F-35 is designed to replace mainly F-16 and is smaller and lighter aircraft that has multiple roles and will be deployed by all 3 branches of military that has fighters - Navy, Marine, Air Force (hence the name joint strike fighter). F-22 is a large aircraft that is designed to replace USAF F-15. It's main function/asset is superior air-to-air combat/intercept, which as Kaplan mentioned in the piece, not all that useful in the post cold war world.

Air-to-Air combat in particular would be less important than Air-ground/sea support (which IS the JSF role) in operations with the PRC since it would largely be interdiction of Taiwan invasion forces

At the beginning of a conflict, air-to-air would be important to establish total dominance of the skies (which would be ncessary against an opponent like PRC who has a huge numerical advantage).

For smaller scale conflicts/special ops type missions the ability to get in and out undetected and execute a precision strike is key.

Having the F-22 for either of these is important, however I'm not sure either justifies a need for huge numbers of them, especially with the efforts to transition to UAVs in combat roles in the future.

There's less need for defensive interceptors to be stealthy, although stealth does help singificantly for any combat role. However, since U.S. foreign policy is still that Taiwan is not entirely separate from China (one of the most confusing and self-negating policies ever concieved if you ask me), I'm not so sure that we'd be exporting stealthy aircraft to Taiwan anytime soon.

UAV combat fighters - which have not yet been developed - would have a couple of significant advantages:

1. They could be designed to fly higher G maneuvers since with no human's physiology to worry about they would be able to out-turn, out-roll and out dive any human piloted craft
2. Without a human on board, you don't need display avionics, life-support systems, escape chairs etc. Probably you can knock 1,000 - 2,000 lbs off of it. That's 10% of what the JSF weighs. You might even be able to knock more off since your control surface actuators can be located right at the surface and you don't have to carry any feedback mechanism in the cockpit. Also you don't need to have the volume of the cockpit present. All this contributes to lighter craft which can accellerate faster, climb faster, turn and roll even tighter...

And net net a UAV fighter would be cheaper to builld. The only weak link is that you have to have very solid and secure telemetry that can get through the heaviest of jamming.

Nor were those F-15s particularly useful during the Cold War...

wayhey1

lol

How do you know?

How do I know? Because it was a Cold War.

Very true, although I'm not sure how much weight is tied up in control interface and feedback hardware on most modern fighters (fly-by-wire has rendered the actuator configuration on manned aircraft basically identical to what it would be on a UAV). The sidestick is pretty light and CRT cockpit displays went out some time ago; odds are that the pilot's helmet (which can be pretty heavy with some of the electronics built into the helmets for newer systems) weighs almost as much as most of the built-in human interface features in the latest generations of U.S. fighters.

There's definitely a lot to be gained in maneuverability as the pilot's G-force tolerance has been a limiting design factor for quite some time. 20g airframes might get a little heavy to be practical due to the necessary tradeoffs between structural and aerodynamic considerations, but a 10-13g capability would provide a marked advantage in a dogfight.

Of course, planes like the F-22 and F-35 are designed so that air-to-air engagements can be won before the enemy is completely aware they're under attack (or at least they'll have a radar-guided missile locked on and inbound before they know they're not alone), which may largely render dogfighting obsolete. They're still designed to be able to win those kinds of engagements decisively as well, though.

All other issues aside, the military is working to develop UAV combat capability largely to reduce or eliminate the risk of life to the pilots.

They are called UCAVs...and have been under development for almost as long as UAVs. As for telemetry, they can be programmed to take off, fly a designated profile, and land themselves at the selected location without human intervention...jamming is still a concern, but these vehicles can be programmed to operate autonomously.

My only concern is what we lose by taking the pilot out of the cockpit...that out of the box thinking ability. The sense to be innovative when inquiring into an aircraft that fails to pass an IFF interrogation. All it takes is the damned battery in the encryption device for IFF to go weak and IFF no workie.... UCAV would shoot you down, a pilot has other options available to them for identifying friend from foe.

This constant argument surrounding the F-22 and the JSF...is somewhat confounding. I disagree with the alternative, letting our potential adversaries catch up technologically, or at least get a little closer to us. To what ends?....to make the fight more fair? The F-22 is amazing, the JSF is the answer to the various air wings of each of our services. By using a single common aircraft, support and supply infrastructure will be amazingly common throughout... A Navy plane could break at an Air Force base and recieve the same parts and support that it would at a Navy base....without having to fly parts, tools, and maintainers from home plate to the broke jet site. That is not the case right now....there are very few planes that are common amongst the services air forces.

wayhey1:

How do I know? Because it was a Cold War.

Cold wars are fought and won with the same weapons as hot wars. The only difference is that the trigger is never pulled. Preventing dominance by our Cold War foes by deterrence was just as valid (and more desireable) a use for our fighter fleet as actually defeating them in combat.

Not quite. Its more about the PERCEPTION of systems capabilities rather than actual capabilities. Think about how much of the operational capabilities definitions of the F-22 were set by the PERCEPTIONS of the capabilities of the Mig-25. Perceptions that turned out to be quite wrong (top speed, operational ceiling, range etc). And in turn how many of the Mig-25s design parameters were set by the B-52 and other high altitude bombers that were on the Pentagon books.

Cold wars are fought more with perception than actual operational capability.

I'm not sure that we're up to the point of autonomous UCAVs yet. Intel and surveilience UAVs which are set to fly a racetrack over an area of interest and return to base (or follow a pre-determined course over a series of objectives) are definitely out there, they've been used in various forms as far back as Vietnam, possibly before that. Even the Predator UAV's fitted with Maverick missiles have a human hand on the trigger by remote.

Commonality between the versions of F-35 is largely overplayed in the media, there are significant systems which are common between the three variants, but there are by necessity very significant differences between them as well. We're not remotely up to the point technologically where a single aiplane could be built with the capabilities required by all three services (USAF, USN, USMC) that would still be very good in combat or be able to fly far enough to be useful.

Which does nothing to undermine my point that the F-15 can't be considered to have been useless just because we never actually put it into combat against Soviet aircraft. Whether as perceived or as it was, it presented a deterrent-- it was a weapon that was used in the cold war even though it wasn't used for firing missiles or dropping bombs.