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.
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
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.
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.
Good for them
You’d think evading something would be a success
evading prehistoric weaponry is a bad sign
A win is a win no?
For that pilot, yes. For everyone else… Yikes
I don’t see what’s so complicated. You’re a guy with a missile launcher. You look up, and see an F-35. You shoot a missile at it.
This is the most expensive, supposedly most advanced stealth fighter jet in the history of the world and it took a budget of trillions of dollars to develop. It’s a big deal that a jet that costs about a hundred million to get and needs expensive mainteinance for every hour of use could feasibly be destroyed by a weapon that costs tens of thousands of dollars.
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?
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
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’ "
Why are three marked off? They only shot down the one?
They are supposedly invisible, so you could never know
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
Yeah the IR SAM threat is not a new thing, 25 NATO coalition aircraft were damaged or downed by IR SAMs during the Gulf war, and that was three decades ago. The IR SAM threat has been understood since the SA-7/9K32 Strela-2. This is why IR signature reduction is so important to stealth/low observability technology.
What’s new are these frankenSAM systems in Yemen and Ukraine using advanced infrared guided air to air missiles with high off boresight capability like the R-73, ASRAAM and latest AIM-9s as SAMs, and advanced ground based infrared search and track systems that can connect to more traditional SAM, which extends the range of the IR threat considerably.
An F-35 is not going to be as good as something like the F-117, B-2, B-21 or YF-23 prototype at hiding it’s engine exhaust from ground based sensors, it’s not even as good as the F-22 at that, nevermind those previous aircraft where the engine exhaust isn’t even visible from below. Such was likely one of the compromises in the F-35s design, to allow for mass production and fulfilling all the different roles all 3 F-35 variants carry out.
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.
Nah, the joke is the military generals who have been in charge for so long are rubes and can’t even do corruption right. The Boeing shareholders/board members who are being paid these billions of dollars are the ones enjoying $4000 dollar wine and imported Kobe Beef steaks with the lobbyists
Ahhh gotcha. I was wondering if that’s what you meant.
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.
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.
Overcomplication is a feature of privatized military production because it’s far more efficient at creating profits.
100% this. But my question is that since the US is the largest weapon dealer in the world, both in terms of dollar amount and number of planes etc, who the hell are buying these things and why? Surely when you are purchasing something that costs billions of dollars you have to account for the on-going support costs too? Most countries don’t have the luxury of ignoring costs do they?
Answer is that weapons are largely sold to NATO countries as part of a protection racket by the US. Until the war in Ukraine started, nobody was willing to test the idea that US weapons were superior, and it was taken as given that NATO was the strongest fighting force on the planet. This worked as great marketing for US weapons industry. Now the illusion of superiority is starting to crack, and I’m sure weapons sales will take a hit as a result.
More the illusion of being dependable. The deal, at least as I can imagine it, was like this: you buy our stuff, and if shit happens, we come and save the day. Now, with the unpredictability of certain people, this whole deal seems to be up in the air.
Sure, that’s how empire work, vassals get protection as long as it’s expedient for the empire to do so. It’s also important to note that, it’s not like Trump just appeared out of thin air. Trump is a product of the declining material conditions and internal contradictions within the imperial core. The reason the US is pulling back from Europe is because the burden of the empire is becoming too much for the US to bear, not simply because an orange bad man was elected.
The Ukranians have been developing their own in-house weapons systems and have had some really big successes with entirelly homegrown weapons systems: it weren’t western weapons that made the Black Sea unsafe for the Russian Navy even when docked in home harbours and it weren’t western weapons systems that have been blowing up the military and economic infrastructure deep inside Russian territory - Ukranian drones did it.
At the same time, the war on the actual frontline has become drone-heavy and most of the solutions in that domain are made by the Ukranians themselves (not to say that drones alone would win it, not even close).
Ukraine started this war with their pants down and indeed if it weren’t for western systems and ammunition they would’ve lost it long ago, if only because Russia’s depth of military resources was 5+ decades worth of Soviet military kit, but at the same time they’ve been building up their own military production and becoming more and more independent of those, so I wouldn’t be so sure that if merelly the US stopped sending weapons and (more importantly) ammo, Ukraine would lose the war, though if the whole West did that would be far more likely.
Last I checked this was a land war, so kind of weird to talk about great successes in Black Sea which are also rather questionable given that Russian navy still has dominance there. Meanwhile, the amount of military infrastructure Ukraine manages to blow up is minuscule, especially compared to the amount of infrastructure Russia blows up in Ukraine on regular basis.
The war on the actual frontline is still primarily conducted by artillery which accounts for 80% of casualties. However, even in drone production, Ukraine is far outmatched by Russia which does it on industrial scale.
The idea that Ukraine has been building up military production is frankly nonsensical because Russia is able to strike anywhere in Ukraine with impunity. This precludes Ukraine from having large military factories, and at this point Ukraine even lacks the energy infrastructure to run them because Russia has systematically dismantled it over the past three years.
Finally, aside from having shortages of literally everything, Ukraine is running out of manpower as its army is being attrited by Russia. Even if Ukraine was able to produce weapons domestically at scale, which it cannot, there aren’t people left alive to use them.
Didn’t we just sign a ceasefire agreement with these guys? Or were those “talks”?
edit: this probably happened weeks ago before the ceasefire, but the article is unclear.
This is probably why we signed a ceasefire
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.
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
All of those were caused by Ansarallah fire causing the carrier to take evasive maneuvers. Ansarallah inflicted the damage either way
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.
Critical support for both the Houthis and Poseidon
Scoreboard — US aircraft carriers 0 Poseidon’s trident 2
Those were F/A-18 Super Hornets from the aircraft carrier. Not as advanced as you might think.
An order of magnitude cheaper
Well, they’re not the so-so hornets. So like, a little advanced.
True. Still, not exactly something 3rd world countries (or many 2nd-world) can produce.
Advanced enough to not take a swim while on duty.
please let the funniest thing possible happen
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!
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.
Then just take a drink. The wife can take notes for me.
