Cost of Concurrency: $1.4 billion

Now balance that against the cost of keeping all of the jets that the F-35 is to replace flying 10-15 years longer.

Damn, this belongs in the F-35 thread ;(

further reduced the frequency of the 1960s vintage P-18 VHF acquisition radar

The P-18 is formed by multiple, Yagi-type transceiver antenna. He would need to rebuild the Yagi antenna (changing the antenna segment length and spacing) in addition to changing the Yagi-antenna vertical & horizontal spacing within the main array itself in order to work with a new, lower frequency.

@JSR
Sorry, but the Russians simply cannot outspend the West in the areas of R&D to claim technical superiority.

@LMFS

have you considered, how to make stand-off jamming against a 400 km range SAM? That needs to be a hell of a jammer indeed…

It’s only 400km vs non VLO assets. A VLO assets will be able to get within 100-200km which is well within the range of jammers like MALD-J and LO CMs like JSM.

@Krivakapa

You need to locate radar first which is problematic with LPI mode it have and high mobility,

Large, lowband radars are not LPI (they don’t claim to be) and not very mobile (take at least 15 minutes or so to setup/redeploy). This is not the 1990’s anymore and one of the hallmarks of the F-35 is it’s ESM suite combined with it’s ability to single-ship geolocate emitting targets. On top of that you can add multi-ship ESM.

@Inst

if the Russians wanted to knock out a F-35, they’d camouflage it so that the US and the Israelis wouldn’t know it’s there.

No amount of camo will hide a radar truck from a SAR map. Will popup SHORAD be a problem, yes, but the F-35 is already being fitted with weapons (like SDB2/JAGM/Spear3) to react to popup threats. You are making a big mistake if you are counting on relying on SHORAD as your primary defense.

@RALL
The quote from Hostage does not mention RCS, that is the author’s words. The direct quote from Hostage says”:

“The F-35 is geared to go out and take down the surface targets,” says Hostage, leaning forward. “The F-35 doesn’t have the altitude, doesn’t have the speed [of the F-22], but it can beat the F-22 in stealth.” But stealth — the ability to elude or greatly complicate an enemy’s ability to find and destroy an aircraft using a combination of design, tactics and technology — is not a magic pill, Hostage reminds us.

Note that he says stealth (not RCS) and further qualifies it with a list of features.