Attila,
There is no 'lesson' intended, we're all equals here, opinions like anatomy etc. etc.
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Out of your post, I just have one single question: why build it? What is the point of having the aircraft if there are, as you've described, so many other viable options which are even more cost effective than the program?
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Inbred Cultural Inertia. Whose symptomology takes many forms. In 'diagnosing the disease' one needs to define a methodologic approach to critiqueing the problem. I chose the cybernetic/cognitive vs. analytic paradigm as outlined in _Illusions Of Choice_. These two formats are the flip sides of a coin based on rationalizing a template to meet a complex scenario vs. empirically (scientific method) determining whether the perceptions of said scenario's existence are factual or assumptive based on historical precedent and interpretation of specific case points.
1. Roles and Missions are Turf Sensitive.
As a factor of airpower force structuring, is based on the assumption of existing mission roles to specific (usually unrelated) details of scenario application. In such an 'applied reasoning' system, compeitition between multiple service providers doesn't breed diversity of mission execution, it encourages competition of (singular) role function. Congress funds what is proven to be successful and success is copied right down to the point where it can no longer be (in basing mode in this case). Fighters are thus defined not by application to a service unique mission but rather what that service has to do to bring fighters FROM it's environment to one which is compatible with an existing one. If you predefine what the hole is, you can basically design a peg to fit and familiarity will contribute to acceptance. But what if the hole is not really there any more, do you drill it? Full scale, high intensity, (maximum perceived need to 'try every trick') warfare being such a /rare/ phenomena, it is no wonder that it is easier to guarantee the outcome of microwars by fixing the methodology you approach full scale ones based on conditional (fixed scenario based) execution. So long as you can sell 'your way' long enough, hard enough, without options or alternatives, the enemy will naturally end up accepting your approach, if only in designing a countermeasure that largely looks like the hole you want drilled. The better (analytic) approach is to say 'What is the mission? Can I reasonably -prove- that the mission still exists or that it ever did?' And THEN decide what system best meets the need. Preferrably as a function of a common-not-joint design which standardizes the details of capability while leaving the functional flexibility to be determined by the random-event factors.
2. Staticism through False Diversity.
Based on the complexity of the modelled vs. actual scenario and the difficulty you create in responding to simple problems with complex solutions as much as inaccurately modeled ones (as illustrated above).
Particularly where joint/multiforce employment scenarios are based on political wrangling rather than truly best-solution approaches to winning _a_ war. Where designing for fixed scenarios is further complicated by a need for 'jointness' (everybody gets a chunk of the glory pie), inventing something that does something better than the existing need-solution mix, can jeopardize operational justification across multiple air/land/sea mission boundaries. Obsolescing whole groups of force structure development. Endangering careers beyond your own uniform color.
Thus 'diversity' of mission systems is further proven to be a lie because there is no RIMA clause by which systems of systems must be proven in their complete whole vs. the need of the moment vs. the 'scenario' they were designed around _against a future resource vs. threat potential bias_ of retirement/replacement. If a nation weakens itself through complex systems design to the point where force structure cannot be maintained it loses diversity anyway.
Such complexity for it's own sake can /sometimes/ force an opponent into mirroring the entire synergy (or developing a countermeasure for it) that is a highly structured warfighter but it more often than not is just a furtherance of the 3-monkey ideal by which 'to each his own' is limited as much as assured by interservice rivalry and the need (through the JCS and service Secretaries) to cheerlead each other's systems through Congressional beggars table to a limited budgetary funnel that always turns traitorous (backstabbing) at the end.
Detachment from shared doctrinal development is thus as unhealthy for maintaining a SOA warfighter as apparent competition because it doesn't endorse merely staticism around one platform/mission but the way that approach is justified as a function of maintaining the total bulk (force structural inertia) of missions that interact with it. Particularly if (frequently) you _don't need_ a joint-service solution to mission execution as the size of your TF, the notion of treating each platform as a universal construct for cheaply fulfilling a given utility function becomes all the harder to accept. Because it implies that no service has it's own mission identity that all are subordinate to fluctuating political ideals that technology cannot find a solution for.
This handsoff agreed partisanship is further endorsed by the crummy nature of high level officer exchange and staff college intercourse on how each side really /does/ go about their mission. Ask an AF officer how much he liked his last Army tour. Heck ask him if he /knows someone/ who did a volunteer exchange with the grunts. Then ask him if he has the knowledge of theater target lists from the last war to prove an argument that interdiction (the AF's and to a large extent the Navy's chief role) works better.
3. R&D Doesn't Seek Solutions.
R&D is NOT about developing new weapons systems. It's about developing new R&D contracts. For a commercial weapons industry in which the successful production ratio is perhaps 1 in 20, another research contract or grant is where the money is because there is low physical investment in production real estate, sub contractor screening or materials lead iteming.
Of course technology /does/ move on. Through contracted civillian (university) as much as 'controlled' (in house labs) military development which is deliberately isolated from the operational community.
From within the R&D community perspective, you are even more insular from 'other ways of doing things' (even things which your own system is nominally a part of, like an airframe that can do CAS or INT missions) as an operational user interaction. Indeed, you aren't /paid/ to be aware of potential doctrinal effects of your system over somebody else' because both on a personal and professional (career) level, program survival is what ensures your position after years of system-specific knowledge attainment has aged you and while giving specific field knowledge which may or may not be up to date with what college grad-X is bringing with his masters. As such you also have little or no incentive to apply analytic reasoning to whether your 'your solution' is worth the cost. Even as your technical knowledge may have little or no application to a user service you don't see often know it's absolute value to them.
Failure to bring to fruition a system which you have poured your life into believing was necessary (no matter how shallow the knowledge base of that assumption) flushes the military industrial complex of skilled engineers looking for another lifestyle and further fails to instill the analytic lesson which is that paths started down without sound justification often close off for reasons beyond engineering redemption. As another bunch of inexperienced idiots replace the jaded betrayal to begin the cycle again.
And so sleeping dogs _lie_ and everybody is happy in a military hierarchy which is 'up or out' (promotion or dead-end pay grade) based on the money inherent to the R&D of another miracle solution to replace the last one which never reached production. As the force structure (doctrinal solution) as much as it's component systems grows stale in what may have been a false premise of mission need to begin with.
Of course, just occasionally, something does get fixed if it is sufficiently non-threatening (generalist peg pound-fits the existing hole). But even as the baselines for a given technology tend to age /greatly/ between generational replacements, so to does a system of creating a shadow realm of RFI/RFP developmental hackery create a budgetary logjam behind which key enablers also must be replaced and /their/ cost is such that the overall system of systems now becomes more expensive than can be supported for _existing_ doctrinal formula (X number of fighters requires Y number of tankers, ACP/BMC3/ISR, EA/SEAD). Usually with a repeal of confidence effect that the existing 'high tech' solution must be replaced with fill systems that are even more inappropriate to creating a balanced force.
Of course industry's excuse is that "Hey, we only build what they say they want." But once the spec is set, there is a HUGE weight of PAC type advocative influence brought to bear in Washington to push it through. And it isn't the military that funds it.
4. Subordinate Societal Orders.
As a function of insular self interest, Generals command Officers who lead Men. And despite being nominally subordinate to civillian rule of law, soldiers never take orders from them, only from the 'chain of command' inbetween. At the budgetary beggars table, manpower (all the money spent on housing families of men, their continued military education, career path advancement and eventual retirement) is thus the the sun towards which the operational side of the money tree ultimately grows most-green.
With standoff precision fires and large enough ('force protection' as an attritional hedge) units, there is little or no element of strategic thought in maneuver, you simply drive towards something the enemy cannot afford to lose until they try and stop you. And then you kill them with overwhelming firepower as they marshal for the engagement. Rendering all engagements 'CAS' of a kind.
Yet a PFC still salutes a lieutenant, not a SecDef. Until the day an IED makes it cheaper to replace the grunt with a robotic vehicle. And you can only afford the money to develop a complex-environment recognitive AI which navigates said UGV by removing the man from the cockpit of the comparitively -simplistic- (no bumps in the road, straightline navigation with a very restrictive threat:response list) of the most costly force modeal that there is.
Then there is friction. Because now you are not only removing mission identity from a given SERVICE. But you are threatening the very _hierarchial status quo_ by which the armed forces function as a highly internalized system of controlling pyschology.
If you threaten the top echelon by making it possible for an Army Corporal manning a Hunter drone to do as much good in his attached unit AOR as an AF Captain'd FLIGHT of F-16s will (money per drone over longer sortie lengths with more appropriate BUET vs. GBU-12 'CAS' ordnance) then you create a military in which the nature of the machine defines a minimum requirement of the man rather than demanding more of him to achieve the same capability.
And particularly given a typically top heavy staffing element in the peacetime military, that's another black mark against anybody from an independent technical or strategic (think tank) community coming up and saying "Look, we've got this idea, it does a better job than X-many of your existing men and it saves money too!" Because money ensures diversity of lesser solutions. And lesser solutions mean more men. And more men need more commanders.
Without endorsement by an active user command and/or the 5 Wall Asylum whispering in the ear of the JCS and Secretaries, programmatic choices will _never reach Congress_ to be shot down or selected. Inhibiting a governmental process by which military subordination to their nominally civillian order givers is assured by the TRUTH of what they put on the table. When you look at it from this standpoint, everybody in DARPA can Q up fiendishly superior killing devices to their hearts content. And if they don't support the systematic prejudices of the user community, they will never leave the lab. Until the waste vs. gain level gets so high that the lab, the military and the society around which a military system of 'protection' was originally built, collapses for want of alternatives.*
5. Hero Worship.
Nobody expects R2D2 to be a better pilot than Luke Skywalker. Thus nobody gives a damn when Darth Vader puts multiple kilowatts worth of laser energy through his dome. Yet the fact remains that there is absolutely no way on earth that a human could fly down the Death Star Trench at anything like modern fixed wing aircraft speeds 'evading turbolaser fire' without smacking a sidewall.
If R2 flew the ship, why did Luke put himself at risk making strategic decisions (laydown vs. dive bomb, long approach through trashfire vs. missiles away?) that /themselves/ were faulted in their approach by compression and friction of the tactical environment (and his place in it) such as to put the MISSION COMPLETION ITSELF at risk?
The answer is simple. Ego. We /dread/ being told that man's day as a warrior has long since past OVER the battlefield as much as on it, because, societally, they are all that is left to represent the ultimate freedom to do 'nothing particularly useful' on a day to day basis. While reserving unto themselves the right to practice the ultimate freedom of killing another man on the off chance of there being a war where they are needed.
And thus, like sports stars and movie actors pilots are heros. Not for what they do. But for what they -seem to- as the complete opposite of our own slogging work ethic.
It is terribly sad that people would rather chain themselves to an ever-burgeoning debt for the chance to see /someone else/ have a 'really good time' as a kind of vicarious "I can see me as him!" entertainment but that is what the technology of PGM sport wars not short wars has largely led us to do in a society where we don't conquer to own but for some 'moral purpose' which is not itself clear (if 9/11 was so awful that we could not bear to let it go unavenged, why are troops not in the White Mountains of AfG-Pak looking for Osama, /no matter what/ Musharref gibbers on about sovereignity of allied nations?).
This is of course further reinforced by the 'expert opinion' for which most make absolutely no critical-thought concession to job preservation bias. Pilots certainly enjoy what they do and 'as professionals in their field', everytime they tell someone that the day of UCAVs is 'at least another generation away' nobody questions the resultant (self fulfilling prophecy) huge waste of resources inherent to failing to proof the theorem with even a 60:40 split of inventory as a _a hybrid period mixed force concept_. No, it's all F-35's or nothing because 'the cheap fighter' only stays that way at 1,600 and above.
And the public and fiduciary authority buy it, literally, because, they want to believe it, secretly, the joy a pilot has is the excitement a civillian WANTS to believe in, 'if only' he hadn't been born who he is.
And thus the postulative argument that a UCAV, by being cheaper and removing the operational friction of a pilot-on-scene, could be the _more efficient killer_ never is factored in. Because humans would rather be inefficient knowing that they will win 'anyway' (numbers) than non-partisan observers to a warfighter that doesn't put their sense of self in the same jeopardized-thrill sense of vicarious participation.
Which means they will never understand that Jo Schmuck from the nearest Macdonalds Grill could fight an airwar better than any pilot ever could. With robotic airpower.
And this scenario is self perpetuating as much as extemporaneous in it's fait de' accompli nature because pilots 'grow old as much as up' to either become your friendly winged cattlecar driver. Or generals. And thus the false selfbelief deriving from their own time in the cockpit works to translate into the next generation which they will also support in trade for loyalty and respect of rank system. And again the Cybernetic paradigm reinforces what is, rather than exploring the validity of the perception that is it's need as an element to defining a replacement.
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Oh, and with regards to the forward operating bases, I meant that due to its STOVL capability that you wouldn't need an entire airport to service the thing, rather only a smaller ramp and hangar.
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In Chechnya, where things are completely bogged down because nobody wants to clean up the problem 'the old fashioned way' (Russia's Iraq); the Russians have gone to C2 suppression through a network of superb Radio DF units that recently assassinated a high ranking rebel personality by launching an SS-21 from over a hundred miles away, to land on the building he was placing a cellphone call to his son from. The days of V-2-hits-the-same-country or even SCUD-hits-the-same-city are LONG GONE sir. And with it the notion that STOVL is better either because it brings the fight closer to the enemy (the exact opposite of what you want, provided you have cheap sortie numbers as an alternative). Or makes it somehow 'harder to find' (follow the convoy of tractor-trailer rigs) in local airports.
Anything with 400-1,200ft of static target area is not worth trying to hide from threat survey, if only because of all the target discretes which MTI must come to it. Comparitively, you can suffer four THAAD/ERINT penetrations out of 20 missiles fired on a HAS farm and even 'double parked' in flow thru shelters, the 16 aircraft whose barns were not directly impacted will be perfectly safe. While the TELs which fired the shots _should be_ eating either Mach 8 ARRMD shots in return (each with four hunting weapons like LOCAAS or SMACM). Or flood-covered by airborned orbits of UCAV.
STOVL /might/ have an operational justification if it let us switch to a manned contingent of say 6-10 'patrol' (manned) aircraft and a packed'n'stacked drone force (shelved as much hangared) of say 40-60 GTW airframes. On a 20-40,000 ton SCS/CVL type SWATH. Cheaper, Further, Longer, Better. But even then, given the radius that the drone could achieve vs. the STOVL fuel penalty of the F-35B in particular. Added to the greater shot-count and speed-to-range viability of ADSAM (E-2 cues SM-6 ERAM onto targets buried in clutter under the local horizon or rising as TBMs from deep inshore over the far one...) concept as a superior replacement for the FADF mission.
It is questionable as to what exactly a STOVL airframe could do 'better', simply because it had a man in it.
Better, IMO, to concentrate STOVL efforts on USMC/USAr mission needs where it is pathetically clear that helicopters are too vulnerable to play an active role over a battlefield populated by MANPADS and Smart Mines. And too slow to serve as 'deep attack' assets moving from dispersed basing to areas of influence and overwatch as much as occupation. i.e. Key West _must_ die before STOVL can do anything good (and then only in OOTW/SSC conflicts where A2A/S2A threats are minimal to non-existent to begin with).
KPl.
