birthright and thus set in stone forevermore.

wrightwing wrote:

You seem to be under the false impression that the F-35 isn't very agile.

Well it isn’t you know. Remember the quick look review and all that stuff about buffeting and transonic roll off? It’s inability to be flown at AOA greater than 20 degrees? No? Well there’s your problem then, you’re ignoring the facts and instead just accepting what the marketing brochure says as fact. Maybe you should take a deep breath and wait for the testing to complete (or advance at least) over the summer (mind you it might have been summer 2013, I’m not sure now). But you may need to take even that with a grain of salt as the F-35 passed its CDR back in 2007 despite the fact that the tail hook didn’t work.

wrightwing wrote:

Quote:

For those of you that live in the real world, I submit that with its weight, relatively small wing (higher wing loading), and limited weapons load, the F-35 will at times not only fail to dominate WVR fights if so exposed, but potentially "be dominated." This is particularly true if it gets tied up in such a fight while in the strike mode where the A2A armament is limited due to the strike payload.

Wing loading isn't the determining factor for agility. An F-4 has a lower wing loading than an F-16, and the latter will complete a 360 degree turn faster than the former turning 180 degrees. Body lift, drag, unstable design, etc.. all play large roles in how agile a plane is. The F-35 derives a large amount of lift from its airframe, in addition to the wing area. A similarly armed F-16/18, etc... would have similar limitations. The F-35 could avoid the enemy altogether, whereas the legacy aircraft don't have that option. There would be F-35s/22s with A2A load outs flying with the strikers, so it's really a non-issue.

Wing loading IS a determining factor for agility, it’s just that the F-16 and later aircraft including the F-35 augment the amount of lift that the wings generate through the generation of vortexes from wing roots and in the case of the F-35, its inlets. Of course, generating vortexes and the resulting effects/behaviors isn't an exact science so sometimes they stutter or interact with other structures on the aircraft to create buffeting in an unpredictable way or, even better, one side of the aircraft will generate a vortex while the other doesn’t causing the aircraft to roll unexpectedly.

wrightwing wrote:

Quote:

One last point on this. We all assume that 5th gen A2A missiles are going to be very lethal. Since the F-35 is programed to be around 40-50 years, it's going to have to deal with 6th gen missiles as well. It's probable that these missiles will have an extremely high probability of killing their target, F-35 or otherwise. Therefore, the only way to survive against them will be to avoid detection or stay out of range. Both of these defenses are obviously long gone once you are in visual range. There is a reason the DoD is planning to buy 4,900 JASSMs. It's aircraft survivability in the 21st century.

Legacy aircraft will be even more vulnerable in the coming decades. Until a foe has an aircraft with a smaller RCS/better avionics, the F-35 will do just fine.

Nope, they don’t need a smaller RCS they just need a way to make the F-35s smaller RCS not matter, same thing for avionics. You keep assuming they have to do what you’re doing better. They don’t.

OK RB I see where your coming from.
RE: technology theft, The US is no stranger to that game and is very often on the recipient end! Witness just a couple months ago some poor fella trying to leave Russia just happened to have a whole luggage container chock full of Tupolev military avionics parts. Wonder where those were supposed to be going??? It's a good bet that a worker for a regional Certain Intelligence Agency 'station' saw the arrest go down and slipped quietly away into the crowd.

RE: 25th in math. Fast flash media statistics are not what they always seem.
See this: http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com ... education/

Humans are notoriously poor predictors of the future. Even those that dedicate their entire lives to the craft are little better than the wild-eyed guessers. The inglorious end of the great republic has been predicted so many times that it isn't worth printing anymore.

@JeffB: You might want to take some of your own medicine and read the QLR.

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Well it isn’t you know. Remember the quick look review and all that stuff about buffeting and transonic roll off? It’s inability to be flown at AOA greater than 20 degrees? No? Well there’s your problem then, you’re ignoring the facts and instead just accepting what the marketing brochure says as fact.

Nowhere in the QLR does it even come close to implying that it cannot be flown at AOA greater than 20 degrees. What it did say was that it has yet to be flown at AOA greater than 20 and that the risk of concurrency costs associated with a fix (if required) will not be settled until the tests are complete. That is a huge difference in meaning.

Just so you don't think I read it right, here is the section.

Notice that the language is all about "risk", "could be" and "potentially" due to the testing having not been done, which btw, is going to start shortly for high AOA work.

In case you want to stake everything you believe in on the QLR, notice that they also made a mistake about the effects of buffet and HOBS shots. They mistakenly make the assumption that the helmet is required in order to take a HOBS shot. The truth is that EODAS is constantly tracking WVR targets and all the pilot needs to do is pick a target on the shoot list and pull the trigger (if it's in range).

But hey, why let facts get in the way of personal opinion.

I skipped over the words and went straight to the pictures, they really are worth a thousand words aren't they?

Notice how it's almost linear Spud? You can draw a line from 18 degrees AOA @ 0.7M right down to 9 degrees AOA @ 0.95M. Good thing it won't have maneuver much in that part of the envelope hey? LM claim that it'll get to 50 degrees angle of attack, I think they're being conservative. I reckon it'll get all the way to 180 once the wings rip off! Laughing

Spudman wrote:

In case you want to stake everything you believe in on the QLR, notice that they also made a mistake about the effects of buffet and HOBS shots. They mistakenly make the assumption that the helmet is required in order to take a HOBS shot. The truth is that EODAS is constantly tracking WVR targets and all the pilot needs to do is pick a target on the shoot list and pull the trigger (if it's in range).

But with the aircraft and displays shaking so much how do they select the right plane off the list? And which plane is that again? That blurry one just passing two o'clock? Laughing

I'm looking forward to the flight test results in summer Spud, they're bound to be "interesting" Wink

archeman wrote:

OK RB I see where your coming from.
RE: technology theft, The US is no stranger to that game and is very often on the recipient end! Witness just a couple months ago some poor fella trying to leave Russia just happened to have a whole luggage container chock full of Tupolev military avionics parts. Wonder where those were supposed to be going??? It's a good bet that a worker for a regional Certain Intelligence Agency 'station' saw the arrest go down and slipped quietly away into the crowd.

Let's see....Israel, China, France, Brazil, or maybe he was duped by the FSB posing as any of the above. Who know's? If the US was involved, I seriously doubt the CIA would be amateurish enough to have his handler there in the terminal though. I like novels too, but that's just not real world.

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RE: 25th in math. Fast flash media statistics are not what they always seem. See this: http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com ... education/

That has some valid points, although it doesn't dispute what I was saying. To assume that we are always going to be on top technologically is dangerous. The R&D the article references is driven by business and the education facts are backed-up more than they are disputed by the article. Please don't tell me you are satisfied with 25th out of 34? Fundamental Math is ah....standardized, and thus the test should be. In order to improvise and innovate, you have to have that standard foundation from which to leap. It is true the breadth and depth of our higher education system (colleges) has kept us in the forefront up to now though, I'll give you that.

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Humans are notoriously poor predictors of the future. Even those that dedicate their entire lives to the craft are little better than the wild-eyed guessers. The inglorious end of the great republic has been predicted so many times that it isn't worth printing anymore.

I'm not predicting the end of the "great republic". (Although we are increasingly becoming a socialist republic, which doesn't sound so great....that's another topic though.) I was simply pointing out the dangers of over-valuing technology in something as up close and deadly as a dogfight. The enemy has a vote too. They should never be underestimated. The F-35 should in my view avoid dogfighting at all cost. Lasers not withstanding, too many of it's advantages are nullified in such a time and space compressed engagement. It's just another airplane at that point. I hope it's as maneuverable as it's potential opponents. It doesn't appear to be more so IMO.

Forum: F-35 Variants and Missions

JSF WVR Air to Air Combat