The Houthis Almost Shot Down an F-35—and Washington Is Panicked
The Houthis Almost Shot Down an F-35—and Washington Is Panicked
According to new reporting from the New York Times, a Houthi surface-to-air (SAM) missile barely missed an American F-35 fifth-generation fighter, the crown jewel of the U.S. fighter inventory. The F-35, participating in Operation Rough Rider against the Houthis, was forced to take evasive action to avoid the missile.
The incident raises questions about the survivability of one of America’s most advanced fighters, and raises concerns over how effective the relatively unsophisticated Houthi air defense system has been at hampering U.S. action.
Wait, an f35? THAT F35? The super expensive, country sinking cost, MULTIPLE TRILLION dollar (with a capital T, that's X,000,000,000,000 USD), super late, overbudget, multiple decade long development (80s-2010s?), the "that's too expensive, cut everything that made it unique out" F-35?
The F-35 program that KEEPS getting MORE expensive?
The F-35 that, if you look at a pie chart of ALL of United States budget, would be a singular visible chunk?
The F-35 project that's commonly cited when learning about logical fallacies as an example of sunk cost fallacy?
yea they're shooting at em now
Don't worry, folks. Pete Hegseth's in charge. This is fine.
Take a drink for every f-35 that gets destroyed. And take a drink for every f-35 that isn’t!
Then just take a drink. The wife can take notes for me.
Take a drink
for every f-35 that gets destroyed. And take a drink for every f-35 that isn’t!Heggy's way ahead of you.
And one drink every time an f35 fall of a carrier
Pretty sure that's what they're doing, I'm having a hard time believing that people can be so inept.
Maybe we should stop FUCKING AROUND if we dont want to find out?
Millennium Challenge 2002.
That's when we learned that low tech can beat high tech in this manner.
Did they learn the lesson at DOD? Of course not. They demoted the guy who won and made him play out a cosplay battle where America Wins!
I wouldn't say they learned nothing from that war game. They've never done to Iran what they did to the other six of the infamous seven that the Bushies planned to dismantle. I suspect that that war game is a factor in that decision. This thing with the Houthis serves to refresh their memories I guess. At least I hope. Who knows, with this admin, anything can happen
They demoted the guy who won and made him play out a cosplay battle where America Wins!
To be completely accurate: Paul Van Riper was already retired when he agreed to lead red force in MC02. After it was clear that red force was winning, they stopped the exercise and restarted it with a bunch of new restrictions on what red force was allowed to do. Essentially, scripting the win for blue force.
Oh I remember hearing about this but forgot the name. Primo “military intelligence is an oxymoron” stuff.
TBF, taking down an advanced USA fighter jet is a tad less impressive when they are apparently falling into the sea on a regular basis
At least some of those aircraft appear to be falling into the sea because Aircraft Carriers are having to make rather extreme turns, evasive manuevers, in order to evade other Houthi missiles / drones.
Inflatable bumpers that can be activated during emergency maneuvers to keep planes on deck.
Please donate my billion dollar idea profits to lemmy in my name. Thanks.
Those were F/A-18 Super Hornets from the aircraft carrier. Not as advanced as you might think.
100% numerous people in the US military know that they're sitting on extremely expensive ships/aircraft/vehicles that are with modern enough weaponry, easy to destroy. A question of whether they have the power, for enough time required, to fix the bloat
Difficult and expensive to develop, manufacturer, maintain. Trapped in service contracts with completely single source suppliers, no alternatives. If it wasn't so expensive to maintain, even just the ammunition, maybe it wouldn't be such a panic situation but well after pretty much constantly being at war since the countries inception, the US is sitting on an albatross of a military. Not just all the equipment but how much employment is tied to supporting the albatross. Albatross multiplied hard with Iraq and Afghanistan paired with all the tax cuts since Reagan. Without Afghanistan and Iraq, probably wouldn't be so wallet concerned for for a good amount longer
Lol I'm sure a blitzed Pete Hegseth will fix these problems.
Apparently, it was DEI keeping the planes in the air, so our new crackerforce is dumping the planes overboard. Won't have to worry about them if we give them to the orcas.
So... the article describes that:
... the simplistic nature of the [Houthi Anti Air] systems also helps them to avoid earlier detection by America’s advanced equipment. “Many of the [SAMs] are also improvised, leveraging non-traditional passive infrared sensors and jury-rigged air-to-air missiles that provide little to no early warning of a threat, let alone an incoming attack,”
and:
but the Houthis claim that the Barq-1 and Barq-2 [Iranian AA missle systems] have maximum ranges of 31 miles and 44 miles and can engage targets at altitudes of 49,000 feet and 65,000 feet, respectively.
with some of these missiles being:
capable of firing Taer variants also reportedly have electro-optical and/or infrared camera to aid in target acquisition, identification, and tracking.”
... So I find it rather odd to describe passive IR guided AA missiles as 'non-traditional'.
I think a better phrase would be 'novel' or 'unaccounted for'.
Passive IR missiles of different exact specifications are... pretty common through the entire history of ... just missiles, in general.
Jet engine exhaust is extremely hot, and it would seem the F35 is not actually as good at masking it as previously thought, probably when its flying away from the missile launcher and is thus showing its big hot ass... if passive IR + electro optical missiles can get this close.
('electro-optical' is a fancy term for basically a visual spectrum camera + computer tracking an identified target... you know, like a snapchat face filter...)
" probably when its flying away from the missile launcher and is thus showing its big hot ass... "
Stupid, sexy joint strike fighter.
Yeah, it sounds like they're trying to downplay how they disimissed the tech as "outdated" during design and construction.
The mindset reminds me of their infamous wargame: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
It's possible that we're also just seeing a fundamental shift in tech here. When this plane was being developed, the only way to track the F-35 was to have a world-class radar system. That's the kind of defense net it's meant to evade. But now? You can track things optically just by having a bunch of cameras pointed at the sky, combining data together using some cheap AI system. Did this event happen in the daytime?
Reading this stuff reminds me of earlier in the 2010s when Iranian weapon systems press releases were always met with mockery, I live in region with heavy military tech development companies. I had a feeling back then that progress is progress and eventually they'll be at a point of close enough to make the risk calculation too high for the US to operate so far from production/maintenance compared to whatever country is the current target for invasion/bombings and their weapon sources. I think we're getting to that point
Operate and lose equipment that cost a billion+ to make equipped with ammunition that are hundreds of thousands to millilions of dollars to resupply that also need to be serviced for extended periods of time and major parts replaced after only a few uses. Parts of the US intentionally let costs run away. Whether they thought the technolical advantage actually made a justifiable enough difference for the poor production rate and maintainability cost is another question
Star trek 6, "well the thing's gotta have a tailpipe."
The F-35, participating in Operation Rough Rider against the Houthis, was forced to take evasive action to avoid the missile.
So, they had to, like, dodge a missile? And that is panic worthy?
Supposedly the F35 should never have been seen or detected in the first place.
The fact that a missile was tracking it and they had to dodge it means that these stealth capabilities are lacking.
What? They can see and hear our blaringly loud war bird spewing kilotonnes of hellfire over their heads? But we paid a gogol of dinaros so it would be invisible!
It's a stealth plane apparently, so I guess it wasn't supposed to be seen, but they saw it.
It had to rely on a last resort as opposed to its primary defensive system which constricts its design in a big way, its stealth component.
I heard it's supposed to be super stealthy and really smart, so I guess they didn't expect to even have to do that lol. Otherwise, we could spend less money and use the older less stealthy and technologically advanced jets.
Enter Maverick, ready to fly the old jets.
I have a soft spot for new planes being shot down by "outdated" technologies.
[translations, copypasted, so you don't have to visit the source on reddit]
translations:
- "Sorry, your plane is on fire"(rhymes in Serbian)
- "Mine is visible, but doesn't crash!"
- "Airplane junkyard: 'We have F-117 parts!'"
- "The ground suddenly got in his way"
- "Missed the Surčin airport"
- "Look, daddy, no hands!"
- "What's going to happen with the White House? I'm going to set it on fire!"
- "Give us another one... I need a roof for my pig pen!"
Followed by three more phrases which don't translate well.
- "Like a child knows what is invisible"
- "We'll fuck, NATO, my bro!"
- "Short but 'effective' "
Goes to show, that technology can only get you so far, if your doctrine sucks.
Also, they downed one and damaged another, why did they cross of three?
Also, they downed one and damaged another, why did they cross of three?
(See existing replies)
Good for them
The relevant bit from the times article:
Several American F-16s and an F-35 fighter jet were nearly struck by Houthi air defenses,
I think the fact that they weren't shot down says more.
That's right, they just happened to fall of a carrier for no reason at all.
Can someone eli5 why a plane successfully evading a missile is cause for panic?
I'm not sure why anyone would be "panicking" about the loss of a the latest US boondongle? The US MIC hasn't been building things for fighting performance or efficiency since at least the end of the cold war, and probably before. An f-35 "almost" being shotdown just sound like boeing get's another trillion dollars to build an "f-35+."
All the career generals get to spend the next 10years instructing their minions to write intellectually bankrupt papers about how the US needs to engage our "strategic partners" to match this "new threat". Honestly they could probably just copy the slurry of papers that were written after 9/11 about "low-tech threats" that the next generation of arms needs to deal with. Meanwhile the generals will be taken to the Capital Grill for their weekly lobbyist meetings where they get to drink $40 glasses of wine and eat $100 steaks because they are the most basic, worthless and craven people that our shitty political system has put in charge of trillions of dollars over their careers.
Regardless those people aren't "panicking."
You mean $400 glasses of wine and $1,000 steaks.
America going in the same "Turns out their Military doesn't quite have the bang to match their flash" direction as Russia, only the reason for that in America is spending ever more insane amounts for ever tinier benefits (though they too have their own version of Corruption, only it's more indirect than Russias and involves 4-star Generals making sure they have "thankful friends" in the Private Sector for when they retire from the Military).
Meanwhile the Houtis, just like the Ukranians, are doing a lot with much, much (MUCH) less.
It's depressing how accurate this probably is.
You’d think evading something would be a success
Not when you're flying the second most expensive type of airplane that is so expensive they can only build a few of them and whose strength is supposed to be undetectability.
Seems like technological advancements of the past few decades are making US tech obsolete.
One of the pathways to failure is overcomplication - it makes things far harder to keep working and far more likely to have failures, severely reduces how many units you can actually produce and also reduces the flexibility to tackle novel counters.
The Germans made that exact mistake in WWII with things like the Tiger Panzer.
Meanwhile the Ukranians are showing just how much you can do with little if you're not pinned-down by your own military technology choices and have competent people around to whom you just throw "solve this" problems and leave them free to do it their way.
Overcomplication is a feature of privatized military production because it's far more efficient at creating profits. Making a few expensive items in artisanal fashion and then charging huge maintenance fees is how defense contractors make money. They don't want to build large factories and hire lots of workers to produce low margin items like artillery shells. They want to build a handful of F35s and milk each one as much as they can.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainians are entirely reliant on western weapons to fight, and are massively outgunned by Russia lacking production capacity of their own. If the US stops sending weapons to Ukraine then the war ends in a month.