Oh Lord, look at me and my sixth-generation boner

As regular readers of this blog know, I do like me some advanced fighter aircraft. Of course, I am always happy to support relatively low-tech solutions that work, such as the A-10, but I get kind of excited by news of big advances in fighter aircraft technology.

And so, hot on the heels of the fifth-generation fighters, the F-22 (of which we did not build enough) and the F-35 (which is consistently proving its critics to be just fucking wrong) we are apparently hard at work (as we should be) on a sixth-generation fighter:

The Air Force has begun experimenting and conceptual planning for a 6th generation fighter aircraft to emerge in coming years as a technological step beyond the F-35, service leaders said.
"We have started experimentation, developmental planning and technology investment," Lt. Gen. Arnold Bunch, Military Deputy, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, Acquisition, told Scout Warrior in an interview earlier this year.
The new aircraft, engineered to succeed the 5th-generation F-35 Joint StrikeFighter and explode onto the scene by the mid 2030s, is now in the earliest stages of conceptual development with the Air Force and Navy. The two services are now working together on early conceptual discussions about the types of technologies and capabilities the aircraft will contain ... [w]hile the Air Force has not yet identified a platform for the new aircraft.

Keep in  mind, no other nation has successfully fielded a fifth-generation fighter. The Chinese and the Russians both purport to have one in development, but neither is in production, both appear to have huge problems and neither has the full spectrum of features that make, for instance, the F-35 such an effective fifth-generation fighter. Avionics, communication and networking are at least as important in a fifth-generation fighter as performance. The game is no longer about dog-fighting ability. If you get down to that, the F-16 and the Russian Su-27 (and its descendants) will kick ass every time. The game now is about killing the enemy from a distance, in large numbers, before they even know you are there.

After all, if you are going to kill large numbers of highly trained fighter pilots you've never met, you should at least be efficient about it. There is a whole bunch about what the services hope to achieve with sixth-generation fighters at the link. I'm pretty excited.

Is common sense finally coming to defense procurement?

It would appear that the Navy, at least, is realizing that not everything that glitters is gold. Having cut off production of the F-22, a magnificent air-superiority fighter that should still be in production, the military stubbornly continues production and deployment of the F-35. The F-35 is intended to serve all three airborne services -- the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps -- even though the services have very different needs. The F-35 is a stealth fighter,  like the F-22, and thus is the flavor of the month. It is ill-suited to ground attack operations because of payload restrictions, not as good at air superiority as the F-22, and a fuck-all disaster as a carrier fighter -- the Navy simply does not want, nor should they, a carrier fighter with one engine. If you operate over water most of the time, sorry, but you want a second engine. As for the Marines, they want a mud-mover -- an airplane that can dump-truck a lot of explosives on bad guys right next to Marine positions, then land on a short, crappy runway or, preferably, vertical landing with no runway, like the Harrier. The F-35 has a variant that can land that way, but apparently the vertical take-off exhaust burns holes in the decks of the Marines' amphibious landing ships that bring the F-35 to the combat theater. Bad news.

Now, the Navy is making noises that indicate it might be coming to its senses:

The U.S. Navy’s next generation air superiority fighter will not be “super-duper fast” or employ much in the way of stealth, a senior navy official announced on Wednesday.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert, the Navy’s top officer, divulged some details about the Navy’s so-called Next Generation Air Dominance F/A-XX fighter jet during a speech at an industry conference.
“I don’t see that it’s going to be super-duper fast, because you can’t outrun missiles.” Greenert said, the Washington Examiner reported. “And you can’t become so stealthy that you become invisible — you are going to generate a signature of some sort,” he also noted, adding “You know that stealth may be overrated…. If something moves fast through the air and disrupts molecules in the air and puts out heat – I don’t care how cool the engine can be – it’s going to be detectable.”

I think it probably is too late to ditch the F-35, simply because of the money spent on it. We are on the verge of having squadrons deployed. It probably will work for the Air Force, but it won't work for the Navy or Marines. Further, it is more expensive than the F-22, which is a better plane for the Air Force. But at least the Navy is recognizing that the newest, brightest and shiniest might not be the best. Frankly, the best ground-attack aircraft around remains the A-10, a plane the Air Force calls the Thunderbolt but everyone else calls the Warthog. It is slow and ugly,  but it takes a licking and keeps flying, plus it can deliver a tremendous amount of ordinance on people who need killing. And the Air Force wants to kill it because the Air Force does not want to fly mud movers. Close air support is beneath them.

Well, if the Air Force doesn't want to do that shit, then the Navy and Marines need to get a grip on reality. This sounds like a good first step. Would it look something like this?