Air Combat Command is a leech that sucks operational readiness out of the military.

No shit. The F-47 is in some stage of active development and the Air Force is going to buy at least some of the result. The F/A-XX is still in the specification and competition stage and doesn't even have a real designation.

Why have they been trying to run two sixth gen programs simultaneously?

I guess while I'm asking this, what is even the fundamental difference between an F/A-18 and an F-16, or between an F-35A and an F-35C?

I do have enough grasp of this to get why an F-35B or Harrier is a whole other can of worms

while this thread is up,

what is the logic behind increasing the defense budget and cutting a couple billies from R&D in general? are they expecting ww3 tomorrow?

>>65052692
Gotta make sure you maximize your buddies stonks before the Dems blow the fuck out of the Rs in the midterms and cancel every contract that doesn't increase their portfolios, and their preferred defense contractor's stonks.

>>65052687
Naval aircraft see much heavier loads on launch and recovery than land-based aircraft, which necessitates structural changes that end up changing pretty much everything. You can take a naval aircraft and de-navalize it to make a good but suboptimal land-based aircraft, but going the other way around only gives garbage.

>>65052692
The US military thinks China will be attempting to take Taiwan within the next 15 years and possibly even the next 2 years. With the costs of the Iran war adding up, there's doubts over whether we're prepared for it.

>>65052687
because every time the USN and the USAF try to make one design you either get
A) The F-117
or
B) the F-35

At this point its easier to just min max the damn thing and be done with it.

>>65052774
f35 was ruined by the marine corps and the euros

>>65052947
Bullshit. Every time it's been tried it was a fuckfight with or without the marines. Look at F111.

>>65052665
That’s the request from the White House. No chance it ends up being the final budget. F/A-XX is currently funded at about $1 billion, with Congress effectively mandating a down selection by not allowing both competitors to get contract extensions from this pool. There’s zero chance they effectively double defense spend while reducing F/A-XX funding to about one fifth of current when it’s a favored program of some of the biggest names on the defense subcommittees. The executive does not write the budget, it makes requests that Congress can then choose whether or not to honor. Also that website is one of the worst slop mills on the internet, it’s not worth reading let alone linking here.

>>65052692
RDT&E is up massively between the fiscal request and reconciliation request. There’s no cut, the combined total for procurement and RDT&E as requested nearly equals last fiscal’s topline not counting reconciliation

>>65052665
The USN is still getting fucked over by the A-12 program from more than 36 years ago. They just cannot be trusted with cutting edge development.

>>65052687
>Why have they been trying to run two sixth gen programs simultaneously?
Because when they tried to run one program with the F-35 we ended up with a less than ideal aircraft that costs wayyyy the fuck more than it should while not being as good as it could be.
A ship based aircraft has vastly different needs than a land based one. Throw in the USMC and the fuckery triples.

>>65052774
Was there really supposed to be a naval F-117?

>>65052979
The F-35 is the best combat aircraft in the world and costs less than any 4.5 gen.

>>65052952
nah it's literally the marines and europe's fault with the turbofan
without the turbofan it's a massively less complicated design

>>65052983
And yet is isn't what it should have been.

>>65052981
>The United States Navy tested the F-117 in 1984, but determined it was unsuitable for carrier use. In the early 1990s, Lockheed proposed an upgraded carrier-capable F-117 variant dubbed the "Seahawk" to the Navy as an alternative to the canceled A/F-X program.

Same thing happened to the F-111

>>65052983
Unless an F22 is in the airspace

>>65052947
>f35 was ruined by the marine corps and the euros

Not this again…
The F-35 is the way it is because the cold war ended, budgets got slashed and the DOD rolled in the USAF and USN future aircraft requirements into the USMC and the UK’s Royal Navy ASTOVL program, run by DARPA and tried to make a one fighter to appease them all.
I think also at the time this decision was being made the USAF wanted a V/STOL fighter but by the time the JSF concept demonstrator was flying the USAF had dropped that requirement.

>>65052991
The F-22 is already a sidegrade to the F-35 because it wasn't designed to be an extensible platform. Once Block 4 hits, the F-22 won't even be able to pretend to be as capable.

>>65053070
The F22 could be expanded upon if everyone wasnt terrified of diminishing returns. It runs on software older than windows XP and has a lot of junk taking up space it doesn't need in 2026.

>>65052969
How should I interpret this article then?

genuine question, my reading comp is not fantastic lol

https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2026/04/budget-would-cut-pentagon-research-third-can-industry-compensate/412634/?oref=d1-homepage-top-story

>>65053572
Your article is about basic and applied research, which is stuff like university grants. His comment is about product development and engineering, which is paying MIC contractors to get the projects they're working on to a state where they're ready to be used.

So it's not really a matter of cutting our future tech in order to buy current stuff, it's a matter of potentially cutting far future tech in order to get near future tech ready faster.

>>65053657
ngl thanks for the qrd

>>65052680
but according to /k/ the f47 flew in 2020
(nevermind the fact that they havent even picked a design till 2024)

>F47
Where's F36-46?

F-33 would’ve sounded cooler than F-35 I believe the aircraft is cursed because of that numerology.

F-22 is the strongest numerologically speaking.

F-11 would also have been a powerful number which got skipped.

F-47 is a powerful number combination too so I expect it to do well