According to new reporting from the New York Times, a Houthi surface-to-air (SAM) missile barely missed an American F-35 fifth-generation fighter, the crown jewel of the U.S. fighter inventory. The F-35, participating in Operation Rough Rider against the Houthis, was forced to take evasive action to avoid the missile.
The incident raises questions about the survivability of one of America’s most advanced fighters, and raises concerns over how effective the relatively unsophisticated Houthi air defense system has been at hampering U.S. action.
Godspeed to the Houthis.
Wait, an f35? THAT F35? The super expensive, country sinking cost, MULTIPLE TRILLION dollar (with a capital T, that’s X,000,000,000,000 USD), super late, overbudget, multiple decade long development (80s-2010s?), the “that’s too expensive, cut everything that made it unique out” F-35?
The F-35 program that KEEPS getting MORE expensive?
The F-35 that, if you look at a pie chart of ALL of United States budget, would be a singular visible chunk?
The F-35 project that’s commonly cited when learning about logical fallacies as an example of sunk cost fallacy?
yea they’re shooting at em now
Don’t worry, folks. Pete Hegseth’s in charge. This is fine.
Take a drink for every f-35 that gets destroyed. And take a drink for every f-35 that isn’t!
Then just take a drink. The wife can take notes for me.
Take a drink
for every f-35 that gets destroyed. And take a drink for every f-35 that isn’t!Heggy’s way ahead of you.
And one drink every time an f35 fall of a carrier
Pretty sure that’s what they’re doing, I’m having a hard time believing that people can be so inept.
TBF, taking down an advanced USA fighter jet is a tad less impressive when they are apparently falling into the sea on a regular basis
At least some of those aircraft appear to be falling into the sea because Aircraft Carriers are having to make rather extreme turns, evasive manuevers, in order to evade other Houthi missiles / drones.
Inflatable bumpers that can be activated during emergency maneuvers to keep planes on deck.
Please donate my billion dollar idea profits to lemmy in my name. Thanks.
Critical support for both the Houthis and Poseidon
Scoreboard — US aircraft carriers 0 Poseidon’s trident 2 Also Lockheed
Those were F/A-18 Super Hornets from the aircraft carrier. Not as advanced as you might think.
Advanced enough to not take a swim while on duty.
Well, they’re not the so-so hornets. So like, a little advanced.
True. Still, not exactly something 3rd world countries (or many 2nd-world) can produce.
based on the impact of war and how people have been living there in Yemen for the past decade, I’d say “3rd world” is a reasonable assumption/classification.
An order of magnitude cheaper
All of those were caused by Ansarallah fire causing the carrier to take evasive maneuvers. Ansarallah inflicted the damage either way
100% numerous people in the US military know that they’re sitting on extremely expensive ships/aircraft/vehicles that are with modern enough weaponry, easy to destroy. A question of whether they have the power, for enough time required, to fix the bloat
Difficult and expensive to develop, manufacturer, maintain. Trapped in service contracts with completely single source suppliers, no alternatives. If it wasn’t so expensive to maintain, even just the ammunition, maybe it wouldn’t be such a panic situation but well after pretty much constantly being at war since the countries inception, the US is sitting on an albatross of a military. Not just all the equipment but how much employment is tied to supporting the albatross. Albatross multiplied hard with Iraq and Afghanistan paired with all the tax cuts since Reagan. Without Afghanistan and Iraq, probably wouldn’t be so wallet concerned for for a good amount longer
Yeah… maybe all the tight-coupling for a 1% better product wasn’t the best decision.
It’s great for the businesses making money, though!
Lol I’m sure a blitzed Pete Hegseth will fix these problems.
Apparently, it was DEI keeping the planes in the air, so our new crackerforce is dumping the planes overboard. Won’t have to worry about them if we give them to the orcas.
Millennium Challenge 2002.
That’s when we learned that low tech can beat high tech in this manner.
Did they learn the lesson at DOD? Of course not. They demoted the guy who won and made him play out a cosplay battle where America Wins!
I wouldn’t say they learned nothing from that war game. They’ve never done to Iran what they did to the other six of the infamous seven that the Bushies planned to dismantle. I suspect that that war game is a factor in that decision. This thing with the Houthis serves to refresh their memories I guess. At least I hope. Who knows, with this admin, anything can happen
They demoted the guy who won and made him play out a cosplay battle where America Wins!
To be completely accurate: Paul Van Riper was already retired when he agreed to lead red force in MC02. After it was clear that red force was winning, they stopped the exercise and restarted it with a bunch of new restrictions on what red force was allowed to do. Essentially, scripting the win for blue force.
Did they learn the lesson at DOD? Of course not.
Counterpoint: They knew it all along, but didn’t care because the entire point of the MIC is to funnel as much taxpayer money as possible to owners of weapons companies.
Oh I remember hearing about this but forgot the name. Primo “military intelligence is an oxymoron” stuff.
Maybe we should stop FUCKING AROUND if we dont want to find out?
So… the article describes that:
… the simplistic nature of the [Houthi Anti Air] systems also helps them to avoid earlier detection by America’s advanced equipment. “Many of the [SAMs] are also improvised, leveraging non-traditional passive infrared sensors and jury-rigged air-to-air missiles that provide little to no early warning of a threat, let alone an incoming attack,”
and:
but the Houthis claim that the Barq-1 and Barq-2 [Iranian AA missle systems] have maximum ranges of 31 miles and 44 miles and can engage targets at altitudes of 49,000 feet and 65,000 feet, respectively.
with some of these missiles being:
capable of firing Taer variants also reportedly have electro-optical and/or infrared camera to aid in target acquisition, identification, and tracking.”
… So I find it rather odd to describe passive IR guided AA missiles as ‘non-traditional’.
I think a better phrase would be ‘novel’ or ‘unaccounted for’.
Passive IR missiles of different exact specifications are… pretty common through the entire history of … just missiles, in general.
Jet engine exhaust is extremely hot, and it would seem the F35 is not actually as good at masking it as previously thought, probably when its flying away from the missile launcher and is thus showing its big hot ass… if passive IR + electro optical missiles can get this close.
(‘electro-optical’ is a fancy term for basically a visual spectrum camera + computer tracking an identified target… you know, like a snapchat face filter…)
" probably when its flying away from the missile launcher and is thus showing its big hot ass… "
Stupid, sexy joint strike fighter.
Yeah, it sounds like they’re trying to downplay how they disimissed the tech as “outdated” during design and construction.
The mindset reminds me of their infamous wargame: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
Reading this stuff reminds me of earlier in the 2010s when Iranian weapon systems press releases were always met with mockery, I live in region with heavy military tech development companies. I had a feeling back then that progress is progress and eventually they’ll be at a point of close enough to make the risk calculation too high for the US to operate so far from production/maintenance compared to whatever country is the current target for invasion/bombings and their weapon sources. I think we’re getting to that point
Operate and lose equipment that cost a billion+ to make equipped with ammunition that are hundreds of thousands to millilions of dollars to resupply that also need to be serviced for extended periods of time and major parts replaced after only a few uses. Parts of the US intentionally let costs run away. Whether they thought the technolical advantage actually made a justifiable enough difference for the poor production rate and maintainability cost is another question
It’s possible that we’re also just seeing a fundamental shift in tech here. When this plane was being developed, the only way to track the F-35 was to have a world-class radar system. That’s the kind of defense net it’s meant to evade. But now? You can track things optically just by having a bunch of cameras pointed at the sky, combining data together using some cheap AI system. Did this event happen in the daytime?
Star trek 6, “well the thing’s gotta have a tailpipe.”
Yeah the IR SAM threat is not a new thing, 25 NATO coalition aircraft were damaged or downed by IR SAMs during the Gulf war, and that was three decades ago. The IR SAM threat has been understood since the SA-7/9K32 Strela-2. This is why IR signature reduction is so important to stealth/low observability technology.
What’s new are these frankenSAM systems in Yemen and Ukraine using advanced infrared guided air to air missiles with high off boresight capability like the R-73, ASRAAM and latest AIM-9s as SAMs, and advanced ground based infrared search and track systems that can connect to more traditional SAM, which extends the range of the IR threat considerably.
An F-35 is not going to be as good as something like the F-117, B-2, B-21 or YF-23 prototype at hiding it’s engine exhaust from ground based sensors, it’s not even as good as the F-22 at that, nevermind those previous aircraft where the engine exhaust isn’t even visible from below. Such was likely one of the compromises in the F-35s design, to allow for mass production and fulfilling all the different roles all 3 F-35 variants carry out.
The F-35, participating in Operation Rough Rider against the Houthis, was forced to take evasive action to avoid the missile.
So, they had to, like, dodge a missile? And that is panic worthy?
Supposedly the F35 should never have been seen or detected in the first place.
The fact that a missile was tracking it and they had to dodge it means that these stealth capabilities are lacking.
What? They can see and hear our blaringly loud war bird spewing kilotonnes of hellfire over their heads? But we paid a gogol of dinaros so it would be invisible!
It had to rely on a last resort as opposed to its primary defensive system which constricts its design in a big way, its stealth component.
It’s a stealth plane apparently, so I guess it wasn’t supposed to be seen, but they saw it.
I heard it’s supposed to be super stealthy and really smart, so I guess they didn’t expect to even have to do that lol. Otherwise, we could spend less money and use the older less stealthy and technologically advanced jets.
Enter Maverick, ready to fly the old jets.
I have a soft spot for new planes being shot down by “outdated” technologies.
[translations, copypasted, so you don’t have to visit the source on reddit]
translations:
- “Sorry, your plane is on fire”(rhymes in Serbian)
- “Mine is visible, but doesn’t crash!”
- “Airplane junkyard: ‘We have F-117 parts!’”
- “The ground suddenly got in his way”
- “Missed the Surčin airport”
- “Look, daddy, no hands!”
- “What’s going to happen with the White House? I’m going to set it on fire!”
- “Give us another one… I need a roof for my pig pen!”
Followed by three more phrases which don’t translate well.
- “Like a child knows what is invisible”
- “We’ll fuck, NATO, my bro!”
- "Short but ‘effective’ "
Why are three marked off? They only shot down the one?
The reddit thread proposes it could have been a lie for propaganda.
Looking into it, it seems only three NATO planes seem to have been shot down total over the conflict. So maybe the propaganda piece was showing total shot down planes and using the F-117 as the model?
Good point, if they were already shot down then it’s possible.
They are supposedly invisible, so you could never know
How reliable are US media reports?
If the Serbs shot more than one down we would have heard about it in 2000.
From who?
Did you hear about the Russians shooting down a plane armed with a nuclear missile in 2024?From the Serbs? They bragged about shooting one 20 year old plane down. They would 100% brag about 3.
Goes to show, that technology can only get you so far, if your doctrine sucks.
Also, they downed one and damaged another, why did they cross of three?
Also, they downed one and damaged another, why did they cross of three?
(See existing replies)
please let the funniest thing possible happen
Good for them
The relevant bit from the times article:
Several American F-16s and an F-35 fighter jet were nearly struck by Houthi air defenses,
I think the fact that they weren’t shot down says more.
That’s right, they just happened to fall of a carrier for no reason at all.
Didn’t we just sign a ceasefire agreement with these guys? Or were those “talks”?
edit: this probably happened weeks ago before the ceasefire, but the article is unclear.
This is probably why we signed a ceasefire
Seems like technological advancements of the past few decades are making US tech obsolete.
One of the pathways to failure is overcomplication - it makes things far harder to keep working and far more likely to have failures, severely reduces how many units you can actually produce and also reduces the flexibility to tackle novel counters.
The Germans made that exact mistake in WWII with things like the Tiger Panzer.
Meanwhile the Ukranians are showing just how much you can do with little if you’re not pinned-down by your own military technology choices and have competent people around to whom you just throw “solve this” problems and leave them free to do it their way.
Overcomplication is a feature of privatized military production because it’s far more efficient at creating profits. Making a few expensive items in artisanal fashion and then charging huge maintenance fees is how defense contractors make money. They don’t want to build large factories and hire lots of workers to produce low margin items like artillery shells. They want to build a handful of F35s and milk each one as much as they can.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainians are entirely reliant on western weapons to fight, and are massively outgunned by Russia lacking production capacity of their own. If the US stops sending weapons to Ukraine then the war ends in a month.
Overcomplication is a feature of privatized military production because it’s far more efficient at creating profits.
100% this. But my question is that since the US is the largest weapon dealer in the world, both in terms of dollar amount and number of planes etc, who the hell are buying these things and why? Surely when you are purchasing something that costs billions of dollars you have to account for the on-going support costs too? Most countries don’t have the luxury of ignoring costs do they?
Answer is that weapons are largely sold to NATO countries as part of a protection racket by the US. Until the war in Ukraine started, nobody was willing to test the idea that US weapons were superior, and it was taken as given that NATO was the strongest fighting force on the planet. This worked as great marketing for US weapons industry. Now the illusion of superiority is starting to crack, and I’m sure weapons sales will take a hit as a result.
More the illusion of being dependable. The deal, at least as I can imagine it, was like this: you buy our stuff, and if shit happens, we come and save the day. Now, with the unpredictability of certain people, this whole deal seems to be up in the air.
Sure, that’s how empire work, vassals get protection as long as it’s expedient for the empire to do so. It’s also important to note that, it’s not like Trump just appeared out of thin air. Trump is a product of the declining material conditions and internal contradictions within the imperial core. The reason the US is pulling back from Europe is because the burden of the empire is becoming too much for the US to bear, not simply because an orange bad man was elected.
The Ukranians have been developing their own in-house weapons systems and have had some really big successes with entirelly homegrown weapons systems: it weren’t western weapons that made the Black Sea unsafe for the Russian Navy even when docked in home harbours and it weren’t western weapons systems that have been blowing up the military and economic infrastructure deep inside Russian territory - Ukranian drones did it.
At the same time, the war on the actual frontline has become drone-heavy and most of the solutions in that domain are made by the Ukranians themselves (not to say that drones alone would win it, not even close).
Ukraine started this war with their pants down and indeed if it weren’t for western systems and ammunition they would’ve lost it long ago, if only because Russia’s depth of military resources was 5+ decades worth of Soviet military kit, but at the same time they’ve been building up their own military production and becoming more and more independent of those, so I wouldn’t be so sure that if merelly the US stopped sending weapons and (more importantly) ammo, Ukraine would lose the war, though if the whole West did that would be far more likely.
it weren’t western weapons that made the Black Sea unsafe for the Russian Navy
Not true. What little success they had there was due to British naval drones. Those worked for a while until Russia adapted. Now you hardly ever hear of success anymore.
Ukranian drones did it.
Again, technically not the case. Most of them are Chinese, the Ukrainians just strap explosive shells on them.
the war on the actual frontline has become drone-heavy
Drones play a large and vital role but they have not and cannot replace the role of conventional artillery. In fact the most effective use of drones in this conflict has been as artillery spotters. The reason why Ukraine relies on kamikaze drones to such an asymmetrical extent is because they have little else left by now. It is done out of necessity, not because it is the optimal thing to do.
Further, there is a certain inherent bias in OSINT toward overestimating the impact of drones on the battlefield due to the fact that they come with their own video footage whereas an artillery shell does not film as it flies toward a target.
Ukraine started this war with their pants down
Not really. Ukraine had the largest and best equipped military of any European country except for Russia at the start of this conflict. They were involved in an active conflict since 2014, had tens of thousands of soldiers already deployed and large swathes of the eastern front heavily fortified, and they had been receiving training from NATO for years as well as weapons.
Then they were further pumped full with all remaining Warsaw pact equipment that could be scrounged up (which was actually a very large amount) when the conflict began.
and indeed if it weren’t for western systems and ammunition they would’ve lost it long ago
This is true.
at the same time they’ve been building up their own military production and becoming more and more independent
Quite the opposite. Ukraine began this war with far more of a military industry than it has now. It lost almost all of it to Russian strikes, and what is left are almost exclusively small scale decentralized production which can only produce small weapons (drones first and foremost) and ammunition but nothing on the scale of tanks, artillery systems, air defense systems, etc.
Ukraine is now more dependent on western supplies than it has ever been, and not just in the military sphere. Its entire government is being kept afloat by US and European money which pays the salaries of virtually everyone in the Ukrainian government. It even imports energy. Functionally Ukraine’s economy is dead.
Last I checked this was a land war, so kind of weird to talk about great successes in Black Sea which are also rather questionable given that Russian navy still has dominance there. Meanwhile, the amount of military infrastructure Ukraine manages to blow up is minuscule, especially compared to the amount of infrastructure Russia blows up in Ukraine on regular basis.
The war on the actual frontline is still primarily conducted by artillery which accounts for 80% of casualties. However, even in drone production, Ukraine is far outmatched by Russia which does it on industrial scale.
The idea that Ukraine has been building up military production is frankly nonsensical because Russia is able to strike anywhere in Ukraine with impunity. This precludes Ukraine from having large military factories, and at this point Ukraine even lacks the energy infrastructure to run them because Russia has systematically dismantled it over the past three years.
Finally, aside from having shortages of literally everything, Ukraine is running out of manpower as its army is being attrited by Russia. Even if Ukraine was able to produce weapons domestically at scale, which it cannot, there aren’t people left alive to use them.
