Well well well..... Looks whose back on the procurement board.
>>65026426Congress never allowed it to leave though. Every time DoD tried to cancel it Congress wrote it into law that they had to spend money to buy a couple. If anything Hegseth and Co. probably feel vindicated by what happened, since the push to develop space based AMTI was in large part motivated by survivability concerns
>>65026426Elon is right, this australian scam is a worthless target in any modern conflict
>>65026438>>65026491That'll be a great idea, right up until the chinks shoot anti satelite weapons at them and we all get kessler syndromed.
>>65026725>xis national pride wounded, immediately escalates to doomsday fantasies Those who live in front of glass dams should not throw stones.
>>65026725Not a thing in LEO. Would be funny to see the chink GEO satcom networks get kesslered though.
>>65026491elon doesn't know shit from clay
>>65026491elon muskovite also claims you can counter f-35s with drones and visual reference sensors
>>65026491Elon is the kind of tard to say water isn't wet with a straight face
>>65027013To be fair, that almost happened when the Iranian M358 / SA-67 nicked the rear of the F-35 last week.
>>65026491They seem to work pretty well when you don't park them under missile fire.
>>65027127Not really. What happened there is the simple fact that stealth isn't an invisibility cloak. Musk was talking about mitigating stealth, which is different from just targetting a plane in a way that VLO isn't impervious from.
>>65027013Literally just happened, dipshit. >>65026993It doesnt matter what he knows. What matters is his ability to have an idea and then hire the right people to manifest it. Dude is parallel parking skyscrapers and you're unironically throwing shade? Bro, get real.
>>65026438What is the problem with the US fighting like wild niggers over watermelon to avoid buying a modern AWACS?I mean it the USAF and they've spent vast sums on some far more retarded things
>>65027135The problem is that innovation upsets midwits.
>>65027127>Iranian M358 / SA-67 nicked the rear of the F-35 last weekIt was Majid / AD-08.
>>65027137I find it 'disturbing' that they seem to be going backwards in the evolutionary path that they helped establish.You could understand if they were poor and had to scrimp a bit to save up, but this kind of money is literally lost down the back of trumps buttcrack, just sort of reach in there and grab some
>>65027135They've had plenty of chances to see how they work in action too. Not just wargames, the RAAF's contributed to anti-ISIS and Ukraine airspace monitoring with them with plenty of US pilots involved. Hell they even have one in the sandpit right now helping. They know the damn things are good which is why NATO wanted to buy a bunch of them.
>>65027148Introducing a new AWACs that will be in service till like 2070 in an era where standoff munitions can engage from further and further away is kinda retarded. Especially when our main adversary, China, is throwing thicc stacks at making longer and longer range missiles. Its an inevitability that we will shortly reach a time where AWACs will constantly be within the engagement envelope (on the ground and in the air) which means we need to redesign it to be very survivable (like some kinda B-1 lancer with a dome on top) or just develop something else.
>>65027158Trying to extend the life of the 707 fleet forever is retarded too. The day may come that AWACS as we know it doesn't make any sense at all but it isn't here yet. Even just a small order to get a more modern capability for hot zones would make more sense than just running the E-3s in the hopes someone invents, commercialises and sells you a better solution before they fall out of the sky.
>>65027135The USAF only wants to spend money on fighter planes they don't use.
>>65027127That was an F18
>>65027249I'm talking about the weirdly smooth black and white video, with the green box reticle. Maybe it was 2 weeks ago by now.
>>65026438If the only lesson learned from the E-3 incident that planes are vulnerable on the ground with proper protection, I don't know what to say. Other issue is that AMTI isn't ready and there's very few E-3s around. What's the interim then until AMTI if it works as advertised? The other dumb part with AMTI vs. AWACS is that AMTI works a lot better with AWACS around. Why it's being seen as a zero sum game is beyond me apparently.
>>65027135Secretary of the Air Force is a former NRO guy so he's in general extremely bullish on AMTI.
>>65027345the lesson here is that base commanders in the middle east have been very negligent these last few years and security is way too lax.
>>65027353Also that the lessons from Ukraine weren't implemented anywhere near as well as anyone hoped. The USAF is lucky they're forced to learn it first hand now rather than against China.
>>65026954LEO is big, at 200km shit deorbits pretty quick at 1000km it can take thousands of years.
>>65027372People are assuming that AMTI is sitting at really low LEO. I don't know why. Even Starlink sits around the 500 km range and satellites at that range don't deorbit for years without some sort of propulsion input or outside influence.
>>65027386KSP was great for teaching orbital mechanics but I think the compressed scale convinced a lot of people there is only very low Earth orbit and geostationary.Most LEO satellites are between 500km and 1000km but 2000km still counts as LEO.
>>65027357I think everyone assumed they'd have the luxury of picking when the next war happened and weren't moving with the required urgency.Which in this case they did I guess, but they chose poorly.
>>65027407Peace time military procurement turns into a jobs program if you don't fight hard against corruption.With nearly every nation allowing political donations we haven't been fighting corruption for a long time.
>>65027179I agree to a degree but, you know, Turst deh plehn.
>>65027135Because there is shit that the x37b can do (or carry as payload) and the rq180 are currently doing that will make sense in the coming years
>>65027536Trusting the plan hasn't exactly been working out in regards to this administration.
>>65027135Boeing has not exactly been a great steward of the E-7 program, to put it lightly. Nor have they been a great steward of the T-7, or the KC-46 for that matter. They probably only got F-47 because Lockheed has been worse with F-35, and because if you take St. Louis separate from the rest of Boeing they’ve done a good enough job with their fighter projects that if you close your eyes you might be able to convince yourself it’s still McDonnell you’re dealing with.
>>65027746>KC-46reads like one of the worst cases of corruption and incompetence in a long time
>>65027746>Boeing>McDonnell Plot twist: McDonnell is the problem, Boeing went to shit after the merger.
>>65026725>Again with the chink copeIts like the 80s with the soviets.
>>65027766Incompetence more than anything. It’s a fixed price contract that they absolutely lost their ass on. >>65027773Former McDonnell operations are the only part of Boeing Defense that aren’t actively on fire. It’s a fun bit of common wisdom the internet latched into like a fighting dog, but it’s also bullshit. Most of Boeing’s modern woes can be traced directly to decision made under the tenure of that dipshit McNerney
>>65027773Where Boeing really went to shit was when they separated the leadership from the everett field to their office which was all mcdonnell. So decisions are made from an office halfway across the country by people who never even set foot in the production facility or talk to the engineers or assembly workers on site. They went from being engineer driven to corporate driven
>>65027787Oh I know it's a mangement problem, but it's the post-merger management.Which decided to do management things instead of aircraft things after moving the office away from all the lame engineers so the cool business go-getters could do their thing without anyone mentioning those pesky techincal things.
>>65027810Boeing made its bed and blamed McDonnell for it. Phil Condit was career Boeing and started every issue you talk about. Dennis Muilenberg was career Boeing and went along with every retarded policy Condit and McNerney started. The rot came from within and they refuse to take accountability for it, which is why they are still rotting.
>>65027787Boeing's old products are fine, too. B-52, B-1, CH-47, AH-64, E-3, P-8, etc. It's mostly new stuff they have problems with. And there's stuff like the E-7 program being a shitshow while the Australians didn't seem to run into problems with it, so it sounds like it's more of an Air Force problem than a Boeing problem there.
>>65027353Its not really the fault of the base commanders. They don't get to procure C-UAS systems on their own initiative. The problem is leadership didn't prioritize procuring it despite ample evidence it was important and no lack of enthusiasm from the industry. Everyone is offering a C-UAS solution. Everything from guns to apkws, directed energy, ew, interceptor drones. They all exist. Some were even bought, but clearly not enough. Its not entirely their fault, they weren't expecting to be forced into fighting Iran right right now. They thought they had time. They were wrong. C-UAS at every US military base should have been an emergency requirement two years ago. It certainly is now. >>65027345Yeah I don't get where the false dichotomy is coming from. It shouldn't be a question of either AWACS or AMTI. But both. The E-3 should have been replaced years ago. But the airforce has had to two blackholes of F-35 software cluster fucks and the Minuteman III replacement sucking up budget and they can hardly afford much else right now. In 2024 there was bipartisan support in congress to take the F-35 IP from Lockheed and do an open bid to continue software development. But there hasn't been much talk since. That should be done. Lockheed cant write code and the sooner that's solved the sooner other things like E-7 and C-UAS can be taken care of.
>>65027829P-8 isn’t exactly old, it’s fairly contemporary to the KC-X debacle that led to KC-46. It’s probably their one recent success story. B-52 is not doing well, don’t know where you got that idea. Every time you hear news about the upgrade program it’s a cost overrun or schedule slip. AH-64 wasn’t Boeing, it was Hughes and then McDonnell. B-1 was Rockwell but at least Boeing isn’t messing up the pylon reactivation the same way they are the B-52 upgrade. CH-47 and E-3 I’ll concede as being smooth sailing, as I don’t ever hear about program issues beyond the E-3 being far too old.
>>65027386AMTI is going to have to be relatively low, the only feasible mechanism for it is radar. To build and get enough sats into space with enough useful emission power is extraordinarily difficult to do cheaply enough to provide comprehensive coverage. Something like starlink is an order of magnitude simpler because it doesn't have to pick up reflection off of the earth and signal process that while ignoring ground clutter. They could probably build bigger ones higher up but then you would spend massive amounts of money trying to get tens of thousands of them up there
>>65027844>P-8 isn’t exactly old, it’s fairly contemporary to the KC-X debacle that led to KC-46. It’s probably their one recent success story. My bad, I was thinking it entered service in the late 90s, but I see it was the late 2000s.>B-52 is not doing well, don’t know where you got that idea.It's the longest serving aircraft in history that isn't a biplane or North Korean rustbucket, that seems pretty good to me.
>>65027864The plane still flies but every upgrade they’re trying to do to it is massively behind schedule and over budget. “We can buy other companies and produce old products to spec as long as we never ever think about upgrading them” is a really bad position to be in, but that’s very nearly where they are at when you look at their recent track record. I hope they can turn it around with MQ-25 and F-47, as they’re critical programs for both Boeing and the country at large, but it’s going to be difficult Ortberg to right the ship given everything wrong with the company since Condit
>>65027717Thats the plan
>>65026747You people don't understand the Chinese.They killed 500,000-1,000,0000 of their own just to stall the Japanese for 3 days in ww2.If you actually blow up the dam and kill 14,000,000 Chinese people you will only harden their resolve, if they destroy 1 McDonalds in Austin TX your whole society will crumble.
>>65026426why are you doing this
>>65028117>amerisharts are weak and cowardly they will surrender immediately There is no precident for this in American history. The Japenese made the same error in 1941. If anybody so much as scratches a Ronald McDonald statue the MIC will have a blank check to eradicate continent of our choice. Trust.
i dont even understand why they cancelled the sucessor to what is their backbone for aerial operations in the first place.
>>65028195The argument against it is that there are serious and well justified concerns that it will be impossible to operate a large AWACS against a peer opponent due to the increasing range and lethality of both air and ground based missiles. Doubly concerning is that the ability to strike them on the ground in theater, while long held by peer opponents, is rapidly proliferating to formerly less capable adversaries. E-7 is a troubled program to put it lightly, and you would not see them in operationally relevant quantities until sometime in the early 2030s if all goes well from this point, and that program is one where things have very rarely gone well, so you have to anticipate the threat picture at that time to gauge if it’s worthwhile. Unfortunately extrapolating from current development trends the threat picture next decade looks like it came out of a sci fi horror movie
>>65028202so the answer is to just not having enablers anymore yeah thats progress.
>>65028206The answer is spending the billions of dollars you are using to acquire and update this platofrm to develop something more survivable. Because the alternative here is feeding your multi billion dollar AWACS and its entire crew to your enemy’s semi autonomous flying killbot swarm, which will be entering service roughly contemporary to this boondoggle of a program.
>>65028202>E-7 is a troubled program to put it lightlywhat's wrong with it? shitposter e-7 seem to work ok
>>65028218just giving up the capabality a awacs gives you is absolutely retarted. you need awacs for modern air operations. just because the plattform is less surviveable now doenst mean you lost the need for the capability it delivers.you could try to separate the command element from the flying early warning element to mitigate the risk of loosing one.just saying we will use better technology someday will lose wars.
>>65028117>you will only harden their resolvethats not how that works lol. china has a very large middle class now, full of people who do not want to be involved in human wave tactics.
>>65028283China has a whole "everyone for the nation" thing going on, from kindergarten to college this doesn't disappear just because they are "middle class" now. The US has a "the nation for me" mentality.
>>65027706this guy knows
>>65026438>survivability concernsThey survive just fine if you're not a retarded alcoholic.
>>65028422This is how we used to deal with survivability concerns for high value assets we had to keep parked within missile range.But then, back then actual adults were in charge of things.
>>65027134you're indian
>>65027773>McDonnell leadership fucks up bad enough that the company nearly collapses>Boeing buys them out>McDonnell leadership ends up steering the ship againFucking why?
>>65026491Planes bad, sattelites good.This post was brought to you by the space company marketing guy.
>>65027787>Former McDonnell operations are the only part of Boeing Defense that aren’t actively on fireYes, because they set everything else on fire so they could go back to being McDonnell.
>>65027766>reads like one of the worst cases of corruption and incompetence in a long timeBecause it is.
>>65026993>>65027013>>65028646He will literally save humanity and you are jealous and poor.
>>65028218>crewJust make it a big ass drone.
>>65027118>Elon is the kind of tard to say water isn't wet with a straight faceIt would make him less retarded than you.
>>65028311China is (ironically) one of the more individualistic of the East Asian countries, culturally speaking. China's got the largest police force in the world for a reason, you know
