Russian Stealth Fighter

[Short Field]

So it's okay for a uniformed member of the Air Force Auxiliary to refer to the Commander and Chief of US Forces as "Chairman Obama" now?

A "Uniformed member of the Air Force Auxiliary" still equals "civilian" with full civil rights.  A member of the military is not a civilian and has restricted civil rights - in or out of uniform.  That still doesn't excuse being disrespectful to the elected leader of our country.   But it is his right....

[flyguy06]

Who's in uniform?  I posted that while sitting in my boxers! 

Sorry Strick... I will refer to him as just Beloved Leader.

So I lose my right to be critical of the president when I am NOT in uniform? 

Now back on topic....

Regardless if the photos are correct or not, the Russians are trying to gain back their technological/ numerical products lost after the fall of the USSR.  In this case with the help of India.  Most likely with the education of said nationals in the US.  The fact they are moving in this direction should be a concern.

Pumbaaa.. ahhhh nevermind. I wont even go there with you here on CapTalk. Like was said earlier. ther eis a place for that type of discussion and this aint it

[davidsinn]

Ignoring the political discussion the F-22 program is not killed. It was shortened. I think it was only shortened by a dozen airframes. We will still have a few hundred of these things when production is finished.

[Майор Хаткевич]

Ignoring the political discussion the F-22 program is not killed. It was shortened. I think it was only shortened by a dozen airframes. We will still have a few hundred of these things when production is finished.

At the price tag they come at, if the President allowed it to continue, you'd hear a lot of people in DC saying that he is increasing the deficit! 


Going back a few posts, the same applies to the Constellation program. While it pains me, and I think it's more important to fund the space program compared to Disney Land profits, if the President gave the money to NASA, you'd hear the Republican party talk about how the President's head is in the clouds.

[Strick]

It scares the heck out of me when THE soviets, I mean the russians start selling these things to IRAN, NORTH KOREA, CHINA AND OUR  FIREND HUGO DOWN SOUTH. 




When I was twelve, I helped my daddy build a bomb shelter in our basement because some fool parked a dozen warheads 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Well, this thing could park a coupla hundred warheads off Washington and New York and no one would know anything about it till it was all over.

[exarmyguard]

Head-on, reminds me of YF-23...

[Pumbaa]

The Soviets (er, excuse me, Russian Confederation) are no slouches.

As for imitation, it is not only the sincerest form of flattery, it can go some pretty decent way toward suggesting fruitful directions for development. Far from the first time, this imitation in aerospace applications may have superficial similarities, but a lot of what makes our ordnance effective can't be seen on the surface. While our core approaches to effective aircraft has been superficially different, the Russians have employed divergent concepts with considerable success.

We are not the only ones on the planet to have gotten the square peg/round hole challenge right. As the Russians themselves have said in the past, successful solutions to specific universal problems tend to look similar on the outside.

From the TU-144 to the Buran Shuttle, getting it looking similar on the outside is no guarantee that the thing actually works in the end.

However, when Sukhoi is involved, things tend to be pretty nifty.

[Irishrenegade]

Back in July of 09, Lockheed Martin reported a hacker that stole plans and blueprints for the F-35 JSF...looks like we know who could have done it

The reports stated that the hacker had used an IP hider such as HideIP but I think they would have used something alot more than just that. The trace went to China but I really doubt that it was someone in China...probably the hacker making it look that way.

But I'm in no way blaming the russians...they are just as advanced as we are so maybe they did actually do this legit.

[Gunner C]

Oh please.  Russia is a third world country with nukes.  They're in no way as technologically advanced.  Nearly everything they have is a knock-off of what we have already developed, whether from reverse-engineering or by outright stealing.  If you look at cities of the old east bloc, you'll see that they're rather modern; until you get up close and you see that they're cheap ticky-tacky.  Russia is a paper giant, but a dangerous one.

[Pumbaa]

I don't remember the F-35 being compromised, and we would have been notified internally about it.. the same thing was said about some helo's, but it wound up being public mock-ups 6 years old...

Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman said, "I'm not aware of any specific concerns." That's a key phrase. Lockheed Martin--the F-35 superjet's primary contractor--also commented "We actually believe The Wall Street Journal was incorrect in its representation of successful cyber attacks on the F-35 program." And the company's CFO Bruce Tanner added "I've not heard of that, and to our knowledge there's never been any classified information breach."

Government and defense contractor computer networks face a pretty continuous rate of hack attempts. As a result such companies have even more stringent data security protocols in place than normal organizations. They're still not absolutely impervious to hacking, of course, as no such system ever is. So that's why the most highly classified data--critical to the super-secret offensive and defensive capabilities of hardware like the F-35--is typically stored on computers that have an extremely low-tech "air gap firewall". They're not connected to the external Internet in any way whatsoever.

[jimmydeanno]

I don't remember the F-35 being compromised, and we would have been notified internally about it.. the same thing was said about some helo's, but it wound up being public mock-ups 6 years old...

Probably talking about this: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124027491029837401.html

WASHINGTON -- Computer spies have broken into the Pentagon's $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project -- the Defense Department's costliest weapons program ever -- according to current and former government officials familiar with the attacks.

continued in link above

[Pumbaa]

You are correct in pointing out the WSJ article, but as stated above, the DoD said it was wrong... LM said it was wrong, and if there was an actual public breach, internally we would have been notified, and that notification would have been part of the public record as well.

[aveighter]

The text below is from the AFA a few days ago.  Cause for concern?  You be the judge.  The F-35 program is dragging with disturbing revelations regarding the program continuing to appear.  189 Raptors was the number deemed by the geniuses @ DOD and the WH to be adequate (the AF wanted 300+).  Two have been lost (so far), a certain number are always in maintenance/training leaving a relative handful to bridge the gap between now and some future time when the F-35 will arrive in sufficient numbers to save the day along with scads of super-UAVs. 

Maybe we can buy some of those Indo-Russian F-22skis.

Is It a Game Changer?: The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb believes the Russian PAK FA (prototype flown last month) is just that, citing a new Air Power Australia analysis by Carlo Kopp and Peter Goon. The defense analysts say "available evidence" shows a "mature production PAK FA" could compete with the F-22 in very low observable performance and "will outperform" it "aerodynamically and kinematically." That means, they say, the PAK FA renders all legacy US fighter aircraft and the F-35, upon which the Pentagon has staked the future of US airpower, "strategically irrelevant and non viable after the PAK FA achieves IOC in 2015." Goldfarb posits: "If the Russians had flown the PAK FA nine months ago, you have to think Congress would have rolled the White House to keep the F-22 line open, which it almost did anyway." (Both Goldfarb's article and the APA analysis are worth noting.)