Lockheed develops rack to make F-35A/C a six-shooter

[krorvik]

With 2 external AIM-9X's and the now internal 6 AMRAAM's they have a fighter with the same nominal load-out of the F-15

And stealthy. And well ahead of any realistic load of the legacy F-16 (not counting the upcoming truck version). Nice to see this announced.

[loke]

On previous page there is a post with links 'for reading': viewtopic.php?f=54&t=55440&p=418295&hilit=frontal#p418295

Then there is: 2019 Pentagon Report to Congress on Chinese Military Development

https://news.usni.org/2019/05/03/2019-p ... evelopment
&/OR:
https://news.usni.org/2019/05/03/report ... -on-taiwan

PDF of report: https://assets.documentcloud.org/docume ... REPORT.pdf (17.6Mb)

Another precis: https://seapowermagazine.org/report-cit ... nese-navy/

& anotherie: https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2019 ... ns/156726/

Thanks, much appreciated!

[loke]

A war in the pacific will most likely be either very contained, or it will go nuclear. If it goes nuclear nobody will be sending much of anything. Because there will be not much to send, and there will be nowhere to send it.

I'm laughing at this under a mushroom cloud while listening to 99 Luftballoons

jokes aside Its more complicated than that. You can look at the massive conventional warfare build up in Europe in the 1980s, even in a nuclear war huge mass formations of troops, tanks, planes, arty etc-- Even in a war we thought would include tens of thousands of nuclear weapons

There might well be nukes that are used. But Its not MAD. People confuse that. MAD was never "mutually agreed on" despite the moniker. the Soviets never agreed with or adopted that as their doctrine. As early as the 1950s western strategists were already sounding the alarm that there needed to be middle grounds between Peace and the END OF ALL THE WORLD. (Americans are always so humble, did you know the end of America is the end of the World?I love us)

There may well be nuclear strikes, but it might be limited to tactical nukes against airfields or hardened military targets. Or relegated to Sea Warfare like depth charges or Torpedos. To destroy cities invites the same on your own cities, The notion of "hostage cities" and tit for tat are more current. by the late 1970s the US had abandoned MAD in fact. Both sides might work stringently to avoid Nukes, especially if one side feels the other side has an advantage. In which case they may steer well clear of it. If one can win on the battlefield but not against nukes, then one would press the battlefield and try to steer clear of nukes.

Even then, STOVL/VSTOL Harriers were going to be executing a kind of "Aerial guerilla warfare" against Russian aircraft in the 70s and 80s over Europe. The Harrier may be worthy of scorn and is considered by many to be a meme, but if one took out a bomber full of nukes it might have saved millions of people long after NATO airfields were radioactive craters.

Even in nuclear war conventional forces matter, which is what we saw in the 1980s.

MAD means "Mutually Assured Destruction" -- not "Agreed"

Of course one may hope that even after escalation to tactical nuke, one may hope that it does not escalate further -- however I am not that optimistic -- also keep in mind that when one party start to feel that it may be losing, the level of desperation will increase, and the probability of sending off more nukes will increase dramatically. What is there to lose? If they don't send off the nukes now then the foe will probably disable the nukes. Also, since we are losing we must use whatever tools left to crush the enemy = send off all the IBMCs still functional.

Why wait for the enemy to crush you, if you may have a chance to crush the enemy first? Seems illogical to do nothing if the enemy is about to crush you... So to avoid a nuclear winter the US should not be too aggressive in a potential future conflict with China/Russia -- to make sure they don't become desperate and fire off all the nukes they got, while they are still functional... sounds like a recipe for disaster to me...

have not read much about the USMC and how they operate; how would they protect a forward airbase against a near-peer? The Chinese is rapidly developing and fielding quite a lot of potent stuff.

How would the Swedes do it?

Irrelevant IMO -- this is not the early 1980s anymore, and China is not the USSR -- the question is, what tools and methods will the Chinese have available to locate and attack forward bases? The capabilities is developing very rapidly and is IMO already today above and beyond what the USSR had during the cold war. Imagine where they will be 10-15 years from now...

[mixelflick]

:shock: Look at this BEASTIE BOY! Some RACK eh. Heading for WRACK & RUIN!

https://sites.breakingmedia.com/uploads ... open..jpeg

Am I the only one who thinks the F-35 looks better (much better) with external stores?

The AIM-9x carriage looks awesome, like canine teeth. Even when you start adding LGB's, JDAM's etc it looks fantastic. I can only imagine how external AMRAAM's are going to look! And perhaps it's time LM rolls that out - air to air beast mode. It'll be able to carry just as many (perhaps more) AAM's as the F-15X, and do so cheaper and be much more survivable.

Pictures may not be an objective criteria to evaluate aircraft/aircraft buy rates. But perception is reality, and many of these US Senators and Reps are highly visual. An F-35 armed to the teeth with external loadouts may spell the difference between bigger F-35 block buys, vs. building F-15x's...

[lbk000]

I've been thinking about this matter recently as well. Effective communication is always a higher form of conflict resolution than expenditure of force, and history is rife with examples where warfare took a turn for ritual and display.

It is important to be able to impress upon the receiving end the force they have to contend with, in order that they understand the consequences of their action. The F-35 in its 5thgen VLO capacity may well be too advanced, too alien a concept for the opposition to understand. This is great when the goal is kill them with minimal risk, but when you want them to change their minds, you need something comprehensible and therefore, convincing.

On the home front, I think this is a major reason why the A-10 maintains such traction amongst the greater public -- the aircraft, its purpose and capabilities are obvious and comprehensible. They can see what their tax dollars buy: a big fricking gun. The F-35 appears inscrutably and incongruously benign, and so for the Average Joe, seems completely irrelevant ("Just what are we paying 300gorillion for, it doesn't even have a gun").

[marsavian]

Don't know if it's an optical illusion but the F-35 appears slimmer and sleeker with external stores to me, almost futuristic looking. It's not a bad look and I suspect its EW will protect it even in those states.

[marauder2048]

There might well be nukes that are used. But Its not MAD. People confuse that. MAD was never "mutually agreed on" despite the moniker. the Soviets never agreed with or adopted that as their doctrine.

Assured destruction was a McNamara era concept for strategic weapons: you build essentially an all
SLBM force with relatively inaccurate weapons to assure, because SSBNs are highly survivable,
the destruction of Soviet cities and industrial centers.

The argument is that the inaccurate SLBMs are not first strike weapons (can't threaten hardened targets,
not responsive) and the enemy has no incentive to build a large arsenal to counter the SLBM force
because the enemy can't, absent ASW breakthroughs, ever build enough nukes to
blind bombard the world's oceans.

The Soviets never adopted it and surprisingly to some the US never adopted it either; McNamara never
implemented it and neither did his successors.

But assured destruction never extended below the strategic level; NATO and the Warsaw Pact had all sorts of
theater and tactical nukes and all sorts of contingency plans on how and when to use them.

In an era before PGMs, there was no other way to offset NATO's huge (1:4) disadvantage in armor.

[spazsinbad]

BACK to the RACK. Has anyone seen this old graphic before (purportedly from LM of olde) at SNAFU F-35 FLOGspot: ???????

F-35 News. You're impressed with 3 AMRAAMs per bay? We were once promised so much more!!! 05 May 2019
https://www.snafu-solomon.com/2019/05/f ... ith-3.html

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vbB2P4lPHU8/ ... ing-ii.jpg

OOPS! 'SWP' found it (I should read more and do less IGNORE of SNAFUman comments) 20 Aug 2006 F-16.net

viewtopic.php?p=73691#p73691 ASLO yep the graphic is not proportioned correctly amaturdish .

[southernphantom]

Why anyone takes Solomon seriously is beyond me.

[spazsinbad]

Well that is known however our SPUDMAN retorts some good stuff and this is one example: 'SWP' pointed to this URL:

https://www.tu.no/artikler/kun-ett-krys ... erg/412047 18 Nov 2017

"...Babione emphasizes that there is a large arsenal that will be integrated when the F-35 development is completed in 2018 and in Block 4 in just over five years. All partner countries have weapons they want to integrate on the plane.

It is also about other ways to utilize the bomb room. One example is the aircraft manufacturer's own project "Sidekick" which is about stacking Amraam missiles on top of each other, allowing the F-35 to fly with six such air-to-air missiles internally instead of four as today. Lockheed Martin has a prototype that will soon be transferred to operational testing...."

[blain]

Very Shrewd move on L-M's part to announce it while the discussion on the merits of the F-15X starts. With 2 external AIM-9X's and the now internal 6 AMRAAM's they have a fighter with the same nominal load-out of the F-15 but stealthy and with 5th generation avionics. The lobbyists and marketing guys should be able to take this and capitalize on it. Sure the external Aim-9's reduce the stealth of the aircraft but have to assume it will still be far better than the F-15. Bet they wish they had internally funded the design of external fuel tanks.

There is a trade off with carrying the AIM-9X. It really depends how much do you lose with regards to the RCS. I really wonder whether its better to just carry the 6 AIM-120s in most scenarios. You'd lose the off bore sight capability, but would be less likely to be detected. The AIM-9X miss by the SH also stands out in my mind.

[marauder2048]

Very Shrewd move on L-M's part to announce it while the discussion on the merits of the F-15X starts. With 2 external AIM-9X's and the now internal 6 AMRAAM's they have a fighter with the same nominal load-out of the F-15 but stealthy and with 5th generation avionics. The lobbyists and marketing guys should be able to take this and capitalize on it. Sure the external Aim-9's reduce the stealth of the aircraft but have to assume it will still be far better than the F-15. Bet they wish they had internally funded the design of external fuel tanks.

There is a trade off with carrying the AIM-9X. It really depends how much do you lose with regards to the RCS. I really wonder whether its better to just carry the 6 AIM-120s in most scenarios. You'd lost the off bore sight capability, but would be less likely to be detected. The AIM-9X miss by the SH also stands out in my mind.

AIM-120 has had HOBS capability for years now.

[jetblast16]

8 slammers

[blain]

Very Shrewd move on L-M's part to announce it while the discussion on the merits of the F-15X starts. With 2 external AIM-9X's and the now internal 6 AMRAAM's they have a fighter with the same nominal load-out of the F-15 but stealthy and with 5th generation avionics. The lobbyists and marketing guys should be able to take this and capitalize on it. Sure the external Aim-9's reduce the stealth of the aircraft but have to assume it will still be far better than the F-15. Bet they wish they had internally funded the design of external fuel tanks.

There is a trade off with carrying the AIM-9X. It really depends how much do you lose with regards to the RCS. I really wonder whether its better to just carry the 6 AIM-120s in most scenarios. You'd lost the off bore sight capability, but would be less likely to be detected. The AIM-9X miss by the SH also stands out in my mind.

AIM-120 has had HOBS capability for years now.

I was sure about the usefulness/effectiveness of HOBS for AIM-120s in a dogfight. Doesn't thrust vectoring give the 9x better agility in dogfights? You'd lose the ability to target a fighter with an IR missile if you carried only AMRAAMs. Minimum ranges appear similar with both missiles. But flares from an SU-22 can counter an AIM-9X then I am not sure it matters if you only carry ARAAMs, especially if it helps you reduce your RCS.

You can cue weapons with the EOTS. But I have read differing info on the DAS. Does it provide good enough info to cue an A/A weapon off bore sight? If it does can the DAS determine IFF? Or is the assumption that you are already maneuvering against the threat and you have already determined the aircraft is an adversary?

[SpudmanWP]

If an ASRAAM is a viable HOBS missile with no TVC and only small tail fins then the AMRAAM can certainly be one.

The F-35 can vector a weapon based on the fused data from any sensor. No single sensor is required for any certain weapon.

As far as if the EODAS can provide a weapon's quality track:

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