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.
Maybe we should stop FUCKING AROUND if we dont want to find out?
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.
Good for them
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
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!
Oh I remember hearing about this but forgot the name. Primo “military intelligence is an oxymoron” stuff.
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?
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.
It’s a stealth plane apparently, so I guess it wasn’t supposed to be seen, but they saw it.
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!
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.
it evades cheap missiles but at what cost!?
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.
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.
It’s only a big deal because of what a corrupt disaster it’s development was. It’s still a plane made of physical material that you can blow up. The fact that someone can shoot at it is no more surprising than the concept of object permanence. If this fact surprises anyone, it’s only because they’ve been dazzled by the exorbitant waste.
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…)
Star trek 6, “well the thing’s gotta have a tailpipe.”
" 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.
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?
The mindset reminds me of their infamous wargame: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
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
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 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?
Why are three marked off? They only shot down the one?
The reddit thread proposes it could have been a lie for propaganda.
They are supposedly invisible, so you could never know
How reliable are US media reports?
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.
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.
Critical support for both the Houthis and Poseidon
Also Lockheed
Scoreboard — US aircraft carriers 0 Poseidon’s trident 2
All of those were caused by Ansarallah fire causing the carrier to take evasive maneuvers. Ansarallah inflicted the damage either way
Those were F/A-18 Super Hornets from the aircraft carrier. Not as advanced as you might think.
An order of magnitude cheaper
Advanced enough to not take a swim while on duty.
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.
based on the impact of war and how people have been living there in Yemen for the past decade, I’d say “3rd world” is a reasonable assumption/classification.
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.
please let the funniest thing possible happen
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.
