The God-Emperor revealed yesterday that Boeing – yes, THAT Boeing, the one that cannot help but make a colossal mess out of literally everything it does nowadays – is going to be the producer of America’s future “sixth-generation” combat jet:
As His Most Illustrious, Noble, August, Benevolent, and Legendary Celestial Majesty, the God-Emperor of Mankind, Donaldus Triumphus Magnus Astra, the First of His Name, the Lion of Midnight, may the Lord bless him and preserve him, pointed out, this thing is going to be called the “F-47”, which the generals apparently chose as its designation.
Given the God-Emperor is the 47th President of the United States of America (and really, by rights, is also its 45th AND 46th), that is very obviously an appeal to Ornj Boi’s COLOSSAL ego. I would have thought by now that T-Rex would be able to distinguish between genuine respect, and insincere flattery. He generally has shown the ability to do so with foreign leaders – witness the very different manner in which he treats, say, Queer Stormer of PommieBastardLande, or Emanuelle Micron of the Future Caliphate of France, versus how he treats the Neo-Tsar.
Nonetheless, the fact that Boeing received this contract, should not fill anyone with any degree of confidence.
First, of course, this is BOEING we are talking about. The company once known for its engineering prowess and absolute dedication to excellence, has long since been taken over by the much more cut-throat financial engineers who ran McDonnell Douglas, back in the day, and then mounted a stealthy (see what I did there?) takeover of Boeing after the latter acquired the former. The result has been the long series of disasters and catastrophes that have turned what was once the most respected name in civil and military aerospace engineering, into a laughingstock.
Preliminary indications are that Boeing has learned nothing from its long series of cock-ups, either:
Despite the restructuring, Boeing has reaffirmed its commitment to a merit-based, inclusive workplace. It stated that it remains dedicated to recruiting diverse talent and fostering an environment where employees can thrive.
Translation from corporatese into English:
MOAR WAKANDAN ‘N’ WAMMENZES ENDJINEERZ NAOWH!!!!
Second, this ballyhoo about a “sixth-generation” fighter jet very much needs to be put into perspective. We have no idea what this new “F-47” looks like, what its characteristics are, or how it might perform in combat, but to be a sixth-gen jet, it needs to fulfil a highly demanding set of technical criteria:
And therein lies the crux of the problem:
The FUSA does not have a single truly combat-effective FIFTH-GENERATION fighter jet, never mind moving on to a sixth-generation one.
That sounds inflammatory and, probably, downright stupid, given the FUSA has both the F-22 (still in active service), and the F-35 Joint Strike Flying Piano Morris Marina Turducken. My views on the F-35 are VERY well known by this point. As for the F-22, I will be the first to state that, for its time, it was revolutionary, and gave the USAF a capability that no one else in the world had.
Unfortunately, once we look past the hype and start examining the facts, we realise that the US fifth-gen fighter fleet is actually in extremely bad shape.
The F-35’s availability rates, for all variants, are catastrophically low – FAR below the rates required and stipulated in the contracts for these stupid things. Each Turducken requires some 6-8 man-hours of maintenance for every single hour of flight time, and the pilots themselves get far less flight time than they should, relative to NATO standards.
The F-22 is even worse – I have seen maintenance estimates ranging from 18 to 40 man-hours per flight hour. It is an incredibly complex machine that has proven monumentally expensive to build and fly, and that makes it nearly impossible to justify its deployment in combat against a serious enemy with serious air defences.
This is what I mean when I write that the US does not have an actual, combat-effective, fifth-generation fighter. It simply does not matter how advanced the machine is, if it is too expensive, unreliable, and maintenance-heavy to fly in real quantities to make a difference in a theatre of operations.
Third, the cost of this proposed “sixth-generation” fighter is EYE-WATERING. The first number we have seen booted about, is a unit cost of – and I hope this is not true – US$300 MILLION PER JET. When you account for the US’s greatly diminished manufacturing capacity, and the well-known tendency of defence procurement projects to overrun their budgets by between 100% and 200%, the unit cost for a SINGLE “F-47” could easily exceed US$500-600M by the time all is said and done.
That would mean the lifetime unit cost of one of these superjets could exceed US$1-1.5 BILLION.
These numbers are horrifying when you put them into the context of modern air combat. The Russians, Chinese, North Koreans, and Iranians already have radar systems that can detect supposedly “stealthy” aircraft, using low-frequency radar. Their radar installations and fighters cost a hell of a lot less than US$300 million a pop. The Russians, in particular, are hard at work developing drones that can serve as weapons and interception platforms, controlled by “motherships”, such as the Su-57.
This means that fielding a single F-47 against the “system of systems” used by other potential adversary nations, is going to be cost-prohibitive.
And that brings us to the next point:
Future air combat is not going to be about having a single super-dooper-pooper wunderwaffe. It is going to be about leveraging a network of advanced systems that all talk to each other, sharing data and targeting information in real-time.
The F-35 is supposed to be able to do this, with its onboard datalink systems, though the bugginess of its software is severe, and I have serious questions about whether it can actually serve as a targeting and coordination platform in a real war when put up against the extremely dense ECM the Russians are known to possess.
The F-22 cannot do these things, which is part of the reason why it was cancelled after completing only about half of its already-halved production run.
All this tells me is that the FUSA has learned NOT ONE SINGLE DAMNED THING from the egregious and repeated failures of the F-35 programme. The US still thinks the best way to win wars is to produce exquisite, extremely expensive, cutting-edge weapons that are light-years ahead of anything a theoretical enemy might have – yet, when you actually put them to the test, they are so delicate that they break the moment you so much as SNEEZE in their general direction.
The Russians and Chinese have a completely different philosophy to weapons. The Russians, in particular, make weapons that actually… y’know… WORK. And which are genuinely lethal.
The Su-57 is, to this day, the world’s only seriously combat-tested fifth-generation fighter, that has a verifiable track record of performing multi-role missions against a near-peer enemy. It has demonstrated the ability to operate behind enemy lines, penetrating deep into Ukrainian airspace to perform Suppression of Enemy Air Defence (SEAD) missions. It has shot down Ukrainian fighters at far beyond visual range (BVR), using hypersonic interceptor missiles. It has done ground attack missions. It has provided realtime data and intelligence to ground forces through its own integrated datalinks.
In other words, it is a proven platform – a true masterpiece indeed:
And, while we do not know the exact cost of the Su-57, the best estimates I have seen, is of a flyaway cost of around US$50M. This compares extremely well to a unit flyaway cost of around US$82-110M for a Turducken, or US$140M (or more) for an F-22.
When you combine that with the fact that the Su-57 has maintenance requirements that are on par with, and possibly lower than, the Su-30, Su-33, and Su-35 platforms, which all share a common heritage and similar airframes, then you realise that the Russians do not have a merely theoretical platform – they have one that actually works in the real world.
That is the reason why Algeria and India have expressed serious interest in buying the Su-57E export version, and why other nations, like Iran, North Korea, and a few more, are looking at it as a possible leapfrog upgrade for their own fighter fleets.
And all of this is before we get to what the Chinks have been up to of late.
We still do not quite know what these new “sixth-generation” jets actually are. The J-36 prototype, for instance, does not look like something capable of sustained supersonic flight – as Gus the Eyetie Engineer points out in the videos above, its shape is all kinds of weird for such a thing. But it MIGHT be a new class of tactical bomber or reconnaissance aircraft – we simply lack the data or evidence to draw any serious conclusions.
As for the J-50, again, we do not know what it does, what it is for, how it works, or anything particularly useful.
What we can say, with considerable certainty, is that, given the serious progress the Chinks have made with their CAC J-20 and SAC J-35, we cannot underestimate the ability of the Chinese to build and mass-produce a true “sixth-generation” fighter aircraft that has a high degree of reliability.
That is BEFORE we get to the vexed question of what the Russians are doing on the subject of “sixth-generation” aircraft.
The MiG-41, or PAK DP, is a long-rumoured, hypothetical (for the moment) sixth-generation fighter aircraft that will, supposedly, operate at near-space altitudes, fly at hypersonic speeds, and will fire lasers, all while being stealthy. I have no idea whether this is even technically possible.
Ameribros love to mock the Russians for their flights of fancy. They really should stick to their knitting, though. A bit over 9 years ago, I wrote a poast about how the US’s “next generation air dominance” (NGAD) concept sounded so ridiculous that the US might as well buy a bunch of X-wings instead. Nothing that has happened in the near-decade since then, has changed my mind.
Keep in mind, as far as the Russian MiG-41 is concerned, this is the same Mikoyan-Gurevich design bureau that gave us the MiG-25 and MiG-31, and which was working on a truly revolutionary fifth-generation design called the MiG-1.42 (or 1.44, depending on whom you ask), back before the collapse of the Soviet Union put the kibosh on the whole thing.
Plus, the Sukhoi design bureau – which provides the vast bulk of Russia’s modern combat aviation fleet, in the form of all the various modernised variants of the Su-27, Su-30, Su-33, Su-34, Su-35, and of course Su-57 – had a fifth-generation concept called the Su-47 Berkut (“Golden Eagle”) at around the same time. That was a truly radical design, with a forward-swept wing, and elements of its airframe made their way into the modern Su-27-derived family of multi-role aircraft that have proven so fearsomely effective against Ukraine.
The point of all this is, the Russians are almost certainly working on something of their own, that will be at least the equal of whatever the FUSA has planned – for the simple reason that the Russians make weapons that WORK. They are not necessarily the fanciest, or the most technologically sophisticated (though I would argue that point, these days). But they are some of the prettiest, and the most lethal.
By comparison, the US has experience only in developing flying white elephants that look great in an elephant walk, but cannot actually perform in serious high-pressure combat.
Finally, we have to ask serious questions about whether or not Boeing has the expertise to build a true sixth-generation aircraft. Maybe it does – I really have no idea. But Lockheed Martin, for all of its MANIFEST failures with the F-22 and F-35, does have all of the accumulated knowledge and expertise in building fifth-generation aircraft in large quantities.
Boeing’s experience is limited to its collaboration on the now-cancelled F-22, and its X-32 demonstrator for the Joint Strike Fighter competition. And if you know anything about the X-32, you know it looked like… well, just see for yourself:
That, right there, is a flying MOOSE.
I could very well be completely wrong about all of my criticisms of this “F-47” wunderwaffe. Given what we have seen over the past thirty years of US weapons procurement policy, though, I think I have a pretty healthy margin of error.
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The X-32 was essentially a stealth A-7 Corsair, which served well for a very long time. Unlike the X-35, its design tilted more toward cost and maintenance. It didn’t have the same “fighter look,” and that hurt it in the competition. But I thought it was a credible solution proposal.
It didn’t help that the competition was stupid, demanding an attack aircraft that could also do air superiority and oh, by the way, vertical landing.