> Meanwhile, modern conflict, from Ukraine’s drone war to naval engagements in the Red Sea to Iran’s own mass missile and drone salvos, increasingly favors systems that can be produced at scale and replaced when lost. The F-35 is a masterpiece. But a force designed around a masterpiece is not designed for long, protracted wars, and U.S. adversaries know this.
The problem is that the F-35 was intended to be the low cost, mass produce-able workhorse for long protracted wars against technologically inferior adversaries where extremely high performance would be unnecessary. Yes it incorporates advanced stealth and electronics that make it a very capable aircraft, especially when it's going up against F-4s, but these weren't driving the cost. The US had already developed these technologies, and once you have them putting them on another aircraft isn't too expensive. And in particular the main focus was on lifetime cost - keeping flight hours reasonable and maintenance down compared to a higher performance aircraft like the F-22. This plane was designed around exactly this sort of conflict.
The problem was horrific project mismanagement. Building factories before the design was complete, delays due to development operations being done in parallel, making essentially 3 different aircraft with radically different requirements use a common design - the initial program cost skyrocketed and the only way out was to keep upping the order quantity to keep unit costs low. Cost per flight hour was supposed to be $25k, it's now $50k. Engine maintenance time was supposed to be 2 hours, it wound up being 50. And the issues didn't stop after initial development - with each successive iteration there have been new issues resulting in further delays, with airframe delivery on average still being 8 months behind schedule. None of that had anything to do with the F-35's core capabilities. For comparison, the F-35 has lower production costs than the non-stealth F-15EX which is based on a 50 year old airframe, but it has a 30% higher flight hour cost, and the program cost is 100X for 20X airframes.
This sort of botched procurement has caused terrible issues for multiple military projects, such as the Navy's failed Constellation-class frigate program, or the Army's immediate cancellation of the M10 Booker. These aren't masterpieces built for the wrong war, these are failures at producing what was intended. One has to wonder how you can mess up Epiphone guitar production so bad you accidentally wind up with a Stradivarius. It does not bode well for the orchestra.
The program was intended to make money and it did. My university has ties to the military and I was talking to people working on the Joint Strike Fighter about ways to reduce software bugs, I was told candidly that software bugs are job security and they’ll be riding that gravy train all the way to retirement, which they did.
well yes you need to keep the aerospace and engineering pipelines full if you ever need to actually go to war. So boeing and all the other chumps making gravy is part of the deal in downtime
The Booker was a perfect fit for the Army reqs, and filled a genuine need. But it didn't have a sponsor that was willing to pay for it. The Armor Branch didn't like it, and the Infantry Branch, which is the real user couldn't muster enough support in the DoD.
The Connie is a good ship and the two under contract will be fine vessels when they're commissioned. Frigates are no longer "cheap" ships, and the sticker shock was higher than expected despite the obvious changes that were going to be made to the FREMM design. But it's cancellation has more to do with dysfunction at the top of the Navy (and DoD) then the program of record.
Also, you're overestimating the flight hour costs of the F-35. Even the B model doesn't hit $50k. The other variants are closer to $35k/hour (adjusted for inflation) than $50K.
> we would just have fleets of Cesnas flying around with a person hanging out the door with a shotgun lol.
Pfft, get real - Robinson R22 light broomstick choppers with muster pilots and crop dusting family STOLs make far more sense for their agility, ground hugging, and rough short take off / landing field capabilities.
That quibble aside, I can see things going that way, until flooding waves of many drones push up the human life cost past being able to respond.
Either way, they still need to be backed by some agile radar capabilities - variations of the E-7A Wedgetail design for ground and air to keep sensing on the hop.
In WWII terms they come as a function of aircraft production capability as the stategy was to keep putting fresh young faces in trainer cockpits and advancing everybody that didn't crash after a quick run down of controls and a couple of paired instructor fligts.
I had a couple of aunts that were both members of the UK/AU Women's Auxiliary Air Force (1939 - 1949) and they each had rudimentary training for spitfires, heavy bombers, jets, etc that came down to mere hours and "see how you go".
In a serious war drone factories are getting bombed (by F-35s) and there is no need to handle a never-ending stream of drones. The war in Ukraine is special because neither side is capable of air supremacy.
Note that the original article doesn't say anywhere that F-35-like capability is not needed.
The F-35 is a massive success. It is a common design that brought together what would have been three to five different planes into one. Costs doubling is further proof of how amazing it is- inflation has basically outpaced that. Cost per flight hour has more to do with data analytics and the Socialism within the DoW (it's a jobs program) than actual need. A lot of delays were quasi-on purpose.
It has crazy supply chain logistics, and has greatly strengthened ties with our allies, and helped boost their engineering and manufacturing capabilities.
90% of that are destroyed far away from targets and the other 10% do cause some damage, but it is usually far from being devastating as the drone is far from being very precise.
A single F35 which could penetrate air defense and go into the country would be a real problem. If Russia has 10 of them, I think it would significantly alter the current equation of power as it may allow for air superiority.
> and has greatly strengthened ties with our allies
If you count as "allies" the smaller countries that feel like they need to buy US planes otherwise they will get bullied, knowing that the US routinely threatens to invade them... I guess.
The alternative future, of just producing non-STOVL, is particularly relevant now. The USMC needs some organic aviation, but it doesn't need an F-35C. Organic drones would be an excellent fit for Wasp class ships and beach head forces.
Of course it was all tied up with needing allies to buy to increase order size, and the UK Bukit the STOVL bits, so naturally they had to buy all STOVL jets to increase British industry buy.
It's a rat's nest of everyone trying to please all their stakeholders. It is, eventually, a great jet, but it could have been a better, cheaper jet, delivered sooner, and already past Block 5.
Oh yeah, did anyone mention how long it takes to integrate a new system onto the F-35? Fracking years. All of which has to be done by LM, forever. Because the F-35 is not a jet, it's a Master Contract.
Given budgets and slipped timeframes, there was a lot of criticism of the F-35 unifying platforms as opposed to just letting every service do their own one (or two) things as had been the norm. But, at the end of the day, not clear it was a bad strategy.
It is actually pretty clear. Getting there in the end doesn't mean it was a good choice.
The range of the F-35 is too low for the Navy, because it sits in the F-16 concept. But there is no fighter/interceptor split in the AF either, and the range is too low for AF as well.
So now we have the F-47, a very belated ack that the F-35 has short legs. But it also won't fix the problem because it is too focused on the F-22 role, absolute air dominance against e.g. J-20.
The F-35C has greater range than the F/A-18 Super Hornet, the F-16, and the F-22. It's only exceeded by the F-35A and the F-15EX. And "no fighter/interceptor split"? What does that even mean? The USAF hasn't had a true interceptor since the F-106 was retired.
The F-35 achieved exactly what was written on the tin. To be a stealthy replacement for the F-16, A-7, and AV-8B.
The fact that the USN doesn't have a long-legged air superiority fighter has nothing to do with the F-35, and the USAF never considered China as a concern when the ATF requirements were issued (that became the F-22).
Are you kidding? Republicans never cut anything meaningfully. They are only a shade more fiscally responsible than Democrats. Your comment totally blames Republicans and does not put any blame on Democrats who are at least 50% responsible for where we are today.
I don't think aerospace is a good example of efficiency in the private sector. Lockheed Martin did the F-35 and it's main competition in the US is Boeing...
I'm not an expert but from my friends in the industry (including multiple at Lockheed and Boeing), it's definitely not a story about how good and efficient the private sector is. Boeing especially sounds like it's been a real mess with a lot of project management issues.
Take a gander at how much SpaceX has benefited from government contracts. And for Anduril, well the phrase "all hat, no cattle" is pretty appropriate. In all my years I've never seen so much hype for a company that really hasn't produced much.
I would like to see the government (at all levels) have more in house capabilities and less absurd degrees of outsourcing.
I’m currently watching an 8-figure park remodeling project happening near home. Instead of hiring one or two competent construction managers for a few hundred thousand dollars, the city seems to be spending several million dollars for outside management to oversee this one project. (Never mind how much they’re overpaying for the actual construction.)
> I would like to see the government (at all levels) have more in house capabilities and less absurd degrees of outsourcing.
This would help at all levels.
It's very difficult as a government employee to properly supervise contractors when you have little idea what those contractors are actually doing.
But it's hard to gain that experience when you don't actually ever do those things yourself either.
Empower competent people and the government can still succeed, even today. The issue is that everything seem stacked against the idea of either retaining competence or empowering those who are competent to do their work.
Aside from the very real attempts by people to defang the government by offloading all of its functions to the private sector, government is also undermined by an entirely different coterie of idealist, who believe that all the government needs is more process and coordination.
It's very hard indeed to retain competent personnel when they're needlessly mired in non-value-added process steps that are there simply to provide CYA box-checking.
Two different issues... On one hand, government should not compete with private enterprise because it has many unfair advantages. Imagine paying taxes to subsidize your competition, who is also exempt from regulations that apply to you. That is the kind of corruption that comes from government-run businesses.
As for this one:
>I’m currently watching an 8-figure park remodeling project happening near home. Instead of hiring one or two competent construction managers for a few hundred thousand dollars, the city seems to be spending several million dollars for outside management to oversee this one project.
Every time the government touches any money, there is an opportunity for corruption. I'm betting that there are kickbacks, nepotism, or some other bullshit involved in the case you mention here. There are countless fraud schemes. California is trying to pass a law against people like Nick Shirley investigating and reporting on widespread fraud, because they know where their bread is buttered.
A lot of people believe the gov't can do a good job when it is not being actively subverted by people who ideologically want it to fail, and grifters. The only thing that has proven more expensive than having the gov't do something is having them partner with private industry to do it.
No US ship was to my knowledge even hit by a drone/missle.
Iran has been prepping forever for this with Russian/Chinese equipment.
This sounds identical to previous arguments I saw of how hard it would be for US to beat Iran in open conflict. China is different but comparing theoretical ability with reality is different also.
The only reality we have as of now is that f35 completely dominated the enemy on every single front. It's insane to see discussions like these when we just witnessed one of histories greatest showcases of technological dominance.
There is no technology or method in this conflict that would have changed the current state. If a nation wants to toss cheap drones at you there's basically nothing that can be done. Another example is US blockade, without something that can take an F35 down there is actively nothing Iran or China could do to prevent a complete crippling of their country.
You are missing the point above - the F35 has enabled complete air dominance over Iran, and ability to perform any operation with impunity over Iran's land.
Iran is leveraging its geography and asymmetrical warfare against civilian ship (as done by its proxies), but if the US has build tons of cheap attack drones, that wouldn't have changed anything about this equation. The US already has the ability to strike anywhere in Iran.
Nothing in the world would have stopped iran launching cheap drones at civilian ships. Article is trying to say F35 is a problem when clearly it's not.
You're conflating operational efficacy and strategic incompetence.
Operationally, and tactically AFAIK, the US has been dominant. Strategically it appears to be a massive failure, mainly because there was no actual achievable strategic goals going in to this war. Read some of the reporting on JCS advice and cabinet level decision making leading up to the war. It's illuminating (again and again) of the risks on overly loyal advisors and getting the advice you want, not the advice you need.
Somewhat ridiculous piece. Ukraine, 4 years after, still operates a significant number of jets it entered the war with. This is despite hundreds of attempts to eliminate them on the ground with airstrikes, drones, cruise and ballistic missiles.
And naturally F-35s on that theatre would have been a game changer making mass strikes on Moscow possible. For all the dysfunctions of American military industrial complex it remains a fighter without peers (unless you count F-22) or serious AD threat.
No one was going to launch mass strikes on Moscow. Russian nuclear doctrine would have treated that as an existential threat.
The psychology of Ukraine's drone campaign as a response to Russia's original drone launches is very interesting. It's a classic boiling frog move.
Drones are seen as an improvised amateur threat. Unlike a bombing campaign, which is seen as "proper war", drones are an annoyance. They're fragile, cheap, unglamorous, unsophisticated, easy to shoot down, and wasteful, because you need tens or hundreds to make sure a few get through.
That gives drone campaigns a huge advantage. You can do a lot of damage and your enemy doesn't quite get what's happening.
Psychologically, there's a Rubicon-level difference between someone dropping bombs on Leningrad from a plane and a drone swarm attacking the same targets.
In practice the threat level is similar. Drones have absolutely become an existential threat to Russia.
Ukraine's top drone commander was interviewed by The Economist.[1] He used to be a commodities trader, and he looks at warfare from that perspective. His goal is to kill Russian soldiers faster than Russia can replace them, until they run out of young men. His drone units are currently doing this, he claims. They supposedly lose one Ukrainian drone unit soldier per 400 Russians dead. Material cost per dead Russian soldier is about US$850. He looks at attrition war as an ROI problem.
His risk management strategy is to have redundant everything, so there's no single point of failure.
Lots of small drones. Distributed operators. Many small factories. Varied command and control systems.
He makes the point that they use lots of different kinds of drones - some fast with wings, some slow with rotors, some that run on treads on the ground. There's no "best drone". Using multiple types in a coordinated way makes it hard for the enemy to counter attacks. No one defense will stop all the drones.
Ukraine built 4,000,000 drones in 2025. This year, more. The Ukrainian military needs a new generation of drones about every three months, as the opposition changes tactics. They view most US drones as obsolete, because the product development and life cycle is far too long. (See "OODA loop" for the concept.)
This is a big problem for the US military's very slow development process. Development of the F-35 started over 30 years ago.
The development and production lifecycle _has_ to be long for a country not fighting a current war.
Ukrainian munitions get used up almost immediately. They don't need to stockpile, they are in a steady state wartime production.
On the contrary, peace time countries have to stockpile. A manufacturing line cannot be ramped up from zero to wartime, we need low volume manufacturing to retain the expertise and the supply lines. But that, in turn, means that we have to either trash the entire manufacturing output every few months (which would be insane), or stockpile. The latter option also requires building more capable systems so that the stockpiles are still relevant in a few years.
Even if Russia sees a particular tactic or weapons system as an existential threat it's questionable whether they have the capability to escalate further. I mean they can threaten nuclear strikes on Ukrainian population centers but would anyone believe that the threats are credible?
Tell that to the folks on the front lines, along with folks on both sides, military or not, who have had to deal with it.
Russia would never nuke Ukraine to begin with. They know that by doing so, most of the world would unite against them, and many, including Putin, would be on the chopping block.
Seriously doubt any country on Earth is going to attack Russia and risk global thermonuclear annihilation over anything other than a direct attack on their own lands.
Russian self-image is protector of the family of Slavic people and nations. Resorting openly to destruction of a Slavic people would be an incoherent tactic.
That self-perception lowered the gate for interference in Ukrainian affairs in the first place, but also set a ceiling on escalation.
Russia is not fighting Ukraine, it is fighting NATO in Ukraine. And, IIANM, it has the capability of hitting non-Ukranie NATO targets in various places around the world - with cruise missiles and such. The assumption that "oh, Russia will never do this" is actually quite reckless and dangerous; and I don't just mean dangerous to whoever would get attacked, but dangerous for people all over the world, as we may find ourselves in a nuclear exchange with multiple blasts in multiple locations with radioactive matter spread far and wide.
Regarding the drones - definitely agree with you that drones have completely reshaped the experience on the front lines of this war. I understand that in a recent exercise with NATO forces, a Ukranian unit of drone operators essentially "took out" a couple of battalions:
Such nonsense. The EU may be supplying Ukraine with some munitions etc, but if NATO was actively involved, the war would have been over in a year; either conventionally or via nuclear weapons.
I dont buy that anymore. We had that "escalation" yell at every stage, every new tech. Tanks, jets, everytime ukraine got help, the "moscow puppets" yelled about nuclear war and escalation. I m of the opinion we could have stopped 4 years of butchery if we had supported Ukraine decisevly from the start. The words of the peaceniks just dont hold value anymore. They lack predictive power so significantly those utterances seem delusional at time. Quite frankly if sb marches into a peaceful neighbor country, they dont get to call for the referee the moment they kick the shit out of them.
They have been getting replacement MiG-29s and Su-25s from allies and are starting to use f-16s from NATO nations.
"A coalition of NATO countries, primarily the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and Belgium, are providing F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine. The United States authorized the transfer and is providing training and spare parts, with deliveries having begun in 2024 to strengthen Ukraine's air force against Russia."
So yes, they still have an airforce. They're just getting re-supplied.
Also the Ukrainian airforce was ULTRA conservative about sorties to make sure they conserved as many fighters as possible.
From looking at the sources below, it looks like Ukraine still has about 1/3 of the fighter aircraft it started the war with, though it started with many non-serviceable units (seems that at least 20 aircraft were non-operational), and received many parts from abroad:
I am not sure what is meant by 'a significant number of', and I'm not sure if all commenters have a common definition of that phrase, so I'm unable to judge the veracity of the comments above.
The thing about the Russo-Ukrainian war is that it is a failure for both sides. The primary lesson from this war is, how do we avoid ending up like those poor guys? If the US Army fights a war with anyone, let alone China, on the doctrine that it should set up a static attritional front line with drone warfare, the joint chiefs should all be fired.
Maduro was a clown. Iran is two orders of magnitude above Venezuela and the US (plus friends) are already struggling.
Russia is at least one order of magnitude above Iran.
I have no doubt that the US would win at the end, but at a massive cost of life and money. You cannot afford that, you cannot even afford a 1/10th of that.
I live in America, I'm obviously pro-America, but losing touch with reality will only make things worse.
Drones have a limited range and limited capacity to inflict damage. Yes, they are effective at hunting infantry, but you can't reach across an ocean and strike the US with "millions of drones".
Relatedly, aircraft carriers are great for beating up on small powers, but they are vulnerable and would not be effective at reaching across the ocean and bombing China.
Plus, both nations have nukes, so the idea of either China or the US "winning" a war against the other side is easily cancelled out.
What you are left with, is a lot of posturing about superpower wars which is a waste of time. All sort of people thumping their chest, wargaming things out, as if any of this nonsense isn't immediately squashed with the nuclear trump card.
There will be no superpower wars.
There will, however, continue to be wars against smaller states, and the F35, aircraft carriers, etc, are really effective at those kinds of things. That is, effective at waging the wars that will actually happen. Nukes and the pacific ocean stop any war of consequence against China.
First Sea Lord Admiral Wilson famously called submarines "underhanded, unfair, and damned un-English." Yet this didn't prevent the RN from purchasing submarines from the US in 1901, far earlier than most other industrial nations.
I don't know if you've looked recently, but the pacific is, likev pretty big. Maybe even bigger than that.
The primary problem with killing carriers is, has been, and will be, finding the things.[1]
Drone strikes on oil refineries work because, with few exceptions, the refineries rarely move. You can literally program a drone to go x miles in a specific direction and then drop a bomb.
It's also considerably harder to hide things like drones in big empty spaces.
If loitering drones became a serious threat (as opposed to the, you know, literally super sonic missiles the navy has spent the last 40 years planning for) itms pretty easy to imagine anti-drone planes/ships/drones sweeping a large radius around your carriers.
[1] Satellites can definitely do things, but they're not magical and people can track where they're looking and just... sail in a different direction. Also if someone was actually using satellites to target american carriers with munitions the americans would probably just destroy the satellites.
Once the big valuable vessel is found, it can be reasonably tracked from orbit.
The interesting thing about drones is the ability to attack from many directions at the same time, overwhelming the short-range defenses. IIRC no fewer than 5 naval drones attacked the Moskva missile carrier at once, and successfully sank it eventually. Naval drones are compact, barely visible, and, unlike torpedoes, highly maneuverable.
Aerial drones are also highly maneuverable. Large navy ships are pretty tough on the outside, able to withstand a blast of a moderate-size shell or bomb. But they have smaller, harder-to-reach vulnerable areas. This is the kind of target drones are apt to attack precisely.
Most anti-air weapons are pretty expensive to fire, because they were intended against high-value targets like planes or cruise missiles. They are insufficient and wasteful to fire against hundreds of small, inexpensive targets.
It's like having a shotgun and a sledgehammer, but fighting against a swarm of hornets. Despite a large advantage in damage-dealing capacity, you quickly become incapacitated.
On your first point - it is much more difficult than you think to "reasonably track" a vessel. There's no hardware just sitting there to watch what direction the carrier moves next. Satellites have to orbit - that's why you only get new photos of ground targets once or twice during a news cycle. Carrier movement patterns in wartime are designed to avoid reacquisition.
Finding the things is not trivial. Finding them twice is even less trivial.
> Satellites can definitely do things, but they're not magical and people can track where they're looking and just... sail in a different direction
I know nothing about this really, so forgive my ignorance.
Assuming a carrier is found and tracked by a satellite in the ocean, how could it possibly escape the satellite's detection before being targeted by a drone or some other type of munition? If the ship starts sailing in a different direction, the people (or AI) tracking via satellite would notice and adjust, right?
I believe satellites are usually in an orbit. They
can’t follow an carrier for example. The satellites may be in a constellation that can track the carrier. That is why anti-satellites weapons have been developed. E.g., a jet fighter flies straight up and then fires a long range missile.
If the carrier is aware of the overflight (and I assume the USN isn't run by complete idiots), it can adjust course after the overflight. And at 30 knots, can be 100s of miles away from its initial location when the satellite returns.
Now satellite constellations make it harder, since their numbers limit this strategy. But currently, none of the know systems utilize SAR like the LEO satellites, so they wouldn't function well in bad weather. They'd have to rely on optics which can be severely degraded.
My understanding is to track something like a carrier the satellite has to be in low earth orbit. Those circle the earth about every two hours. So it is not so much the carrier outruns the satellite; it is the satellite outruns the carrier.
A typical LEO optical satellite has maybe a 60km swath at high resolution. And it isn't just a couple of hours - an orbit doesn't go over the same spot every two hours. You only may get 1-2 passes a day with a given type of constellation.
China would be using their Yaogan-41 (geostationary) to try to track, which might work, in good weather, during daytime, IF the carrier group was south of Japan (it's equatorial). Carriers deliberately transit through weather, strike groups disperse broadly and use decoy behavior in wartime, and a geostationary optical satellite won't know which blip is the carrier and which is a support ship 50km away.
Every night, you lose the carrier group and have to find it again in the morning, if you can. Usually you can't, even with China's layered approach using optical, SAR, ELINT, and OTH radar.
A carrier can likely get far enough to generate a miss. Missiles and drones have very limited sensors so in order to hit anything another platform has to cue them with a fairly precise target location. In other words, an adversary like China would need to have enough satellites, submarines, and/or patrol aircraft to maintain a continuous target track long enough to make a decision, launch the weapons, and have them fly out to the target. Current thinking is that China could probably do this inside the first island chain but would struggle to put the pieces together further out in the open Pacific Ocean.
I don't believe parent is right, but satelites don't stay in one place unless they're on the equator, because otherwise they have to be moving. This means that you need many satelites to maintain coverage of a single spot.
I don't know how many military satelites China has, but I would have assumed it would be sufficient to cover the pacific sufficiently to find an aircraft carrier. (the obvious caveat here being clouds, which are fairly common over the ocean)
The JWST has a 6.5 meter mirror. The largest (known) spy satellites have a mirror of ~3m diameter. At GEO (geostationary orbit) that would provide an imaging resolution of about 7 meters. An aircraft carrier is about 337x76 meters. So from geostationary altitudes, a satellite similar to a KH-11 would see an American aircraft carrier as a blob of about 48 "pixels". This is probably enough signal to track all aircraft carriers around the globe in real time. It would have a field of view roughly the size of Houston (50x50 miles) and would have enough electricity from solar panels to power reaction wheels to stay pointed at carrier groups indefinitely. (~15-year lifespan would be limited by xenon supply for ion thrusters that keeps the satellite in GEO orbit)
Some quick Googling implies China has satellites capable of tracking shipping via radar from geostationary orbit. I'm not really convinced that aircraft carriers can hide these days?
Those satellites KNOW where the freighters are going, and check in every day on progress. They aren't looking for something that's intentionally sailing in an unpredictable direction (with no radio emissions in wartime).
I think people forget how many satellites are pointed at all parts of the planet. They are used for crop reporting and weather and all sorts of shit. It isnt the 1960s where only the super powers have them and they drop rolls of film.
Satellites aren't pointed at "all parts of the planet". They're generally taking regular photos of known locations, when the right type of satellite passes over. That's where you get lucky shots like the one you noticed. Then that satellite has to orbit, and there isn't another one nearby just ready to take another photo. Then the carrier changes direction...
Sure any single one but there are many companies, some with hundreds of satellites in orbit at any given time who will point it where ever if you pay them enough
An aircraft carrier is not that fast, if you see it once you know roughly what radius of circle it is going to be in for a while (ignoring the fact that they are likely going somewhere for a reason its not their job is to say out of sight)
The oceans are unreasonably large, you would need an astronomical number of hydrophones to get any type of coverage. Hydrophones are primarily placed in choke points for this reason.
China is putting containerized missile launch tubes and drone launch systems on their container ships. If these get widely deployed at some point, there could come a time when there will be weapon systems already on-location in all of the major ports of China's adversaries. Most naval facilities have civilian ports nearby.
Despite the nuclear reactor, aircraft carriers won't stay in the fight long if their supply lines are disrupted. And also it's not likely that a carrier group could fend off a wave of 10,000-20,000 drones launched from a container ship that happens to be sailing near it.
At the end of the day, we rely more on nuclear weapons and MAD to deter these kinds of major hostilities between powerful countries. Talking about how conventional weapons match up is a bit of a red herring. The only thing that would change that would be very reliable nuclear missile/warhead interception systems - and I don't think any country even has a roadmap to such a thing.
20,000 drones could hit a carrier and not sink it. 100,000 drones would not sink it. Not if they all landed direct hits. It's like firing a handgun against a tank. You need more oomph.
To sink an aircraft carrier you really need like 10 direct hits with hypersonic missiles. Or a couple of hits with a torpedo. If you are lucky, maybe even a single torpedo hit. People underestimate how hard it is to sink a ship. You really have to attack it below the water line, from the bottom. A single torpedo is more effective than 100,000 drones when it comes to sinking big ships.
What drones could do, is damage the runway and radars and other equipment that would constitute a "mission kill" -- e.g. the carrier has to withdraw for a period to fix the damage to equipment on deck.
But now think a little bit -- the drones have limited range. They have to be launched from somewhere. So just launch missiles from that location. You get the same thing -- a mission kill. You don't need a million drones. And the missile will have much larger range than the drones, and will cause more damage.
So the bottom line of all of this is no US aircraft carrier would venture near Chinese shores in the event of a war with china. That is probably because those shores would be lightning up with mushroom clouds anyway, as would ours. So what do you need the drones for?
As you stated, there would be no need to sink the carrier to remove it from service. Heck you don't even have to damage the carrier at all if you damage enough of its fleet. Sufficient damage to the tarmac of the carrier, the bridge, radars, weapon systems, and communications of a sufficient portion of the ships of the carrier group would remove it from service, for a very long time, especially if American/Korean/Japanese ports and dry-docks were also damaged by container ships already docked in/near those facilities (likely too close for our current missile defense systems to defend against).
Missiles are also an option, though carrier groups have some ability to defend themselves against them (less capability against hypersonic missiles, of course). The Chinese container ships are reported to have up to 60 vertical launch systems, which may be insufficient to overwhelm a carrier group and remove the carrier from service. It's reported that carrier groups can defend against "dozens to 100+" missiles.
That's why I'd imagine that it might be easier for a single container ship to disable a carrier group using 10,000+ drones instead of 60+ missiles. Especially as you wouldn't need fiber-optic cables, against ships a COTS AI targeting system would be sufficient (still robust against jamming, but allows for longer range than fiber-optics would).
Neither Ukraine nor Russia are using manned aircraft in any significant ways. They are at most used to lob gliding bombs from far behind the front lines.
> And naturally F-35s on that theatre would have been a game changer making mass strikes on Moscow possible.
And then what? Kyiv has been under relentless strikes from drones and missiles for 5 years. And Moscow was hit by Ukrainian drones several times.
You'll need to suppress all the anti-air defenses first, and it will likely be too costly.
It remains to be seen how well F-35s actually perform in that role against an adversary with modern anti-air defense and with modern drone-based tactics.
Both Russia and Ukraine learned to avoid concentrating forces, so what are you going to strike? Use an F-35 to attack a single Jeep with a mounted machine gun? F-35 has limited range and carries very limited armament, so you can't just carpet-bomb everything. At some point, you'll need to use much less survivable heavy bombers.
Strike the stuff that can't move: government offices, factories, bridges, dams, power plants, ports, logistics hubs. The heavy B-2 bombers are themselves quite survivable, and were in fact used in the initial strikes.
Government offices are hardened against strikes, and they are going to be located beyond the reach of F-35s anyway in case of a war with Russia or China.
> bridges, dams, power plants
A war crime, btw. Bridges and dams are also notoriously hard to destroy.
> The heavy B-2 bombers are themselves quite survivable
They are, but less so compared to lighter aircraft.
It's like watching salami slicing happen in real time. It also forces a dilemma on Russia. Every move of GBAD to Moscow to defend against drone leaves an airfield uncovered. Move some to airfields and it leaves a refinery open. And on and on.
One of the authors is a retired general, so he probably knows a bit more than us internet randos. Still, the last paragraph says: "The lesson of the Iran campaign is that the F-35 performed superbly in exactly the kind of fight it was built for." I feel like it's hard to gainsay the utility of the F-35 when it's useful in a real war we're actually in.
The author's main argument against the F-35 is that it can be easily destroyed on runways now, as drones and missile developments have outpaced missile defense, leaving the US and US allies vulnerable to a preemptive strike by China.
That might be true, but it's also strategically valuable to diminish the military capabilities of allies of China (e.g. the Iranian theocracy), which may make up for the tactical weaknesses of the F-35 against China in a direct confrontation. It's also possible that drone/missile defense will catch up (e.g. lasers), but that's hard to say at this point.
It concerns me how casual the article and some of the comments here discuss an actual war against China, as if that were a reasonable scenario.
Of course I understand wanting to be prepared even for grim scenarios such as these. Military strategists should of course continually be refining such plans. But casual discussions like this, without even so much as a disclaimer about it being a hypothetical and extremely undesirable outcome, may pave the way towards it through normalization.
A general war against China is impossible. But a "limited" war fought over Taiwan isn't beyond the realm of possibility.
Which does take it into a kind of Schroedinger's realm. The US takes it seriously, so it develops technology for it, and China doesn't invade. But would China have invaded if the US hadn't prepared for that war? Quite possibly, but you can never know.
In the quite likely scenario that Iran goes on any longer, the US will become so war exhausted that we will be unable to provide any support for Taiwan.
The Iran war is a skirmish by any reasonable measure. It does not exhaust either the US Navy or the Airforce, and the Army isn't even participating.
Now I understand it has a large impact because of oil prices and the closing of the strait of hormuz, but don't confuse the economic impact of the closing of shipping lanes with something that "exhausts" the US military.
Remember this is the military that spent two decades in Afghanistan and Iraq, using considerably more resources. Those were actual wars, followed by occupations that lasted two decades. And that didn't exhaust the US.
In terms of the Naval cost, it is occupying 15% of ships, with zero ships sunk or damaged. I believe there were 13 soldiers killed during strikes on bases in the area. Those bases have been manned for decades and have not exhausted the US Army. Let's maintain some perspective.
Reports are that the US has exhausted certain key capabilities such as high end missiles and interceptors. We've likely used more interceptors in a month against a fourth rate power than Ukraine has in their entire war against Russia. That's extremely damning and irresponsible from a strategic perspective.
Exhausting key functionality like that will absolutely lead to major losses of things like manpower and ships against a near-peer adversary.
I would dispute the depletion of expensive munitions, but I still believe that is largely irrelevant next to political exhaustion.
I do not think most Americans would care to defend Taiwan, even against the China boogeyman. The practical realities of losing Chinese goods would be a devastating reality few are prepared to face.
The reality of losing TSMC is no joke either. I remember Covid times when many G20 leaders went to Taiwan begging for some chips so that they could keep exporting cars and other things that need computer chips.
I agree, political exhaustion is the real constraint.
I personally would not be willing to do anything to defend Taiwan from China. But then again, I don't support any of the wars we fought in the middle east, either.
JP Morgan is predicting $5/gallon gas. Apparently gas prices are one of the best indicators to predict presidential support. In normal times, this seems unfair-lots of external factors can influence gas prices. Rare that you can so directly point towards administration action causing an effect.
Every day this conflict continues is going to have devastating political outcomes. I largely subscribe to the belief that Kamala losing was a reflection that people were mad at inflation.
The problem here is that gas prices have bifurcated to the point that an "average" doesn't mean much. I'm pretty sure I know how California will vote regardless of the gas price, but gas in Texas and much of the midwest will remain cheap.
For sure. I am in SoCal, and when I hear people complaining of the “$4 gas”, I can only laugh. I still believe the average represents a real increase being borne across the country, even if it is felt unevenly.
I get what you are saying, and I was sympathetic to this view in the Ukraine war (where we gave orders of magnitude more munitions than have been spent on Iran).
At that time, I believed it "We are running out of missiles, we are running out of shells", etc.
But it turns out the US adapted. They increased production, they substituted for next best options, they got other countries to produce for us, and still we have not run out. Not after years of Ukraine.
So I am no longer on the "US is running out of munitions" bandwagon. Plus, this military spending increases productive capacity.
This is a misconception, and honestly it's hubris talking. The US has already burned through a big chunk of its key munitions. More than half of its THAAD interceptors, about a quarter of its Patriot stock, roughly 1,000 total with limited yearly production, and a serious slice of Tomahawks, some of which will take years to replace.
Even with ramp ups, you are looking at 3 to 4 years before extra production actually shows up. And for the really constrained systems like GBU-57, cruise missiles tied to Williams engines, or anything needing Chinese gallium, even that timeline is probably optimistic if China keeps export controls in place.
And this constant comparison to Iraq or Afghanistan just does not hold up. Those were wars where the US could sit in safe zones and strike from distance. A Taiwan scenario is completely different. It is right on China’s doorstep, against a peer the US has never actually faced at this scale. Even the USSR was not comparable in terms of economic integration or industrial strength.
edit:
If the ceasefire collapses this Wednesday as Trump has signaled, these numbers will start moving again, and the replacement time estimates will only get worse because the industrial base hasn't yet begun delivering against any of the surge contracts
Also, there is a 0% chance that China has not been closely observing this and updating their plans in case we end up in a hot war. Unlike Iran, they have the resources to mount serious attacks on supply chains, electronic attacks on support infrastructure, and overwhelm defenses – if it came to a head in Taiwan, they’d be willing to trade an uneven number of drones and modern fighters (both significantly outclassing Iran in quality and quantity) to take out hard to replace things like AWACS or THAAD radars. The difference in resupply distance is heavily B skewed in their favor.
The asymmetry with Iraq goes both ways. In Iraq, the goal was regime change and occupation. In Taiwan, the goal is to disrupt the most difficult type of military operation in existence (opposed landing). No one is planning to roll Abramses into Beijing.
US will start a draft and turn up more warfighting manufacturing. They have no way to respond to things other than with violence. Of course they'll lose the fight for Taiwan, but America has no problem fighting stupid wars they then lose.
> It concerns me how casual the article and some of the comments here discuss an actual war against China, as if that were a reasonable scenario.
The last few wars started by the US were based on scenarios that looked good on paper and in reality they did not went so well.
Look at the Iran war: "we're gonna kill their supreme leader and the regime will fall". Almost two months later nothing changed in any significant way despite bombing it relentlessly.
Coming back to your concern, I'm pretty sure some people at the Pentagon believe the US can fight China using an expeditionary force and somehow win.
The iran war - for all it was a bad idea eliminated a lot of iran's war capacity which seems to be the real goal - near as anyone can tell what they were. Regime change would be nice, but needs more than the us was ever gave indication they would do.
the followon effects like the closing of the straight were obvious which is why few Iran hatehs thought it was a good idea
The Iran War never looked good on paper. The only people who thought it would succeed were Trump and the cast of characters he surrounded himself with. I doubt if many congressional Republican chickenhawks thought it would succeed.
The only way to oust the regime is with ground troops, ripping out the Revolutionary Guard and its tentacles. For all its corruption, Iran is far from a failed state, and there aren't factions waiting in the wings, ready and willing to take over the government with force. (There are political factions, to be sure, but they're already integrated into the government, though without leverage over the Revolutionary Guard.) The only armed group remotely capable of even trying would be the Kurds, but the US and in particular Trump screwed them over in the past, multiple times. Even if they thought they could go it alone (which they couldn't), there was zero chance they were going to enter the fray without the US committing itself fully with their own invasion force (i.e. success was guaranteed), because failure would mean ethnic Kurds would be extirpated from Iran, and might induce Iraq and Syria to revisit the question of Kurdish loyalty to their own states. And, indeed, Kurdish groups took a wait and see approach, assembling some forces but waiting to see how the US played their cards.
It's just so ridiculous. Nobody is going to be writing books about the mistakes or hubris of US intelligence, military strategists, or political scholars and analysts. Even the most diehard American proponents of regime change in Iran, at least those with any competence, could have predicted (and did predict) this outcome. This was 100% a Trump fiasco, though the whole country shares some culpability for this kind of epic failure by allowing someone like Trump to win the presidency... again.
It's a little ironic that its due in part[1] to Trump's reticence to commit ground forces that we've come to this pass. I hesitate to criticize that disposition, but at the same time it's malfeasance to start a war without being willing and able to fully commit to the objective.
[1] Assuming the war had to happen, which of course it didn't.
> It concerns me how casual the article and some of the comments here discuss an actual war against China, as if that were a reasonable scenario.
It’ll be more concerning if wasn’t discussed in such a way. War is rarely reasonable. China doesn’t find it unreasonable to go to war over Taiwan. And for what? National pride and unity? It’s completely unreasonable, but everything they’re developing militarily is exactly for that. We must approach the subject clearly and explore every possibility as a real one. These discussions are about ending wars as quickly and decisively as possible while causing the minimal amount death.
The more I read about it, the more firmly I believe it is in the U.S.’s best interest to avoid military conflict with the world’s only manufacturing superpower.
Not that we could afford wars with non-superpowers either.
We’re a fading manufacturing power and corporate profit-maximization since the 80s has made things very brittle. The most obvious example for HN is semiconductors but there are many other things which we either don’t make in sufficient quantity at all or which have significant dependencies on countries like China. In a war, it doesn’t help, if, say your factory is in Utah when it depends on Chinese rare earth until someone spends 5-10 years getting a new mining & refining supply chain online.
> an actual war against China, as if that were a reasonable scenario.
Most modern military planning considers it a foregone conclusion. Whether that's accurate or not is arguable, but approaching discussions of military spending from a perspective grounded in current planning is certainly reasonable.
> Meanwhile, modern conflict, from Ukraine’s drone war to naval engagements in the Red Sea to Iran’s own mass missile and drone salvos, increasingly favors systems that can be produced at scale and replaced when lost.
In the conclusion:
> The lesson of the Iran campaign is that the F-35 performed superbly in exactly the kind of fight it was built for. The lesson for force designers is that the next war may not be that fight.
What a weird article. It starts out by saying f-35 is not fit for modern war. Concludes by saying it works perfectly in modern war.
The middle part talks about combining f-35 with drones to get the best of both worlds, but isn't that what people already are doing? Iran war allegedly had lots of drones on both sides.
And of course blowing up iran is going to be totally different from some hypothetical war with china. Will the f-35 work well in a conflict with china? I have no idea but the article didn't really make any convincing arguments about it.
> I have no idea but the article didn't really make any convincing arguments about it.
It did.
It pointed out that the bases from which the F-35s would have to operate in a war with China would be very vulnerable:
"The concentration of high-value equipment and personnel at each operating location makes the F-35’s basing problem qualitatively different from that of simpler aircraft. The loss is not just one jet but the capacity to generate sorties from that site."
It pointed out that you can't produce F-35s at scale, which fucks you in the long run:
"At over eighty million dollars per airframe, with Lockheed Martin delivering fewer than two hundred aircraft per year across all variants and all customers worldwide, there is no surge capacity waiting to be activated and no precedent for accelerating a program of this complexity on wartime timelines. When one side can produce weapons by the hundreds and thousands — missiles, loitering munitions, and one-way attack drones — while the other relies on small numbers of exquisite platforms, the advantage shifts toward the side with scale."
The key message of the article is simply this (which should not be "weird" to anyone):
"The corrective is not to abandon the F-35 but to redefine its role. A smaller fleet should be reserved for the missions that truly require its unique capabilities — penetrating advanced air defenses, gathering intelligence in contested environments, and orchestrating distributed networks of unmanned systems. The marginal procurement dollar should shift toward platforms that are cheaper to build, easier to replace, less dependent on vulnerable forward infrastructure, and expendable in ways that manned fighters are not."
> "At over eighty million dollars per airframe, with Lockheed Martin delivering fewer than two hundred aircraft per year across all variants and all customers worldwide, there is no surge capacity waiting to be activated and no precedent for accelerating a program of this complexity on wartime timelines. When one side can produce weapons by the hundreds and thousands — missiles, loitering munitions, and one-way attack drones — while the other relies on small numbers of exquisite platforms, the advantage shifts toward the side with scale."
The article gets this wrong as well, the f35 can be built at scale, no other fighter aircraft is produced in such high numbers, its also significantly cheaper on a per airframe basis vs Gen 4 aircraft and its more advanced. This article is nonsense and the author doesn't know what they are talking about.
It says right in the article ~200 a year. The base scenario in recent war games, the US lost 270 aircraft total, of which 206 were USAF. Japan lost 112, Taiwan's air force effectively ceased to exist. Across iterations, Air Force losses ranged from 168 to 372(mostly on the ground)in a fight with China over Taiwan. Those are substantial losses but assuming all the losses were f35(they were not) even at current non wartime production rates the United States could replace that in a few years time.
Also the war games showed that when LRASM supplies were depleted, the f35 became the primary anti ship and strike asset as it was one of the few aircraft that could fulfill the role and survive.
But it's a bit irrelevant because we couldn't produce enough pilots either -- the training pyramid means you can only graduate so many new pilots each year, capped by the number of instructors at each level.
There is a similar problem with drone pilots -- it took Ukraine and Russia years to scale up and get to the current level of skill. However, training drone controllers is cheaper because the aircraft cost nothing.
More than any other non wartime fighter in recient history. and if war breaks out we can produce a lot more once we gear up factories - as every other war needed-
That's a non-answer. You're comparing it within its category when the point of contention is specifically and explicitly that its production can't match that of drones etc. In a broader sense the entire category of manned fighter jets can't scale to keep up with drone production.
Ukraine produces thousands of drones a day, including interceptor drones.
A valid question is how the investment in drone warfare is best balanced with that in traditional warfare, but that is besides the point of the difference in scaling production.
If the headline of the article was that fighter jets are bad in general instead of just F-35, i suspect the convo would be very different.
But still, even if you assume that was what the author meant, its still a confusing article. The status quo already is that we dont just use fighter jets.
The primary purpose of something like the F-35 program is not producing a bunch of jets that we can use to win wars. Similar to how NASA's purpose is not to make large rockets that send things to orbit for cheap.
It is to investigate new technologies (i.e. how do we control a thousand drones) and preserve domain knowledge in a large number of engineers spanning multiple generations. If all these engineers go work at $BIG_TECH optimizing ad revenue for watching short videos, we'll have to rediscover basics the next time.
When we have to fight the next serious war, we are not going to primarily use F-35 jets built twenty years ago, it's going to be something built on a similar platform in larger numbers to specifically address challenges of that era. If it can not be made cheap enough, whatever contractors involved are going to be nationalized. All major wars between comparable powers were fought with technology hot off the assembly lines, not billion dollar prototype models developed twenty years ago to bomb caves in deserts.
If you look at it from this angle, all the idiosyncrasies make sense. There's of course the inefficiency of defense contractors skimming off profits at multiple layers, but if you find a solution to that while preserving productivity, you'd win the economics nobel tomorrow.
> When we have to fight the next serious war, we are not going to primarily use F-35 jets, it's going to be something built on a similar platform in larger numbers to specifically address challenges of that era. If it can not be made cheap enough, whatever contractors involved are going to be nationalized.
That is, to some extent, what the F-35 is; the mass-produced plane that incorporates what we learned from the F-117 and F-22 and whatnot. We've already made 10x as many as the F-22's production run.
> If China produces 100 times or 1000 times their current numbers (and they can), marginal differences in capability are not going to matter.
If china somehow learnes magic and produced 10,000 f16 equivalents and got into a major non-nuclear shooting war with the united states... they'd lose 10,000 planes. At some point there is such a qualitative difference that numbers don't really matter.
This is delusional. The PLAAF is a capable force and innovates more quickly than the USAF. Chinese A2A weapons are very good kinetically, and while EW and stealth would have an advantage, engagement geometry means an 4:1 fight is always going to be costly. We could expect significant attrition in EW and stealth advantage over the first few weeks as their RADARs and seekers adapt.
In WW2 the US would send a 1,000 bombers to hit a target and still miss. That's why they needed so many. Now a single attack jet can hit multiple targets with very high probability.
The primary purpose of something like the F-35 program is not producing a bunch of jets ... It is to investigate new technologies
I thought the F-22 investigated the technologies and the F-35 is the mass-produced version.
When we have to fight the next serious war ... it's going to be something built on a similar platform in larger numbers to specifically address challenges of that era.
Not if every jet takes 20 years to develop.
If it can not be made cheap enough, whatever contractors involved are going to be nationalized.
Which would accomplish nothing since the rot is so deep.
The F-35 was designed to be a partially-nerfed export version of some of the capabilities in the F-22. It was anticipated that the large production rate would significantly reduce the unit costs, which seems to have panned out. They probably shouldn't have tried to produce three significantly different variations of the same design, since that added materially to the development cost.
The 6th gen platforms appear to be coming in at significantly reduced cost relatively to what they are replacing, which was a major objective.
> I thought the F-22 investigated the technologies and the F-35 is the mass-produced version.
Sure, I'd think of it as a mass^2 produced version then ;)
> Not if every jet takes 20 years to develop.
Think of F-35 variants, not entirely new platforms. If I have to guess, one reduced to a barebones autonomous version built for the purpose to commanding drone swarms and dealing with incoming drone swarms.
The insight here is, that in current warfare, quantity is the quality that matters. And with quantity, cost of replacement needs to be low, platforms expendable, cheap to maintain and resupply. It, and it's support infrastructure, need to not easily be detected and targeted by drones while on the ground. F35 is not these things. It's powerful but brittle, and like many US platforms, too much value packed into too few platforms. Not enough sustain in prolonged modern conflict. A one-punch military.
>The insight here is, that in current warfare, quantity is the quality that matters. And with quantity, cost of replacement needs to be low, platforms expendable, cheap to maintain and resupply. It, and it's support infrastructure
The irony, of course, is that the US military knew that back in WWII in how the Sherman tank was able to defeat the "better" German tanks for all the same reasons listed above.
Now the US has the same small set of defence contractors who are staffed by ex-government officials and no one asks any hard questions when every single project is 10yrs late and overbudget.
I think the insight is that you need a high-low mix. Some threats call for top of the line capabilities (like early days of the Iran conflict with stand-off munitions and top-spec interceptors being used against Shahed drones and cheap cruise missiles). Some threats can be more economically serviced by a less capable, cheaper, and more available system.
It isn't reasonable to expect that propellor drones will be used long term - they are too easy to shoot down. you need just enough ability to force the enemy to not waste they energy making them when something more expensive is harder to shoot down and thus more likely to work.
It's always been about the biggest, fastest, longest range punch. That is extremely useful for deep strike (which has always been NATO doctrine), but when the range is short you need quantity and mobility far more than you need quantity.
Being able to cut off your enemy is an extremely effective weapon if your enemy needs massive supply. Drop the major bridges between Moscow and Ukraine and the war would soon be over.
But when you can't do that for whatever reason you need quantity and mobility far more than you need quality.
The ideas that I as a civilian was sold over the past decades don't appear to hold up any longer.
As someone a while back put it, Russia lost several Bundeswehrs worth of equipment and keeps on grinding. Neither side is able to mass large forces, in a large part due to drones. And Iran can punish the US despite being comically outgunned.
Modern equivalents of Sherman and T-34 tanks over burdensome Tigers and a population willing to support heavy losses.
A Bundeswehr worth of equipment is so little nowadays that Bundeswehr itself lost several Bundeswehrs worth of equipment while being at peace for the last few decades.
I heard it argued that Germany didn't have the raw resources and production capacity to go for quantity. Especially later in the war. So quality it was.
Not really, the tanks were both inefficient to operate and inefficient to build (lack of standardization, constantly changing plans, have to redesign every single part..)
That's not true. They could have standardized on a few rugged platforms -- and in fact, some in Nazi Germany advocated for that -- but their industry and engineering were generally self-sabotaging and a mess.
When people say things like the GP, they are talking about German early war tanks, not the late ones.
The problem is that the early WWII arms race was so fast that I don't know how anybody can say with confidence that Germany lost to worse tanks than theirs. By the time the allies got any volume into battle, they also got better designs than their earlier ones.
Depends what type of models you look at. There were many German designs that were much less prone to technical breakdowns due to pragmatic and mission focused design choices e.g. many of the Jagdpanzer ("tank destroyer") class like StuG II and Herzer were produced en masse and was very successful. Also, the Jagdpanther was a strong design.
There are three stances that I can see in the debate at the moment.
* Quantity has a quality all of its own.
* Innovation and agility allows you to adapt and survive.
* Low capability platforms often can't be used to deliver useful effect & commanders will try every option not to use them in a fight. When they get committed it can be disastrous.
The first two clearly have merits, but every military professional I have ever worked with has cited them at me, so I don't think that they are underweighted in discussion. I believe that the last one is not treated with enough weight in the debate. The best example I have of it is the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Platforms with glaring problems, fielded and maintained at huge cost, completely unable to achieve their strategic purpose. Even when sulking in port these ships have proven to be deadly for their crews and maintainers. Another example is the TB3 drone. It had a staring role for about 10 days in the Ukraine, but those were 10 days where the Russians ran out of petrol to run their air defence systems on. It hasn't been in evidence since because it just can't be used in the current environment.
One that worries me is the upcoming T31 (uk arrowhead variant) frigate. The argument for it is that it is a relatively affordable platform that the RN will have enough of to actually be able to get out and about. However, it doesn't have a sonar, so... what actual use is it as a frigate (I know the story about the helicopter and some other bits and bobs... but... really?)
Sure, when the other side has run out of the good kit dragging crap out of storage might work, but until then you are going to be sending good men to their death in second rate equipment. Is that going to build war winning morale?
Second rate equipment is for playing lets pretend, or for fighting wars of national survival. We should avoid both.
Quantity has a quality *if* it can get to the battlefield.
The big stuff is for trying to keep the small stuff away from the battlefield. When you can't do that for whatever reason you need a bunch of small stuff of your own.
But a frigate without sonar isn't inherently horrible--lots of places don't have subs.
The total cost of the entire program over its projected lifetime is $1.7 trillion. The F-35 is made by one company, Lockheed Martin (with some pieces made by a couple others). This entire program is a massive transfer of taxpayer money into one company.
Another data point is that it's estimated that all student debt in the US combined is $1.7 - 1.8 trillion.
Yeah, congress forces the military to contract out to companies in enough congressional districts to secure passage of the legislation. We basically force these companies into byzantine and inefficient supply chains because we treat it all as a jobs program.
You can just do both. The US does have some cheaper, more expendable drone platforms, and it's continuing to work on more. It should probably scale up production of them, though.
One thing you and the OP are not addressing is that most of these modern tactics are also necessitated by the fact that building an air force, navy, or cavalry that can beat modern superpowers is just a complete non-starter.
I'm not so sure the F-35 is built for the wrong war as much as the war would probably call for the F-35 if it didn't already exist.
The American military is a jobs program for defense contractors. They build the most expensive thing possible because they know we will pay for it, and that we'll just keep increasing our military budget. They build for war with nuclear-equipped, highly developed nations, specifically because the smaller nations aren't a threat to us. So when we do decide to go knock out a smaller nation, we don't have the warfighting capability to tackle a small nation. When we try to blockade with our ships, a single drone can do so much damage that the ship is useless, so we don't use them. They aren't practical for anything other than launching inland sorties. And we have a relatively small infantry, so we can't fight big land wars.
And the military is corrupt. They misplace hundreds of millions of dollars (cash) when they go overseas. The IRS is responsible for finding massive fraud schemes that the military never noticed. Why didn't they notice? Because there's no consequence. The military isn't a business; they can practically write blank checks with taxpayer dollars, and if they lose the money, what're we gonna do, fire them? Same for contractors. They can overcharge us or build faulty weapon systems/vehicles/etc, and it's not like we have 10 alternatives around the corner.
"It’s not Mildred sitting at a switchboard saying ‘Joe, you go to the corner of 42nd and Broadway,’ no it’s the AI. It’s not that hard given the state of current computing to imagine a system where the targeting grid is quote commanding and control itself.”
I would just point out that 10-15 years ago Defense executives were talking about drone warfare (search "The Third Offset Strategy"). I recall an executive client being obsessed with this, and in fairness back then they had lost major contracts because their components (think electronic warfare) were designed for max power, i.e., max size and weight.
Again, this was 10-15 years ago. Now with the Ukraine war everyone acts like it is obvious...and I agree, it has been for awhile. We just never had a theater to test this stuff in. I suspect US defense contractors were on-board for Ukraine and Iran to advance development efforts significantly.
It was obvious to many, and it was obvious also that air forces would oppose this because it was a massive shift in thinking.
They have only come around a little at present. US Army is still buying Apache.
The US primes were caught napping in Ukraine, all the new tech is indigenous. They haven't deployed anything new successfully. The traditional exquisite weapons could win the war early, but of course Biden held them back because he's an idiot, and Trump spent them against Iran. Now they are gone. In the mean time, Trump cancelled the infrastructure to design and build armaments during DOGE cuts, now he wants to scale back up, but the money will be wasted because industrial capacity is not there.
> Think of a violin made by a master craftsman: beautiful, precise, capable of extraordinary performance, but impossible to produce quickly or cheaply. It takes time, rare expertise, and materials that cannot be sourced at scale. You would not equip an entire orchestra with instruments like that.
Kinda lost me at the first sentence with this metaphor; you can and do equip an orchestra with instruments of similar caliber to the violins. Woodwinds are expensive. Bigger strings are expensive. Percussion is expensive. Maybe brass is cheap idk but there aren't many of them in an orchestra. In fact the plurality of instruments in most orchestras is violins.
Every instrument (brass, woodwind, even a simple triangle), past a certain threshold is expensive, and their sound is different to their lower priced peers, and yes, you can't equip every violinist with a $2MM violin, just because.
Also, saying that instrument X is higher caliber to instrument Y is completely wrong. They all needs immense workmanship to produce, and immense effort to play. This effort can't be compared. A double bassist's finger spread for the first three positions is almost equal to whole keyboard/fretboard of a violin, but a violin can play 8x more notes with a bow when compared to the double bass. Momentum is a strong adversary when you try to change direction with a full size German bow.
You might think woodwinds are easy. A French horn player needs to play adjacent notes with small lip movements. That's an unforgiving blade's edge. A tuba player needs lungs of a whale to keep that long notes, etc. etc.
Also, just because viola, cello and double bass looks like a violin is borderline insult to all of them at once, and ignoring the other heavy lifters like clarinets, oboes and fagots.
Like how the article outlines. An expensive violin is good for a solo performance, but loses its importance in an orchestra. Like how F-35 becomes the wrong thing when the theater of war calls for different conventions and operates with completely different dynamics.
P.S.: Yes, I have played double bass in a symphony orchestra.
> Also, just because viola, cello and double bass looks like a violin is borderline insult to all of them at once, and ignoring the other heavy lifters like clarinets, oboes and fagots.
I don't think that last bit translated well.
Beyond that, what on earth are you talking about. Frankly what is the grandparent talking about? $2m violins cost that much because they're rare and famous and have a story, not because they somehow have a higher quality than a modern equivalent. Sort of like the mona lisa.
I don't think so. It's a good analogy how F-35 needs a good ground crew and logistics chain to keep it flying. Like how an orchestra needs these instruments to create subtle but extremely important pillars of sound, even if they're rarely or barely heard.
Also, not al $2MM violins cost that much because they have a story, but they're built by distinguished builders and built to order, for the person playing it, with old-stock woods and whatnot.
Yes, they don't cost that much, but you pay for the craftsmanship and the privilege. Price is an artificial construct after some point.
I think it is more referring to the quality of craftsmanship of the violin compared to other violins. You can’t make a whole orchestra of Stradivarius violins and their equivalents for other instruments (though what the Stradivarius equivalent is for timpani I couldn’t tell you :)
He's not talking about the number of violins, he's talking about the quality of them. Top-notch violins cost hundreds of thousands or even millions. But it's mostly famous solo musicians who own such instruments - an entire orchestra is not playing with those.
> the plurality of instruments in most orchestras is violins.
That only has to do with physics of sound intensity: to create a sound that is perceived as "twice as loud" as "one violin" you'd need ... ten violins.
Increased defense spending actually makes the US less, not more, safe. Everyone we're going to fight is prepared for an asymmetric, cheap war. We're vulnerable in how much they can make us spend to wage that war. A million dollar patriot missile to shoot down a cheap drone, etc.
But also look at Ukraine. They are punching well above their weight with asymmetrical tactics, but Russia is not defeated.
Drones and other autonomous, cheap weaponry changes a lot. Smaller states and non-state actors can inflict much more serious and expensive damage now more than ever.
Large weapons still matter though. If we ever were to enter an existential battle you would quickly see how big, expensive systems can still be advantageous. I am sure people will take issue with this comment but look at the relative restraint of Russia in Ukraine or the US in Iran vs, say, WWII. Modern morality prevents such scale and tactics until it does not. Then suddenly what matters are big weapons and the huge supply chains powering a war machine.
Both the US and Russia are also pivoting heavily towards drones, and they've been developing them for decades. Yes we have big, expensive weapons programs but we also have a lot of stuff ready or soon to be ready which is much, much cheaper.
> I am sure people will take issue with this comment but look at the relative restraint of Russia in Ukraine [...] vs, say, WWII.
They have been bombing civilian infrastructure, abducting children, torturing and executing civilians and POWs, executing deserters or wannabe deserters the entire fucking Ukraine war. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_the_Russo-Ukrain...
Civilian to military casualty ratio is 1:20 for Russia-Ukraine war and 2:1 for WWII. The difference is huge. Whether this is actual restraint I have no knowledge but if it quacks like a duck ...
Russia is keeping their expensive equipment in the back since years now because they're afraid to lose it. They would be fire bombing cities if they could. Russia already used white phosphorous in this war. The only reason they're not killing more civilians with missiles and drones is because they can't build more of them.
Russia has been attacking Ukrainian cities with missiles and drones since the beginning of the conflict. But Russia simply lacks the capacity to fire-bomb cities on a large scale. They only have a handful of operational heavy bombers left and no real ability to manufacture more so they're unwilling to risk them.
Yep, apparently Ukraine still cannot affect fuel production in Russia to any significant point. Drones with less than 100 kg of explosives do not do particularly significant damage. One really need to deliver like a ton or more of explosives and for that one needs bombers that can penetrate air defenses or very expensive stealth cruise missiles or big ballistic missiles.
Of course it has had a significant impact. The reason Russia has repeatedly turned off fuel exports every couple of months for the past couple of years despite high global prices because Ukraine keeps disabling enough of their refining capability to cause shortages.
Ukraine dramatically reduced Russian fuel export revenue, and the sanctions did so even more.
It was really coming to the point of urgent existential threat to the Putin regime this spring, before Trump and Netanyahu bailed him out, first by doubling the global oil price and then by relaxing sanctions.
And Ukraine's drone / cruise missile portfolio includes things like the Flamingo, more than twice the payload and range of a Tomahawk.
If Ukraine had access to Tomahawks, Russian oil industry would not exist at this point. With drones after two and halve years of attacks with multiple hits at the same refineries Ukraine reduced Russian fuel production at best by 20%.
Flamingo is still mostly vaporware. For precise strikes against Russian factories Ukraine uses either Storm Shadow or domestic Neptun.
But that just shows again that drones are not particularly effective against most industrial targets and even against oil installations the damage is not lasting.
Or consider how US was able to destroy the bridge in Iran yet Crimea bridge and bridges in Rostov that are absolutely vital to Russian war logistics still stands.
> Modern morality prevents such scale and tactics until it does not.
In the sense that the tide of geopolitics means that if someone tried that they'd mark themselves as a defector in the current scheme of morality and would stand to lose a lot when the rest of Europe inevitably treats that as an example of how they are about to be treated.
Shot exchange is indeed a problem, but it's far more complex than this makes it sound. The opportunity cost of _not_ shooting down the drone isn't the cost of the drone, it's the cost of whatever it's going to destroy if you don't shoot it down.
Sometimes it makes sense to use a million dollar missile to destroy a $5,000 drone, if that drone would otherwise destroy an even more expensive air defense radar or energy production facility. This says nothing about the cost and value of the lives that might be lost in an enemy strike.
We would not be safer if the enemy had cheap drones and we had no weapons capable of fighting back.
The main problem is that air defense interception is incredibly challenging and expensive primarily because a mid-course defensive interceptor needs considerably greater capabilities than the weapon it is intercepting, because it needs to catch up to the incoming missile or drone mid-flight.
Sure, this can lead to massive overkill problems. Yes, the US should invest more in the low end of the high/low mix. But no, this does not mean there's no place for the high end, or that they should never be used to destroy lower end targets if that's all that is available.
A more interesting challenge, if you ask me, is in the naval domain. Imagine a capital ship has two options for defending against incoming threats - either fire an expensive and limited stock interceptor missile with a 99% kill chance, or wait until the threat is inside the range of a cheap cannon or laser system with a 95% kill chance. There's a real command level tradeoff to be made here. If you shoot every drone with interceptors, you lose shot exchange badly, and you just run out of interceptors. But if you let every target through into the engagement range of your close range systems, you run the risk that one makes it through to your ship, potentially causing damage and casualties.
The future of war is going to be wild one way or the other.
>Sometimes it makes sense to use a million dollar missile to destroy a $5,000 drone, if that drone would otherwise destroy an even more expensive air defense radar or energy production facility. "
If that $5000 drone was alone then sure. However if they launch 200 drones (money equivalent of one missile) you'd be looking at totally different picture. Also they usually launch combo. Few missiles and whole bunch of drones. even worse
I disagree on air defense inherently being very costly.
Old school was guns. Price per round was cheap. But the expensive missile kills the platform holding the cheap gun, you have to go with missiles. But the drone war is a different beast entirely. Drones can't shoot back. Thus the answer is guns. How well will their light drones fare against a Cessna armed with an automatic shotgun? How would the jet drones fare against a WWII warbird?
Lots of cheap, mobile guns. No meaningful self defense but doctrine is to always depart after shooting.
The naval one is much harder because you're not free to disperse your ship into many pieces. But, still, consider your cannon. Let's step down a bit, cheaper cannon with a 90% kill rate--but you put several of them.
Also seems that having a very capable military that lets you project power around the world also invites that power to be used. See for instance the Iran war. Quite pointless by all accounts and wouldn't have happened if the US didn't have aircraft carriers to send around the world.
So perhaps thriftiness in defense spending would also invite a prioritization in actual defensive capabilities?
I think the likely result would be more war. It wouldn't be with america, but without anerica providing protection to its allies in the region, the various countries in the region would probably be emboldened to fight it out themselves (im assuming in this scenario that russia and other great powers are also incapable of force projection. Obviously russia is busy right now, but historically they were knee deep in the middle east and much of us involvement now is a legacy of the cold war)
Even in a hypothetical situation where the USA had no aircraft carriers our military probably would have conducted some raids to delay Iran building nuclear weapons. The initial strikes against nuclear facilities were done with B-2 bombers launched from Missouri.
The threat that President Bush issued in 2002 was due to Iran being a state sponsor of terrorist groups, which was true then and is still true today. Historians can argue over whether that threat was a good idea at the time but it's too late to retract it now. We have to deal with the actual situation as it obtains today.
As for what Iran's leadership decided and when, we really have very little visibility into that so don't believe anything you hear. We're not even certain which faction is really in control of nuclear weapons policy. (This isn't an endorsement of the recent attacks.)
That's bullshit. He denounced half of all developing countries for sponsoring terrorism. And forgot to denounce all the ones that sponsored the terrorists that had just attacked the US.
> As for what Iran's leadership decided and when, we really have very little visibility into that so don't believe anything you hear.
The had elections at the time, and voted in the candidate promising nuclear weapons at the next year. So no, that's lying propaganda again.
To be fair the US is making steps into this realm and it's definitely a known issue. Their Shahed derivative, laser weapons becoming more ubiquitous.
I'm surprised how many drones countries are starting to manufacture. e.g the UK delivered 150k drones to Ukraine recently, based on the current state of the UK armed forces that kind of surprised me and definitely shows a change in ethos on how modern first world militaries will wage war in the future.
The US took the old Vietnam-era unguided rocket pods (Hydra 70), of which they produce hundreds of thousands every year, and slapped a dirt-cheap guidance kit to the front of each rocket. Supposedly 90-95% effective. A bunch of countries are developing their own clones of the concept.
A single F-16 can carry 42 missiles. They've been rapidly expanding the number of platforms they can attach these to.
Yes a 99% success rate versus like 600 incoming still means some of them will get through.
Which is the same reason no level of military power is going to keep the Strait of Hormuz open (or at least, no level beyond a truly absurd one and even then - see the Kerch bridge in Crimea).
> Increased defense spending actually makes the US less, not more, safe.
It just makes us spend more money on defense, which is the entire point.
The industry obviously wants more and more profits.
They are never going to recommend getting rid of $200m F22s and replacing them with 30 $300k drones that would be more effective and cost 5% as much money.
That's 5% as much profit for them. They're not interested.
They are interested in profits, not national security.
And as you pointed out, they'd prefer a LESS secure world that inherently demands more money going to security.
You could spend more on security to actually be more secure. It's just that no one with any power is interested in that world.
Article hits on this: F-35 is probably the best SEAD plane ever made. And best VTOL. And can do the full mission set of a multirole fighter, although not as exceptional in those roles.
The F-35 is the best stealth aircraft you can have in a war against china. But it alone is not going to win that war. I wouldn't say it's the wrong jet for that war just because of that.
If you put the f-35 along all the rest of the us military, the war can be won and the f-35 plays a critical role in that win.
There is no in winning a war between the US and China, even assuming it doesn't go nuclear. There would only be losers all over the world. It would make the current Iran conflict look like a tiny speedbump (albeit one which is likely to cause malnutrition and starvation for millions of people in subsaharan Africa within 6-12 months).
First, in a war with China, China would be in the (more) morally just position. Second, as you can see in Iran, in Korea, in Vietnam, etc (and that's just US wars), aircraft only inflict pain, they do not win. US imperialists would really really like for that not to be the case, but it is just not. You would need a boots on the ground, and a draft, and will still probably lose and maybe cause our own government to topple. The Vietnam war was lost not because we didn't have fancy toys, but because the revolutionaries fought so hard and well that the U.S. army about on the verge of rebellion.
China very successfully built a rich economic system that is the factory of the world while eroding our own domestic capacity. In a war they can cut us off. We are not even as strong as we were during the Vietnam war, though we have fancier toys. Good luck!
He keeps citing China but the US isn't at war with China. For the wars that the US is fighting, i.e. against Iran and similarly equipped adversaries, the f-35 seems to be performing well.
A potential Chinese-American hot war is the conflict that today’s USAF and USSF should be preparing for.
Winning sub-peer conflicts is fine for projecting hard power (when it works...) and protecting allies (when you have them...) but it doesn’t really budge the needle on national security.
Fighting a war against China (presumably over Taiwan) doesn't seem like it would have much to do with national security.
That aside, people are simply not able to model how the next peer conflict will be fought ahead of time. All sides will be learning as they go. Building complex systems like the F-35 seems like a good way to maintain engingeering/technology culture that can be adapted when the time comes.
Also, I'm fairly skeptical of China's military. They keep purging people, and the human element in war seems underrated.
The premise that it is built for the "wrong war" is two fold. Design by committee didn't help the aircraft and made cost overruns and timelines worse but, the bigger premise or problem doesn't take to account that we still have other aircraft that fulfills other roles.
Also, the collaborative combat aircraft is being developed with the F22 and F35. Arguably though the collaborative combat aircraft is a bigger challenge than the F35 program as a whole and it is still in development whether it can be completed. We could downsize the F35 fleet or provide it in military aid but, I don't we can truly say wrong war it will still be available when a different war occurs and Aircraft have a long shelf life.
The current production rate of F35s is actually higher than you might thing (>150 a year) and there is talk of adding another production line due to order backlogs.
Opponents of the Dragon Tank point to it's 10-Million-Dollar fangs and 35-Million-Dollar prehensile tail and say this is somewhat excessive... But developing new technology is essential to maintaining America's military advantage.
theres a lot of things to critique about the us, but the f35 isn't one of them.
Over the past few years we have seen it operate with impunity over multiple countries. It astounding to me that in the 12 day war and the iran conflict there hasn't been issues from maintance alone.
We dont know how well the F35 holds up against patriots or s400's, but what we do know for certain is that against virtually everything else it unstopable.
More so when you realize the us has 600 and is making another 200 a year, and in a real war, you would lose some but theres rough parity between the number of s400 systems that exist, and the number of f35s that exist, and all those s400's will never be in teh same war or same place.
"Just as it took the brutal reality of naval warfare in the Pacific to shift the Navy’s love from the battleship to the aircraft carrier, it may take the catastrophic failure for limitations of exquisite tactical aircraft to overwhelm the forces keeping them drinking up most of the trough.
The corrective is not to abandon the F-35 but to redefine its role. A smaller fleet should be reserved for the missions that truly require its unique capabilities — penetrating advanced air defenses, gathering intelligence in contested environments, and orchestrating distributed networks of unmanned systems. The marginal procurement dollar should shift toward platforms that are cheaper to build, easier to replace, less dependent on vulnerable forward infrastructure, and expendable in ways that manned fighters are not.
The lesson of the Iran campaign is that the F-35 performed superbly in exactly the kind of fight it was built for. The lesson for force designers is that the next war may not be that fight. The future of airpower belongs to a larger orchestra, many of its instruments unmanned, inexpensive, and replaceable. Prudence demands that the United States start building it now."
The world has changed in many ways. Countries might now consider having weapons systems that are less-dependent on the US/China/Russian triumvirate. And much of the defensive threats don't require stealth - they require availability on short notice and the ability to work in various conditions (cold/hot/etc).
The A10 Warthog is still in service due to the outsized volume of some incredibly wrong voices being able to shout down modern understandings of warfare. The role of CAS as an extension of the ground troops themselves controlled by infantrymen with tooling to automate that job is the future but the military industrial complex moves slowly.
This would be an interesting article 4 years ago. Now I think it's old news and we've got the War Department spending $50bn on a new autonomous warfare wing.
I think ultimately the real weapon of mass destruction will be long-range drones the size of a DJI drone, each holding a small but extremely powerful explosive.
And then send millions of them, with specific single targets. Each AI controlled to target single weakpoints in buildings, bridges, or even specific people. You can't stop a million of them even with EMPs because you can just end a million more. You can destroy entire cities with a technology like this. If each drone costs $10,000 and you send a million of them that's only $10 billion for a war and complete destruction of your enemy.
Explosives don't scale in the way you seem to think they do. Below a certain threshold of warhead mass, you won't do much more than scratch the paint. The effects aren't linearly additive. The warheads required to penetrate military targets are incredibly heavy; you won't be loading them on a DJI drone nor traveling far even if you could.
I think the opposite. Drones are subject to the tyrany of the rocket equation: they need fuel (or batteries) to fly, then fuel (or batteries) to carry the fuel, etc, in a compounded way. Which makes long range drone inherently more expensive than short range ones.
Right now, the novelty of the technology means the offensive has an advantage. But long term it will be the defensive who will benefit the most from drones.
I described below how you could launch thousands of them from a single massive container that gets dropped by B2 bombers. You have to use your imagination, you're not limited by today's technology anymore.
I was answering to your comment in the current thread, where you explicitly said "long-range" drones. Long-range drones will always be more expensive than short range drones, and not in a linear way, in an exponential way.
Thousands of short range drones dropped from B2 bombers sound like an interesting idea, until you hear about JDAM bombs, of which the US has a virtually unlimited supply, which are cheap, and are incredibly powerful compared to anything one could attach to a DJI-sized drone.
You could also just write "magic" and say we should invest in wizards.
No DJI sized drone using any available or near future technology is going to have a range of more then whatever 20 to 30 minutes of well-below subsonic flight time can get you.
You could drop them from B2 bombers and they could fall to the ground en masse at hundreds of miles an hour and then the propellers could open up as they get closer to the ground.
Or you could launch them in massive containers like in Infinity War and these containers filled with thousands of them would land on the ground and open up and release the drones.
You're just not imaginative enough to solve the problem you described.
Referencing Marvel movies in one's description of proposed military hardware is not only immediately discrediting but also a good sign that self-reflection is in order.
Ukraine, in operation spiderweb, has already launched drones from containers deep within Russia to damage "... one third of Russia's strategic cruise missile carriers, estimated to be worth $US7 billion ..."
So you know. Glide bombs. Which already exist and are already used and have a range of about 130km for a high altitude launch and a lot payload.
Or some absurdly heavy ballistic missile...which would be worse then existing ballistic missiles and is the type of target for which Patriot is specifically designed for (along with a number of other systems now).
This is an amazingly unserious post to the point I hope you're trolling. Or just twelve.
Bizarre to call this an F-35 problem, it's with the entire US supply chain and the F-35 is the least of it.
The F-35 at least has been produced in quantity and the unit cost has come down and they're finally rolling out some decent upgrades. Yes it's a messed up program in so many ways as its literal decades of history shows but:
The bigger issues is our industrial base cannot replace our many missile systems quickly enough, including surface to air, antiship, and surface to surface. We can't build ships or planes very quickly, either.
We are woefully low on stocks and can't meet commitments in NATO, mideast, and against China and N Korea. Taiwan is and has been waiting years on billions in backorders.
The other issues is everything is as expensive as f-ck. We're shooting down dirt cheap drones costing in the thousands with missiles costing in the millions. The article at least mentions this.
And what is the proposed solution to this? A giant, expensive, long range fighter that will coordinate expensive drone buddies (google NGAD). Because we think it's realistic to try and defeat Chinese forces when we're thousands of miles from base and they're at home.
First off we need to replenish systems we already know how to make and that are effective. We need to learn to build sh-t quickly, at home and with allies, and it's bizarre no politician has taken the lead on this because it involves popular stuff like spending government money, creating blue collar manufacturing jobs, growing small businesses with more reliable gov contracts, and so forth.
Then we need to develop cheaper systems including lots of drones, anti drone stuff, and low cost interceptors and antisurface missiles.
Then we need to reform contracting infrastructure and rules to move much much faster and with less cost to experiment and iterate more rapidly going forward like the Ukrainians (and even the Iranians) are doing.
We need to do all of this and quickly and no one from either party is providing leadership. This is the biggest reason the US and west are at risk of becoming paper tigers - we have cut our infrastructure and defense spending and microoptimized inventory to the point where we can't restock quickly enough to be a credible deterrent force.
The F-35 was specified when the Joint Strike Fighter program began in 1995, with the development contract awarded in 2001, and the first flight in 2006 or thereabouts.
Of course it was built for a different war... the use of drones didn't proliferate until after the 2010s and really more since the 2020s with Russia/Ukraine.
So, thanks Captain Obvious and arm-chair quarterback, for the insightful article.
People forget just how old the F-22 and F-35 actually are, mostly because they are still the current state-of-the-art. That is 1990s tech.
The 6th gen platforms currently in testing address many of the issues raised with the 5th gen platforms. Which you would expect since they weren't designed in the previous century.
So, an author who takes no issue with the war of aggression against Iran, and is preoccupied with planning a war against China. Well that's just great.
I think it's more contractors were responsible for providing only their deliverables. The program design as a whole is done by the DoD when they bid out their requirements.
I've seen an argument--which I don't have enough expertise to advocate for--that the F35's broad but shallow appeal ("jack of all trades, master of none") has an indirect strength: A wider base of demand goes with a manufacturing and supply chain that is constantly active and can be ramped-up if needed.
Speaking of military hardware in general, I can easily imagine there are cases where "best for logistics" completely trounces "best for the job".
> A wider base of demand goes with a manufacturing and supply chain that is constantly active and can be ramped-up if needed.
Except it can't really be ramped up. It's enormously expensive to build a single F-35, let alone maintain them, and the geographic distribution of the effort only makes that worse.
And then they made it worse again by making many parts of the F-35 F-35 specific. You can't just drop in the same radio LRU from most other airframes and use it with the F-35, it has its own and its own maintenance cycles. The thing was designed to be expensive, it was not designed for manufacturing efficiency.
> Except it can't really be ramped up. It's enormously expensive to build a single F-35
This is completely wrong, though. It's cheaper to build an F-35 than it is to build a Eurofighter, Rafale or Gripen, which are significantly older and less capable platforms. And not even "a little" cheaper - quite a bit cheaper. Economies of scale are real
The taxpayer funding is often the smaller part the complete lifetime pay package.
> A 2014 study of U.S. Department of Defense appointees showed that 28% exited to industry. As of 2023, 80 per cent of U.S. four-star retirees are employed in defense industry.[0]
There are actually entirely reasonable, rational explanations for this, but it's not a great look.
Undoubtedly so! But blame the people who get free money out of your income to be impartial and make decisions, not the people who have to earn their pay to carry out the decisions. If they wanted to prohibit that sort of thing they could.
America hasn’t faced a peer-level, modern military since the Korean War. For seventy years, it has specialized in "wars of choice" against overmatched opponents, mistaking uncontested airspace for actual invincibility.
U.S. weapons supremacy is increasingly exposed as a marketing facade. Despite a $1T annual budget, the industrial base is so brittle that strategic missile stocks were nearly depleted within a month of engagement with Iran. To keep the gears turning, Washington is now cannibalizing the stockpiles of its own allies.
You could make the case that the F-35 isn't a weapon; it’s a sophisticated wealth-extraction tool designed to fleece the American taxpayer. While it excels at deleting defenseless targets in lopsided conflicts, its primary mission is maintaining the flow of capital into a bloated military-industrial complex that prioritizes contractor profits over combat endurance.
Yes, the U.S. possesses the most lethal tactical hardware in history, but its industrial backbone is currently ill-equipped for a prolonged, peer-to-peer war of attrition.
- Korean War (North Korea/China)
- Rating: Competent
- Note: North Korea began with a well-equipped, Soviet-backed armor force; China followed with massive, highly disciplined infantry waves that effectively fought the UN coalition to a stalemate.
- Vietnam War (North Vietnam/Viet Cong)
- Rating: Technologically Incompetent
- Note: While technologically outmatched, they demonstrated elite level unconventional warfare, logistical persistence (Ho Chi Minh Trail), and sophisticated anti-aircraft defenses.
- Invasion of Grenada (Grenadian Military)
- Rating: Poor
- Note: A very small force with limited heavy weaponry and minimal organizational depth.
- Invasion of Panama (Panamanian Defense Forces)
- Rating: Poor
- Note: Though professionalized to an extent, they lacked the hardware and air defense to resist a modern concentrated assault.
- Gulf War (Iraq)
- Rating: Competent (on paper) / Incompetent (in execution)
- Note: Iraq held the world's fourth-largest army at the time with modern Soviet equipment, but failed significantly in command, control, and air superiority.
- Intervention in Somalia (Local Militias/Warlords)
- Rating: Poor
- Note: Characterized by decentralized "technical" vehicles and light arms; effective only in urban ambush scenarios rather than conventional warfare.
- War in Afghanistan (Taliban/Al-Qaeda)
- Rating: Incompetent (conventionally) / Competent (insurgency)
- Note: Zero conventional capability (no air force/armor), but highly capable at sustained, low-tech asymmetric warfare.
- Iraq War (Ba'athist Iraq)
- Rating: Poor
- Note: By 2003, the military was severely degraded by a decade of sanctions and previous losses; it collapsed within weeks of the conventional invasion.
- Military Intervention in Libya (Gaddafi Loyalists)
- Rating: Poor
- Note: Largely reliant on aging Soviet hardware and mercenary units; unable to project power against NATO-backed air cover.
- War against ISIS (Insurgent State)
- Rating: Poor (conventionally) / Competent (tactically)
- Note: They lacked a traditional air force or navy but utilized captured heavy equipment and "shock" tactics with high psychological impact.
> - Invasion of Grenada (Grenadian Military)
> - Rating: Poor
> - Note: A very small force with limited heavy weaponry and minimal organizational depth.
> - Gulf War (Iraq)
> - Rating: Competent (on paper) / Incompetent (in execution)
> - Note: Iraq held the world's fourth-largest army at the time with modern Soviet equipment, but failed significantly in command, control, and air superiority.
> - Iraq War (Ba'athist Iraq)
> - Rating: Poor
> - Note: By 2003, the military was severely degraded by a decade of sanctions and previous losses; it collapsed within weeks of the conventional invasion.
the lesson of those wars to the US is, like sports teams, we need to deploy our forces in kinetic actions regularly or we lose our edge, lose touch with the battlefield and capabilities of opponents.
peace is better than war, of course, but you need to look at the progress of history as a stochastic process, and if you skip all the little wars because you have a choice, you will be ill-prepared for the big wars when they are thrust upon you. maybe call the little conflicts "friendlies", we need to compete in the friendlies to be ready for the unfriendlies.
>America hasn’t faced a peer-level, modern military since the Korean War. For seventy years, it has specialized in "wars of choice" against overmatched opponents
America has not faced any wars in its own "theater", it's own backyard; rather, it has "chosen" to fight wars that seemed important enough to travel halfway round the world, bringing lots of stuff. One of the American military's strengths is logistics, both getting there and on the battlefield.
>mistaking uncontested airspace for actual invincibility.
America pioneered and still leads in combined arms fighting doctrine and capabilities, and that basically requires air superiority as the first step. There's no mistake, it is creating uncontesed airspace (which starts with creating the capabilites) that enables victory at low casualty rates. It's not so much invincibility as "convincing vincibility" of opponents.
>China followed with massive, highly disciplined infantry waves that effectively fought the UN coalition to a stalemate.
just to clarify what "effectively fought" means, the Chinese entered the war when the ROK+US+UN forces had reached as far as the Yalu River, and yes their "infantry waves" response, i.e. lightly armed human waves, pushed the anti-communists back but at very, very high cost:
"North Korean casualties are estimated at around 1.5 million, including both military and civilian losses, while Chinese military casualties are estimated to be around 400,000 to 600,000."
"South Korean military losses during the Korean War were approximately 137,899 dead, with additional casualties including 24,495 missing and 8,343 captured. The United Nations forces, primarily composed of U.S. troops, suffered around 36,574 deaths, with total UN losses estimated at about 210,000 dead and missing."
I think cheap missiles and drones changed a lot of things. One could see this in Ukraine; more recently in Iran. USA is primarily focusing on heavy impact and expensive wars. This may be a more effective strategy, but it does not seem to be very realistic. I can't help but feel that this is especially much the case with regard to Iran, because the USA, despite what the orange bolo is saying, does not seem to be that eager to intensify the war (e. g. no ground invasion - and that's very telling if you remember the Iraq or Afghanistan invasion).
I didn't down/up voted anything, but the title/article/thread is about piece of equipment not being a good fit for a war that happens in 2026, not if war is good/bad or right/wrong.
It's like saying that war is bad in a discussion about developing biplanes before WW2. Yes, war is bad, but that's what people are talking about.
But why? I'm not against the idea in principle, but there has to be a motivation beyond "It's possible". Even the search for knowledge, which is a good reason to invest in R&D, but how much would we learn on the moon for that 2 trillion that we couldn't learn more cheaply through other means?
Writers of history or historical fiction often wonder how did average people in militaristic, fascist societies from the past view their society? I think it’s obvious from the present-day US: they were amused. They were entertained by it. Human suffering, a necessary feature of such cultures, is trivialized by draping the death machine behind the veneer of fun, exciting game!
Huh?The F35 has flown.more missions against the Palistinians than perhaps ANY aircraft that has ever been use in war, and the F35 is central to commiting genocide on the Palistinian people, and there is very very little they can do about it, so by the logic of obsenity, does war have another?, it plays the "tune" in the keys of screams and horror.
People may not know how long the F-35 program has been going on. It's over 30 years. Discussions about what a next generation figher would be began in the Clinton administration. From the very start it was a series of compromises to be an all-in-one fighter. There are different needs in the military: air-to-air, ground bombardment, etc. Even stealth is a variable need. You just don't need it when you have air superiority. But having it also means not mounting weapons on the exterior of the airframe (as, say, the F-16 and F-14 did), which reduces how much ordinance it can deliver and indirectly how much fuel it can carry. F-35 operations are pretty much entirely dependent on in-air refuelling as a result.
Another fun fact in all this is the F-14. Did you the Navy has a policy of shredding all F-14s? Why? Because they were sold to Iran in the 1970s (pre-Islamic Revolution obviously) and the US wanted to make sure they could never get spare parts.
Anyway, as a result of that the US didn't want a repeat of selling the F-35 to a country that became an enemy so the US effectively has the ability to turn off the F-35 for every buyer... except one: Israel. Technically I think the avionics require daily activation and the US is the only supplier of those codes.
So, one nit I have about this article is the operational record of the F-35 in this current war. I don't think that's entirely correct. Iran's fairly primitive air defense has managed to damage the F-35 in at least one incident [1]. Also, you can assess the risk by how a fighter is used. As in, does the military use them with stand-off weapons [2] or not? This means using precision-guided munitions from a distance, possibly over-the-horizon. This wastes more payload on fuel. Those munitions are more expensive. The only reason you do it is because you fear the air defenses or otherwise can't guarantee air superiority. There have been a lot of reports the US military still primarily relies on standoff weapons in Iran. This is of course unconfirmed.
The bigger issue here is that post-Vietnam, and particularly since the 1990s, the US military has adopted a Strategic Air Doctrine. Rather than putting boots on the ground, the US projects military power by the ability to bombard. Unfortunately, that has limited utility. No regime has ever been overthrown by air power alone. And we're seeing that now. The entire Iranian military is built to resist strategic bombardment.
So yes, in this sense, the F-35 is built for Strategic Air Power and that's just not that relevant anymore.
So how do you put boots on the ground? Well, in Iran's case, it's like the country was specifically designed in a map editor to make this near-impossible. Iran is 5 times the size of Texas and has a population of ~93M people. It's surrounded on 3 sides by mountains and on the other by the Persian Gulf, which itself is bottlenecked by the Strait of Hormuz, which no US military ship has even approached in this conflict.
People just don't understand how complicated the logistics of this are and how many soldiers are required. You need, for example, tanks. You can't air lift multiple tank battalions. A plane can carry one, maybe two, tanks. They need fuel, munitions and maintenance. You need air defense and to establish bases. You need people to do all those things. Those people need to be fed.
Logistically, it's as complicated and large as D-Day.
It's also why I find the Taiwan question (also in this article) so frustrating, for two reasons:
1. China doesn't have the amphibious capability to cross 100 miles of ocean to land on Taiwan, establish a beach head and suppress a military of hundreds of thousands (as well as an insurgency) and to occupy the island. If you think they do, you have no idea what this takes;
2. More importantly, China has absolutely no reason to invade Taiwan and has shown no inclination to do so. this is the part that gets people mad for some reason. All but 10 countries on Earth have what's called the One China policy. This includes the US and Europe. That policy is that Taiwan is part of China and the question can simply remain unresolved. China belives the situation will be resolved eventually and there's absolutely no rush to do anything. The US agrees, policy-wise.
So any talk of a Taiwan invasion is just scaremongering to sell weapons. Like the F-35.
Maybe, just maybe, you should take with a grain of salt when the guy who sells you weapons tells you there's an imminent threat that requires you to buy the weapons they sell.
The primary goal of this program is not to make a plane, it's to spend $2 trillion in military contracts. As a side effect, it runs as a jobs program for engineers and its US based supply chain. Technology gets developed but with a super low ROI.
The problem is that the F-35 was intended to be the low cost, mass produce-able workhorse for long protracted wars against technologically inferior adversaries where extremely high performance would be unnecessary. Yes it incorporates advanced stealth and electronics that make it a very capable aircraft, especially when it's going up against F-4s, but these weren't driving the cost. The US had already developed these technologies, and once you have them putting them on another aircraft isn't too expensive. And in particular the main focus was on lifetime cost - keeping flight hours reasonable and maintenance down compared to a higher performance aircraft like the F-22. This plane was designed around exactly this sort of conflict.
The problem was horrific project mismanagement. Building factories before the design was complete, delays due to development operations being done in parallel, making essentially 3 different aircraft with radically different requirements use a common design - the initial program cost skyrocketed and the only way out was to keep upping the order quantity to keep unit costs low. Cost per flight hour was supposed to be $25k, it's now $50k. Engine maintenance time was supposed to be 2 hours, it wound up being 50. And the issues didn't stop after initial development - with each successive iteration there have been new issues resulting in further delays, with airframe delivery on average still being 8 months behind schedule. None of that had anything to do with the F-35's core capabilities. For comparison, the F-35 has lower production costs than the non-stealth F-15EX which is based on a 50 year old airframe, but it has a 30% higher flight hour cost, and the program cost is 100X for 20X airframes.
This sort of botched procurement has caused terrible issues for multiple military projects, such as the Navy's failed Constellation-class frigate program, or the Army's immediate cancellation of the M10 Booker. These aren't masterpieces built for the wrong war, these are failures at producing what was intended. One has to wonder how you can mess up Epiphone guitar production so bad you accidentally wind up with a Stradivarius. It does not bode well for the orchestra.
The Connie is a good ship and the two under contract will be fine vessels when they're commissioned. Frigates are no longer "cheap" ships, and the sticker shock was higher than expected despite the obvious changes that were going to be made to the FREMM design. But it's cancellation has more to do with dysfunction at the top of the Navy (and DoD) then the program of record.
Also, you're overestimating the flight hour costs of the F-35. Even the B model doesn't hit $50k. The other variants are closer to $35k/hour (adjusted for inflation) than $50K.
I think in a serious drone war we would just have fleets of Cesnas flying around with a person hanging out the door with a shotgun lol.
Pfft, get real - Robinson R22 light broomstick choppers with muster pilots and crop dusting family STOLs make far more sense for their agility, ground hugging, and rough short take off / landing field capabilities.
That quibble aside, I can see things going that way, until flooding waves of many drones push up the human life cost past being able to respond.
Either way, they still need to be backed by some agile radar capabilities - variations of the E-7A Wedgetail design for ground and air to keep sensing on the hop.
In WWII terms they come as a function of aircraft production capability as the stategy was to keep putting fresh young faces in trainer cockpits and advancing everybody that didn't crash after a quick run down of controls and a couple of paired instructor fligts.
I had a couple of aunts that were both members of the UK/AU Women's Auxiliary Air Force (1939 - 1949) and they each had rudimentary training for spitfires, heavy bombers, jets, etc that came down to mere hours and "see how you go".
Note that the original article doesn't say anywhere that F-35-like capability is not needed.
The saying "Quantity has a quality all of its own" is not obsolete in 2026.
90% of that are destroyed far away from targets and the other 10% do cause some damage, but it is usually far from being devastating as the drone is far from being very precise.
A single F35 which could penetrate air defense and go into the country would be a real problem. If Russia has 10 of them, I think it would significantly alter the current equation of power as it may allow for air superiority.
You can fit three Ukraines between Guam and Taiwan.
If you count as "allies" the smaller countries that feel like they need to buy US planes otherwise they will get bullied, knowing that the US routinely threatens to invade them... I guess.
Of course it was all tied up with needing allies to buy to increase order size, and the UK Bukit the STOVL bits, so naturally they had to buy all STOVL jets to increase British industry buy.
It's a rat's nest of everyone trying to please all their stakeholders. It is, eventually, a great jet, but it could have been a better, cheaper jet, delivered sooner, and already past Block 5.
Oh yeah, did anyone mention how long it takes to integrate a new system onto the F-35? Fracking years. All of which has to be done by LM, forever. Because the F-35 is not a jet, it's a Master Contract.
The range of the F-35 is too low for the Navy, because it sits in the F-16 concept. But there is no fighter/interceptor split in the AF either, and the range is too low for AF as well.
So now we have the F-47, a very belated ack that the F-35 has short legs. But it also won't fix the problem because it is too focused on the F-22 role, absolute air dominance against e.g. J-20.
No one should call it success. It is what it is.
The F-35 achieved exactly what was written on the tin. To be a stealthy replacement for the F-16, A-7, and AV-8B.
The fact that the USN doesn't have a long-legged air superiority fighter has nothing to do with the F-35, and the USAF never considered China as a concern when the ATF requirements were issued (that became the F-22).
This problem is beyond parties and trying to play partisan politics about it only prolongs the hurt.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONET
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S
I'm not an expert but from my friends in the industry (including multiple at Lockheed and Boeing), it's definitely not a story about how good and efficient the private sector is. Boeing especially sounds like it's been a real mess with a lot of project management issues.
I’m currently watching an 8-figure park remodeling project happening near home. Instead of hiring one or two competent construction managers for a few hundred thousand dollars, the city seems to be spending several million dollars for outside management to oversee this one project. (Never mind how much they’re overpaying for the actual construction.)
This would help at all levels.
It's very difficult as a government employee to properly supervise contractors when you have little idea what those contractors are actually doing.
But it's hard to gain that experience when you don't actually ever do those things yourself either.
Empower competent people and the government can still succeed, even today. The issue is that everything seem stacked against the idea of either retaining competence or empowering those who are competent to do their work.
Aside from the very real attempts by people to defang the government by offloading all of its functions to the private sector, government is also undermined by an entirely different coterie of idealist, who believe that all the government needs is more process and coordination.
It's very hard indeed to retain competent personnel when they're needlessly mired in non-value-added process steps that are there simply to provide CYA box-checking.
As for this one:
>I’m currently watching an 8-figure park remodeling project happening near home. Instead of hiring one or two competent construction managers for a few hundred thousand dollars, the city seems to be spending several million dollars for outside management to oversee this one project.
Every time the government touches any money, there is an opportunity for corruption. I'm betting that there are kickbacks, nepotism, or some other bullshit involved in the case you mention here. There are countless fraud schemes. California is trying to pass a law against people like Nick Shirley investigating and reporting on widespread fraud, because they know where their bread is buttered.
No US ship was to my knowledge even hit by a drone/missle.
Iran has been prepping forever for this with Russian/Chinese equipment.
This sounds identical to previous arguments I saw of how hard it would be for US to beat Iran in open conflict. China is different but comparing theoretical ability with reality is different also.
The only reality we have as of now is that f35 completely dominated the enemy on every single front. It's insane to see discussions like these when we just witnessed one of histories greatest showcases of technological dominance.
There is no technology or method in this conflict that would have changed the current state. If a nation wants to toss cheap drones at you there's basically nothing that can be done. Another example is US blockade, without something that can take an F35 down there is actively nothing Iran or China could do to prevent a complete crippling of their country.
And the latter hurts the US (and the rest of the world) way more that the blockade by the US hurts Iran.
No amount of F35s will change that. Iran has no reason to try to attack US military vessels or aircraft.
Surprisingly (actually unsurprisingly) relevant: https://acoup.blog/2026/03/25/miscellanea-the-war-in-iran/
Especially the part about who blinks first ...
Iran is leveraging its geography and asymmetrical warfare against civilian ship (as done by its proxies), but if the US has build tons of cheap attack drones, that wouldn't have changed anything about this equation. The US already has the ability to strike anywhere in Iran.
Operationally, and tactically AFAIK, the US has been dominant. Strategically it appears to be a massive failure, mainly because there was no actual achievable strategic goals going in to this war. Read some of the reporting on JCS advice and cabinet level decision making leading up to the war. It's illuminating (again and again) of the risks on overly loyal advisors and getting the advice you want, not the advice you need.
And naturally F-35s on that theatre would have been a game changer making mass strikes on Moscow possible. For all the dysfunctions of American military industrial complex it remains a fighter without peers (unless you count F-22) or serious AD threat.
The psychology of Ukraine's drone campaign as a response to Russia's original drone launches is very interesting. It's a classic boiling frog move.
Drones are seen as an improvised amateur threat. Unlike a bombing campaign, which is seen as "proper war", drones are an annoyance. They're fragile, cheap, unglamorous, unsophisticated, easy to shoot down, and wasteful, because you need tens or hundreds to make sure a few get through.
That gives drone campaigns a huge advantage. You can do a lot of damage and your enemy doesn't quite get what's happening.
Psychologically, there's a Rubicon-level difference between someone dropping bombs on Leningrad from a plane and a drone swarm attacking the same targets.
In practice the threat level is similar. Drones have absolutely become an existential threat to Russia.
But psychologically, they're not seen as such.
His risk management strategy is to have redundant everything, so there's no single point of failure. Lots of small drones. Distributed operators. Many small factories. Varied command and control systems. He makes the point that they use lots of different kinds of drones - some fast with wings, some slow with rotors, some that run on treads on the ground. There's no "best drone". Using multiple types in a coordinated way makes it hard for the enemy to counter attacks. No one defense will stop all the drones.
Ukraine built 4,000,000 drones in 2025. This year, more. The Ukrainian military needs a new generation of drones about every three months, as the opposition changes tactics. They view most US drones as obsolete, because the product development and life cycle is far too long. (See "OODA loop" for the concept.)
This is a big problem for the US military's very slow development process. Development of the F-35 started over 30 years ago.
[1] https://www.economist.com/europe/2026/03/22/ukraines-top-dro...
Ukrainian munitions get used up almost immediately. They don't need to stockpile, they are in a steady state wartime production.
On the contrary, peace time countries have to stockpile. A manufacturing line cannot be ramped up from zero to wartime, we need low volume manufacturing to retain the expertise and the supply lines. But that, in turn, means that we have to either trash the entire manufacturing output every few months (which would be insane), or stockpile. The latter option also requires building more capable systems so that the stockpiles are still relevant in a few years.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/moscow-comes-under-one-of...
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/russia...
Even if Russia sees a particular tactic or weapons system as an existential threat it's questionable whether they have the capability to escalate further. I mean they can threaten nuclear strikes on Ukrainian population centers but would anyone believe that the threats are credible?
Russia would never nuke Ukraine to begin with. They know that by doing so, most of the world would unite against them, and many, including Putin, would be on the chopping block.
Seriously doubt any country on Earth is going to attack Russia and risk global thermonuclear annihilation over anything other than a direct attack on their own lands.
Mostly because that's useless. Ukrainian weapon production and economy is located in Europe. Ukraine is basicaly western PMC now.
If nuclear war starts, nukes would be falling on European cities and facilities, not Ukrainian.
That self-perception lowered the gate for interference in Ukrainian affairs in the first place, but also set a ceiling on escalation.
I think that's the above comment's point. Attack moscow -> existential threat -> they're already on the chopping block -> nukes.
Russia is not fighting Ukraine, it is fighting NATO in Ukraine. And, IIANM, it has the capability of hitting non-Ukranie NATO targets in various places around the world - with cruise missiles and such. The assumption that "oh, Russia will never do this" is actually quite reckless and dangerous; and I don't just mean dangerous to whoever would get attacked, but dangerous for people all over the world, as we may find ourselves in a nuclear exchange with multiple blasts in multiple locations with radioactive matter spread far and wide.
Regarding the drones - definitely agree with you that drones have completely reshaped the experience on the front lines of this war. I understand that in a recent exercise with NATO forces, a Ukranian unit of drone operators essentially "took out" a couple of battalions:
https://www.krone.at/4046529
If that is the case they are doing a poor job at doing so, without even fighting the full might of NATO.
They claimed that with basically every little sprinkle of new aid for like two years, until everyone realized it was a bluff.
Putin is many things, but actively suicidal looks like a no.
Everything else is just an order for preemptive suicide.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgkUVIj3KWY
They have been getting replacement MiG-29s and Su-25s from allies and are starting to use f-16s from NATO nations.
"A coalition of NATO countries, primarily the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and Belgium, are providing F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine. The United States authorized the transfer and is providing training and spare parts, with deliveries having begun in 2024 to strengthen Ukraine's air force against Russia."
So yes, they still have an airforce. They're just getting re-supplied.
Also the Ukrainian airforce was ULTRA conservative about sorties to make sure they conserved as many fighters as possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_warfare_in_the_Russo-Uk...
https://aerospaceglobalnews.com/news/how-many-aircraft-losse...
I am not sure what is meant by 'a significant number of', and I'm not sure if all commenters have a common definition of that phrase, so I'm unable to judge the veracity of the comments above.
indicates what the author said is true.
The majority of these losses are on the ground.
Oh yeah, I'd like to see you try that.
Maduro was a clown. Iran is two orders of magnitude above Venezuela and the US (plus friends) are already struggling.
Russia is at least one order of magnitude above Iran.
I have no doubt that the US would win at the end, but at a massive cost of life and money. You cannot afford that, you cannot even afford a 1/10th of that.
I live in America, I'm obviously pro-America, but losing touch with reality will only make things worse.
The world is not like your RTS games.
The Chinese are going to spam literally MILLIONS of drones all over the Pacific...
Relatedly, aircraft carriers are great for beating up on small powers, but they are vulnerable and would not be effective at reaching across the ocean and bombing China.
Plus, both nations have nukes, so the idea of either China or the US "winning" a war against the other side is easily cancelled out.
What you are left with, is a lot of posturing about superpower wars which is a waste of time. All sort of people thumping their chest, wargaming things out, as if any of this nonsense isn't immediately squashed with the nuclear trump card.
There will be no superpower wars.
There will, however, continue to be wars against smaller states, and the F35, aircraft carriers, etc, are really effective at those kinds of things. That is, effective at waging the wars that will actually happen. Nukes and the pacific ocean stop any war of consequence against China.
The primary problem with killing carriers is, has been, and will be, finding the things.[1]
Drone strikes on oil refineries work because, with few exceptions, the refineries rarely move. You can literally program a drone to go x miles in a specific direction and then drop a bomb.
It's also considerably harder to hide things like drones in big empty spaces.
If loitering drones became a serious threat (as opposed to the, you know, literally super sonic missiles the navy has spent the last 40 years planning for) itms pretty easy to imagine anti-drone planes/ships/drones sweeping a large radius around your carriers.
[1] Satellites can definitely do things, but they're not magical and people can track where they're looking and just... sail in a different direction. Also if someone was actually using satellites to target american carriers with munitions the americans would probably just destroy the satellites.
The interesting thing about drones is the ability to attack from many directions at the same time, overwhelming the short-range defenses. IIRC no fewer than 5 naval drones attacked the Moskva missile carrier at once, and successfully sank it eventually. Naval drones are compact, barely visible, and, unlike torpedoes, highly maneuverable.
Aerial drones are also highly maneuverable. Large navy ships are pretty tough on the outside, able to withstand a blast of a moderate-size shell or bomb. But they have smaller, harder-to-reach vulnerable areas. This is the kind of target drones are apt to attack precisely.
Most anti-air weapons are pretty expensive to fire, because they were intended against high-value targets like planes or cruise missiles. They are insufficient and wasteful to fire against hundreds of small, inexpensive targets.
It's like having a shotgun and a sledgehammer, but fighting against a swarm of hornets. Despite a large advantage in damage-dealing capacity, you quickly become incapacitated.
Finding the things is not trivial. Finding them twice is even less trivial.
I know nothing about this really, so forgive my ignorance.
Assuming a carrier is found and tracked by a satellite in the ocean, how could it possibly escape the satellite's detection before being targeted by a drone or some other type of munition? If the ship starts sailing in a different direction, the people (or AI) tracking via satellite would notice and adjust, right?
https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Ty...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon
Now satellite constellations make it harder, since their numbers limit this strategy. But currently, none of the know systems utilize SAR like the LEO satellites, so they wouldn't function well in bad weather. They'd have to rely on optics which can be severely degraded.
https://eos.com/blog/types-of-satellites/
China would be using their Yaogan-41 (geostationary) to try to track, which might work, in good weather, during daytime, IF the carrier group was south of Japan (it's equatorial). Carriers deliberately transit through weather, strike groups disperse broadly and use decoy behavior in wartime, and a geostationary optical satellite won't know which blip is the carrier and which is a support ship 50km away.
Every night, you lose the carrier group and have to find it again in the morning, if you can. Usually you can't, even with China's layered approach using optical, SAR, ELINT, and OTH radar.
I don't know how many military satelites China has, but I would have assumed it would be sufficient to cover the pacific sufficiently to find an aircraft carrier. (the obvious caveat here being clouds, which are fairly common over the ocean)
https://www.csis.org/analysis/no-place-hide-look-chinas-geos...
What?
> unless they're on the equator
What?
> because otherwise they have to be moving
What?
At minimum they travel with 6 or 7 ships and leave a wake a mile long and they only go tens of miles an hour, it isnt a speed boat.
Here is an Indian carrier (formerly Russian) on google maps and the US ones are large https://www.google.com/maps/place/14%C2%B044'30.3%22N+74%C2%...
I think people forget how many satellites are pointed at all parts of the planet. They are used for crop reporting and weather and all sorts of shit. It isnt the 1960s where only the super powers have them and they drop rolls of film.
Which is why you get things like this https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/05/satellite-firm-planet-labs-t...
An aircraft carrier is not that fast, if you see it once you know roughly what radius of circle it is going to be in for a while (ignoring the fact that they are likely going somewhere for a reason its not their job is to say out of sight)
Despite the nuclear reactor, aircraft carriers won't stay in the fight long if their supply lines are disrupted. And also it's not likely that a carrier group could fend off a wave of 10,000-20,000 drones launched from a container ship that happens to be sailing near it.
At the end of the day, we rely more on nuclear weapons and MAD to deter these kinds of major hostilities between powerful countries. Talking about how conventional weapons match up is a bit of a red herring. The only thing that would change that would be very reliable nuclear missile/warhead interception systems - and I don't think any country even has a roadmap to such a thing.
To sink an aircraft carrier you really need like 10 direct hits with hypersonic missiles. Or a couple of hits with a torpedo. If you are lucky, maybe even a single torpedo hit. People underestimate how hard it is to sink a ship. You really have to attack it below the water line, from the bottom. A single torpedo is more effective than 100,000 drones when it comes to sinking big ships.
What drones could do, is damage the runway and radars and other equipment that would constitute a "mission kill" -- e.g. the carrier has to withdraw for a period to fix the damage to equipment on deck.
But now think a little bit -- the drones have limited range. They have to be launched from somewhere. So just launch missiles from that location. You get the same thing -- a mission kill. You don't need a million drones. And the missile will have much larger range than the drones, and will cause more damage.
So the bottom line of all of this is no US aircraft carrier would venture near Chinese shores in the event of a war with china. That is probably because those shores would be lightning up with mushroom clouds anyway, as would ours. So what do you need the drones for?
Missiles are also an option, though carrier groups have some ability to defend themselves against them (less capability against hypersonic missiles, of course). The Chinese container ships are reported to have up to 60 vertical launch systems, which may be insufficient to overwhelm a carrier group and remove the carrier from service. It's reported that carrier groups can defend against "dozens to 100+" missiles.
That's why I'd imagine that it might be easier for a single container ship to disable a carrier group using 10,000+ drones instead of 60+ missiles. Especially as you wouldn't need fiber-optic cables, against ships a COTS AI targeting system would be sufficient (still robust against jamming, but allows for longer range than fiber-optics would).
> And naturally F-35s on that theatre would have been a game changer making mass strikes on Moscow possible.
And then what? Kyiv has been under relentless strikes from drones and missiles for 5 years. And Moscow was hit by Ukrainian drones several times.
You'll need to suppress all the anti-air defenses first, and it will likely be too costly.
You write that, and literally quote my point about F-35 making deep strikes against dense air defense possible in the very next sentence.
Both Russia and Ukraine learned to avoid concentrating forces, so what are you going to strike? Use an F-35 to attack a single Jeep with a mounted machine gun? F-35 has limited range and carries very limited armament, so you can't just carpet-bomb everything. At some point, you'll need to use much less survivable heavy bombers.
And if these vaunted Russian IADs can't stop Ukrainian drones with a RCS the size of a barn, they stand little chance against a stealth fighter.
> bridges, dams, power plants
A war crime, btw. Bridges and dams are also notoriously hard to destroy.
> The heavy B-2 bombers are themselves quite survivable
They are, but less so compared to lighter aircraft.
The author's main argument against the F-35 is that it can be easily destroyed on runways now, as drones and missile developments have outpaced missile defense, leaving the US and US allies vulnerable to a preemptive strike by China.
That might be true, but it's also strategically valuable to diminish the military capabilities of allies of China (e.g. the Iranian theocracy), which may make up for the tactical weaknesses of the F-35 against China in a direct confrontation. It's also possible that drone/missile defense will catch up (e.g. lasers), but that's hard to say at this point.
Of course I understand wanting to be prepared even for grim scenarios such as these. Military strategists should of course continually be refining such plans. But casual discussions like this, without even so much as a disclaimer about it being a hypothetical and extremely undesirable outcome, may pave the way towards it through normalization.
Which does take it into a kind of Schroedinger's realm. The US takes it seriously, so it develops technology for it, and China doesn't invade. But would China have invaded if the US hadn't prepared for that war? Quite possibly, but you can never know.
Now I understand it has a large impact because of oil prices and the closing of the strait of hormuz, but don't confuse the economic impact of the closing of shipping lanes with something that "exhausts" the US military.
Remember this is the military that spent two decades in Afghanistan and Iraq, using considerably more resources. Those were actual wars, followed by occupations that lasted two decades. And that didn't exhaust the US.
In terms of the Naval cost, it is occupying 15% of ships, with zero ships sunk or damaged. I believe there were 13 soldiers killed during strikes on bases in the area. Those bases have been manned for decades and have not exhausted the US Army. Let's maintain some perspective.
Exhausting key functionality like that will absolutely lead to major losses of things like manpower and ships against a near-peer adversary.
I do not think most Americans would care to defend Taiwan, even against the China boogeyman. The practical realities of losing Chinese goods would be a devastating reality few are prepared to face.
Do you know what does belong to the west? ASML. What makes TSMC actually work.
But more importantly, ASML does exactly what America tells them to do.
And Europe for the most part does as well.
Sorry, I wish Europe had the fortitude to not be subordinated to the US, but that's how it is.
I personally would not be willing to do anything to defend Taiwan from China. But then again, I don't support any of the wars we fought in the middle east, either.
Every day this conflict continues is going to have devastating political outcomes. I largely subscribe to the belief that Kamala losing was a reflection that people were mad at inflation.
This map should be eye opening. https://gasprices.aaa.com/
At that time, I believed it "We are running out of missiles, we are running out of shells", etc.
But it turns out the US adapted. They increased production, they substituted for next best options, they got other countries to produce for us, and still we have not run out. Not after years of Ukraine.
So I am no longer on the "US is running out of munitions" bandwagon. Plus, this military spending increases productive capacity.
Even with ramp ups, you are looking at 3 to 4 years before extra production actually shows up. And for the really constrained systems like GBU-57, cruise missiles tied to Williams engines, or anything needing Chinese gallium, even that timeline is probably optimistic if China keeps export controls in place.
And this constant comparison to Iraq or Afghanistan just does not hold up. Those were wars where the US could sit in safe zones and strike from distance. A Taiwan scenario is completely different. It is right on China’s doorstep, against a peer the US has never actually faced at this scale. Even the USSR was not comparable in terms of economic integration or industrial strength.
edit:
If the ceasefire collapses this Wednesday as Trump has signaled, these numbers will start moving again, and the replacement time estimates will only get worse because the industrial base hasn't yet begun delivering against any of the surge contracts
The last few wars started by the US were based on scenarios that looked good on paper and in reality they did not went so well.
Look at the Iran war: "we're gonna kill their supreme leader and the regime will fall". Almost two months later nothing changed in any significant way despite bombing it relentlessly.
Coming back to your concern, I'm pretty sure some people at the Pentagon believe the US can fight China using an expeditionary force and somehow win.
the followon effects like the closing of the straight were obvious which is why few Iran hatehs thought it was a good idea
The only way to oust the regime is with ground troops, ripping out the Revolutionary Guard and its tentacles. For all its corruption, Iran is far from a failed state, and there aren't factions waiting in the wings, ready and willing to take over the government with force. (There are political factions, to be sure, but they're already integrated into the government, though without leverage over the Revolutionary Guard.) The only armed group remotely capable of even trying would be the Kurds, but the US and in particular Trump screwed them over in the past, multiple times. Even if they thought they could go it alone (which they couldn't), there was zero chance they were going to enter the fray without the US committing itself fully with their own invasion force (i.e. success was guaranteed), because failure would mean ethnic Kurds would be extirpated from Iran, and might induce Iraq and Syria to revisit the question of Kurdish loyalty to their own states. And, indeed, Kurdish groups took a wait and see approach, assembling some forces but waiting to see how the US played their cards.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/us/politics/trump-iran-wa... https://archive.ph/gaHnu
It's a little ironic that its due in part[1] to Trump's reticence to commit ground forces that we've come to this pass. I hesitate to criticize that disposition, but at the same time it's malfeasance to start a war without being willing and able to fully commit to the objective.
[1] Assuming the war had to happen, which of course it didn't.
It’ll be more concerning if wasn’t discussed in such a way. War is rarely reasonable. China doesn’t find it unreasonable to go to war over Taiwan. And for what? National pride and unity? It’s completely unreasonable, but everything they’re developing militarily is exactly for that. We must approach the subject clearly and explore every possibility as a real one. These discussions are about ending wars as quickly and decisively as possible while causing the minimal amount death.
The hype is it's own product.
Not that we could afford wars with non-superpowers either.
Most modern military planning considers it a foregone conclusion. Whether that's accurate or not is arguable, but approaching discussions of military spending from a perspective grounded in current planning is certainly reasonable.
> Meanwhile, modern conflict, from Ukraine’s drone war to naval engagements in the Red Sea to Iran’s own mass missile and drone salvos, increasingly favors systems that can be produced at scale and replaced when lost.
In the conclusion:
> The lesson of the Iran campaign is that the F-35 performed superbly in exactly the kind of fight it was built for. The lesson for force designers is that the next war may not be that fight.
What a weird article. It starts out by saying f-35 is not fit for modern war. Concludes by saying it works perfectly in modern war.
The middle part talks about combining f-35 with drones to get the best of both worlds, but isn't that what people already are doing? Iran war allegedly had lots of drones on both sides.
And of course blowing up iran is going to be totally different from some hypothetical war with china. Will the f-35 work well in a conflict with china? I have no idea but the article didn't really make any convincing arguments about it.
It did.
It pointed out that the bases from which the F-35s would have to operate in a war with China would be very vulnerable:
"The concentration of high-value equipment and personnel at each operating location makes the F-35’s basing problem qualitatively different from that of simpler aircraft. The loss is not just one jet but the capacity to generate sorties from that site."
It pointed out that you can't produce F-35s at scale, which fucks you in the long run:
"At over eighty million dollars per airframe, with Lockheed Martin delivering fewer than two hundred aircraft per year across all variants and all customers worldwide, there is no surge capacity waiting to be activated and no precedent for accelerating a program of this complexity on wartime timelines. When one side can produce weapons by the hundreds and thousands — missiles, loitering munitions, and one-way attack drones — while the other relies on small numbers of exquisite platforms, the advantage shifts toward the side with scale."
The key message of the article is simply this (which should not be "weird" to anyone):
"The corrective is not to abandon the F-35 but to redefine its role. A smaller fleet should be reserved for the missions that truly require its unique capabilities — penetrating advanced air defenses, gathering intelligence in contested environments, and orchestrating distributed networks of unmanned systems. The marginal procurement dollar should shift toward platforms that are cheaper to build, easier to replace, less dependent on vulnerable forward infrastructure, and expendable in ways that manned fighters are not."
The article gets this wrong as well, the f35 can be built at scale, no other fighter aircraft is produced in such high numbers, its also significantly cheaper on a per airframe basis vs Gen 4 aircraft and its more advanced. This article is nonsense and the author doesn't know what they are talking about.
Really? Can you indicate how many can be produced yearly?
Also the war games showed that when LRASM supplies were depleted, the f35 became the primary anti ship and strike asset as it was one of the few aircraft that could fulfill the role and survive.
But it's a bit irrelevant because we couldn't produce enough pilots either -- the training pyramid means you can only graduate so many new pilots each year, capped by the number of instructors at each level.
There is a similar problem with drone pilots -- it took Ukraine and Russia years to scale up and get to the current level of skill. However, training drone controllers is cheaper because the aircraft cost nothing.
Ukraine produces thousands of drones a day, including interceptor drones.
A valid question is how the investment in drone warfare is best balanced with that in traditional warfare, but that is besides the point of the difference in scaling production.
But still, even if you assume that was what the author meant, its still a confusing article. The status quo already is that we dont just use fighter jets.
It is to investigate new technologies (i.e. how do we control a thousand drones) and preserve domain knowledge in a large number of engineers spanning multiple generations. If all these engineers go work at $BIG_TECH optimizing ad revenue for watching short videos, we'll have to rediscover basics the next time.
When we have to fight the next serious war, we are not going to primarily use F-35 jets built twenty years ago, it's going to be something built on a similar platform in larger numbers to specifically address challenges of that era. If it can not be made cheap enough, whatever contractors involved are going to be nationalized. All major wars between comparable powers were fought with technology hot off the assembly lines, not billion dollar prototype models developed twenty years ago to bomb caves in deserts.
If you look at it from this angle, all the idiosyncrasies make sense. There's of course the inefficiency of defense contractors skimming off profits at multiple layers, but if you find a solution to that while preserving productivity, you'd win the economics nobel tomorrow.
That is, to some extent, what the F-35 is; the mass-produced plane that incorporates what we learned from the F-117 and F-22 and whatnot. We've already made 10x as many as the F-22's production run.
There are barely more than a thousand F-35s, the number of US aircrafts used in WW2 was about 300,000.
If China produces 100 times or 1000 times their current numbers (and they can), marginal differences in capability are not going to matter.
If china somehow learnes magic and produced 10,000 f16 equivalents and got into a major non-nuclear shooting war with the united states... they'd lose 10,000 planes. At some point there is such a qualitative difference that numbers don't really matter.
That has never really happened in history, so good luck I guess.
In WW2 the US would send a 1,000 bombers to hit a target and still miss. That's why they needed so many. Now a single attack jet can hit multiple targets with very high probability.
Quantity is back in the game again thanks to drones, right now we would lose without escalating to a nuclear war.
They get sanctioned and/or hit by B-2s long before the factories to do so are even completed, let alone producing a hundred thousand fighter jets.
Yes, if you can bomb your opponent without retribution you can indeed get away with what we have now.
This is what the F-35 and the modern US airforce is built for. We're likely not going to be fighting desert nomads forever.
I thought the F-22 investigated the technologies and the F-35 is the mass-produced version.
When we have to fight the next serious war ... it's going to be something built on a similar platform in larger numbers to specifically address challenges of that era.
Not if every jet takes 20 years to develop.
If it can not be made cheap enough, whatever contractors involved are going to be nationalized.
Which would accomplish nothing since the rot is so deep.
The 6th gen platforms appear to be coming in at significantly reduced cost relatively to what they are replacing, which was a major objective.
Sure, I'd think of it as a mass^2 produced version then ;)
> Not if every jet takes 20 years to develop.
Think of F-35 variants, not entirely new platforms. If I have to guess, one reduced to a barebones autonomous version built for the purpose to commanding drone swarms and dealing with incoming drone swarms.
The irony, of course, is that the US military knew that back in WWII in how the Sherman tank was able to defeat the "better" German tanks for all the same reasons listed above.
Don't really see or hear about the USA building or using propeller driven planes in military outside of special ops.
It's always been about the biggest, fastest, longest range punch. That is extremely useful for deep strike (which has always been NATO doctrine), but when the range is short you need quantity and mobility far more than you need quantity.
Being able to cut off your enemy is an extremely effective weapon if your enemy needs massive supply. Drop the major bridges between Moscow and Ukraine and the war would soon be over.
But when you can't do that for whatever reason you need quantity and mobility far more than you need quality.
As someone a while back put it, Russia lost several Bundeswehrs worth of equipment and keeps on grinding. Neither side is able to mass large forces, in a large part due to drones. And Iran can punish the US despite being comically outgunned.
Modern equivalents of Sherman and T-34 tanks over burdensome Tigers and a population willing to support heavy losses.
The problem is that the early WWII arms race was so fast that I don't know how anybody can say with confidence that Germany lost to worse tanks than theirs. By the time the allies got any volume into battle, they also got better designs than their earlier ones.
* Quantity has a quality all of its own.
* Innovation and agility allows you to adapt and survive.
* Low capability platforms often can't be used to deliver useful effect & commanders will try every option not to use them in a fight. When they get committed it can be disastrous.
The first two clearly have merits, but every military professional I have ever worked with has cited them at me, so I don't think that they are underweighted in discussion. I believe that the last one is not treated with enough weight in the debate. The best example I have of it is the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Platforms with glaring problems, fielded and maintained at huge cost, completely unable to achieve their strategic purpose. Even when sulking in port these ships have proven to be deadly for their crews and maintainers. Another example is the TB3 drone. It had a staring role for about 10 days in the Ukraine, but those were 10 days where the Russians ran out of petrol to run their air defence systems on. It hasn't been in evidence since because it just can't be used in the current environment.
One that worries me is the upcoming T31 (uk arrowhead variant) frigate. The argument for it is that it is a relatively affordable platform that the RN will have enough of to actually be able to get out and about. However, it doesn't have a sonar, so... what actual use is it as a frigate (I know the story about the helicopter and some other bits and bobs... but... really?)
Sure, when the other side has run out of the good kit dragging crap out of storage might work, but until then you are going to be sending good men to their death in second rate equipment. Is that going to build war winning morale?
Second rate equipment is for playing lets pretend, or for fighting wars of national survival. We should avoid both.
The big stuff is for trying to keep the small stuff away from the battlefield. When you can't do that for whatever reason you need a bunch of small stuff of your own.
But a frigate without sonar isn't inherently horrible--lots of places don't have subs.
Another data point is that it's estimated that all student debt in the US combined is $1.7 - 1.8 trillion.
No wonder America keeps falling behind.
This isn't even remotely true, who is paying you to post this drivel?
I'm not so sure the F-35 is built for the wrong war as much as the war would probably call for the F-35 if it didn't already exist.
And the military is corrupt. They misplace hundreds of millions of dollars (cash) when they go overseas. The IRS is responsible for finding massive fraud schemes that the military never noticed. Why didn't they notice? Because there's no consequence. The military isn't a business; they can practically write blank checks with taxpayer dollars, and if they lose the money, what're we gonna do, fire them? Same for contractors. They can overcharge us or build faulty weapon systems/vehicles/etc, and it's not like we have 10 alternatives around the corner.
"It’s not Mildred sitting at a switchboard saying ‘Joe, you go to the corner of 42nd and Broadway,’ no it’s the AI. It’s not that hard given the state of current computing to imagine a system where the targeting grid is quote commanding and control itself.”
Again, this was 10-15 years ago. Now with the Ukraine war everyone acts like it is obvious...and I agree, it has been for awhile. We just never had a theater to test this stuff in. I suspect US defense contractors were on-board for Ukraine and Iran to advance development efforts significantly.
They have only come around a little at present. US Army is still buying Apache.
The US primes were caught napping in Ukraine, all the new tech is indigenous. They haven't deployed anything new successfully. The traditional exquisite weapons could win the war early, but of course Biden held them back because he's an idiot, and Trump spent them against Iran. Now they are gone. In the mean time, Trump cancelled the infrastructure to design and build armaments during DOGE cuts, now he wants to scale back up, but the money will be wasted because industrial capacity is not there.
Kinda lost me at the first sentence with this metaphor; you can and do equip an orchestra with instruments of similar caliber to the violins. Woodwinds are expensive. Bigger strings are expensive. Percussion is expensive. Maybe brass is cheap idk but there aren't many of them in an orchestra. In fact the plurality of instruments in most orchestras is violins.
Also, saying that instrument X is higher caliber to instrument Y is completely wrong. They all needs immense workmanship to produce, and immense effort to play. This effort can't be compared. A double bassist's finger spread for the first three positions is almost equal to whole keyboard/fretboard of a violin, but a violin can play 8x more notes with a bow when compared to the double bass. Momentum is a strong adversary when you try to change direction with a full size German bow.
You might think woodwinds are easy. A French horn player needs to play adjacent notes with small lip movements. That's an unforgiving blade's edge. A tuba player needs lungs of a whale to keep that long notes, etc. etc.
Also, just because viola, cello and double bass looks like a violin is borderline insult to all of them at once, and ignoring the other heavy lifters like clarinets, oboes and fagots.
Like how the article outlines. An expensive violin is good for a solo performance, but loses its importance in an orchestra. Like how F-35 becomes the wrong thing when the theater of war calls for different conventions and operates with completely different dynamics.
P.S.: Yes, I have played double bass in a symphony orchestra.
I don't think that last bit translated well.
Beyond that, what on earth are you talking about. Frankly what is the grandparent talking about? $2m violins cost that much because they're rare and famous and have a story, not because they somehow have a higher quality than a modern equivalent. Sort of like the mona lisa.
I don't think so. It's a good analogy how F-35 needs a good ground crew and logistics chain to keep it flying. Like how an orchestra needs these instruments to create subtle but extremely important pillars of sound, even if they're rarely or barely heard.
Also, not al $2MM violins cost that much because they have a story, but they're built by distinguished builders and built to order, for the person playing it, with old-stock woods and whatnot.
Yes, they don't cost that much, but you pay for the craftsmanship and the privilege. Price is an artificial construct after some point.
That only has to do with physics of sound intensity: to create a sound that is perceived as "twice as loud" as "one violin" you'd need ... ten violins.
But also look at Ukraine. They are punching well above their weight with asymmetrical tactics, but Russia is not defeated.
Drones and other autonomous, cheap weaponry changes a lot. Smaller states and non-state actors can inflict much more serious and expensive damage now more than ever.
Large weapons still matter though. If we ever were to enter an existential battle you would quickly see how big, expensive systems can still be advantageous. I am sure people will take issue with this comment but look at the relative restraint of Russia in Ukraine or the US in Iran vs, say, WWII. Modern morality prevents such scale and tactics until it does not. Then suddenly what matters are big weapons and the huge supply chains powering a war machine.
Both the US and Russia are also pivoting heavily towards drones, and they've been developing them for decades. Yes we have big, expensive weapons programs but we also have a lot of stuff ready or soon to be ready which is much, much cheaper.
They have been bombing civilian infrastructure, abducting children, torturing and executing civilians and POWs, executing deserters or wannabe deserters the entire fucking Ukraine war. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_the_Russo-Ukrain...
Restraint, my unbleached asshole.
That was mainly the Americans, British, and the Germans, not the USSR.
Also, what makes you think they could in this war? Do you think they can send bombers over Ukranian cities and drop a shitton of ordnance?
The Russians aren't deploying nukes; that is the only actual 'restraint' to date.
It was really coming to the point of urgent existential threat to the Putin regime this spring, before Trump and Netanyahu bailed him out, first by doubling the global oil price and then by relaxing sanctions.
And Ukraine's drone / cruise missile portfolio includes things like the Flamingo, more than twice the payload and range of a Tomahawk.
Flamingo is still mostly vaporware. For precise strikes against Russian factories Ukraine uses either Storm Shadow or domestic Neptun.
But that just shows again that drones are not particularly effective against most industrial targets and even against oil installations the damage is not lasting.
Or consider how US was able to destroy the bridge in Iran yet Crimea bridge and bridges in Rostov that are absolutely vital to Russian war logistics still stands.
In the sense that the tide of geopolitics means that if someone tried that they'd mark themselves as a defector in the current scheme of morality and would stand to lose a lot when the rest of Europe inevitably treats that as an example of how they are about to be treated.
Sometimes it makes sense to use a million dollar missile to destroy a $5,000 drone, if that drone would otherwise destroy an even more expensive air defense radar or energy production facility. This says nothing about the cost and value of the lives that might be lost in an enemy strike.
We would not be safer if the enemy had cheap drones and we had no weapons capable of fighting back.
The main problem is that air defense interception is incredibly challenging and expensive primarily because a mid-course defensive interceptor needs considerably greater capabilities than the weapon it is intercepting, because it needs to catch up to the incoming missile or drone mid-flight.
Sure, this can lead to massive overkill problems. Yes, the US should invest more in the low end of the high/low mix. But no, this does not mean there's no place for the high end, or that they should never be used to destroy lower end targets if that's all that is available.
A more interesting challenge, if you ask me, is in the naval domain. Imagine a capital ship has two options for defending against incoming threats - either fire an expensive and limited stock interceptor missile with a 99% kill chance, or wait until the threat is inside the range of a cheap cannon or laser system with a 95% kill chance. There's a real command level tradeoff to be made here. If you shoot every drone with interceptors, you lose shot exchange badly, and you just run out of interceptors. But if you let every target through into the engagement range of your close range systems, you run the risk that one makes it through to your ship, potentially causing damage and casualties.
The future of war is going to be wild one way or the other.
If that $5000 drone was alone then sure. However if they launch 200 drones (money equivalent of one missile) you'd be looking at totally different picture. Also they usually launch combo. Few missiles and whole bunch of drones. even worse
Old school was guns. Price per round was cheap. But the expensive missile kills the platform holding the cheap gun, you have to go with missiles. But the drone war is a different beast entirely. Drones can't shoot back. Thus the answer is guns. How well will their light drones fare against a Cessna armed with an automatic shotgun? How would the jet drones fare against a WWII warbird?
Lots of cheap, mobile guns. No meaningful self defense but doctrine is to always depart after shooting.
The naval one is much harder because you're not free to disperse your ship into many pieces. But, still, consider your cannon. Let's step down a bit, cheaper cannon with a 90% kill rate--but you put several of them.
So perhaps thriftiness in defense spending would also invite a prioritization in actual defensive capabilities?
Hell, Iran didn't actually work into building them before Trump decided to attack them.
As for what Iran's leadership decided and when, we really have very little visibility into that so don't believe anything you hear. We're not even certain which faction is really in control of nuclear weapons policy. (This isn't an endorsement of the recent attacks.)
> As for what Iran's leadership decided and when, we really have very little visibility into that so don't believe anything you hear.
The had elections at the time, and voted in the candidate promising nuclear weapons at the next year. So no, that's lying propaganda again.
I assure you that is a much better problem than the alternative.
I guess it is a good thing then that this isn't something they actually do.
They use cheap weapons to shoot down cheap drones. Their primary anti-drone missile was developed in the 2010s and costs less than a Shahed.
The US took the old Vietnam-era unguided rocket pods (Hydra 70), of which they produce hundreds of thousands every year, and slapped a dirt-cheap guidance kit to the front of each rocket. Supposedly 90-95% effective. A bunch of countries are developing their own clones of the concept.
A single F-16 can carry 42 missiles. They've been rapidly expanding the number of platforms they can attach these to.
Which is the same reason no level of military power is going to keep the Strait of Hormuz open (or at least, no level beyond a truly absurd one and even then - see the Kerch bridge in Crimea).
But Orange Dementia didn't even think about that.
Except this is more propaganda than truth. In general america does not use patriots to shoot down drones except in exceptional circumstances.
Not that the ecconomics of missile defense isnt a problem. It can be. But some of it has been highly exagerated.
It just makes us spend more money on defense, which is the entire point.
The industry obviously wants more and more profits.
They are never going to recommend getting rid of $200m F22s and replacing them with 30 $300k drones that would be more effective and cost 5% as much money.
That's 5% as much profit for them. They're not interested.
They are interested in profits, not national security.
And as you pointed out, they'd prefer a LESS secure world that inherently demands more money going to security.
You could spend more on security to actually be more secure. It's just that no one with any power is interested in that world.
They're only interested in making more money.
If you put the f-35 along all the rest of the us military, the war can be won and the f-35 plays a critical role in that win.
China very successfully built a rich economic system that is the factory of the world while eroding our own domestic capacity. In a war they can cut us off. We are not even as strong as we were during the Vietnam war, though we have fancier toys. Good luck!
USA is shifting focus to china in lots of their policy documents
China is massively building up arms
Lots of talk about a potential invasion of taiwan at some point.
Its clearly something war planners are worried about.
Winning sub-peer conflicts is fine for projecting hard power (when it works...) and protecting allies (when you have them...) but it doesn’t really budge the needle on national security.
That aside, people are simply not able to model how the next peer conflict will be fought ahead of time. All sides will be learning as they go. Building complex systems like the F-35 seems like a good way to maintain engingeering/technology culture that can be adapted when the time comes.
Also, I'm fairly skeptical of China's military. They keep purging people, and the human element in war seems underrated.
Also, the collaborative combat aircraft is being developed with the F22 and F35. Arguably though the collaborative combat aircraft is a bigger challenge than the F35 program as a whole and it is still in development whether it can be completed. We could downsize the F35 fleet or provide it in military aid but, I don't we can truly say wrong war it will still be available when a different war occurs and Aircraft have a long shelf life.
Anyone making claims about cost has a lot of work to do because the F-35 program is actually extremely cheap per unit now for what it is.
https://ekonomickydenik.cz/app/uploads/2023/09/20230905-awn-...
The F35 is very, very impressive, just maybe not very suitable for a long war of attrition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxJLUZWPEb8
(Re-Upload: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8__8--YAm4)
Over the past few years we have seen it operate with impunity over multiple countries. It astounding to me that in the 12 day war and the iran conflict there hasn't been issues from maintance alone.
We dont know how well the F35 holds up against patriots or s400's, but what we do know for certain is that against virtually everything else it unstopable.
More so when you realize the us has 600 and is making another 200 a year, and in a real war, you would lose some but theres rough parity between the number of s400 systems that exist, and the number of f35s that exist, and all those s400's will never be in teh same war or same place.
The corrective is not to abandon the F-35 but to redefine its role. A smaller fleet should be reserved for the missions that truly require its unique capabilities — penetrating advanced air defenses, gathering intelligence in contested environments, and orchestrating distributed networks of unmanned systems. The marginal procurement dollar should shift toward platforms that are cheaper to build, easier to replace, less dependent on vulnerable forward infrastructure, and expendable in ways that manned fighters are not.
The lesson of the Iran campaign is that the F-35 performed superbly in exactly the kind of fight it was built for. The lesson for force designers is that the next war may not be that fight. The future of airpower belongs to a larger orchestra, many of its instruments unmanned, inexpensive, and replaceable. Prudence demands that the United States start building it now."
And then send millions of them, with specific single targets. Each AI controlled to target single weakpoints in buildings, bridges, or even specific people. You can't stop a million of them even with EMPs because you can just end a million more. You can destroy entire cities with a technology like this. If each drone costs $10,000 and you send a million of them that's only $10 billion for a war and complete destruction of your enemy.
A thousand sparrows does not an eagle make.
Right now, the novelty of the technology means the offensive has an advantage. But long term it will be the defensive who will benefit the most from drones.
Thousands of short range drones dropped from B2 bombers sound like an interesting idea, until you hear about JDAM bombs, of which the US has a virtually unlimited supply, which are cheap, and are incredibly powerful compared to anything one could attach to a DJI-sized drone.
No DJI sized drone using any available or near future technology is going to have a range of more then whatever 20 to 30 minutes of well-below subsonic flight time can get you.
Or you could launch them in massive containers like in Infinity War and these containers filled with thousands of them would land on the ground and open up and release the drones.
You're just not imaginative enough to solve the problem you described.
Referencing Marvel movies in one's description of proposed military hardware is not only immediately discrediting but also a good sign that self-reflection is in order.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb
Or some absurdly heavy ballistic missile...which would be worse then existing ballistic missiles and is the type of target for which Patriot is specifically designed for (along with a number of other systems now).
This is an amazingly unserious post to the point I hope you're trolling. Or just twelve.
The F-35 at least has been produced in quantity and the unit cost has come down and they're finally rolling out some decent upgrades. Yes it's a messed up program in so many ways as its literal decades of history shows but:
The bigger issues is our industrial base cannot replace our many missile systems quickly enough, including surface to air, antiship, and surface to surface. We can't build ships or planes very quickly, either.
We are woefully low on stocks and can't meet commitments in NATO, mideast, and against China and N Korea. Taiwan is and has been waiting years on billions in backorders.
The other issues is everything is as expensive as f-ck. We're shooting down dirt cheap drones costing in the thousands with missiles costing in the millions. The article at least mentions this.
And what is the proposed solution to this? A giant, expensive, long range fighter that will coordinate expensive drone buddies (google NGAD). Because we think it's realistic to try and defeat Chinese forces when we're thousands of miles from base and they're at home.
First off we need to replenish systems we already know how to make and that are effective. We need to learn to build sh-t quickly, at home and with allies, and it's bizarre no politician has taken the lead on this because it involves popular stuff like spending government money, creating blue collar manufacturing jobs, growing small businesses with more reliable gov contracts, and so forth.
Then we need to develop cheaper systems including lots of drones, anti drone stuff, and low cost interceptors and antisurface missiles.
Then we need to reform contracting infrastructure and rules to move much much faster and with less cost to experiment and iterate more rapidly going forward like the Ukrainians (and even the Iranians) are doing.
We need to do all of this and quickly and no one from either party is providing leadership. This is the biggest reason the US and west are at risk of becoming paper tigers - we have cut our infrastructure and defense spending and microoptimized inventory to the point where we can't restock quickly enough to be a credible deterrent force.
Of course it was built for a different war... the use of drones didn't proliferate until after the 2010s and really more since the 2020s with Russia/Ukraine.
So, thanks Captain Obvious and arm-chair quarterback, for the insightful article.
The 6th gen platforms currently in testing address many of the issues raised with the 5th gen platforms. Which you would expect since they weren't designed in the previous century.
On paper it looks cool.
In practice it was /never/ the right plane. The contractors knew and didn't care.
I've seen an argument--which I don't have enough expertise to advocate for--that the F35's broad but shallow appeal ("jack of all trades, master of none") has an indirect strength: A wider base of demand goes with a manufacturing and supply chain that is constantly active and can be ramped-up if needed.
Speaking of military hardware in general, I can easily imagine there are cases where "best for logistics" completely trounces "best for the job".
Except it can't really be ramped up. It's enormously expensive to build a single F-35, let alone maintain them, and the geographic distribution of the effort only makes that worse.
And then they made it worse again by making many parts of the F-35 F-35 specific. You can't just drop in the same radio LRU from most other airframes and use it with the F-35, it has its own and its own maintenance cycles. The thing was designed to be expensive, it was not designed for manufacturing efficiency.
This is completely wrong, though. It's cheaper to build an F-35 than it is to build a Eurofighter, Rafale or Gripen, which are significantly older and less capable platforms. And not even "a little" cheaper - quite a bit cheaper. Economies of scale are real
Pick on a less useful animal.
> A 2014 study of U.S. Department of Defense appointees showed that 28% exited to industry. As of 2023, 80 per cent of U.S. four-star retirees are employed in defense industry.[0]
There are actually entirely reasonable, rational explanations for this, but it's not a great look.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_door_(politics)
One can dream
U.S. weapons supremacy is increasingly exposed as a marketing facade. Despite a $1T annual budget, the industrial base is so brittle that strategic missile stocks were nearly depleted within a month of engagement with Iran. To keep the gears turning, Washington is now cannibalizing the stockpiles of its own allies.
You could make the case that the F-35 isn't a weapon; it’s a sophisticated wealth-extraction tool designed to fleece the American taxpayer. While it excels at deleting defenseless targets in lopsided conflicts, its primary mission is maintaining the flow of capital into a bloated military-industrial complex that prioritizes contractor profits over combat endurance.
Yes, the U.S. possesses the most lethal tactical hardware in history, but its industrial backbone is currently ill-equipped for a prolonged, peer-to-peer war of attrition.
> - Gulf War (Iraq) > - Rating: Competent (on paper) / Incompetent (in execution) > - Note: Iraq held the world's fourth-largest army at the time with modern Soviet equipment, but failed significantly in command, control, and air superiority.
> - Iraq War (Ba'athist Iraq) > - Rating: Poor > - Note: By 2003, the military was severely degraded by a decade of sanctions and previous losses; it collapsed within weeks of the conventional invasion.
the lesson of those wars to the US is, like sports teams, we need to deploy our forces in kinetic actions regularly or we lose our edge, lose touch with the battlefield and capabilities of opponents.
peace is better than war, of course, but you need to look at the progress of history as a stochastic process, and if you skip all the little wars because you have a choice, you will be ill-prepared for the big wars when they are thrust upon you. maybe call the little conflicts "friendlies", we need to compete in the friendlies to be ready for the unfriendlies.
America has not faced any wars in its own "theater", it's own backyard; rather, it has "chosen" to fight wars that seemed important enough to travel halfway round the world, bringing lots of stuff. One of the American military's strengths is logistics, both getting there and on the battlefield.
>mistaking uncontested airspace for actual invincibility.
America pioneered and still leads in combined arms fighting doctrine and capabilities, and that basically requires air superiority as the first step. There's no mistake, it is creating uncontesed airspace (which starts with creating the capabilites) that enables victory at low casualty rates. It's not so much invincibility as "convincing vincibility" of opponents.
just to clarify what "effectively fought" means, the Chinese entered the war when the ROK+US+UN forces had reached as far as the Yalu River, and yes their "infantry waves" response, i.e. lightly armed human waves, pushed the anti-communists back but at very, very high cost:
"North Korean casualties are estimated at around 1.5 million, including both military and civilian losses, while Chinese military casualties are estimated to be around 400,000 to 600,000."
"South Korean military losses during the Korean War were approximately 137,899 dead, with additional casualties including 24,495 missing and 8,343 captured. The United Nations forces, primarily composed of U.S. troops, suffered around 36,574 deaths, with total UN losses estimated at about 210,000 dead and missing."
that's about 2 million or more killed vs 210,000
It's like saying that war is bad in a discussion about developing biplanes before WW2. Yes, war is bad, but that's what people are talking about.
but that's rather beside my point.
2) not even true, they use F-15E for missions that don't need stealth, they have way more payload capacity
Another fun fact in all this is the F-14. Did you the Navy has a policy of shredding all F-14s? Why? Because they were sold to Iran in the 1970s (pre-Islamic Revolution obviously) and the US wanted to make sure they could never get spare parts.
Anyway, as a result of that the US didn't want a repeat of selling the F-35 to a country that became an enemy so the US effectively has the ability to turn off the F-35 for every buyer... except one: Israel. Technically I think the avionics require daily activation and the US is the only supplier of those codes.
So, one nit I have about this article is the operational record of the F-35 in this current war. I don't think that's entirely correct. Iran's fairly primitive air defense has managed to damage the F-35 in at least one incident [1]. Also, you can assess the risk by how a fighter is used. As in, does the military use them with stand-off weapons [2] or not? This means using precision-guided munitions from a distance, possibly over-the-horizon. This wastes more payload on fuel. Those munitions are more expensive. The only reason you do it is because you fear the air defenses or otherwise can't guarantee air superiority. There have been a lot of reports the US military still primarily relies on standoff weapons in Iran. This is of course unconfirmed.
The bigger issue here is that post-Vietnam, and particularly since the 1990s, the US military has adopted a Strategic Air Doctrine. Rather than putting boots on the ground, the US projects military power by the ability to bombard. Unfortunately, that has limited utility. No regime has ever been overthrown by air power alone. And we're seeing that now. The entire Iranian military is built to resist strategic bombardment.
So yes, in this sense, the F-35 is built for Strategic Air Power and that's just not that relevant anymore.
So how do you put boots on the ground? Well, in Iran's case, it's like the country was specifically designed in a map editor to make this near-impossible. Iran is 5 times the size of Texas and has a population of ~93M people. It's surrounded on 3 sides by mountains and on the other by the Persian Gulf, which itself is bottlenecked by the Strait of Hormuz, which no US military ship has even approached in this conflict.
People just don't understand how complicated the logistics of this are and how many soldiers are required. You need, for example, tanks. You can't air lift multiple tank battalions. A plane can carry one, maybe two, tanks. They need fuel, munitions and maintenance. You need air defense and to establish bases. You need people to do all those things. Those people need to be fed.
Logistically, it's as complicated and large as D-Day.
It's also why I find the Taiwan question (also in this article) so frustrating, for two reasons:
1. China doesn't have the amphibious capability to cross 100 miles of ocean to land on Taiwan, establish a beach head and suppress a military of hundreds of thousands (as well as an insurgency) and to occupy the island. If you think they do, you have no idea what this takes;
2. More importantly, China has absolutely no reason to invade Taiwan and has shown no inclination to do so. this is the part that gets people mad for some reason. All but 10 countries on Earth have what's called the One China policy. This includes the US and Europe. That policy is that Taiwan is part of China and the question can simply remain unresolved. China belives the situation will be resolved eventually and there's absolutely no rush to do anything. The US agrees, policy-wise.
So any talk of a Taiwan invasion is just scaremongering to sell weapons. Like the F-35.
Maybe, just maybe, you should take with a grain of salt when the guy who sells you weapons tells you there's an imminent threat that requires you to buy the weapons they sell.
[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/19/politics/f-35-damage-iran-war
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standoff_weapon
The primary goal of this program is not to make a plane, it's to spend $2 trillion in military contracts. As a side effect, it runs as a jobs program for engineers and its US based supply chain. Technology gets developed but with a super low ROI.