Now let's talk program and unit cost and combat range.
The Arrow was a brilliant plane for its time and purpose. But its cancellation was not wrong (if perhaps immature) - if there are no Tu-92 to shoot down, there's no need for the Arrow.
It's like the CANDU that solved a problem (Canadian inability to enrich U and make welds for PWR) using a solution at hand (world's largest capacity to make heavy water) but that is now largely obsolete (the CANDU's have been increasing their enrichment is an attempt to gain market share).
EDIT: I know that Tu-92, like B-52s still fly as part of the triad. But when the Arrow was designed there was no triad, or even diad. But what does the Arrow do to Tu-92s that an (modern, not the '50s crap) AA missile can't do better?
Why should Canada do coalition missions? They have nothing to do with Canada. Coalition missions are euphemism for beating up a weaker country. As far as I can remember, the F-35 in Canada was always argued by those who want to play John Wayne in foreign lands.
If Canada can't defend against the US, then they should just accept they'll be swallowed by it or start making babies and populating the prairies. In the meantime, if Canada wants to contribute to defense of its allies, it should focus on creating a credible air counter to the Arctic.
Canada does coalition missions because Canada relies on allies for defense. We traipsed along on British misadventures for a century or so because we relied on them for defense and wanted to keep the British happy, and then we traipsed along on American misadventures for the last century because we relied on them for defense and wanted to keep them happy.
Every country on the planet is trying to catch up to the US - this isn’t Canada-specific. Canada’s only real differentiation is that they’re completely isolated, whereas at least Mexico has potential support from the southern direction.
The f-35 lacks the range and speed, coupled with the lack of airbases in Canada means that it is not very effective. Canada needs something like a Su-35, a big twin engine with a large range, but those aren't for sale, obviously.
It's not the F-35's fault it's not suitable for Canada. It was never intended for tundra. It's Canada's fault that for the last 20 years there's been no juicy tender for a long range fighter to entice the europeans or the yanks to come up with a suitable modification of one of their twin fighter jets.
An F-35 doesn't need to be faster than an SU-35 when it has triple the radar lock on distance and missiles the SU can't outrun. The thing has a radar cross-section of a US 25¢ coin and can see beyond the horizon on radar, the Russian planes would be dead before they could react to it. It's such a comically overpowered plane that talking about it makes one sound like a kid at a playground making up rules for his action figure in a make believe fight.
I think you oversell the F35 stealth. It really depend on the angle and speed of the plane, and the age of the radar (fwih the radar signature of a us coin was true in 2014, but optics and radars have improved too, especially recently, and especially thank to the Ukraine drone war feedback). The future seems to be fighter + cheaper drones with similar radar signature rather than full stealth. Which might be easier to do with the small f35 signature for sure.
But every military is aware that the plan to go full fox-3 (+ stealth) might die in the next decade, and we might be back to FOX-2 / dogfighting. Is it likely? Not really, but drone and AI change the battlefield to much to be sure of anything.
I think you're giving the F-35 a lot of unjustified credit. For one, Russian air doctrine has long fielded interchangeable radar/IR homing seekers specifically to target American stealth platforms. If your F-35 is afterburning so it can match an Su-35's supercruise speed, they can get smacked by an R-77 from BVR by a Russian jet just as easily as an AIM-120 could crush the Sukhoi. Radar stealth is not a panacea in the EOTS era, and the F-35's side/rear aspect stealth is not enough to make it invisible at every angle.
Furthermore, as much as I love a slick single-engine fighter, the F-35 is still fundamentally designed to operate in contested airspace. Canada, if they operated the jet for the next 50 years, would likely never have to use it for it's intended joint strike purpose. Unless you habitually molest the borders of other nations, the F-35 is not a purchase that makes a whole lot of sense to taxpayers. If the F-35 was truly "comically overpowered" then Congress wouldn't be asking to restart the F-22 production line, now would they?
> For one, Russian air doctrine has long fielded interchangeable radar/IR homing seekers specifically to target American stealth platforms. […]
Is that a demonstrated capability, or a claimed one? Because if there's one thing the war in Ukraine has shown, it's that Russia seriously overpromised on the performance of its high-tech hardware.
Congress wants to keep the A-10 Warthog flying even though the Air Force desperately wants to be rid of it because it's a good jobs program, there are considerations outside of battlefield prowess that go into their thinking. Not to completely dismiss their opinions because they probably have more information than we do, but their world is not warfare.
Even giving the Russians every capability that they claim to have, it is questionable if they can even keep producing much of the high end of their technology with the sanctions leveled against them. Without Western components they are unable to manufacture a decent range of their good stuff.
The Su-35 has a combat range of 1600 kilometers, and the two Canadian fighter bases are about 2750km apart, which means they can barely fight in the area directly between the bases! The Su-35 would not be an effective interceptor when so far from the threats either (as the response times would be terrible). If Canada wants to defend itself from aerial threats, it just needs more bases and more planes.
If a notional Canuck Su-35 couldn't do it, probably nothing could.
The Su-35 has one of the highest fuel fractions of any military aircraft at about 38% of max take-off weight. That's 9% higher than an F-22 and equates to 11,500kg of fuel.
Just conceptualise 11.5 tonnes of fuel - basically an American yellow school bus being hauled into the air by a fighter than can do Mach 2 and pull 9g.
To be fair though the F-35A has a remarkably high fuel capacity too, about 8,000kg. All that chunkiness has an advantage.
Jet fuel is about 7 pounds a gallon. So we’re talking about something like 4000 gallons. A bus is something 40 feet by 10 feet by 10 feet, which is like 20000 gallons. So it’s about a fifth of a school bus.
We can, and have, shut off large portions of the grid in seconds.
Take the 2003 blackout. Yes, the whole shut down took 15 minutes (?). But thats because it was a cascading effect that had to travel down the lines. Once the fault was detected by a particular segment of the grid, the relays responded in milliseconds. They have since the 1920s? Add in an "incoming solar flare" fault condition and we can trip the whole grid in seconds and send a start signal to the diesel generators to warm up to bring her back up.
Pretty nifty trick.
Question is why would we? The grid has been undergoing a lot of strengthening against EMPs and flares for decades. Its not obvious to me that a flare can take it out, especially if we shed dumb loads (partial blackout, say data centers) before it hits to give the conductors and transformers head space.
If we had done enough to mitigate EMPs, the nuclear powers of the world wouldn't have space-based nuclear EMPs as the first step of their attack plan. We still do, and so does Russia.
Geomagnetically-induced current is different from the plain-vanilla EMPs anyway—GIC can last for hours.
I don't think there are any space-based EMPs, at least no publicly known ones. There have been and perhaps still are plans to detonate high-yield nuclear weapons at high altitude above enemy territory to cause an EMP, but that is a very different situation from a CME solar storm. We're able to spot a CME hours in advance vs mere minutes for submarine-launched ICBMs, and the latter would only ever be deployed in the opening minutes of an all-out nuclear war, in which the electric grid and all grid-level precautions against solar flares are likely to be irrelevant, because most of its critical components would be vaporized or torn to shreds by attacks on ground targets anyway. Even just forcing the other side to keep burning money on military countermeasures that do work might be worth a few launchers and warheads.
Ish. There seems to be some vocabulary fuckery going on around the term "orbital", most likely due to a poor choice of wording upstream. "Orbital" in the shit-blew-up-outside-the-atmosphere sense EMP strikes are absolutely phase 1A of any large scale nuclear attack and such capabilities are trivially executed by ICBMs with appropriate warhead selection and detonation altitude parameters. "Orbital" in the EMP-weapons-literally-orbiting-the-planet sense violates several international treaties. Given the levels of secrecy required to pull that off for any length of time it seems unlikely but is impossible to rule out entirely.
I fail to understand why we don't do more to make equipment robust to this kind of thing. There's a whole range of problems that this solves looong before we get to general nuclear exchange.
If stuff was shielded, isolated, and grounded better, everything from your phone to your WiFi would work a lot better and have longer range. Wind slapping power lines together wouldn't destroy everything plugged in inside your house and solar flares wouldn't be more than a passing concern. The design changes to affect all of this aren't remotely expensive or difficult, we just don't.
There is no need to shield electronics. The induced currents only cause damage to long conductors, to the electrical grid and to long fiber optic cables.
That's a complicated one, it's still the electronics but they need a particular circuit that can stop short rise time transients. Also, any larger devices probably want to have shielding and ethernet devices will need some extra hardening, we're talking 25+kv/m events here so unless your computer can handle the monitor being at a 25kv differential from the tower you're gonna have a bad time.
It's not very different in terms of amplitude, though rise times for an E1 EMP impulse can supposedly be single digit nanoseconds so equivalent to a >400 MHz impulse. I know from experience that modern electronics can't handle that because I've fried USB ports by operating radio systems in that band, though there are some obvious differences there.
We might easily be unprepared, but that the military tries things that might not work. Military attack is all about trying things that might cripple the enemy and/or increase the cost of an effective defence. So an EMP isn't necessarily because it is expected to do horrific damage. It is just part of a thorough test of an adversaries preparations, making it harder to protect their infrastructure.
> We can, and have, shut off large portions of the grid in seconds.
Speaking from personal experience, this is BS. During a bad wind event, a bunch of lines came down, started a huge forest fire around 10 or 11pm which was heading for a small town with 50-70mph winds. First responders couldn't get in to warn anyone because the downed lines were energized, so they called up the power plant. The whole process to de-energize took hours. There is a kill-switch now, but most power plants apparently can't shut off the juice in a matter of seconds, and they may not even have a plan to do so in an emergency.
This is a cheap response.
The so called replication "crisis" is multifaceted in cause, the biggest of which is complexity of the brain, and the inherent variability of the brain and behaviors of subjects from person to person, moment to moment. It is a difficult science, but the field is improving. Better methods, larger samples, converging evidence accross levels of description, etc etc, none of which are relevant, btw to my criticisms of Freud, the literary phenom non-scientist.
