> 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.
The F-35 is a perfect pork-barrel example: by using subcontractors distributed in many house districts, the project owner ensures its political viability. By my count, only Louisiana, Wyoming, Nebraska, and North Dakota show less than $1MM in "economic impact".
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
That is asinine, what do you think happens to those institutions when incompetence is what gets rewarded. The real threat to the US military is not the lack of weapons, or that the F35 is not as good or as cheap as it could have been, it's because it is a lumbering bureaucracy full of people who couldn't get better jobs elsewhere.
The most qualified candidates for what? 100% of people in the military have passed the ASVAB. And the most capable people in the military are EXTREMELY intelligent.
The problem is unlocking that brilliance in an organization which has LOTS of office politics, cross currents, uncoordinated long term goals, too many interests who get to requirements to every project, etc.
And the biggest problem is that everything the US military decides long term needs sign off by Congress, so there is always a political dimension to every project approval. Congress laughs at the F35 as the “world’s largest jobs program” with components built in just about every member’s district. The A10 is unlikable because Congress wants to keep it around, even though the AirForce thinks it’s cheaper (logistically) and safer to use other aircraft for the role. Not everybody is thinking about the same factors.
Respectfully, the problem is not incompetence or bureaucracy. There's plenty of each in the military but they are only symptoms.
I like the Stanford Beer quote - "The purpose of a system is what it does".
What does the current defense acquisition system reliably produce? Obscene amounts of money for the defense contractors, campaign contributions for politicians, promotions and well-paid private sector careers for the top military leadership. The quality and suitability of its weapon systems, though sometimes excellent, is secondary.
All people who matter in this system, the ones who built and sustain it, are rewarded by the status quo. It's working exactly as intended.
The poor incentive structure is what results in incompetence and bureaucracy. I personally would measure competence with respect to stated aims, not some unstated aim.
If we are to assume the unstated aim is long term wealth extraction then I would again suggest the current extent of short term wealth extraction is putting that long term at serious risk so I would not consider that competence either. I would consider it an emergent behaviour where two or more parasites have to compete against each other for resources from the host, each has the very strong intensive to maximise their personal take even at the risk of the killing host because to leave anything on the table is to allow the competition to have more resources which they will use to attack you with.
Perhaps if the intent is to undermine the US as part of some broader strategic goal, OK, maybe those people are competent, but I would hope that those people are a very very small number of those operating in the system.
Seems to be jobs program. I ended up in defense after a year of being out of work and while all the new grads were desperate and destitute, we were steadily hiring new juniors out of school.
I’ve heard stories from years ago about some of the waste being protected because it we weren’t producing tanks in excess of what we need, some small town in Ohio would lose a ton of jobs and their congressmen his job.
Outside of wartime, yes these are jobs programs. If we stop, we lose the know-how, man-power, and facilities. Starting back up becomes expensive, time consuming, and potentially impossible on the time scales required. That does not bode well for a war you're involved in.
These capabilities don't stick around for free. A corporation isn't going to keep around design staff doing nothing. Even if you move the design staff to the military stuff, you still need to give them work or their skills atrophy.
Incentives matter and incentivizing bugs in software is a very bad idea, it’s how you forget how to write software without so many bugs. And what was the point of it all, it was obvious even back then that the future was cheap missiles / drones.
> it's because it is a lumbering bureaucracy full of people who couldn't get better jobs elsewhere.
I don’t think that they exploit the military industrial complex for personal job security and fortune makes it likely that they’re incompetent. In fact, as a society we seem to praise those who are exceedingly successful at such exploitation, and even elect them to the highest levels of government and hang onto every word they say.
People don't understand that defense contractors are extremely wasteful in their spending, and the contractor's job is not to produce the latest and greatest. They have a dual mandate.
1. To keep supply chains active so we can continue to be able to wage tomorrow's war with yesterday's technology by introducing rent-seekers and middlemen into companies and processes where they shouldn't be.
2. To keep Wall Street, defense contractors, and defense lobbyists happy.
I gotta ask, while I have the attention of HN - why are defense contractors allowed to be public, for-profit corporations that serve Wall Street interests ahead of national defense interests? Am I the only one that sees a massive conflict of interest that can affect (or, probably has affected) our national security in profoundly damaging ways.
It almost feels like Healthcare companies, who are supposed to be focusing on our health and wellbeing, seem to focus on shareholder returns and denying service to the same people that pay the premiums. What's wrong here?
The answer is because we tried to DIY and found that the government at best works as a developer with manufacturing better off outsourced. It is 'under-orderly' compared to a planned system, but the private sector works. There is a reason why it is a norm for military industrial development.
Wall Street and Defense Contractors and Defense Lobbyists wouldn't make too much of a difference anyway when they are already jobs programs. Any sort of industry would have lead to it being an Industrial complex problem.
That people think it would make a difference mystifies me as much as when people claim that 401ks are just to make people dependent upon the market in retirement. When in reality they would be dependent upon the market either in a state funded pension system too because that is where the money comes from.
A lot of big words, but also inaccurate. If you compare the F-35 to basically any plane worldwide with similar capabilities, it's very reasonably priced. You can see that in that it's very popular for export, with pre-sales already sold out until 2035.
There are plenty of articles out there on this for those who want to Google it.
> If you compare the F-35 to basically any plane worldwide with similar capabilities, it's very reasonably priced.
If you compare corvettes to other sports cars, you'll find they are very reasonably priced. That doesn't make a corvette a good economical option for day to day commuting.
There are only 2 5th generation fighters available for export - the F-35 and the J-35. The F-35 is 40% more expensive than the J-35. No one is buying F-35s for the low price tag.
More to the point, the unit costs are low because the number of airframes scheduled to be built is enormous. The US needs to export hundreds of F35s to help distribute the massive cost of the development program. This development program was nearly 400% over initial budget, and the general managing the project was fired over it. The fact is the F-35 is far more expensive than it was intended to be.
Nothing else is remotely as capable in the modern threat environment that most countries can actually buy. That's the cold truth. They can't buy anything else that compares and the best isn't for sale.
The pressure was not "because it was the best thing for those countries or war". The pressure was because it was good for USA manufacturer and economy. It was one of the perks of being a leader of a group of allies - you can pressure them to buy your stuff.
Well if you don't let them buy it then what's the point in developing for that?
Just develop for your own militay or some poorer countries the US can't be bothered to keep as vassals.
The only features the F-35 doesn't have for a modern fight are IP ownership and range.
The former was a military procurement mistake and the latter has been worked on for years [0] but never prioritized.
Also, I'm kind of surprised this was published by War on the Rocks, because it leaves a number of extremely relevant topics unmentioned.
The B-21 explicitly addresses both issues above, while mostly resisting the urge to increase size and complexity.
The Air Force is aware of basing vulnerabilities and is looking at multiple solutions (ACE, autonomous tanking, stealth tanking, modular anti-drone aircraft shelters).
The CCA cross-service effort is already targeting pairing >1 UAV to each manned aircraft.
Replicator and other efforts are addressing the "low-at-industrial-scale" problem, and the US just used waves of Shahed clones against Iran.
The article's points would have been more valid 10-15 years ago, but all now have addressing in progress.
Ukraine would love the F35. We won’t sell it to them at any price, though, because of the escalatory concern with Russia. We only just barely decided to allow them to have F16.
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.
So Ukraine isn't a serious war then? And I take it you believe we failed to employ that strategy in Iran ... why, exactly? The alternative interpretation being that isn't how things work. Swarms of cheap drones are the new reality thus appropriate countermeasures are required on the front lines.
The key difference is that "swarms of inexpensive drones" can be made in "swarms of normal looking residential garages". The entire enterprise can be decentralized making it much tougher to target with strategic weapons.
America does not want to prepare for that kind of conflict. It wants B2 bombers because those look cool when they fly over during the Superbowl.
Ukraine is a real war and it is about men and women crawling in the mud constantly terrified of getting blown up. It is literally battle of the Somme again. How do you recruit college kids for that?
I was thinking that. For most of the last sixty years Russia / the USSR was the peer adversary usually mentioned for NATO to fight. I think they look weaker than they are because Ukraine has actually been pretty competent in the fight.
Re. no swarms of drones because the factories have been bombed, do people really think that'll work on China?
Drones can be made in ordinary civilian houses and apartments. It's too expensive to dig an underground factory just for that, and even if they do (let's assume an abandoned mine could be used), they would still have vulnerable power supply and vulnerable transport. Power plants, transmission lines, rail tracks, bridges are part of the targeted infrastructure. The further they are from the front, the more a logistical nightmare it becomes to move them to where they're needed.
I would guess that there's a big difference between assembling a drone (which can easily be done in a kitchen) and mass-producing parts such as batteries and gas engines for drones that have to fly more than a few dozen kilometers.
The US doesn’t have air supremacy in Iran. We have air dominance, but shoulder mounted infrared guided (bypasses stealth paint to go after engine exhaust) AA is still taking out the occasional F35 and A10.
RU/UA is special because RU completely screwed up the first 3 weeks of the war (likely because of the culture of sycophancy Putin has, similar to Trump) and was driven out of central UA. Russia is too proud to admit they lost and UA wasn’t allowed to attack into RU territory until their suppliers (US, EU) were confident RU wouldn’t nuke us in retaliation. Now UA is busy dismantling RU’s economy and war making industry. Ultimately it’s not comparable to any other war of our lifetimes for several reasons.
UA drone factories aren’t in large industrial buildings. They have hundreds of office / home locations where the parts are printed / assembled. RU largely has a very few mega military vendors who make drones / missiles and they have consolidated their efforts in a few (now vulnerable) locations.
F35 capability is excellent for preparing the battlefield, such as the first few hours when softening up air defenses.
But don’t underestimate how much all countries are learning from watching RU/UA or US/Iran. Drones will continue to evolve to meet the gaps in affordable interception, affordable anti-5thGen aircraft, etc. UA now has armed land, sea, and air drones and each has variants like scout, bomber, interceptor, etc. we will continue to see specialization and comparative advantage evolve in the space.
The US absolutely has air supremacy in Iran. You don't roll out B-52s in a contested airspace. MANPADS have an abysmal ceiling height, they are largely irrelevant short of some very narrow circumstances.
Just for your benefit, stealth coatings and materials (not "paint") are a tertiary defence after shaping and electronic warfare.
Group 3 UAS can't be assembled in homes and office buildings in any meaningful numbers. They are too big. Even Group 2 is marginal. I think you're confusing Group 1 quadcopters with long range OWA drones like Shaheds.
>They have hundreds of office / home locations where the parts are printed / assembled
This shouldn't be a big surprise to Russia or anyone else, as it has precedent. German aircraft production peaked in 1944 at the height of allied strategic bombing.
In the Second World War, the most effective defence against Germany's V1 was getting a fast plane to fly alongside it with its wingtip under the V1's wingtip. They didn't actually "bump" the V1s, just got one wing into a kind of "ground effect" which caused it to roll beyond the capability of the gyro to compensate.
They're doing this to take down all sorts of stuff the Russians are lobbing at Ukraine.
Realistically a Cessna single prop is roughly $100k (average between good condition used and some new ones). A Ukrainian interceptor drone is about $2k + cost of munition. And the Cessna requires an airfield, so it is geo-fenced, while an interceptor drone can take off from flat land or the back of a truck.
People need to wake up and realize the economics of war just changed by several orders of magnitude.
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 flights.
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".
> 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".
Worth noting that their mission was delivery flights with the produced aircraft (a handful of them saw combat, because if you're flying a fighter plane into a warzone your guns might as well be loaded, but it wasn't the main aim). Those who were intentionally flying into combat got a little more training AIUI.
And recovery flights of downed / incorrectly landed (wrt airfield) aircraft, crossing active zones while unarmed, international delivery across the globe, and officially no fighting stuff ... although that was somewhat divorced from practice in the asian theatre.
Still, thanks for chipping in with a "no true Scotswoman" pilot variation - of course bombardiers got training in sighting, navigators in map reading .. largely at that time combat pilots got experience or got dead while exposed to all the barrack room theory about tactics that may or may not survive enemy contact.
In a serious drone war a neutral cargo ship off your coast will open hidden flaps and unleash 10K drones all at once erasing couple bases before they even know whats up.
Enough with the ace combat fanfics. In a serious drone war a neutral cargo ship would not be allowed to hang around with potentially a shitload of drones in its containers.
Wouldn't that be the war crime of perfidy, similar to when the US used a secret plane painted as a civilian aircraft to sink one of the Venezuelan boats 9/2025?
Warships are explicitly allowed to use false flags at sea, provided they lower them and raise their true flag before launching an attack. So all that would change to be legal would be to raise the flag and then unleash the drone swarms.
I'm not quite sure if just putting up a military flag on a civilian transport ship makes it count as a warship or not though.
> 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.
This wasn't unlike how the U.S. did it in Vietnam. They would have a small, unarmed helicopter fly low with an observer and an M-16 to spot (or more likely draw fire) with some Cobra and/or Huey gunships higher up. When the little bird found some targets the big ones would come down and lay waste to the entire area.
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.
> 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 Booker was overweight, meaning it couldn't be air dropped, which was the entire purpose for the program. No one was willing to pay for it because it wasn't what anyone wanted.
> Frigates are no longer "cheap" ships
The point was to produce a cheap ship. It's a ship that already exists and had a pricetag. The issue was it went from 85% commonality to 15% commonality, ballooning the price.
> But it's cancellation has more to do with dysfunction at the top of the Navy (and DoD) then the program of record.
They are one in the same. They could have produced an invincible super battleship and it wouldn't change the fact that they failed to accomplish what they set out to do. All three programs suffer from exactly this dysfunction.
Air dropping was never part of the requirement. It would have been a "nice to have" but not required.
There was no way we were going to be able to take a base model FREMM and use it in the USN without substantial modifications. The Navy screwed up in how they sold this to Congress, and things like wanting to use smaller shipyards for political and logistical reasons doomed it.
The Constellation class frigates had no mission. Just like the failed LCS classes before them, they aren't survivable in a modern high-threat missile environment: weak radars, small magazines. And if they can't survive themselves then they're useless as escorts.
I guess they can be put to work intercepting smugglers in the Caribbean Sea or something.
The US is converging on a single class of combat ships, which is whatever DDG-X turns into. It converges what was previously destroyers, cruisers, and frigates. It is more capable and has a higher displacement than any of them despite being called a "destroyer".
Much of the distinction separation historically was that ship category reflected command officer rank. They have been decoupling that, which honestly makes sense.
I like having C++ on my toolbox, but when Bjarne Stroustoup proudly talks about "F-35 Fighter Jet’s C++ Coding Standards" I am not sure it lands how he thinks it does, given how it turned out to be.
Quite certain that it also contributed to all the software glichs F-35 suffers from.
The whole Coding Standards talk has always felt like an own goal. Don't get me wrong I have extensive C++ experience and wouldn't work on a project that doesn't have guidelines. But the fact that one _needs_ plain english and hard to check in an automated fashion guidelines when using the tool that is C++ implies something about the deeper culture and issues at play.
Sir you're holding the wrong handle. <The audience looks at a hammer with 17 subtly different handles>
This feels like what happens when the selection pressure isn't there. Building for "the next war" (or more broadly "the future") is always bound to be an utter boondoggle, because despite your best intentions and the most strenuous furrowing of your eyebrows you'll have literally no fucking idea what the actual demands of that situation will be. You have to react, that's it. Trying to predict is futile. So better to try to set yourself up to react better?
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 don't know what your point is in this context. They won contracts because they were the cheapest (most efficient) provider of the services. And federal contracts are a small part of the their current revenue.
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.
> 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.
Are there any real examples of a government entity in the US competing with a private enterprise in which it genuinely would have been better for the government entity not to compete? I’m thinking of various public utility projects in CA (these are mostly great and more cities should do it), roads (I’ve never heard of a private road operating complaining about a public road), military (contractors complain when the military fixes their own gear, and this is asinine), the military doing some of its own research as you can read about in books like Ignition.
> there is an opportunity for corruption
It could just be incompetence. I read the construction contract. If I were a contractor, I would not have agreed to the fixed price and the steep late completion penalties without charging two arms and a leg and quoting a very long timeframe.
>Are there any real examples of a government entity in the US competing with a private enterprise in which it genuinely would have been better for the government entity not to compete?
Probably everything the government touches outside of keeping the peace and helping businesses function. Government schools suck. Government insurance sucks. Law enforcement often leaves a lot to be desired. I think one could make an argument that we'd be better off with a toll road system too, but for the convenience and privacy of not having to pay tolls.
It's easier to argue for government management when a service involves practically monopolizing space, such as a road, or if the project is especially dangerous or expensive (such as utilities or the military). But the fundamental forces of competition are still beneficial even in huge and monolithic projects. Even in cases of projects commonly run by governments, the competition emerges as being between governments instead of being between companies.
>contractors complain when the military fixes their own gear, and this is asinine
I agree, it sucks. I am very pro-market but I think the government should lay down the law in these cases and say that it won't tolerate abusive prices and it demands all the technical data necessary for routine maintenance, if not the entire product.
>It could just be incompetence. I read the construction contract. If I were a contractor, I would not have agreed to the fixed price and the steep late completion penalties without charging two arms and a leg and quoting a very long timeframe.
If credible businesses are putting in lower bids and they get passed up for a stupidly expensive alternative, that reeks of corruption. But there could be requirements or assurances that we don't know about. That's up to you to find out if you are interested in that case.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
This is the new reality of military procurement and has been for years. Integrated Logistical Support contracts are preferred by senior leadership for lots of reasons that won't fit into an HN comment box, but the wave tops are that it's wastefully inefficient to have uniformed aerospace engineers, logisticians, project managers, etc. doing R&D work. Private industry does it faster, better, cheaper, and pays bigger salaries with better lifestyles which means they can attract better talent.
I've been an aerospace engineer both in-uniform and out, and I can assure you that uniformed service members (and their families!) sacrifice a lot that's hard to quantify and not always immediately apparent. It's not 1950 any more; the best and brightest mostly don't want to touch government with a 10 foot pole. There's more money and prestige elsewhere, in the private sector.
It's not just that uniformed (or DoD) engineers have no access, the subsystem vendor (e.g. Raytheon) also get no access. LM is incredibly obstructionist, even compared to the bastards at Boeing.
This cluster** has led directly to initiatives for open (Govt open) architectures and vendor agnostic interfaces for talking between vehicles and components, and between component, between jets and drones and C2 etc. That has a long way to go too, but at least we've broken with the idea that it can be a closed system.
I'm familiar with the problems of service careers. There is a lot that could be done to improve that, but that's a different discussion. I think it's extra important now that we have jet engineers who know about AI in the aviation context.
Oh, I know all about LM. I used to work on the Hercules when I was in the Air Force. Experimental flight permits, mods, block upgrades, the works. Greatest aircraft in history, if you ask me, but I digress.
Ultimately the F-35 remains Lockheed's intellectual property, which is what drives all this. They want to sell it to other countries, which they can't do if the USAF owns the IP.
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.
> A single F35 which could penetrate air defense and go into the country would be a real problem.
The difference here is an F-35 + precision weaponry + intelligence to locate high value targets.
It's always going to be cheaper / easier to use shorter-range munitions, which means the launch platform has to be higher / closer.
But without strategic intelligence (what high value targets exist, and what are they supporting?) and targeting intelligence (where are they right now, and where will they be?) neither of the other two capabilities are valuable.
Logistics and command inevitably trend towards centralization, because it's inefficient and expensive to decentralize everything (and at some point the tyranny of compounding logistics makes it impossible).
Where there is centralization, there's a high value target, and that's a job for the F-35 and exquisite standoff weapons.
Should forces be a mix of high-low? Of course! That's something the US realized in the 80s and is why we have the F-16! (still flying, being built, and exported!)
So where is the air superiority over Iran? This only proves Palmer Luckey right. Future of warfare has changed drastically and all countries are taking notes from this War.
youd want some number of both. The ideal defense net against shahed type drones looks very different from the ideal defense net against f35s. Namely, shaheds require very cheap and numerous interceptors and radars, and f35s require very expensive radars and interceptors (and a dream). Anything that works against an f35 would be an egregious waste against a shahed and anything that works against a shahed wouldn't against an f35
Depends. If I need to destroy a bunker, the Shaheds are useless. If I need to shoot down another aircraft (or a Shahed), the Shaheds are useless. That also goes for SEAD, targets that are far away, targets with ECM...
Also, the physical and economic footprint for that many drones isn't small, and a few smart bombs from an F-35 could put paid to your entire inventory.
> 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.
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).
So if you compare it to the previous generation turbine it's better? That isn't very interesting.
The F-35 achieved a goal that isn't needed, at the cost of extreme delay. An F-16 replacement with stealth would have been delivered faster and cheaper. The USMC could concentrate on drones, STOVL and vertical lift. A larger variant for F-15/F/A-18 replacement would have many advantages. The USN always wanted more range out of JSF, but wasn't allowed to buy it.
I’m winning a War, BY A LOT, things are going very well, our Military has been amazing and, if you read the Fake News, like The Failing New York Times, the absolutely horrendous and disgusting Wall Street Journal, or the now almost defunct, fortunately, Washington Post, you would actually think we are losing the War. The enemy is confused, because they get these same Media “reports,” and yet they realize their Navy has been completely wiped out, their Air Force has gone onto darker runways, they have no Anti Missile or Anti Airplane Equipment, their former leaders are mostly gone (This has been, in addition to everything else, Regime Change!), and perhaps, most important of all, THE BLOCKADE, which we will not take off until there is a “DEAL,” is absolutely destroying Iran. They are losing $500 Million Dollars a day, an unsustainable number, even in the short run. The Anti-America Fake News Media is rooting for Iran to win, but it’s not going to happen, because I’m in charge! Just like these unpatriotic people used every ounce of their limited strength to fight me in the Election, they continue to do so with Iran. The result will be the same — It already is! President DONALD J. TRUMP
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.
Stockpiling doesn’t really do much vs. investing in manufacturing.
Contrast the US in the civil war or wwii to the current situation. In both those wars, civilian factories were rapidly converted for the war and manufacturing capabilities were ramped fast.
In Iran, we’ve burned through years or decades of manufacturing capacity and probably used up most of our top tier stockpile.
That only exhausted/destroyed about 33% of Iran’s cruise missile stockpiles. It’s unclear what it did to their drone manufacturing capabilities. It guaranteed they’ll pursue nuclear capabilities moving forward.
At the same time, US investment in manufacturing is tanking due to warmongering and isolationist economic policies.
Iran stalemated us in a month or two, and all the trends I see (education, manufacturing, high tech innovation) point to US capabilities eroding rapidly in the short to medium term.
Being able to stockpile is not the goal, it's a pre-requisite. Having a serious manufacturing capability helps to scale, but you can't convert an iphone assembly line to ballistic missile interceptors, and especially when you don't produce the interceptors at some low rate. There is a lot of technology and know-how that goes into those capabilities, and both get lost if they aren't exercised.
But that means either trashing the output in a few months (emulating Ukraine), or being able to stockpile.
Why would you waste the factory output during peacetime?
It seems like pork spending to me. Put the factories to good use, and maybe have 1% of output go to prototypes; 10% to dual use.
Miniaturization of weaponry (like drones) makes this even more attractive. Also, a iPhone factory (if such a thing existed) could certainly convert to drone manufacturing in short order. Aluminum and glass aren’t great materials for drones, but aluminum is useful for things like machinery that manufactures plastic.
That's because the modern weapon tech tree is vast and complex. It's not factorio, there are no factories that can switch from producing DSLRs to MWIR cameras. A playdough factory can't cast solid rocket motors. A Tesla manufacturing line can't just switch to welding 10cm steel slabs for tanks. Moreover, those military-relevant processes and techniques require know-how that gets lost if the processes are not run.
Small quad hype is just techbro delusion. Those quads have their place, but the vast majority of the defence toolkit needs to be much more sophisticated. For example, Ukraine is still struggling to manufacture a domestic ballistic missile four years into the war, despite having tons of funding, a ballistic program pre-war, and Western experts willing to help. If western countries stopped low-rate production that normally goes into stockpiles, the timeline to start manufacturing up would be similar.
Because the North Vietnamese were not bombing and destroying American home soil schools, apartment blocks, utilities, etc. on a daily basis.
Lacking any real home soil peer citizen engagement the US saw the Vietnam War as a costly pointless loss of money, resources, and life on the far side of the planet.
The difference is, as the other comment points out, the Americans could have (and eventually did) leave South Vietnam any time they wanted with no negative consequences. It was a pure war of choice.
Everyone on the Ukranian side knows that their options are: victory, death, a deeply miserable time in a POW camp, or abandoning their life and becoming a refugee. Regardless of what your rank or social status is.
Different situation. The Americans were killing Vietnamese in Vietnam. There was a near unlimited number of those, including innocent ones.. The Ukrainians are killing Russian soldiers in Ukraine. There's a limited number and if they don't like it they could go back to Russia.
It's rough on the killed soldiers but that's really Putin's fault - I think he was basically the only one who wanted the war. Most Russians looked horrified.
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?
TBF a proxy of one of the nuclear superpowers (ie Ukraine using US arms) is quite different from a run of the mill non-nuclear country retaliating against an invasion using conventional arms manufactured at home. The former invites MAD while the latter is predictable and boring. Seeing as they are the substantially larger aggressor presumably they can pull out of this war of attrition whenever they feel like it.
It wouldn’t be wrong. Nixon got drunk and called for a nuclear strike on North Korea. Kissinger told everyone to ignore this order and the world did not blow up that day.
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.
I basically agree and think it's a great shame that the US didn't say don't invade Ukraine or we'll have the USAF bomb the invading troops. Russia couldn't reasonably use nukes just because they were being stopped invading a country that they'd signed an agreement not to invade when Ukraine gave up its nukes. Many thousands or lives would have been saved.
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.
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:
however, nato is fighting the full might of china, russia, iran, and north korea. the whole set. and china is fighting for both ukraine and russia at the same time. why arent you worried about nato randomly attacling china so china stops supplying russia with drone materials? or north korea so they stop providing shells and soldiers?
russia isnt going to attack nato because it knows it isnt currently fighting nato, and bringing nato into the war will be worse for russia than keeping nato as an arms supplier only.
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.
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.
I think if Russia drops a nuke on Ukraine then even China will desert them.
India for sure will stop trading with Russia, lest it be seen to condone such insanity (India has a nuclear armed rival next door-India will not want Pakistan get any ideas).
I think this is the only reason Russia did not nuke Ukraine.
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.
Electrifying the economy with renewables (and I’ll count nuclear as renewable) is the single most important thing countries can do right now to ensure their own military and economic security.
Distributed solar and wind are more difficult to bomb than nuclear, so they’re probably a slightly better choice (especially if they’re built to island / work off grid).
Non-nuclear renewables ("intermittables") need something else as back up. That is almost always natural gas.
That's been causing a lot of problems for Europe for years now.
There's the dependence on Russia, there's the dependence on the North Sea supply -- and the full-scale invasion started while the Danish fields were off-line -- and there's the dependency on LNG imports from actors that are either unreliable (the US) or far away (the US and Qatar) or both. LNG is also quite expensive.
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.
No there are still tens of original UAF jets that by now clocked thousands of sorties. Sometimes they get shot down or otherwise lost and we get photographic evidence (tail number, sometimes even pre-war colors) that it's one of the OGs.
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 getting close to being an rts though.
real time top down view everywhere all at once, but with commands and targets being set with a ton of parallelism - many rts players at once picking who to send where for the same team
Ukraine fighters are operating out of long-term soviet-era reinforced concrete hangars, while transport aviation is operating out of Romania and Poland which makes striking them a political issue
both solutions are a lot less relevant in case of USA remote-from-home conflicts
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'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.
And at the same time, drones are eating the AD every day, with videos of multiple strikes often coming out on a single day. Most in Crimea, but now more often also elsewhere.
An it shows with how the drone attacks on oil ports, refineries a even on navy ships in harbor have been successful lately.
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.
Oh I love shopping lists, let's see. The FSB HQ, SVR HQ, Rosgvardiya HQ; tens of Army offices across the city. Roscosmos HQ, listening stations for the satellite network. Precision mechanics, optics and electronic foundries manufacturing sites in Khimki, Lubertsy, Lytkarino, Krasnogorsk and Zelenograd. Kosmos concert hall on Militia Day. Am sure there's more good spots along Rublevskoye highway too.
And if there are still some GBUs left after all that, the Kremlin and even the bloody Mausoleum.
_All_ the classic anti-air is useless against drones, as the US also found out. It can be easily saturated, and ground-hugging drones are not a good target for missiles anyway. Ukraine is now using interceptor drones for this reason.
The issue with stealth fighters is that they have nothing to do. The enemy can launch barrages of drones from hundreds of kilometers away, outside the F-35's effective range. Or if you're moving ground forces, they'll be attacked by mobile units armed with short-range drones, also making F-35 less than useful.
That's also the reason why Russia right now is at a full stalemate. Its only semi-working strategy is to filter infantry through killzones that can be tens of kilometers in depth. Russia can easily bomb Ukrainian positions with gliding bombs or missiles like S-300. But there's just nothing to bomb, Ukrainian army is spread out.
The US has not found that out, they knew it, that's why things like lasers and other systems have seen so much development.
Yes the war showed some new aspects, but relentless low capability drone attacks is not the same as flying an F-35 into enemy air space and bombing their critical resources with high accuracy thanks to sensors.
Mass manaufacture and drones and such need to be take into account in the future, but when it comes to what is easer to counter, mass drone attacks or F-35, ill be money on the mass drones being countered first.
There are already many system that can deal with drones quite well. Old school FLAC with improved sensors, fast shooting system, even cheaper drones as counters and of course lasers and so on in the future.
Yes S-300 doesn't deal with drones either, but its pretty clear what to develop to counter-them, how to counter F-35s is not nearly as easy.
> The enemy can launch barrages of drones from hundreds of kilometers away, outside the F-35's effective range.
If they are doing that these drones are no longer as cheap and if you fly against modern anti drone weapon that have costs of a few $ per shot down drone, the economics is no longer in your favor.
> The US has not found that out, they knew it, that's why things like lasers and other systems have seen so much development.
Yes, the US was not prepared. The laser systems were nowhere to be seen, and there are no interceptor drones on the field right now. Or at least not in the quantity needed to protect valuable targets (like AWACS planes).
Also, lasers are just a waste of resources anyway. They only work when the LoS is available, and tracking a small target over large distances requires highly precise machinery. Exactly something that you want on a battlefield.
> Yes the war showed some new aspects, but relentless low capability drone attacks is not the same as flying an F-35 into enemy air space and bombing their critical resources with high accuracy thanks to sensors.
F-35 is not designed to bomb critical resources. It's a fighter jet.
> Yes S-300 doesn't deal with drones either, but its pretty clear what to develop to counter-them, how to counter F-35s is not nearly as easy.
It's not the point. The enemy doesn't need to suppress F-35s to keep launching salvos of hundreds of Shaheed drones into YOUR critical infrastructure that you can't protect. That's the whole point of the article.
Not to argue with most of your points (which I agree with), but the F-35 is really meant to be more of a fighter-bomber than a true air-superiority fighter. It's not really in the same class as F-22/J-20/Su-30/F-15EX kinematically, and that's fine because counter-air really isn't its role.
> tracking a small target over large distances requires highly precise machinery. Exactly something that you want on a battlefield.
Lots of things on the battle field now, would have been considered highly precise in the past. The current generation is more relevant for ships.
> F-35 is not designed to bomb critical resources. It's a fighter jet.
No it isn't. That's complete nonsense.
> launching salvos of hundreds of Shaheed drones into YOUR critical infrastructure that you can't protect.
And my point that you ignored was that technology to do mass shoot-down of Shaheed is much more likely to exists then technology to prevent F-35.
If its a poor economic war the question is if your interceptor can be cheaper then what its preventing. And drones while cheap are not as cheap as, bullets, lasers or smaller drones.
And you say, 'launch from greater distances' that also comes with longer time to intercept because these things don't have radars and aren't that fast. Plus launching ever larger drones at longer range also increases the cost per drone.
But they can't do and F-35 can is that they can go in and take out exactly the vital air defense and other points so that your other aviation assets have an easier time.
Any conception that war in the future will just be two mass manufacturing lines splinting drones at each other is silly, technology and stealth have a major roll to play.
> That's the whole point of the article.
I think the point of the article likely is to convince people that drones should get more funding in the full knowledge of that F-35 wont go away.
Its funny how some of the people who know a lot about this stuff are still going forward with other next generation planes despite cheap drones existing.
Cheap drones are new part of the battle field, but just like with most weapons, the old stuff doesn't go away. Tanks and rifles are still useful. And so is the F-35 and stealth jets.
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.
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.
China’s selling cheap cruise missiles. They come in unmarked shipping containers, so they can reach any target globally, as long as it is within a few hundred miles of a shipping route.
Now, consider how many drones can be manufactured in garages using a shipping container full of components and 3d printer filament.
(Doing it that way means the drone designs improve continuously and with minimal manufacturing lag after tactics shift.)
Ukraine has been launching aerial drones from drone boats for quite a while now - you can look for a video of a black sea drone platform being engaged like that. A lot of the videos of drones hitting AD in Crimea (that usually just show the terminal phase of flight) might have a drone carrier involved in some way.
And a few days ago they unveiled also unmanned interceptor drone launching drone ships, used to hit Russian Shaheed one-way-drones while still over water.
> 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".
On British naval luminary compared submarine warfare to piracy, leading to the emergence a few years later of a tradition of Royal Navy submarine captains flying the Jolly Roger after completing successful missions.
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.
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)
This is literally the point: it's easy to tell them to point a satellite at beirut and get pictures every 3 hours or whatever, it's much more difficult to tell them to point at a location in the middle of the pacific ocean... because you don't know the location in the first place.
Beirut doesn't move around a lot. Carriers do. While there are a lot of satellites pointing at the earth at any one moment, this isn't some kind of Hollywood super screen showing a real time image of the entire pacific. You just see whatever small patch the satellite happens to be pointing at.
And again, ignoring the part where america would probably start shooting down satellites.
Do you seriously think the US Navy doesn't avoid Chinese tracking? What kind of a question is that? Like, there's probably a magazine that lists the cruising destinations of most of the carriers, what ports they're going to stop at next, etc, because, you know, they're not at war and trying to maintain secrecy.
> Do you seriously think the US Navy doesn't avoid Chinese tracking?
How would they avoid having a Chinese satellite continuously track their movement? They have the capability to do that, there is nothing USA can do about it except shoot down all the Chinese satelites.
US carrier groups probably pose the #1 strategic threat to the PRC in the Pacific. You can safely assume they throw whatever resources are necessary at the task of knowing their whereabouts.
I mean, you can try all you want, but there's limits to hiding a fleet of ships on the open sea. They are huge, emit immense heat signatures, and produce miles-long wakes while moving. As long as there are satellites overhead, they will be able to find them.
I suspect we might be talking past one another because we have different degrees of precision in mind: I'm not saying the Chinese could have a missile target lock on a carrier whenever they wanted, much less in wartime. Far from it. But I highly doubt you can reposition a carrier group without them catching wind of it within hours.
This is the sort of arms race that is going to change every year. I just read an article that claimed that China has launched a system of satellites that use non-visual means to track ships in the pacific (via.. emissions or radar or something?) and china can certainly afford to put a bunch of them in orbit.
It's not impossible to track a carrier group via satellites, but it's not trivial either, you can't just, like, open up your windows gui and click on a satellite and click the button that says "follow this carrier" because like satellites orbit and fly around the earth and the ships can alter course when you don't have eyes on them and so on and so forth.
And yeah, as you point out, there's a big difference between having a satellite picture showing a probable carrier group at X and Y coordinates and being able to actually strike the thing.
Now I’m contemplating just how small and light of an instrument could be carried on a Starlink-style satellite that could detect a large ship. A smallish COTS telescope, e.g. a Celestron 8SE ($1700 retail) could easily see a ship from the Starlink constellation altitude.
Never mind that the Starlink radio arrays are, well, radio arrays that quite effectively cover the whole planet. If you think of each satellite as a radio telescope, its resolution is crap and probably cannot disambiguate a carrier group from anything else (at least according to disclosed specs). But it would be quite interesting to build a synthetic aperture array out of multiple satellites. This would rely on emissions from the ships themselves, but I bet it could be done and could locate ships quite nicely.
> 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.
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.
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.
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)
> It would have a field of view roughly the size of Houston (50x50 miles)
Wait, what?
Like, this is a whole bunch of extremely unreliable numbers being stacked on top of each other to reach an unsupported conclusion, but how is a 50 square mile field of view supposed to find something in the middle of the pacific?
The satellite moves, so every orbit it captures a globe spanning strip that is 50 miles wide (here uncritically accepting the 50 miles figure).
And the carrier isn't going to be in the middle of the pacific, its going to want to launch strikes, so its going to be within (say 500 miles) of Chinese military targets, which does narrow down the size of the haystack somewhat.
But yes, this is a significant challenge. On the modern battlefield it is usually significantly harder to find something than to kill something after you have found it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but satellites... orbit. They don't just fly in arbitrary directions following a target.
Even something like a rain storm can lose visual track of a carrier group, or even just night time, at which point you've now got an increasingly large area to search again to find the carrier which can be anywhere inside a several hundred mile circle.
It was admittedly a bit sloppy. The more accurate version (IANAKSPP, I am not a kerbal space program player) would be that the only way to maintain a satelite in one position (without expending an infeasible amount of energy) is to position it above the equator and sync its speed with the Earth's rotation, allowing it to stay in a single position above the Earth. Satelites always have to be moving fast enough such that the centripetal force is sufficient to counteract the Earth's gravitational pull, otherwise they would fall back onto the planet.
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).
Why not? It's not exactly hard? The exact capabilities aren't public, but there are companies that provide daily synthetic radar captures for the whole globe and similarly companies that do this for imagery. It would take ages but I think you and I could both right an algorithm to classify if an image or high map has an aircraft carrier in it? Even if you can't get data for the whole globe taking a photo of a 10 mile of ocean every 10 minutes and shifting the center based on where a boat isn't hard. There aren't that many aircraft carriers. Aircraft carriers and tanks are both capable machines built and designed for a different environment than we have now. They can still be useful. Most countries don't have the ability to image the whole globe or lob weapons across an ocean, but I'm pretty skeptical they'd survive long in a war with say China
I understand you don't think it's hard. It's hard. I'm trying to provide information to help people here understand why. What you're proposing doesn't work. Are you interested in understanding why it doesn't work?
The problem with killing a carrier is not finding it. They're not difficult to spot and not very stealthy. They're massive. The only real problem with killing carrier is getting close. They're constantly protected by a fleet and a small air force whose primary purpose is to protect the carrier.
> The problem with killing a carrier is not finding it. They're not difficult to spot and not very stealthy. They're massive. The only real problem with killing carrier is getting close. They're constantly protected by a fleet and a small air force whose primary purpose is to protect the carrier.
The pacific ocean is over 60 million square miles. A full sized carrier group probably takes up like 100 square miles when it's fully spread out, but that's a very, very, small percentage of the available search space.
And beyond that, you need to actually see the carrier with something, a laser sensor, a direct radar hit, even the human eyeball; you can't just fire a bunch of missiles in the general direction you think the carrier is at and expect them to hit anything (for one thing there's a whole bunch of other ships that will distract the targeting sensors).
Like, I cannot stress this enough, even if you knew the exact location of a carrier at a given moment, down to like 4 decimals of lat/long, and you knew which direction it was sailing, if your missile launcher is 1000 miles away you can't just program it in and fire it off and expect it to fly 1000 miles and then hit the carrier. Even with some kind of amazing on board sensors, there's a dozen other ships just existing near by, the carrier itself is moving unpredictably, not to mention the actual decoying/spoofing systems specifically designed to interfere with targeting sensors.
And this is the problem, you now say "oh well just use a platform that's closer to the carrier so it can get accurate targeting data for a weapon to hit the specific carrier", which is technically possible... until the carrier destroys your targeting platform because why wouldn't it? Whatever distance you have to be within to "lock on" to the carrier will be, pretty much by definition, in range of the carrier to shoot back at.
Hell, as far as I know, they could put literal anti-satellite missiles on carrier aircraft and just fly straight up and shoot down targeting satellites. I don't know if that's something they're currently planning/practicing, but I don't know if any reason they couldn't.
Despite which US carriers are frequently "sunk" during war games.
All that protection didn't stop the Swedish diesal-electric HSMS Gotland seamlessly torp'ing the Ronald Reagan in 2005.
France pulled a similar score 2015, Canada "got" a UK carrier in 2007, IIRC even Australia's taken out a US ship or two in various fun ways over the years.
Diesel-electric subs seem to be the bane of carriers. I'm aware of Dutch, Portuguese and Swedish subs that have "sunk" carriers during exercises, and often together with a significant part of their fleet.
But I do wonder what the starting conditions for those exercises were. The sub's underwater range is limited (although Swedish subs seem to be better than others) and the have to come up every once in a while, at which point they're vulnerable. There's plenty of places to hide near coasts, but I can imagine that on the open ocean, it might be a lot harder for a sub to get close enough.
Carriers are not unstoppable super fortresses, which is why the americans have like 11 of the things, and it's definitely important not to become over confident after years without serious naval challenges, but it's also reasonable to consider all of the mitigating factors involved in large scale military exercises.
I haven't studied the HSMS Gotland incident in any great detail, but just in general for wargames, ships are required to be in certain locations at certain times, stay inside sea lanes, use transponders, ignore certain other ships and in general not completely mess up the existing sea commerce traffic that is trying to go past the exercise area.
If your carrier group is literally 1000 miles away from any piece of land and you have full authorization to sink anything that looks even slightly suspicious, it probably becomes considerably more difficult to sneak up and torpedo a carrier.
But yes, carriers will get sunk, modern warfare is in large part attritional, but if you send out, dunno, $100m worth of subs and sink a $10b carrier, that's a great return on investment, but doesn't help you in the slightest if you're now out of submarines and the enemy sails two more carriers into range.
I'm geting fairly old now and I have no recollection of ever thinking such a thing ...
> but if you send out, dunno, $100m worth of subs and sink a $10b carrier,
Even better if you can send out $80m worth of torpedoes attached to cheap arse unmanned drone delivery units all embedded within a 10x magnitude swarm of cheap arse drone units that have no torpedoes.
High chance of penetration, good chance there'll be some left over to confound and confuse the next carriers.
Absolutely that keeps the high end gear standing well off from tight spaces.
Yeah, but what's stopping the side with carriers from just attacking your torpedo launchers? That's literally the entire point of aircraft carriers, you get to attack things while the ship itself is out of range of retaliation.
If we're postulating magical "ai" attack drones loitering off the coast, what's stopping the americans from sending in their own fleet of equally magical ai attack drones to blow up all the defenders and then sail the carriers up?
Also, again, you'd have to know exactly where the carriers even are, right now $80m worth of torpedo drones would cover like .01% of china's coastal waters.
> Yeah, but what's stopping the side with carriers from just attacking your torpedo launchers?
Numbers game, what's the maximum number of targets that can be covered in a window, the cost of dealing with non torpedo launch capable platforms is the same as the cost of taking out an actual torpedo carrying launcher - the overwhelming threshold is something that is tested in games, of course.
> If we're postulating magical "ai" attack drones loitering off the coast
I'm not, I'm looking at a reasonable near term extrapolation of what China already has and tested.
> what's stopping the americans from sending in their own fleet of equally magical ai attack drones to blow up all the defenders
The usual constraints of hunting and finding in vast area
> Also, again, you'd have to know exactly where the carriers even are
Well, approximately .. and that's what China provides to Iran via sat coverage.
> right now $80m worth of torpedo drones would cover like .01% of china's coastal waters.
I thought the carriers were off Iran and staged well back? I can't see them being as far back as China myself, but perhaps you have some curious reason for wanting to spread them out some place far far away from the conflict. I have no knowledge of that, obviously.
> The usual constraints of hunting and finding in vast area
So how are you hunting and finding the carriers in the first place? You can't have it both ways.
> I thought the carriers were off Iran and staged well back? I can't see them being as far back as China myself, but perhaps you have some curious reason for wanting to spread them out some place far far away from the conflict. I have no knowledge of that, obviously.
We're talking about a hypothetical US carrier war against china. Is there something interesting to talk about with regards to iran trying to defend against carriers?
It's 2026, PRC has GEOsync ISR (optic+SAR) with persistent coverage of Pacific and beyond. Combined with 500+ other ISR sats, they basically have full coverage in relevant theatres, with hand offs for tracking/queuing/targeting. There's really nowhere for surface combatants to evade/hide anymore vs PRC tier adversary. US doesn't have ASAT capabilities to shootdown beyond LEO. Without ranting too much, highend C4ISR is basically massive enabler/coordination force multiplier, technically it's feasible to synergize highend C4ISR and upgraded COTs low end drones swarms to kill carrier groups, either via mathematically guaranteed saturation salvos or push A2D2 past max carrier standoff range, i.e. no viable sorties without entering no escape zone. Of course tier1 response is still hypersonics (including drones), but theoretically the techstack now exists for low end loitering swarms (well relative to PRC low end) to also do so for much less.
This is just nonsense. An unmanned platform that can stay on station for a significant time and strike at hundreds of miles and have enough payload to deal significant damage and be fast enough to arrive in meaningful time and somehow survive approaching a carrier group (those planes have guns, remember? it's not just SM-6 spam) cannot be cheap because of hard physical constraints like the energy required to stay in the air. There are no such "COTS" platforms, DJI quads don't cut it across multiple dimensions.
Clearly I'm not talking about hobbyist quads. We're talking shaheed tier loitering munitions, which is completely COTS (i.e. moped piston engines and for Iran sanctioned electronics stripped from washing machines). That's what PRC acquired 1M units of except with indigenous PRC supply chain which can also enhance Iran's D- execution, i.e. add resilient barrage EW proof mesh networking (all commoditized by now), more efficient hfe propulsion to extend ~2500km to ~4000km with some planform improvements. Synergize with high end orbital C4ISR = any carrier fleet within 3000km = swarm loitering no escape zone = as in carriers (must) bolt in opposite direction and drone will geometrically catchup. 3000km also basically max carrier sortie / stand off range with tanking, i.e. functionally A2D2 to push carriers to effectively 0 sortie range.
It's more or less simple VLS and CVW magazine math to figure out total carrier group saturation numbers. This also assuming prioritizing carrier survival... i.e. CVWs may not even be geometrically recoverable if carriers has to GTFO.
Napkin math hypothetical, if a stacked carrier group with 3DDGs quad packed antiair and CVWs where most tasking dedicated to shooting down drones... PRC needs to launch ~3000 enhanced shaheed136 tier moped munitions to fully deplete magazine and saturate. Considering PRC procurement likely getting them at fraction price of Iran (i.e. 10-20k, remember Iran has sanction tax), this probably actually cheaper than PRC hypersonic salvos. We're talking sub 100m swarms that effectively defeat carriers or at minimum draw billions in interceptors. VS 100m tier1 hypersonic ashm salvos that can do so in 1/20th time.
The TLDR is knowing where carriers are is theoretically a solved problem, and knowing where carriers are enables conemps/ops vs those who do not, i.e. if Iran can somehow launch 10000 drones, simply having shit C4ISR means they can't use same tactic.
You keep saying "loitering" and then use one way ranges. If "loitering", where does the time on station come from? Are the drones refuelled? Do they land or do they just crash when they run out of fuel? Or is "loitering" just as a buzzword devoid of meaning?
No, prop drones don't "geometrically catchup". Shahed's extreme range achieved by flying really slow, the top speed (which they don't sustain constantly to conserve fuel) is about 185kph, for the maximum flight time of about 13 hours. US carriers officially can sustain 60kph indefinitely, and in practice they can go faster. That means on a straight line a Shahed can only gain 1600km in the absolute best scenario. In reality it's much less, because launching takes time and the average speed is slower.
The capabilities that you're describing are a fantasy.
Loitering just means extended endurance, i.e. piston engine that can stay on station for 20+ hours / enhanced range of ~4500km, but can also function as attritable max range munitions. They're loitering because definitionally they can loiter, especially with datalink for midcourse corrections (again PRC specialty). It's basically value engineered TLAMs (which you know, loiters) on props instead of turbofan, where props trade speed advantage for range, but speed completely negated by massive A2D2 no escape zone because props still significantly faster than any surface fleet.
>geometrically catchup
A carrier at 3000km and GTFO sprint opposite direction at max speed, i.e. 30knots / 60km, will have prop drones closing speed/gap at 120km per hour. AKA intercept time distance around ~24 hours at 4500km. Hence why I said ENHANCED shaheeds, i.e. swap propulsion with 30% more efficient heavy fuel engines, increase aspect ratio and improved shaheed basically makes carriers operating within 3000kms unable to reach ~4500km endurance no escape zone. This within the platforms SWAP potential, technically can also just swap payload for fuel but HFE and planform improvements simply more efficient.
3000km also VASTLY optimistic scenario for carriers and limits of prop planform/SWAP potential, it's functionally carrier at 0 sortie scrap metal range. Realistically carriers max effective standoff is ~2200km, at which point effective sorties down to 20% (rest tanking/support). So no, mathematically, carriers cannot fastandfurious straight line out of this, and definitely not surface fleet escorts. The capabilities I'm describing is pedestrian for PRC. Unless one thinks PRC cannot build a better shaheed than Iran who literally built them in caves with box of scraps.
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.
> 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.
Yeah, except missiles are better at it and the navy has spent the last 30+ years innovating ways to defeat missile attacks. What exactly do you think is the difference between a "drone" and a missile here?
> Once the big valuable vessel is found, it can be reasonably tracked from orbit.
Satellites orbit. They move. They have a limited area they can see at any given time and that area is constantly shifting.
Something with the budget of the US Navy can do the math to figure out where the satellite can look and then move. If your sat is orbiting the earth every 4 hours, a carrier group could be 100+ miles away by the time it comes back around.
And, even if you manage to get a satellite picture that shows that at 8:32pm the carrier group was at lat 32/long 42; you can't exactly just open up your missiles and program that in and sink a carrier.
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.
Both the US and China have newer more advanced capabilities than a 50 year old system...
> [SOSUS] was the primary cuing system that antisubmarine forces used to localize and potentially destroy targets for over forty years, but secrecy largely kept that fact from the fleet. The lack of strong fleet support was a factor when budget cuts after the Cold War fell heavily on the surveillance program.
Driving cars down every street in every advanced country to take photos seems ridiculous, but Google did it (StreetView) and the US DoD has more money than Google...
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.
> 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.
Why not just put a nuke in their instead? Like, how is this supposed to work, china just has a totally not suspicious container ship sitting in every major port not moving or carrying cargo or letting anyone inspect it and nobody notices that its full of weapons???
> 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.
If there's a state of war, you don't get to just sail your container ship next to a carrier, that's uh, not how that works.
Like, if this was a tom clancy novel maybe china could do some kind of super clever first strike where they attack a bunch of carriers at the start of a war with their super secret attack ships, but at that point why don't they just sneak their ninja assassins on to the carriers and take them over for the glory of china.
> How is this supposed to work, china just has a totally not suspicious container ship sitting in every major port not moving or carrying cargo or letting anyone inspect it and nobody notices that its full of weapons?
Actually, exactly like that. It looks completely normal. Container ships are super massive, and generally containers are only searched after they're offloaded, before leaving the port. So they don't get searched if they remain on the vehicle.
> you don't get to just sail your container ship next to a carrier
> Actually, exactly like that. It looks completely normal. Container ships are super massive, and generally containers are only searched after they're offloaded, before leaving the port. So they don't get searched if they remain on the vehicle.
And nobody is searching them during a state of war?
> A lot of drones have surprisingly long range.
I guarantee a missile launched from a f35 launched from a carrier has a much longer range.
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?
I think you're imagining 'drones' as 'small quadcopters with hand grenades' as deployed in Ukraine. To be sure even a large swarm of these would struggle against an aircraft carrier, but you need to also consider things like Shahed drones that can carry 1-200kg of munitions and are much cheaper than missiles. Depending on where a conflict takes place, I can see a large number of small disposable drones being used to overwhelm targeting systems while a moderate number of medium drones with a serious payload carry out the actual attack.
Also, while you're completely right about the ruggedness of the ship itself, image recognition electronics are dirt cheap nowadays. You can buy COTS camera-IR modules from under $100 and train them on whatever you want. If I were opposing an enemy that had carriers while I had only drones, I'd target specific parts of the superstructure rather tha the hull.
lightning up with mushroom clouds anyway
I think you are wildly overestimating the appetite for using tactical nuclear weapons. Whoever deploys those first in an offensive capacity is going to gain instant pariah status. The US is torching a lot of its traditional alliances as is, deploying a nuclear weapon in anger would result in international criminal status and probable internal collapse soon after. nor do I see any likelihood of China using them against Taiwan since that would undermine the entire purpose of a military undertaking.
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).
nothing would prevent putting a nuke on the drone, and making a it a tactical nuke delivery system. you can have them as big or small as you want, and in air, on the surface, or under the water.
you are applying arbitrary constraints to a thing thats just "put an rc controller on it"
ukrainian drones are doing something like 700 miles to hit the oil ports in primorsk. its not the 2500 miles that a missile might do for hitting diego garcia, but nothing says you could get one to. after all, a b2 bomber can go on long flights. put controller on it, and control it via a satellite, and the b2 becomes a drone
In the navy they call long-range underwater drones a "torpedo". It has been assumed to be a primary threat against ships for a century. Modern navies have many systems purpose-built to deal with that threat.
Plus these things have a range of about 50 miles. It's not like if you are a carrier floating in the pacific, you will be swarmed with a thousand torpedoes. To launch one requires a submarine, and while one may hide, it's not so easy to penetrate the defenses of a carrier group in the middle of the pacific.
Ukraine has had success against mostly unarmored and a few lightly armored Russian ships (and let's face it, these are small ships compared to carriers) in the black sea because the front lines are there and they can launch from a port, travel 5 miles, and hit one of these ships. That's a completely different situation.
Relatively low cost, numbers and sheer persistance.
Post WWII US has always struggled with asymmetric wars that can't be solved with military dominance and rarely addressed on deeper issues.
This current Iran conflict is reminiscent of the Taliban in Afghanistan, who survived 20 years in a frozen conflict with the US before taking back control of the country when the US withdrew.
The betting is strong on Iran still standing when Trump gets bored and carried off stage.
> we're talking about the part of the war that is unrelated to the weapon systems involved.
I'm talking about asymmetric strategies that can be used by a less armed actor to stand off and occassionally clearly best a better resourced actor.
You know, wooden wing hand carved swarms Vs floating fortress cities with orbiting overwatch.
The Taliban, NVA, and likely Iran will be future examples of mice left still standing after the biggest cat on the planet failed to move them on or wipe them out.
That's like equating a cruise missile with an aerial drone (which is nonsensical).
Now I'm not saying defense against UUVs is impossible, but plenty of defenses against torpedoes don't work against them.
Note also that part of the approach of drone warfare is sheer quantity. Stopping 1 may be trivial, stopping 5 may be doable, but stopping 20 simultaneous ones might already be too hard to do consistently and repeatedly.
A drone of this type and a cruise missile are literally the same type of thing, they just occupy different points on the capability spectrum.
You assert "plenty of defenses against torpedoes don't work against [UUV]". Based on what? What is this hypothetical property of a UUV that is superior to a torpedo?
A UUV with sufficient range and warhead is going to be big and heavy. Long-range torpedos weigh 2 tons each for a good reason. Calling something a "drone" or "UUV" does not imbue it with magic physics. It still has to cross some long span of water with enough speed and a large enough warhead and a guidance package capable of finding the target.
What kind of vessel are you going to use to bring these UUV within range of the target? 20 torpedos would be almost the entire magazine depth of an attack submarine. Surface combat ships carry even fewer.
You seem to be ignoring all evidence from how modern naval systems actually work when discussing your hypothetical UUVs.
> A drone of this type and a cruise missile are literally the same type of thing, they just occupy different points on the capability spectrum.
You have a "this type" in your mind. I do not. Even then you're wrong. A drone can loiter and is thus not "literally the same type of thing" as a cruise missile or torpedo.
> What is this hypothetical property of a UUV that is superior to a torpedo? [...] It still has to cross some long span of water with enough speed and a large enough warhead and a guidance package capable of finding the target.
The huge advantage of drones (besides relatively low cost) is not how they cover the distance, but their flexibility in getting to the target, striking with high precision. An underwater drone can technically even circle the target before striking it at its weakest point (although this isn't going to work well if the target is at full speed).
> What kind of vessel are you going to use to bring these UUV within range of the target?
Bigger UUVs. Note that 'within range of the target' is also much higher for UUVs versus torpedoes, easily 160km for UUVs. Note that ambushes with these UUVs may also be an option, if they can loiter or just lie on the sea floor.
Are you oblivious to the fact that cruise missiles can loiter? You are making a distinction without a difference.
All of this reads like you are not familiar with modern military capabilities.
Longer ranger UUVs is equivalent to "even bigger torpedoes". Do you not understand the subject matter? There is a lot of evidence in this post that you do not. You are making up magical scenarios where your UUVs have properties that can't be replicated by any other real system that is literally supposed to execute the same mission.
> Are you oblivious to the fact that cruise missiles can loiter?
At which point we more commonly call them drones or loitering munition. Even using a broad definition, 95% of what technically could fall under cruise missiles is of the traditional non-loitering kind. Same goes for torpedoes.
> Longer ranger UUVs is equivalent to "even bigger torpedoes".
The term UUV covers an enormously diverse set of devices, from fullblown autonomous nuclear subs to tiny industrial inspection drones.
Narrow-mindedly handwaving new technology into bins you're already familiar with and approaching them as such is exactly the type of cognitive failure that lies at the basis of the phrase "generals are always fighting the last war".
Since you are being willfully ignorant, haven't properly addressed the answers I gave you and are throwing out ad hominems I will not spend any more time on you.
And what platform do you imagine is launching these dozens of torp-- drones?
This is the thing everyone fails to understand about carrier warfare: anything you can use to attack the carrier can be outranged by the carrier because it can just employ the same weapons but from airplanes that fly closer to you.
What is the carrier for if the jets it carries cannot stop swarms of drones?
The only thing I can come up with is “war crimes”, but, as Iran pointed out, if you can afford an aircraft carrier, you have trillions of dollars of easily hit civilian targets, so you pretty much automatically lose if the other side retaliates in kind.
> What is the carrier for if the jets it carries cannot stop swarms of drones?
What makes you think they can't?
Ignoring some kind of dedicated anti-drone missile systems that they could equip (if you're just hitting drones you could probably carry like 500 tiny missiles or something, who knows), you can just go and destroy whatever platform is carrying the drones, since your carrier aircraft is pretty much going to outrange it by definition.
I meant the carriers striking range. They’re invincible but useless.
Iran pushed our carrier group far outside of striking range without midair refueling (very dangerous to do in an active war zone). This is because they can blow holes in the ships from the shore.
In the Vietnam War (“the resistance war against america to save the nation” as the vietnamese term it officially), American carriers were stationed 90mi off the coast at point yankee because there were not sufficient anti ship capability. This resulted in the horrific pounding of the country (Operation Linebacker I, II for example). Things have changed (for the better).
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.
An F-35 was confirmed successfully targeted and hit by Iranian Air Defenses.
The pilot was confirmed (by the DoW) to have been injured.
The plane in question seems to have been able to make its way back to friendly territory.
Every other detail about this incident is cloaked in fog of war with Vietnam-era narrative stealth technology and semantic evasive maneuvering. Since it didn't crash in enemy territory the Americans claim it wasn't 'downed' by the enemy. But did the F-35 actually land? like on its own wheels on an actual runway or was it a 'hard landing' (i.e. crash) as NPR's sources claim. Did the pilot eject? What is his condition? What is the condition of the airframe?
>No US ship was to my knowledge even hit by a drone/missle.
Again if one was, would we every know? Would we be told? The f-35 incident has been broadly emblematic of this entire war. Lot of bluster and downplaying and covering up losses. Its like Russia in the Ukraine War; Frequently having to check with Iranian sources to corroborate claims made by the Americans. Whether it is with satellite imagery, or on the true status of the Hormuz or control of Iranian airspace.
The triumphant US have succeeded in reversing the pre-War Iranian offer to give up HEU and the pre-War state of the Strait being open to traffic.
They have also very possibly succeeded in upending the strength of petro dollar that has been bouying up US economic dominance for much of the past 50 years.
Like Vietnam showed, it doesn't matter how much better numbers than the enemy you have, because kill counts don't win wars.
Iran is still the one closer to achieving its objectives (survival for the regime), because they don't need to do much for that to happen. Apply pressure to the Gulf states and global energy and fertiliser markets and at some point, the US will cave. The American public will not tolerate high gas and everything related prices for long, and especially with an election coming up, there will be significant pressure.
US/Israel's war goals are basically unachievable. They can't enforce regime change on a regime backed by millions of fanatical loyal men, with defence and terrain on their side. They can certainly try a land invasion, but that would take years and cost a lot in casualties.
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.
Eventually, defense capabilities against drones may catch up and change the equation, but this is all research at this point.
Your definition of "complete dominance" is different from most people's.
If you completely dominate your enemy, you prevent them from being able to affect the situation. Iran is maintaining a blockade over a major shipping lane that the USA does not want them to. The USA's inability to prevent this shows that they are not "completely dominating" Iran.
No, "air dominance" is a well recognized term, it means you can fly your planes basically anywhere you want, to take out whatever target you want, without risk from AA. They are using it exactly how anyone familiar with warfare terminology would understand it.
"Air supremacy" would be dominance of the air such that enemy cannot effectively interfere. "Air superiority" is the lesser level (enemy interference is not prohibitive).
Air supremacy (using your useful NATO definition) is not stopping Iran from flying drones and missiles. I don't know if that therefore contradicts the US/Israeli forces having Air Supremacy, or if Air Supremacy itself is an outdated term because it doesn't allow for the kind of drone bombardment we see now.
Either way, it's not "complete dominance" which is where we started from ;)
> P.S. air dominance in Iran is meaningless in this conflict. Read e.g. the blog post I linked to for context.
It's meaningless now.
If the US, for some reason, decided to say, "For each drone or missile that you fire at one of your Arab neighbors or Israel, we launch an old-fashioned B52 raid on your industry or infrastructure. Come to the negotiating table." and actually carried out that threat, well, there would be nothing the Iranians would be able to do about it.
That's not the case because of the currently scattered nature of US leadership, but it is a possible contingency that the Iranian government has to take into account. There's a reason they're not actively targeting US warships in the region.
Bombing civilian infrastructure never works like this. As we saw in The Blitz (and in Vietnam, and in Ukraine), it just draws the bombed together, unifying them and hardening their resolve.
Can you use an example that doesn't prove the exact opposite?
Bombing absolutely worked in Vietnam so much that the south didn't actually lose the war until 2 years after the USA left. The war becoming a political nightmare is why the USA left not because the horrendously effective bombing stopped working.
Ukraine is really weird to put in here because Russia has fail to establish any effective air superiority so I can't make heads or tails why you put it in here.
As for the Blitz is was absolutely effective vs the British but USA factories and supply shipments were largely out of reach of the Axis.
Add in the fact that the people of Iran are largely opposed to being governed by a Muslim theocracy (most of the population is not Muslim) I'm frankly struggling to see how you get any of your viewpoints.
That is a unique view of what happened in Vietnam.
But let's look at a more modern example that makes your case: Syria. The US starved that country, seizing the food and oil, funding/arming terror groups - not just the kurds but also Al Nusra and other islamic terror groups, invading portions of the country and placing military bases there to give air support to terror operations and maintain control of the oil wells, blowing up pipelines, for over a decade. Finally after years of starvation and hyperinflation, the government collapsed as the generals were bribed by Qatar (or the Qataris were just intermediaries, we don't know) to lay down their arms and let the Jolani regime take over. When you are convinced your nation doesn't have a future, suitcases of cash and exit visas to mansions in London do wonders.
So yeah, you can punish a nation so much that it is easy to take over.
But, can the world survive 10 years of the straight of Hormuz being closed? I doubt it. Syria was a small country and it held out for a decade. Sure, it had help from Russia and China, but so does Iran now. When the US was strangling Syria, we already controlled the oil and food producing regions of the country. But there is no such arrangement in Iran, and Syria was not able to close off a major shipping lane like Iran can.
So I am skeptical that the US can outlast Iran and inflict enough misery on them to overthrow the region before this Iran adventure is brought to a close by world oil prices and US domestic political unrest.
You're suggesting that bombing civilian infrastructure will cause the Iranians to surrender (or to concede negotiating points in order to stop the bombing).
My point is that this doesn't work - the British under The Blitz famously had "Blitz Spirit" that was all about enduring the bombing and showing the Germans that they couldn't be beaten like this. The Vietnamese did not try to stop the bombing by surrendering or negotiating, and neither have the Ukrainians; again, if anything, they are more unified and more resolute because of the Russians attacks on their infrastructure.
Can you give me a single example where prolonged bombing of civilian infrastructure has brought a country to the negotiating table? Or made them surrender?
Even if it doesn't cause them to "surrender" - I still don't know what the point of this whole "limited operation" is - it would effectively set back Iran's ability to operate a nuclear materials enrichment program, among other things.
I'd also like to point out that German raids on Britain, American raids on Vietnam, and Russian raids on Ukraine are not exactly comparable to the sort of bombing raids carried out by the Allies (particularly the US and UK) in Germany and Japan in scale.
If anything, the Iranians are trying the same strategy the Nazis did with the V1 and V2 with their drones and missiles: use them as a weapon of stochastic terror against the population of the region and on the occasional industrial target.
Again, as I replied above, Japan was nuked. There were 2 bombs. That is not "sustained bombing". Also, they were losing the conventional war and US troops had set foot on Japanese soil.
The Germans surrendered because millions of Russian troops invaded their capital city. The bombing had nothing to do with it (and I would argue, even hardened their resolve against surrendering).
If US destroys Iran it will be the dominate energy supplier for the next 100 years. Iran will be in shambles for 50 years.
If Iran surrenders US will be the dominate energy supplier for the next 30 years. Iran will be in shambles for 10 years.
The former would cause a worldwide depression but the clear winner of that is the US by a very large margin. If Iran wants to destroy itself and its neighbors US would be happy with the untold billions that would flow into the country and its energy infra investments in venezuela. All the wealth of middle east would leave and not be reinvested as now it's risky to invest in the ME.
Iran has the choice of a deal US likes or to make the middle east a wasteland for Israel to dominate for generations while US grows to a power that is hard to comprehend.
The only thing that has to happen for US to win is not surrender to a country with no military whose only threat they can make is to harm everyone else in the world but the US.
You completely oversell Iran capability, I guarantee you that f35 would go down in a war with a country with decent anti air such as Russia or China.
Iran never invested in such technology, they put all their money in drones and ballistic missiles which were extremely effective, we are a month in and the strait is still close.
Their strategy was never to try to sink us ships, it was disruption in the region to extend the conflict which was again very successful.
I can’t decide if the economy has bifurcated or if these inflation stats are totally bogus.
Diesel is almost $7/gallon here. All the stuff we buy (food, services, electronics) are up 30-100% since the beginning of last year, but federal inflation stats claim 3%.
Gas is certainly bifurcated. The west coast is paying up to $5.80 and Texas/midwest are paying $3.20 or so. NY and New England is paying a lot, but from Virginia on down, they are paying less. All the midwest is paying close to texas prices except Illinois, which is paying California prices.
Some of that is differences in taxes, but some of it is due to getting gas from different sources. If we had a pipeline from Texas to CA, there would be less bifurcation.
In terms of food being bifurcated, that too is happening, but to a smaller degree.
Basically the entire West coast is suffering from high inflation.
For the national 3% average to hold, for the low end of my range (30%) to hold on the west coast, the rest of the country would have to be suffering from deflation.
The blockade is like a nuclear bomb detonated on all countries. 30% of World's oil supply is at risk. Not to mention critical elements needed for semiconductor production. Even the US is suffering passively because of this. Only saving grace for US is to restore navigation in the straits. Quicker it does it the quicker we can stop hell that'll be unleashed on the World. You really don't want to be responsible for 30% of Earth starving and dying of hunger because critical fertilizers never reached the masses for food production.
The fertilizer and helium shortages are unfortunate, but expensive gas has ~ doubled global demand for EVs. That’s an ecological miracle, given the idiocy of the US government. That’s probably where the good news ends though.
If spent on humanitarian aid shortfalls, the funds wasted by just the US on this war could have saved 87M lives:
To put that in relative terms: WWII killed ~85M globally; 2/3 of them were civilians. So that’s killed 150% as many as the war crimes committed by Stalin, Hitler and the Japanese occupation of China combined.
I don’t mean to minimize the famine that’s definitely coming later this year.
IIRC Israeli special forces knocked out almost all of Iran's advanced radar systems last summer right before the nuclear program strikes so to say the F35 dominated is somewhat disingenuous.
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.
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.
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.
We were burning a year worth of global patriot manufacturing capacity every day at the beginning of the war. Math says we slowed down and are also running out.
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.
I can't see the interceptor burn through being so low. Doctrine is 2-4 missiles per ballistic target. I've know the OSINT kids have a hard time with something like this since it's all classified and compared to Ukraine much harder to get visual confirmation, but I suspect Patriot use much higher. Hopefully the US has been using more of the PAC-2 than PAC-3 but they may have not been that discreet.
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.
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.
I think people are pointing out how little it actually takes to wage this war against Iran and that there are basically zero costs to the USA to do so. A classic "political exhaustion" requires some degree of meaningful hardship on the USA and a slight gas price increase just isn't enough.
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 mean it's literally beholden to the USA congress and it's most meaningful parts are made in the USA. There is a reason why they fall in line with every USA export control and restriction.
If ASML is Europe's then I'd say all of Europe is the USA's.
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.
Gas is Texas is not that much cheaper than national average and will hit $4 soon if this “war” continues. I have several friends in Texas who are livid about gas prices.
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.
Take a peek at last year's budget for missile production. It's amazingly small, and the production capacity is limited as well. RTX makes both Patriot and SM2/3 missiles, and production is so low that the Navy is going to be using the Patriot in its VLS launchers.
Lockheed makes THAAD, around 100/year. That's nothing. A veritable drop in the bucket.
PAC-3 production MIGHT hit 650 this year, with a goal of 2000 per annum by 2033!!!
SM-6 is about 300/year, and they're hoping to get to 500/year by roughly the same timeframe.
SM-3 is even lower at maybe 75/year. The USN has just never prioritized filling their weapons magazines.
It's hard to know what missiles were expended in the current Iran War, but you can figure out how many were purchased over the years since it's public info. Then subtract what's been used for training, fighting the Houthis in Yemen etc.
Before the war started, total purchases of all PAC-3 were approximately 2500. Some of these were used in training, some donated to Ukraine, and some were part of FMS.
Approximately 500 SM-3 missiles have been delivered. Approximately 1100 SM-6 missiles have been delivered.The majority of both the SM-3 and SM-6 are used by the USN, though some allies have made small purchases of both.
Unclassified estimates have Iran launching over 3000 ballistic missiles and 4500 drones. US policy for BMs is two missiles each. Not all of these would have been engaged by the US (Israeli systems such as Arrow etc would be tasked with missiles targeting Israel, though Israel also has Patriot through FMS). But it's easy to see where 3000 to 4000 interceptor missiles could have been consumed.
Now add in what the USN burned through in the Red Sea when the Houthis started targeting shipping and it's easy to be concerned about magazine depth.
And this is just interceptors. It doesn't count Tomahawks, JAASM, etc.
I don't think the US will become too war exhausted for another war. We just got out of one and we're back in one again. Taiwan would get politicians and people fired up.
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 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.
> 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.
Not to nitpick, but “looked good on paper” was an euphemism for “the powers that be think its doable”. Amd yes, yiu are right: Trump surrounded himself with “loyalist” this time that won’t go against hime like in the previous administration, but with the very undesirable effect of amplifying the echo chamber he lives in.
And like someone said in this thread, lots of hubris.
I am no expert on Iran, but all documentaries that I’ve seen about this reach the same conclusion: you don’t invade Iran using ground forces.
An invasion likely would turn into a quagmire, but what keeps regime proponents eternally hopeful is that unlike Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, etc, Iran has a robust political system. The dictatorship notwithstanding, it has a vibrant parliament and, by global standards, a decent electoral system. The Ayatollah rules by following the maxim, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. If you could excise the Revolutionary Guard (a big if), you wouldn't necessarily need to change the government or its institutions. The existing liberal and moderate factions could quickly fill the vacuum, and would be happy to do so. You wouldn't get a pliant Iran, but that's for the better.
So by invasion the idea would be to rapidly, physically excise the apparatus the Ayatollahs use to maintain control. The structure and identity of that group is well known. It's a large group, and you couldn't catch all the leaders, but so long as you can stop their ability to enforce their rule through execution, you give the rest of the country time to shut them out of the institutions. In theory just weeks.
The problem is the very thing that makes regime change a plausibly good idea--a stable polity and modern, liberal-ish institutions--is the very thing that could result in failure. The Ayatollahs understood that a fragile, backwards system would be a weakness to their rule. Their military and bureaucracy are professional; they know how to follow orders, without being micromanaged, and even if everyone wants regime change, there's a huge collective action problem.
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 estimates I’ve seen say they lost/used 33% of their conventional capacity, 33% was rendered inoperable but recoverable.
I’d guess with the ceasefire, they’re probably back to 40-50% online.
The nuclear capability story is even worse: they were mostly mothballed prewar, suffered partial refinement damage and minimal stockpile loss. Refinement will be back online sometime in the next few years (unless this is a forever war), with weapons following shortly after that.
> 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.
> 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.
So .. ICBM nuclear exchange? Or are we suddenly expecting a large conventional war between nuclear powers in which both sides decide not to bother with them?
Military planners may believe it to be inevitable, the interesting question to chase is why they think that and who the aggressor would be and in response to what.
That aside, it would likely be unconvential and ground breaking in several respects, eg: likely the first conflict with a large initial space based element, each country wanting to blind the other, with each having large constellations of satellites.
Killing farout geostationary spy sats wouldn't be visible .. but fragging the entire LEO space with "sufficient shrapnel" to initiate a cascading sat failure should(?) make for an interesting global skyshow.
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.
The days of China manufacturing cheap junk is long past. These same arguments were made against Japan. Look at a BYD EV and it will have a fit and finish comparable to any US manufacturer. In aviation, they're catching up quickly to the US, and are arguably ahead of Europe and Russia.
I suppose visible is subjective. But they are also key component and raw material suppliers for essentially everything high value as well. The west simply does not have the heavy industrial or resource extraction base to account for anything else to be the case. Every time I’ve looked into literally any product China is at the start of the supply chain if lot much further into it.
And yes, I am alleging outright fraud and misrepresentation when it comes to stuff supposedly required to be entirely domestically sourced due to national security. If China froze all exports to the US and its allies, the US manufacturing base would simply cease to exist in rather short order. The China link might be 35 steps down the supply chain and buried 4 countries deep - but it’s almost always there.
The military is concerned about that and developing alternatives where there is real risk. The supply chain is global and china too has areas where they are missing something critical.
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.
> 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."
He says basing is a problem, but doesn't mention that we have answers to basing problems. He says F-35 production doesn't scale. Then he says F-35 production doesn't need to scale.
The F-35 is a multi-role jet. It wasn't built for what it's doing in Iran, it's just that it can do it. There are other older jets doing similar things in Iran just fine. Compared to past jets we lose fewer of them, so that has to be factored into the overall cost.
If we say, ok, let's just put fewer of them on this base to reduce concentration. They are still there. He didn't get rid of the F-35s, he didn't get rid of his argument that bases are vulnerable. So what is the point? Now if a successful attack gets through and takes out some F-35s....you now have less spare F-35s to do the critical mission you wanted, because you put fewer there to start with.
We have other solutions for this problem, but in peace time it's more efficient to concentrate things. The nature of escalation tends to mean you have some time to reorganize before the real battle comes.
We're still going to have F-35s _and_ drones _and_ missiles. If the enemy has anti-missile and anti-drone defenses, it won't necessarily be the drones and missiles taking those out.
> "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.
January 2023. Specifically focused on an invasion of Taiwan. And the analysis report hardly mentions drones. Not saying it isn't useful info, but it is in essence not much more than an educated (but outdated) guess. Using terms like "showed that" is thus highly unwarranted.
> 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.
You make that sound as if it is not that much, even though the losses (were theorized to have) occurred within a matter of weeks. If anything, it strengthens the point that F-35 production is going to be inadequate in a longer-lasting conflict.
There are semi- and fully submersible variants on the way, that can stay underwater for prolonged periods of time! Sea Baby is growing into quite a few different things over the months.
The submersible drones are quite slow, and require significant support from external sensor platforms. They're useful for defending or denying constrained areas but they can't do much to protect a Chinese invasion fleet near Taiwan.
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.
> 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.
Unlikely that pilots would work for drones in a fight with China over the pacific, the jamming and electronic warfare environment would make remote piloting nearly impossible, which is why CCA efforts are looking at onboard AI piloted aircraft. Even in Ukraine the EW environment is so harsh that FPV drones have resorted to using physical fiber optic cable connections so the drones cant be jammed out of the sky.
Any sort of drone that has the range, speed(shaheds only go ~180 km/h), and survivability to last in or near Chinese airspace is going to be expensive and complicated.
I'm using pilots in the loosest sense, it wouldn't be FPV. Regardless, there is a significant skill requirement.
The lesson from Ukraine and Iran is that 180km/h is fine if you have enough of them. If you have a Jetson Nano and comms link on each one they could be a real PITA to intercept.
Toward the end of WW2, even though the US and UK were turning German cities into rubble, the manufacture of german planes was still so great that empty planes sat around in warehouses because they could not find pilots to fly them.
That is why autonomous drones are very promising, because for manned flight, you will run out of pilots long, long, long, before you run out of planes. I don't think it's ever happened, that a nation with a large air force ran out of planes before running out of pilots.
So complaining about manufacturing capacity of planes is a bit goofy. I'd worry about surge capacity of things that are not gated by human operators. And only in the context of a regional war of choice overseas, since we'd just nuke anyone who tried to invade us at home.
Once you understand these constraints, you can better interpret why US production is allocated the way it is.
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.
The pacific theater is a way different combat environment then Ukraine. The ranges involved and china's IADS is just a whole different beast. The cheap drones that we have been seeing in Ukraine and Iran are just not as useful in a war against china. Cheap drones don't have the range or survivability to penetrate china's airspace or hit moving targets(most go to fixed gps coordinates), this is a job for stand off munitions and manned stealth aircraft. There's no current UAV or CCA that exists that has the capabilities needed to replace manned aircraft for the majority of missions that would need to be flown. Wargaming shows that the b21 and f47 as well as stand off munitions are the workhorses. Although something like a Barracuda-500 seems very interesting but again its like 10x the cost of the drones being used in the Ukraine theater and its production lines are just now being set up.
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.
Yes, and surge requirements are generally quadruple of the normal runtime, but with lead-time. Still, no way we can train pilots at a rate of even 1 pilot every 1.5 days. And imagine the lead times on that!
I see what the author is saying and I agree to some extent, but I think the F35 is mostly irrelevant in terms of the argument being made. I think it is needed and does it's job as a deterrent. The F35 means that that no one can really control the skies against the US. Iran was considered to have fairly robust air defenses and that was all but destroyed within days. So the F35, as the author states, is performing well along with the rest of the United States Airforce.
The issue the US has is that they really do not want to lose US soldiers in this war and because of that they are unwilling to fully occupy or destroy Iran. And the reason they don't want to do that beyond all the normal reasons is that this is a phenomenally unpopular war and every lost life is considered unacceptable by the American people. Similarly, causalities of innocent Iranians is not going to play well domestically or internationally, since one of the ever shifting reasons for war that was given was that the Iranian government was killing it's people. Helping the current Iranian regime kill innocent civilians seems counter productive to that point.
The US nor any country will ever be good at fighting a war where there is no clear objective and they are not fully committed. Winning for Iran is not losing and the US isn't playing to win, so Iran wins by default. This entire campaign is a textbook example of how not to go to war. No military equipment or capability is going to change that.
I think that tech people presume too much overlap between their own domain knowledge and war. The analysis isn't particularly bad, it's just wildly overconfident. Replacing F-35s with drones is like replacing cell towers with bluetooth mesh networks. You can hate the F-35 and love drone swarms, but they aren't in the same niche.
Cheap (~1k USD) drones are easy to intercept, vulnerable to EM/GPS jamming, require nearby operators, break easily, and can't carry enough payload to make a difference. Try to fix any one or two of these and the price will go up. As the price goes, reliability becomes more important. Try to fix them all and you're going to reinvent the missile.
One comment in this thread argued that drone factors can be protected from F-35s by burring them underground, misunderstand that such logistical hurdles are what causes military hardware to be more expensive than civilian equivalents in the first place.
F-35 isn't a deterrent. Nukes are the deterrent. Iran and Venezuela lacked nukes. North Korea doesn't lack nukes.
The F-35 is just peacocking but ultimately useless. If these war games were realistic the game ends on the first move which is asking the question "Do they have nukes." If the answer is yes, then the game doesn't even start.
Nuclear weapons are a deterrent against somebody invading the US (or another NATO country) but that doesn't make conventional forces not a deterrent against other kinds of aggression. Many attacks have been made against the US and not resulted in nuclear retaliation, like 9-11.
India and Pakistan have nukes and have fought each other recently so your assertion that "has_nukes() == no_game_start()" is *false*. Nukes, however probably will deter India from doing the full-Putin into Pakistan.
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.
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.
Cheap drones are extremely limited in the kinds of targets they can reach and damage while evading air defenses. I understand this domain well.
Upgrading drones so that they have sufficient range and carry a sufficiently capable warhead and have a decent probability of surviving a modern air defense environment has been done many times by many countries. The price always comes in ~$1M/drone. It doesn't matter who builds it. Those economics get expensive fast for a weapon system you can't reuse. Much cheaper drones either have no useful range or are susceptible to even cheaper defenses; in either case they don't do any meaningful damage. That point on the price-performance curve wasn't picked at random by competent weapon designers.
Even the Ukrainian FP-5 is ~$0.5M, and it is significantly less capable than some western weapons with a similar profile.
The US has assumed drone swarm attacks would be a thing for decades and has both tested and fielded many systems purpose-built for those scenarios.
Exactly, drones enable quantity and precision. Geran type drones can easily fly 1000nm, and that kind of range needs wide area sensing and patrols to intercept, really expensive at present.
I don't know that a loss right now would be likely, probably a stalemate which would be ruinously expensive for everyone.
Drones favor defenders by making movement costly, there is a considerable advantage to being dug in. Air dominance no longer guarantees being free from low altitude aerial threat. Long range drones require basing further away, which means A2A refuelling, or a massive innovation in drone defence (cheap missiles, autonomous drone interceptors, sensor nets).
> 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.
You are aware that China is producing two fifth gen stealth fighters, and is flight testing two sixth gen platforms? And that Chinese AAMs are world class? Read up on how Pakistan crushed the Indian Air Force recently flying fourth gen Chinese fighters using their current AAMs.
There is no evidence to show that Pakistan crushed the Indian Air force infact it's the other way around. A lot of Chinese equipment was blown out by Indian Brahmos.
The idea that China would lose 10k fighters when we barely have enough AAMs and aircraft in comparison is silly. The days of F-22s clubbing baby seals is long past.
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.
> engagement geometry means an 4:1 fight is always going to be costly
That's not how 6th gen fighter combats work. You get hit by missiles and explode without ever even detecting the opponent.
Does china have better stuff than f16s? Sure (and modern f16s are not the same as 1970s f16s which makes my point harder to understand in the first place anyways) but at some point, with some military technologies, you can't beat them with quantity.
That's how your imagination of 5th fighters work (because there are no 6th gen fighters in service), as if they are somehow invisible. This is a misunderstanding of RADAR.
Lower frequency RADAR will pick up F-35s, but not with enough precision to generate a target track. Pilots spend a lot of thought on the problem of signature management.
A Chinese Wedgetail would be extremely dangerous, as it could provide a very good detection, and with a close enough X-band RADAR you will get a target, and then it is up to kinetic escape/EW/decoys. That is a bad situation to be in during a large force engagement.
The PLAAF is of course working on longer range and faster AEW&C and jam resistant data link and expendable sensors. It is just a matter of time.
I'm not trying to say that f35s are immune to modern chinese technology, I'm trying to say they're immune to previous generation stuff. They don't need to be literally invisible, you can know where they are all you want if you can't actually hit them with a missile.
There's a lot of things that complicate actual fights, people get lucky, people get unlucky, you do clever things like predict incoming sortie directions and saturate that area, but while the f35 is not produced in the same numbers as say, the p51, it's not "the last starfighter" either, the opponent has to get lucky a whole bunch of times before their ability to resist has been removed.
Practically speaking there are between 0 and 1 S-400 systems to worry about, and they will be one of the very first targets. Prompt global strike, JASSM-ER/LR, Tomahawk, AARGM-ER, JATM, even AIM-174B and 260s, they're all coming for it, and all the lesser S-300 (SA-10) / HQ-15, HQ-16/FK-3s etc.
The S-300 systems in Iran were completely ineffective against IDF F-35s. Doubtful they even got a detection.
They don't seem to have fared all that well against US/Israeli F-35s in Iran, and seem to struggle in Ukraine against far less sophisticated opponents.
> seem to struggle in Ukraine against far less sophisticated opponents
Yes, that's the recurring theme in modern warfare. Cheap mass produced shit makes sophisticated tech struggle. The US is now going to be immune from this, especially since we have stopped mass producing anything for thirty years.
Ukraine used cheap drones to destroy a few S400 setups.
The previous poster was claiming that not only can the S400s not detect f35s, they can't adequately combat previous generation stuff either.
I can't comment on how accurate that is, but as for "cheap mass produced shit", I refer you to both times the US invaded iraq. Kill ratios on the order of literally 100 to 1. This is the point at which you can't actually overwhelm better technology with quantity.
Wars are, of course, incredibly more complicated than just measuring kill ratios and highscores as if it were a video game. There's usually multiple factions involved, all with differing objectives and those factions and objectives can change and mutate during the course of the war anyways.
If we look at a war the US unequivocally lost, defending south vietnam from the north vietnam invasion, there are a whole bunch of factors but exactly none of them involved some kind of "high tech too advanced" weapon system being defeated by "lower tech but more mass produced" systems.
Doing some incredibly basic research shows that the actual dollar cost of the vietnam war was, relative to the american economy and so on, pretty small, and not a major factor in the ultimate result of the war. Producing fighter jets or whatever that were 10% cheaper doesn't seem like it would have made much of a difference.
This actually kind of proves my point, we can "go to war" with iraq or iran and as long as we're not implementing literal conscription, the US is willing to maintain those wars for a very long time. There's a gigantic difference in public response between "2 pilots died when f35s were ambushed" and "10,000 american soldiers died in this month's battles around Baghdad". One of those gets you some headlines and a few protests, the other gets you voted out of office.
You fire all your missiles then.. you turn around and leave. The enemy isn't in range to engage you, you're flying away at least the same speed they're chasing, what are they going to do?
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.
That's a stale insight from an old era of warfare. The purpose of quality is to remove quantity. Iran is the case study. A large stockpile of munitions counts for something, but once the factories are gone, you're on a 3 month clock. Factories being deleted can only be achieved with quality (expensive stand-off munitions + F-35s for SEAD, then missile trucks with cheap JDAMs to take out the factories).
30-50 years ago you just couldn't do this kind of warfare, the technology and intelligence didn't exist. Now you can. People haven't updated on this paradigm shift.
People are over-learning the wrong lessons from Ukraine. That is a unique war with air parity. That's why the Ukraine war is shaped the way it is. Not because this is how wars ought to be fought.
This is not to discount quantity. But you can't have only quantity unless you want to fight an attritional war for 10 years (or worse, lose your own industrial production to an enemy that achieves air superiority over your skies because they had the foresight to invest in quality).
The Iran war isn't over yet. Plenty of time for it to become attritional, especially if the people who want Big Gaza / "mowing the nuclear lawn" to become the status quo are in charge. After all, Afghanistan was a quick victory, 20 years of attrition, and eventual exit.
Without factories? I doubt it. I'm not saying the US is going to win (in the sense of achieving objectives), but it's not going to be an attrition war like in WW2 or Ukraine. Japan had factories. Ukraine has factories. You can't sustain a modern war without factories.
Afghanistan wasn't an attrition war (where the outcome is a collapse of one side). The CENTCOM commander explains best why the US lost, it's because of sanctuary:
> The core of the Taliban’s command and control was in the mountainous town of Quetta in southern Pakistan, and the most violent branch of the movement, the Haqqanis, were safely ensconced farther north, also in Pakistan. All were off limits to our forces. Occasionally, Pakistan would apply some pressure, but it was never enough to reduce their ability to operate. I came to see this as the absolutely critical failure of all our plans, and I grew to believe that there weren’t enough U.S. forces in all the world to establish order in Afghanistan, so long as Pakistan was open to the Taliban. It was a logical error in our approach to counterinsurgency that could not be papered over or compensated for.
> You can't sustain a modern war without factories
No, but somehow Iranian backed Hamas and Hizbollah forces manage it from factoryless regions of Palestine and Lebanon. That's what I meant by "big Gaza": a region that's substantially damaged but still capable of fighting, where US/Israeli forces have to keep bombing militants in civilian areas forever. Every few weeks a new pile of dead kids for social media. Is that the plan for Iran?
> US/Israeli forces have to keep bombing militants in civilian areas forever
It's not forever. A common misconception about insurgencies is that they're impossible to defeat because they're an "ideology". But it's more about sanctuary and state sponsorship. Afghanistan was a loss because of sanctuary, as per my quote above. This article provides quantitative analysis on that:
Hezbollah had sanctuary in Syria before Assad's collapse, and their state sponsorship is under strain because their supply route through Syria has been cut off and their state sponsor in Iran has degraded industrial production and finances.
> Is that the plan for Iran?
The plan for Iran is to prevent a fait accompli, defined as 10000 ballistic missiles (exceeding interceptor stockpiles) or a nuclear weapon. The best case scenario is regime change. The second best case scenario is coercing them into terms. The worst case scenario is to degrade their power projection capabilities without a negotiated agreement. But all three scenarios are considered better than the status quo trajectory by the belligerents. The status quo trajectory is seen as leading to a bigger war later (e.g. once they reach 9000 ballistic missiles instead of 5000), or worse.
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'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.
There's a very interesting fallacy at play here. It's true that Ukraine is doing absolutely amazing and ingenious things on a shoestring budget across all military domains. It's also true that the armed forces of other world powers have a lot to learn from them, especially when it comes to drone warfare.
The fallacy comes in when blindly transferring these lessons to other wars and other armies.
In a perfect world with unlimited production and budgets, Ukraine would love to use Patriot or SAMP/T to shoot down every slow moving drone. In the real world, they make do with what they have, because the alternative is defeat and annihilation.
Ukraine is using propeller trainer planes to shoot down Russian drones because they have them and they can be quickly modified for the mission. That doesn't mean that an air force starting with a clean slate would prefer to use a cheap propeller plane in an anti-drone role. Instead, given enough time and budget, they'd probably prefer to build a custom-designed, more expensive and more capable solution, which still lands in a better spot on the shot exchange curve than Patriot vs Shahed. Think interceptor drone (which are usually several times more expensive and capable than their targets, but that's air defense) or 21st century gun systems.
Ukraine is a post Soviet state with a huge stockpile, engaged in a drawn out attritional defensive conflict where neither side has claimed air superiority. They have no choice but to be efficient, and to make everything they have go as far as they can. From an economic point of view, the USA can afford to be less efficient when fighting into Iran.
For the USA, shot exchange as an economic problem is mostly theoretical. The real problem is supply exhaustion. It doesn't matter if the air defense interceptors cost $10,000 or $10,000,000 if the total stockpile and yearly production capacity of them is only enough to fight for 3 months.
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.
The armed forces know this well but many of the internet commentators do not. Many have over-learned the lesson from Ukraine, going all the way from "drones are an important (and even potentially dominant) new tool of warfare" to "everything more expensive than a drone is a huge waste of money - just buy more drones". The real world is rarely so simple.
There are strategic winners and losers of a drone dominated world, just like there were when the machine gun or the airplane began to dominate combat. Calvary charges did not play a major role in WWII for a good reason. I would guess that the F-35 (and in general, fast stealthy attack jets) will continue to deliver a lot of value even in a world with drones. Think more like destroyer and less battleship or horse.
If you made me guess which systems would become obsolete as a result of this, my first guess would probably be attack helicopters. Much of their role can be filled by other less expensive and less vulnerable systems.
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.
I suggest reading Len Deighton's Blitzkrieg (among other WW2 books by him) because it goes into unusual detail on the industrial design and resource allocation decisions that went into tank production leading up to WW2.
Except that the "quality" of their tanks was not exactly top notch, worse they used a lot of resources.
At that point it was just a desperate gamble: "if we can make an invincible tank, then it won't matter how few we have", we both know it did not pay off, not even close.
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.
They actually did standardize pretty quickly. Panzer III and Panzer IV were the workhorses in Russia, paired up with the StuG (which used the Pz III chassis). I think that it's arguable that no production strategy could have led to German success. Had they tried to produce T-34 or Sherman type tanks (and the Panther was kind of intended to be that tank), they still would have been overwhelmed by the sheer number of tanks built buy the Allies. The Soviets at their peak year produced over 29K tanks, with the US contributing around 21K. The Germans maxed out at around 8k.
IMHO, the Soviets alone could have eventually defeated Germany, thought at much greater cost (as if over 20m casualties wasn't already incredible).
Agreed that arguably no strategy could have helped them against the Soviet Union, it was a major blunder going to war with them.
But the Nazis self-sabotaged constantly. The Panzer IV and the Stug III (with the outdated Panzer III chassis) were arguably the closest standard for armor, but they were constantly diverting effort to alternative platforms that were too complex to mass produce and maintain. And the same for other weapons.
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..)
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.
Not necessarily worse, just different design philosophies. German design philosophies changed throughout the course of the war too.
And people don't really know much about the tanks the Germans were using in France and in Barbarossa. The Pz 2 was used extensively in Barbarossa and it was intended as a training tank! The Pz 3 was woefully underarmed compared to T-34 and god forbid come up against a KV1.
But at the end of the war, the Panther was one of the best tanks on the battlefield. Good crew ergonomics, a gun that was perfect, optics that allowed it to be used well. Comparing that to even a Firefly Sherman? Not a fair fight.
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.
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.
Can't argue with that. The context of that quote was Europe defending itself and the reality that most European states are simply not ready for such a high level of attrition.
While Iran has faired better than I expected, it's a reach to say they've punished the US. The US losses are comically small. Of course wars aren't won solely based on battles...
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.
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.
>But a frigate without sonar isn't inherently horrible--lots of places don't have subs.
True, but it's one less mission that it can do. My fear (which I think will be 100% confirmed) is that we will only get a handful even though they are unit cost cheap, because they still cost money to crew and maintain. I need to spend some time modelling the economics of it I guess.
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.
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.
Why do you think this bridge is vital when there is a land bridge (Kherson) with multiple rail links all in Russian controlled territory containing the entry and exit points of the bridge?
That bridge is A) incredibly expensive and something a postwar Ukraine would prefer to exist for economic reasons, B) extremely overbuilt in certain ways, and C) not strictly required if Russia can keep rail going on the landbridge.
It might be in play if the land bridge fell.
It would be almost trivial in terms of range to make it a target of any number of strike munitions. If you can hit the Baltic ports or factories in the Urals...
As for drones vs cruise missiles - at this point every missile strike is associated with drone accompaniment, it's part of the counter SHORAD proposition.
> 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.
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.
IMO, modern sensors paired with robot controlled guns are one of the most promising hard kill solutions for drone combat. Gepard and the newer Skyranger 30 have proven themselves against low-spec threats in Ukraine. C-RAM (aka Land Phalanx Weapon System) is an already deployed system that is very effective against even higher spec threats like missiles.
Of course, there are always tradeoffs. Even the best guns have much shorter ranges than air defense missiles, and that means you need more systems to provide the same area coverage. As you mentioned, the guns themselves (and the sensors and networks feeding them) become a target.
As usual though, likely the solution will require a mix of capabilities across the spectrum, working to cover each others' weaknesses. Nothing is fool-proof, but all can force costly adaptations. Take EW for example. Nothing is cheaper than jamming out the drone's comms or nav. This forces adaptation to autonomy or fiber optic drones, which have their own costs, supply pinch points (Russia now consumes somewhere around 10% of the world's fiber, for example), and tradeoffs.
This is nothing new - layered air defense has been around a long time. The new thing is the explosion of cheap, low-spec threats forcing development of a cheap and sustainable answer to them.
Nets, EW, beam weapons, gun systems, interceptor drones, AMRAAM, Patriot, SAMP/T, etc etc... all fill an important role in targeting different threats.
>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
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.
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.
Half? There were approximately 133 developing countries (depending on how you count) during the George W. Bush presidency so please to give us a list of 66 that he "denounced" for sponsoring terrorism.
Of course the reality is that going back to 2001 the US government has only ever designated seven countries as state sponsors of terrorism. Those were: Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, Sudan, Libya, and Iraq.
Elections in Iran don't necessarily mean much in terms of nuclear weapons policy. It's not clear whether Mahmoud Ahmadinejad actually had much power to impact weapons development one way or another. The real decision making authority appears to lie elsewhere.
This is laughably false. The leadership in Tehran is smart, and they know that nukes are the most assured path to the regime's self-preservation. (see: North Korea). They've been trying to build nukes since the 80s.
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).
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.
The US just blew through a large percentage of its PAC-3/PAC-2 inventory fighting Iran. Other than Patriot, the US doesn't really have much GBAD anymore. A few Avenger systems, some Stinger MANPADs, etc. It's either Patriot or THAAD; and hopefully they're not dumb enough to be using THAAD against drones.
I'm sure they burned through quite a few AMRAAM and Sidewinders doing intercepts as well. Patriot is much more expensive than $1M (try $4M), Stinger is around 250K depending on who the customer is ($750K if you're non-US). AMRAAM is over $1M, Sidewinders $500K.
Even APKWS is $40k, and Shaheed prices are around $30k? So even that low cost option is losing.
There are many different flavors of APKWS, that is the most expensive type. There is real tension between reducing unit costs by maximally leveraging whatever systems they are attached to instead of putting everything in the guidance package and the overhead cost of the customization that entails.
They've been experimenting with variants for many years. There is some belief that they may be able to get unit costs down to $5k for some common variants. Everyone believes $10k is achievable.
> 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.
There are so many companies working on this now (cheap anti-drone tech, cheap cruise missiles, cheap missile interceptors), what you're saying is kind of moot.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
There is a win condition achievable in a US-China war. You leave the army in shambles and take over the political power structures, like with nazi germany or any other conventional country in the world.
It'd be hell, for sure, but it is a war that can end in victory for either side.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No plane is invisible. It is totally unclear if Russian or Chinese technology can detect them. I mean, there is one way to find out....
This being said, should the "invisibility" fail, it becomes a plane that can't dog fight, cant fly very high, can't fly very fast, can't carry a lot of load, needs an insane amount of maintenance (10h per 1h flight) and is expensive. Big bet!
Dog fighting is not a serious concern in modern fighter combat because missiles have gotten so effective that the current strategy has been forced into beyond visual range combat. And stealth doesn't just "fail". In bvr the first side that sees the other is the side that gets to fire a salvo first, which is the primary advantage of stealth technology: so that the enemy doesn't see you from as far as you can see them. All stealth does is linearly lower the radar return of your plane for a given distance and angle, but radar return is inversely proportional to the fourth power of distance. This means that if you get close enough then any decent radar can eventually make out an f35. The whole point of stealth is to make that distance as small as possible.
"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."
I'm just happy the Australian Government invested in the MQ-28 Ghost Bat program. Unit cost is currently estimated to be USD$8-10m according to Boeing and we get a "loyal wingman" platform to force-multiply our small fleet of F-35s and F/A-18 Supers. It can also be remotely directed from the E-7 Wedgetail.
At a cost of $2.3 billion (AU(?)) to date so far and with costs set to increase going forward, are the flagship UAV Ghost Bat and Ghost Shark programs really bang for the buck "good investments" or examples of the ongoing Australian Defence habit of going all in for bespoke capability acquisition projects while ignoring the purchasing of “Military Off The Shelf” (MOTS) systems ?
I have a gut feeling more use (if and when required) would come from the parallel program of spending of $2.3 billion on a multitude of broadly spread smaller drone programs than from flagship drones .. or submarines when and if the US can spare one or get back in the building enough subs to sell extras game.
Article misses the main thing that matters in air superiority fighting: who gets to protect their industrial production.
Low tempo is irrelevant. What matters is whether you can deliver those munitions to the factories early in the fight to prevent it from becoming an attritional war.
In Ukraine, they both have air parity so they can't do that.
"If we all reacted the same way, we'd be predictable, and there's always more than one way to view a situation. What's true for the group is also true for the individual. Over-specialize and you breed in weakness. It's slow death." - Major Motoko Kusanagi, Ghost in the Shell (1995)
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 ..."
Curious why they committed so hard to stealth over electronic warfare capability — was that purely a doctrine decision, or did the sensor fusion architecture actually preclude both approaches simultaneously?
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 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
After reading your comment I did read up on the Gripen. Seems very interesting. Procurement is about the same as the F-35 but the running costs are about 1/4 so over its expected lifetime it'll be considerably cheaper. On the procurement front though Saab seems to offer factory set up as part of the deal, so you make back some of the cost into your economy. Being able to build and maintain them yourself seems like a big plus.
Capability wise the gap isn't as large as I thought either. The latest Gripen-E has similar radar, possibly better software, and they can be kitted out to fire the same air to air weapons. What they don't have is a stealthy airframe and they aren't designed for some of the same mission profiles. If you're a country that doesn't make your own aircraft then having access to both, or just the Gripen for interceptors would make some sense.
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.
An interesting piece, but it doesn't tell in how the F-35 is built for the wrong war.
In fact, it is a mostly positive take on the F-35. It is more about how it should be used according to the author than a criticism about the plane itself.
>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.
Oh, do they? How many F-35s have been lost in combat? As far as I know we had one that was damaged by an IR guided missile and subsequently landed in friendly territory. You don't have to replace what you don't lose.
Drones aren't magic. Sure, you can build swarms of easy to jam, short range, small payload drones that are easy to track back to the base station on a budget. Will they work against a tech-savvy enemy? Maybe. Hope all your targets are really close to the launch site.
And yes, you can upgrade your drones. You can give them longer range, larger payload, higher speed, and more sophisticated electronics. But then they're not cheap anymore and building a swarm will break the bank.
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.
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 just wanna say that it’s not realistic to think that the United States defending Taiwan is anything but a bluff. Westerners aren’t willing to die for a small crummy island a few hundred miles off the coast of China that’s 5000 miles away for most other western countries. It’s just not practical. They will sanction China and make it a pariah state if they invade and call it a day. The idea that we would actually risk our lives or nuclear war to defend them is ridiculous.
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!
"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.”
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.
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.
I'm not a native English speaker, so it's possible I'm misunderstanding something (my apologies in that case). Here's my reasoning:
- The title is "F-35 is built for the wrong war".
- The article suggests that the plane was designed to deal with other threats, not with many cheap drones and missile salvos. That it's a bad tool for the tasks it is now is used for. It's not about war being right/wrong or good/bad.
- You ask "Is there a “right” war?".
These are two different discussions.
A terrible example, but it's like having a title called "Hammer was built for the wrong DIY project" and an article that points out that "they designed/bought hammers when they actually needed a screwdriver!" and you ask if "any DIY project is right". Sure, it's related, but that's a different point/discussion, isn't it? Not exactly something I'd expect to be upvoted, hence my initial comment.
I didn't reply to defend any war or to justify the use of any weapon. I also don't have a problem with anti-war comments. But these guys are talking about the F-35 not being good at dealing with cheap drones and missile salvos, while you're talking about war being good or bad.
As long one doesn't twist what I wrote or assume bad faith, it should be easy to understand the point I was trying to make and where I was coming from.
With this out of the way, and since I'm neither qualified to talk about the F-35 nor see the need to discuss if war is good (it's not), I will now leave the thread.
I did not compare DIY to war, I gave you an example - even called it a terrible example! - to show how your comment and the article are about different subjects. If this is "whataboutism", then I don't know what that word means any more.
And I do think about the consequences of these weapons, both offensively and defensively, but I will focus on that on a thread about the consequences of war, not on one that asks if the plane is good at shooting down waves of offensive drones or not.
You know that part about not twisting what I wrote or assuming bad faith? This is why I wrote it. It's a shame that you've decided to ignore it... not a good way to have discussions online if one side does that.
I don't know if there will be a WW3, but there's a war in Iran, there have been drones entering NATO airspace, etc, and the F-35 is used right now for that. Is it a good plane for the threats you find today? That's what the thread/article is about, not if there will be a WW3 or if war is good or not, and that's why we shouldn't be surprised to see downvotes on comments that are talking about something completely different.
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?
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."
As an armchair military hobbyist, I read this with interest.
The question is, what should be the alternative? Large numbers of "cheap" F-15/16/18 planes? They're not exactly cheap. Military kit prices are notoriously hard to reason with, but some googling tells me a new F-15 costs about the same as a new F-35. Adjusting for total lifetime costs and availability, according to Claude (lazy I know), Gripen is the cheapest western plane to fly at around 28k/hr, Rafale/F-15..18 sit around 50-60k/hr, F-35 around 100k. Eurofighter allegedly even higher at 120k.
I'm not saying these are good numbers! But if they aren't total nonsense, you could have, allegedly, twice the number of gen-4 fighters (4x with Gripen). That's a lot, but not an order of magnitude. It's not like you could swarm the sky over China with gen-4 fighters Vs homeopathic amounts of F-35. And I can well believe in a real big war, preserving a smaller number of more capable planes and pilots is better than starting with a lot of still-expensive planes and lose them more quickly.
At the same time, Israel is reported to have lost over a dozen of pricey, advanced, but more expendable non-stealth drones over Iran. They were probably used in riskier fashion, but I'm not sure what would happen if you replaced them with gen-4 fighters.
It's also possibly one of the most mass produced fighters at the moment. Production numbers exceed 1000 iirc. So hard to argue it cannot be produced in volume.
Finally, the comparison to cheap lawnmower drones is also IMO a bit out of place. They're so cheap because their capabilities are near 0. It just so happens that they have a niche they are perfect for. For sure there's going to be more and more autonomous planes in the sky, but not sure about the general usefulness of the Shahid-style drones. They are perfect for terrorising Ukrainian civilians and disrupting woefully under defended Russian industry.
I'm not saying I know better than the expert article, it just misses to me the alternative, and it's not obvious what it should be. And if youre making a bad choice, when the other choices are actually worse then your choice might be, in fact, good.
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.
> 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.
The F-35 is built for exactly the right defence contractors and pork-barrelling. As for war, can we get back to you on that?
The F-35 is a perfect pork-barrel example: by using subcontractors distributed in many house districts, the project owner ensures its political viability. By my count, only Louisiana, Wyoming, Nebraska, and North Dakota show less than $1MM in "economic impact".
https://view.ceros.com/lockheed-martin/f35-domestic-impact/p...
The polite way of saying that is "Its a jobs program."
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
That is asinine, what do you think happens to those institutions when incompetence is what gets rewarded. The real threat to the US military is not the lack of weapons, or that the F35 is not as good or as cheap as it could have been, it's because it is a lumbering bureaucracy full of people who couldn't get better jobs elsewhere.
> it's because it is a lumbering bureaucracy full of people who couldn't get better jobs elsewhere
So, raise the amount of money paid to the military so the most qualified candidates apply?
The most qualified candidates for what? 100% of people in the military have passed the ASVAB. And the most capable people in the military are EXTREMELY intelligent.
The problem is unlocking that brilliance in an organization which has LOTS of office politics, cross currents, uncoordinated long term goals, too many interests who get to requirements to every project, etc.
And the biggest problem is that everything the US military decides long term needs sign off by Congress, so there is always a political dimension to every project approval. Congress laughs at the F35 as the “world’s largest jobs program” with components built in just about every member’s district. The A10 is unlikable because Congress wants to keep it around, even though the AirForce thinks it’s cheaper (logistically) and safer to use other aircraft for the role. Not everybody is thinking about the same factors.
> the A10 is *unkillable
Sounds like boiling the ocean, a cultural overhaul is probably in order.
Respectfully, the problem is not incompetence or bureaucracy. There's plenty of each in the military but they are only symptoms.
I like the Stanford Beer quote - "The purpose of a system is what it does".
What does the current defense acquisition system reliably produce? Obscene amounts of money for the defense contractors, campaign contributions for politicians, promotions and well-paid private sector careers for the top military leadership. The quality and suitability of its weapon systems, though sometimes excellent, is secondary.
All people who matter in this system, the ones who built and sustain it, are rewarded by the status quo. It's working exactly as intended.
The poor incentive structure is what results in incompetence and bureaucracy. I personally would measure competence with respect to stated aims, not some unstated aim.
If we are to assume the unstated aim is long term wealth extraction then I would again suggest the current extent of short term wealth extraction is putting that long term at serious risk so I would not consider that competence either. I would consider it an emergent behaviour where two or more parasites have to compete against each other for resources from the host, each has the very strong intensive to maximise their personal take even at the risk of the killing host because to leave anything on the table is to allow the competition to have more resources which they will use to attack you with.
Perhaps if the intent is to undermine the US as part of some broader strategic goal, OK, maybe those people are competent, but I would hope that those people are a very very small number of those operating in the system.
Seems to be jobs program. I ended up in defense after a year of being out of work and while all the new grads were desperate and destitute, we were steadily hiring new juniors out of school.
I’ve heard stories from years ago about some of the waste being protected because it we weren’t producing tanks in excess of what we need, some small town in Ohio would lose a ton of jobs and their congressmen his job.
Outside of wartime, yes these are jobs programs. If we stop, we lose the know-how, man-power, and facilities. Starting back up becomes expensive, time consuming, and potentially impossible on the time scales required. That does not bode well for a war you're involved in.
These capabilities don't stick around for free. A corporation isn't going to keep around design staff doing nothing. Even if you move the design staff to the military stuff, you still need to give them work or their skills atrophy.
Incentives matter and incentivizing bugs in software is a very bad idea, it’s how you forget how to write software without so many bugs. And what was the point of it all, it was obvious even back then that the future was cheap missiles / drones.
>lumbering bureaucracy full of people who couldn't get better jobs elsewhere.
That's what trump has always believed all government employees are. Since at least the 70s. DOGE was his weapon to enact his truth.
> it's because it is a lumbering bureaucracy full of people who couldn't get better jobs elsewhere.
I don’t think that they exploit the military industrial complex for personal job security and fortune makes it likely that they’re incompetent. In fact, as a society we seem to praise those who are exceedingly successful at such exploitation, and even elect them to the highest levels of government and hang onto every word they say.
you can just say "capitalism did this" -- no need to pussyfoot around it mate
most of HN will downvote you for it
I was trying to draw more of a connection to rent-seeking behavior, which is I guess one of the failure modes of “free market” capitalism.
This.
People don't understand that defense contractors are extremely wasteful in their spending, and the contractor's job is not to produce the latest and greatest. They have a dual mandate.
1. To keep supply chains active so we can continue to be able to wage tomorrow's war with yesterday's technology by introducing rent-seekers and middlemen into companies and processes where they shouldn't be.
2. To keep Wall Street, defense contractors, and defense lobbyists happy.
I gotta ask, while I have the attention of HN - why are defense contractors allowed to be public, for-profit corporations that serve Wall Street interests ahead of national defense interests? Am I the only one that sees a massive conflict of interest that can affect (or, probably has affected) our national security in profoundly damaging ways.
It almost feels like Healthcare companies, who are supposed to be focusing on our health and wellbeing, seem to focus on shareholder returns and denying service to the same people that pay the premiums. What's wrong here?
The answer is because we tried to DIY and found that the government at best works as a developer with manufacturing better off outsourced. It is 'under-orderly' compared to a planned system, but the private sector works. There is a reason why it is a norm for military industrial development.
Wall Street and Defense Contractors and Defense Lobbyists wouldn't make too much of a difference anyway when they are already jobs programs. Any sort of industry would have lead to it being an Industrial complex problem.
That people think it would make a difference mystifies me as much as when people claim that 401ks are just to make people dependent upon the market in retirement. When in reality they would be dependent upon the market either in a state funded pension system too because that is where the money comes from.
A lot of big words, but also inaccurate. If you compare the F-35 to basically any plane worldwide with similar capabilities, it's very reasonably priced. You can see that in that it's very popular for export, with pre-sales already sold out until 2035.
There are plenty of articles out there on this for those who want to Google it.
> If you compare the F-35 to basically any plane worldwide with similar capabilities, it's very reasonably priced.
If you compare corvettes to other sports cars, you'll find they are very reasonably priced. That doesn't make a corvette a good economical option for day to day commuting.
There are only 2 5th generation fighters available for export - the F-35 and the J-35. The F-35 is 40% more expensive than the J-35. No one is buying F-35s for the low price tag.
More to the point, the unit costs are low because the number of airframes scheduled to be built is enormous. The US needs to export hundreds of F35s to help distribute the massive cost of the development program. This development program was nearly 400% over initial budget, and the general managing the project was fired over it. The fact is the F-35 is far more expensive than it was intended to be.
The F-35 is cheaper than most of the 4th generation fighters on the market. Cheaper than Eurofighter, cheaper than Rafale, cheaper than Gripen.
Cheaper to buy. But with double the operational costs and only 50% availability, this is a miniature part of the story.
The J-35 has just one export customer, Pakistan. And they have yet to even start operating these aircraft yet.
The market sure seems to favor the F-35, with 19 customers.
> You can see that in that it's very popular for export
It's very popular for export since the US has been forcing their allies to buy them over any alternatives, this was shown in the WikiLeaks cables.
Nothing else is remotely as capable in the modern threat environment that most countries can actually buy. That's the cold truth. They can't buy anything else that compares and the best isn't for sale.
The pressure was not "because it was the best thing for those countries or war". The pressure was because it was good for USA manufacturer and economy. It was one of the perks of being a leader of a group of allies - you can pressure them to buy your stuff.
They have already lost two in the first real conflict. Doesn't seem like it's all that capable.
Designing for zero loss in a major war is way more expensive than we can undertake.
I mean, we did that too. That's why there are only 19 operational B-2s (21 built).
Well if you don't let them buy it then what's the point in developing for that? Just develop for your own militay or some poorer countries the US can't be bothered to keep as vassals.
Pre-March 2026 sales will be drastically different to post-March 2026, for obvious reasons.
The only features the F-35 doesn't have for a modern fight are IP ownership and range.
The former was a military procurement mistake and the latter has been worked on for years [0] but never prioritized.
Also, I'm kind of surprised this was published by War on the Rocks, because it leaves a number of extremely relevant topics unmentioned.
The B-21 explicitly addresses both issues above, while mostly resisting the urge to increase size and complexity.
The Air Force is aware of basing vulnerabilities and is looking at multiple solutions (ACE, autonomous tanking, stealth tanking, modular anti-drone aircraft shelters).
The CCA cross-service effort is already targeting pairing >1 UAV to each manned aircraft.
Replicator and other efforts are addressing the "low-at-industrial-scale" problem, and the US just used waves of Shahed clones against Iran.
The article's points would have been more valid 10-15 years ago, but all now have addressing in progress.
[0] https://www.twz.com/air/plans-to-finally-give-f-35-external-...
Was. Having a remote "power off" button, have the effect of chaning the mind of many potential buyers. Specially with Trump.
Are those the right capabilities for the price, though?
If it was the right plane, full stop, wouldn't Ukraine be fielding a wing of them? No, because they're extremely cost constrained.
Ukraine would love the F35. We won’t sell it to them at any price, though, because of the escalatory concern with Russia. We only just barely decided to allow them to have F16.
There are no consequences and those who produced the product still get rich and can still maintain the product with more fees on top. It’s by design
$25k per flight hour is a lot more than what drones cost
What's crazy is there's lots of videos of Ukranians shooting drones from open-cockpit propeller planes that barely cost more than the drones!
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.
We're already moving beyond that to having interceptor drones which are cheaper and far more expendable.
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.
So Ukraine isn't a serious war then? And I take it you believe we failed to employ that strategy in Iran ... why, exactly? The alternative interpretation being that isn't how things work. Swarms of cheap drones are the new reality thus appropriate countermeasures are required on the front lines.
The key difference is that "swarms of inexpensive drones" can be made in "swarms of normal looking residential garages". The entire enterprise can be decentralized making it much tougher to target with strategic weapons.
America does not want to prepare for that kind of conflict. It wants B2 bombers because those look cool when they fly over during the Superbowl.
Ukraine is a real war and it is about men and women crawling in the mud constantly terrified of getting blown up. It is literally battle of the Somme again. How do you recruit college kids for that?
You don't recruit them, you draft them.
Thank god I'm too old. Although I suppose you're never too old for a human wave assault...
Laws are mutable.
Men aged 25 to 60 are subject to conscription under martial law in Ukraine.
Yugoslavia did the same in the 30s, conscripting everyone 21 to 50 before turning Communist.
Japan widened it to 18 to 60 by the time they lost WWII.
Bone spurts will take care of that draft (I’ve read that in the President’s Biography…)
I was thinking that. For most of the last sixty years Russia / the USSR was the peer adversary usually mentioned for NATO to fight. I think they look weaker than they are because Ukraine has actually been pretty competent in the fight.
Re. no swarms of drones because the factories have been bombed, do people really think that'll work on China?
In a serious war why would an adversary like China not put their drone factories deep underground, deep in the territorial interior?
Drones can be made in ordinary civilian houses and apartments. It's too expensive to dig an underground factory just for that, and even if they do (let's assume an abandoned mine could be used), they would still have vulnerable power supply and vulnerable transport. Power plants, transmission lines, rail tracks, bridges are part of the targeted infrastructure. The further they are from the front, the more a logistical nightmare it becomes to move them to where they're needed.
I would guess that there's a big difference between assembling a drone (which can easily be done in a kitchen) and mass-producing parts such as batteries and gas engines for drones that have to fly more than a few dozen kilometers.
Even a single Group 3 UAS like Shahed is larger than a lot of kitchens. They can't be assembled in civilian houses.
You're confusing short range, highly Ukraine-specific Group 1 quads with long range OWA drones.
The US doesn’t have air supremacy in Iran. We have air dominance, but shoulder mounted infrared guided (bypasses stealth paint to go after engine exhaust) AA is still taking out the occasional F35 and A10.
RU/UA is special because RU completely screwed up the first 3 weeks of the war (likely because of the culture of sycophancy Putin has, similar to Trump) and was driven out of central UA. Russia is too proud to admit they lost and UA wasn’t allowed to attack into RU territory until their suppliers (US, EU) were confident RU wouldn’t nuke us in retaliation. Now UA is busy dismantling RU’s economy and war making industry. Ultimately it’s not comparable to any other war of our lifetimes for several reasons.
UA drone factories aren’t in large industrial buildings. They have hundreds of office / home locations where the parts are printed / assembled. RU largely has a very few mega military vendors who make drones / missiles and they have consolidated their efforts in a few (now vulnerable) locations.
F35 capability is excellent for preparing the battlefield, such as the first few hours when softening up air defenses.
But don’t underestimate how much all countries are learning from watching RU/UA or US/Iran. Drones will continue to evolve to meet the gaps in affordable interception, affordable anti-5thGen aircraft, etc. UA now has armed land, sea, and air drones and each has variants like scout, bomber, interceptor, etc. we will continue to see specialization and comparative advantage evolve in the space.
The US absolutely has air supremacy in Iran. You don't roll out B-52s in a contested airspace. MANPADS have an abysmal ceiling height, they are largely irrelevant short of some very narrow circumstances.
Just for your benefit, stealth coatings and materials (not "paint") are a tertiary defence after shaping and electronic warfare.
Group 3 UAS can't be assembled in homes and office buildings in any meaningful numbers. They are too big. Even Group 2 is marginal. I think you're confusing Group 1 quadcopters with long range OWA drones like Shaheds.
>They have hundreds of office / home locations where the parts are printed / assembled
This shouldn't be a big surprise to Russia or anyone else, as it has precedent. German aircraft production peaked in 1944 at the height of allied strategic bombing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_aircraft_production_dur...
The Super Turcano is a prop-driven aircraft that's often suggested for this role.
I wouldn't want to field those around a bunch of FPV interceptor drones.
In the Second World War, the most effective defence against Germany's V1 was getting a fast plane to fly alongside it with its wingtip under the V1's wingtip. They didn't actually "bump" the V1s, just got one wing into a kind of "ground effect" which caused it to roll beyond the capability of the gyro to compensate.
They're doing this to take down all sorts of stuff the Russians are lobbing at Ukraine.
Then you send a swarm and fly a few sacrificial drones them into the airplanes.
Yeah but that drone swarm costs as much as the Cesna so it neutralizes the cost advantage / disadvantage.
A drone swarm can take out a swarm of Cessnas.
Realistically a Cessna single prop is roughly $100k (average between good condition used and some new ones). A Ukrainian interceptor drone is about $2k + cost of munition. And the Cessna requires an airfield, so it is geo-fenced, while an interceptor drone can take off from flat land or the back of a truck.
People need to wake up and realize the economics of war just changed by several orders of magnitude.
A pilot is pretty expensive.
In convential modern terms, sure.
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 flights.
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".
> 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".
Worth noting that their mission was delivery flights with the produced aircraft (a handful of them saw combat, because if you're flying a fighter plane into a warzone your guns might as well be loaded, but it wasn't the main aim). Those who were intentionally flying into combat got a little more training AIUI.
And recovery flights of downed / incorrectly landed (wrt airfield) aircraft, crossing active zones while unarmed, international delivery across the globe, and officially no fighting stuff ... although that was somewhat divorced from practice in the asian theatre.
Still, thanks for chipping in with a "no true Scotswoman" pilot variation - of course bombardiers got training in sighting, navigators in map reading .. largely at that time combat pilots got experience or got dead while exposed to all the barrack room theory about tactics that may or may not survive enemy contact.
They're not fighter planes in Ukraine they're people with conventional weapons shooting at the drones when the planes get close!
It’s a cat-and-mouse game. Drones won’t stay ignorant of fighters shooting them down for long.
It’s a lot cheaper to give them a rear camera than to just tolerate them getting shot down indefinitely.
In a serious drone war a neutral cargo ship off your coast will open hidden flaps and unleash 10K drones all at once erasing couple bases before they even know whats up.
Enough with the ace combat fanfics. In a serious drone war a neutral cargo ship would not be allowed to hang around with potentially a shitload of drones in its containers.
In a serious drone war, the cargo ship wouldn't know it was carrying containers full of drones, as we saw in Ukraine's Operation Spiderweb[0].
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb
Wouldn't that be the war crime of perfidy, similar to when the US used a secret plane painted as a civilian aircraft to sink one of the Venezuelan boats 9/2025?
Like that tens of times unaffiliated cargo ships dragged anchor for tens of kilometers to dredge fiberoptic cables in the Baltic.
Warships are explicitly allowed to use false flags at sea, provided they lower them and raise their true flag before launching an attack. So all that would change to be legal would be to raise the flag and then unleash the drone swarms.
I'm not quite sure if just putting up a military flag on a civilian transport ship makes it count as a warship or not though.
> 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.
This wasn't unlike how the U.S. did it in Vietnam. They would have a small, unarmed helicopter fly low with an observer and an M-16 to spot (or more likely draw fire) with some Cobra and/or Huey gunships higher up. When the little bird found some targets the big ones would come down and lay waste to the entire area.
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.
> 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 Booker was overweight, meaning it couldn't be air dropped, which was the entire purpose for the program. No one was willing to pay for it because it wasn't what anyone wanted.
> Frigates are no longer "cheap" ships
The point was to produce a cheap ship. It's a ship that already exists and had a pricetag. The issue was it went from 85% commonality to 15% commonality, ballooning the price.
> But it's cancellation has more to do with dysfunction at the top of the Navy (and DoD) then the program of record.
They are one in the same. They could have produced an invincible super battleship and it wouldn't change the fact that they failed to accomplish what they set out to do. All three programs suffer from exactly this dysfunction.
Air dropping was never part of the requirement. It would have been a "nice to have" but not required.
There was no way we were going to be able to take a base model FREMM and use it in the USN without substantial modifications. The Navy screwed up in how they sold this to Congress, and things like wanting to use smaller shipyards for political and logistical reasons doomed it.
The Constellation class frigates had no mission. Just like the failed LCS classes before them, they aren't survivable in a modern high-threat missile environment: weak radars, small magazines. And if they can't survive themselves then they're useless as escorts.
I guess they can be put to work intercepting smugglers in the Caribbean Sea or something.
The US is converging on a single class of combat ships, which is whatever DDG-X turns into. It converges what was previously destroyers, cruisers, and frigates. It is more capable and has a higher displacement than any of them despite being called a "destroyer".
Much of the distinction separation historically was that ship category reflected command officer rank. They have been decoupling that, which honestly makes sense.
DDG-X is dead.
Oh yeah, forgot about that. The Navy decided (again) that the hull wasn't large enough to carry all of the mission ordnance.
In WW2 the biggest problem was not building aircraft it was training the pilots who flew them.
And proudly written in C++!
I like having C++ on my toolbox, but when Bjarne Stroustoup proudly talks about "F-35 Fighter Jet’s C++ Coding Standards" I am not sure it lands how he thinks it does, given how it turned out to be.
Quite certain that it also contributed to all the software glichs F-35 suffers from.
The whole Coding Standards talk has always felt like an own goal. Don't get me wrong I have extensive C++ experience and wouldn't work on a project that doesn't have guidelines. But the fact that one _needs_ plain english and hard to check in an automated fashion guidelines when using the tool that is C++ implies something about the deeper culture and issues at play.
Sir you're holding the wrong handle. <The audience looks at a hammer with 17 subtly different handles>
This feels like what happens when the selection pressure isn't there. Building for "the next war" (or more broadly "the future") is always bound to be an utter boondoggle, because despite your best intentions and the most strenuous furrowing of your eyebrows you'll have literally no fucking idea what the actual demands of that situation will be. You have to react, that's it. Trying to predict is futile. So better to try to set yourself up to react better?
The same issues with fighter jets procurement infect everything these days. Public transit, space, government software, etc.
Not everything. Specifically things where the government is involved. That includes government-subsidized private enterprise.
I blame the four horsemen of project management: Brooke's Law, Metcalfe's law, the Ringelmann Effect, and Parkinson's law.
[flagged]
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.
Those traditional prime contractors are basically part of the govt bureaucracy with how they operate. SpaceX and Anduril are good counterpoints.
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 don't know what your point is in this context. They won contracts because they were the cheapest (most efficient) provider of the services. And federal contracts are a small part of the their current revenue.
Boeing's commercial (not government contracting) division is famously dysfunctional and has been for a long time.
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.
> 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.
Are there any real examples of a government entity in the US competing with a private enterprise in which it genuinely would have been better for the government entity not to compete? I’m thinking of various public utility projects in CA (these are mostly great and more cities should do it), roads (I’ve never heard of a private road operating complaining about a public road), military (contractors complain when the military fixes their own gear, and this is asinine), the military doing some of its own research as you can read about in books like Ignition.
> there is an opportunity for corruption
It could just be incompetence. I read the construction contract. If I were a contractor, I would not have agreed to the fixed price and the steep late completion penalties without charging two arms and a leg and quoting a very long timeframe.
>Are there any real examples of a government entity in the US competing with a private enterprise in which it genuinely would have been better for the government entity not to compete?
Probably everything the government touches outside of keeping the peace and helping businesses function. Government schools suck. Government insurance sucks. Law enforcement often leaves a lot to be desired. I think one could make an argument that we'd be better off with a toll road system too, but for the convenience and privacy of not having to pay tolls.
It's easier to argue for government management when a service involves practically monopolizing space, such as a road, or if the project is especially dangerous or expensive (such as utilities or the military). But the fundamental forces of competition are still beneficial even in huge and monolithic projects. Even in cases of projects commonly run by governments, the competition emerges as being between governments instead of being between companies.
>contractors complain when the military fixes their own gear, and this is asinine
I agree, it sucks. I am very pro-market but I think the government should lay down the law in these cases and say that it won't tolerate abusive prices and it demands all the technical data necessary for routine maintenance, if not the entire product.
>It could just be incompetence. I read the construction contract. If I were a contractor, I would not have agreed to the fixed price and the steep late completion penalties without charging two arms and a leg and quoting a very long timeframe.
If credible businesses are putting in lower bids and they get passed up for a stupidly expensive alternative, that reeks of corruption. But there could be requirements or assurances that we don't know about. That's up to you to find out if you are interested in that case.
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.
[dead]
[flagged]
It’s not as if Democrat run California can build a railway these days…
This problem is beyond parties and trying to play partisan politics about it only prolongs the hurt.
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.
'Starve the Beast' may be their intent, but it hasn't been enacted or effective:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONET
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S
Military industrial congress complex
[dead]
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.
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.
>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.
This is the new reality of military procurement and has been for years. Integrated Logistical Support contracts are preferred by senior leadership for lots of reasons that won't fit into an HN comment box, but the wave tops are that it's wastefully inefficient to have uniformed aerospace engineers, logisticians, project managers, etc. doing R&D work. Private industry does it faster, better, cheaper, and pays bigger salaries with better lifestyles which means they can attract better talent.
I've been an aerospace engineer both in-uniform and out, and I can assure you that uniformed service members (and their families!) sacrifice a lot that's hard to quantify and not always immediately apparent. It's not 1950 any more; the best and brightest mostly don't want to touch government with a 10 foot pole. There's more money and prestige elsewhere, in the private sector.
It's not just that uniformed (or DoD) engineers have no access, the subsystem vendor (e.g. Raytheon) also get no access. LM is incredibly obstructionist, even compared to the bastards at Boeing.
This cluster** has led directly to initiatives for open (Govt open) architectures and vendor agnostic interfaces for talking between vehicles and components, and between component, between jets and drones and C2 etc. That has a long way to go too, but at least we've broken with the idea that it can be a closed system.
I'm familiar with the problems of service careers. There is a lot that could be done to improve that, but that's a different discussion. I think it's extra important now that we have jet engineers who know about AI in the aviation context.
Oh, I know all about LM. I used to work on the Hercules when I was in the Air Force. Experimental flight permits, mods, block upgrades, the works. Greatest aircraft in history, if you ask me, but I digress.
Ultimately the F-35 remains Lockheed's intellectual property, which is what drives all this. They want to sell it to other countries, which they can't do if the USAF owns the IP.
But what would you rather have? 2000 Shahed/Lucas drones or a single F35? Same cost for both.
The saying "Quantity has a quality all of its own" is not obsolete in 2026.
2000 shaheds are just a regular week in Ukraine.
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.
I think that "air superiority" thinking is part of what's changed.
USA/Israel forces have air superiority over Iran. That doesn't stop Iran being able to fly drones or missiles.
It does stop Iran from being able to launch a huge number of drones and missiles.
That they were able to launch >0 after losing air superiority is a testament to how much work is in the last mile.
> A single F35 which could penetrate air defense and go into the country would be a real problem.
The difference here is an F-35 + precision weaponry + intelligence to locate high value targets.
It's always going to be cheaper / easier to use shorter-range munitions, which means the launch platform has to be higher / closer.
But without strategic intelligence (what high value targets exist, and what are they supporting?) and targeting intelligence (where are they right now, and where will they be?) neither of the other two capabilities are valuable.
Logistics and command inevitably trend towards centralization, because it's inefficient and expensive to decentralize everything (and at some point the tyranny of compounding logistics makes it impossible).
Where there is centralization, there's a high value target, and that's a job for the F-35 and exquisite standoff weapons.
Should forces be a mix of high-low? Of course! That's something the US realized in the 80s and is why we have the F-16! (still flying, being built, and exported!)
So where is the air superiority over Iran? This only proves Palmer Luckey right. Future of warfare has changed drastically and all countries are taking notes from this War.
im not so sure. Ukraine is sending drones over very long distances now, ducking through air defense.
So why doesn't Ukraine have any F-35s?
youd want some number of both. The ideal defense net against shahed type drones looks very different from the ideal defense net against f35s. Namely, shaheds require very cheap and numerous interceptors and radars, and f35s require very expensive radars and interceptors (and a dream). Anything that works against an f35 would be an egregious waste against a shahed and anything that works against a shahed wouldn't against an f35
Depends. If I need to destroy a bunker, the Shaheds are useless. If I need to shoot down another aircraft (or a Shahed), the Shaheds are useless. That also goes for SEAD, targets that are far away, targets with ECM...
Also, the physical and economic footprint for that many drones isn't small, and a few smart bombs from an F-35 could put paid to your entire inventory.
A single F-35, because Shaheds don't have the legs required in the Pacific.
You can fit three Ukraines between Guam and Taiwan.
F-35 can fly more than once...
> 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.
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.
No one should call it success. It is what it is.
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).
So if you compare it to the previous generation turbine it's better? That isn't very interesting.
The F-35 achieved a goal that isn't needed, at the cost of extreme delay. An F-16 replacement with stealth would have been delivered faster and cheaper. The USMC could concentrate on drones, STOVL and vertical lift. A larger variant for F-15/F/A-18 replacement would have many advantages. The USN always wanted more range out of JSF, but wasn't allowed to buy it.
I’m winning a War, BY A LOT, things are going very well, our Military has been amazing and, if you read the Fake News, like The Failing New York Times, the absolutely horrendous and disgusting Wall Street Journal, or the now almost defunct, fortunately, Washington Post, you would actually think we are losing the War. The enemy is confused, because they get these same Media “reports,” and yet they realize their Navy has been completely wiped out, their Air Force has gone onto darker runways, they have no Anti Missile or Anti Airplane Equipment, their former leaders are mostly gone (This has been, in addition to everything else, Regime Change!), and perhaps, most important of all, THE BLOCKADE, which we will not take off until there is a “DEAL,” is absolutely destroying Iran. They are losing $500 Million Dollars a day, an unsustainable number, even in the short run. The Anti-America Fake News Media is rooting for Iran to win, but it’s not going to happen, because I’m in charge! Just like these unpatriotic people used every ounce of their limited strength to fight me in the Election, they continue to do so with Iran. The result will be the same — It already is! President DONALD J. TRUMP
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.
But psychologically, they're not seen as such.
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.
[1] https://www.economist.com/europe/2026/03/22/ukraines-top-dro...
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.
Stockpiling doesn’t really do much vs. investing in manufacturing.
Contrast the US in the civil war or wwii to the current situation. In both those wars, civilian factories were rapidly converted for the war and manufacturing capabilities were ramped fast.
In Iran, we’ve burned through years or decades of manufacturing capacity and probably used up most of our top tier stockpile.
That only exhausted/destroyed about 33% of Iran’s cruise missile stockpiles. It’s unclear what it did to their drone manufacturing capabilities. It guaranteed they’ll pursue nuclear capabilities moving forward.
At the same time, US investment in manufacturing is tanking due to warmongering and isolationist economic policies.
Iran stalemated us in a month or two, and all the trends I see (education, manufacturing, high tech innovation) point to US capabilities eroding rapidly in the short to medium term.
Being able to stockpile is not the goal, it's a pre-requisite. Having a serious manufacturing capability helps to scale, but you can't convert an iphone assembly line to ballistic missile interceptors, and especially when you don't produce the interceptors at some low rate. There is a lot of technology and know-how that goes into those capabilities, and both get lost if they aren't exercised.
But that means either trashing the output in a few months (emulating Ukraine), or being able to stockpile.
Why would you waste the factory output during peacetime?
It seems like pork spending to me. Put the factories to good use, and maybe have 1% of output go to prototypes; 10% to dual use.
Miniaturization of weaponry (like drones) makes this even more attractive. Also, a iPhone factory (if such a thing existed) could certainly convert to drone manufacturing in short order. Aluminum and glass aren’t great materials for drones, but aluminum is useful for things like machinery that manufactures plastic.
That's because the modern weapon tech tree is vast and complex. It's not factorio, there are no factories that can switch from producing DSLRs to MWIR cameras. A playdough factory can't cast solid rocket motors. A Tesla manufacturing line can't just switch to welding 10cm steel slabs for tanks. Moreover, those military-relevant processes and techniques require know-how that gets lost if the processes are not run.
Small quad hype is just techbro delusion. Those quads have their place, but the vast majority of the defence toolkit needs to be much more sophisticated. For example, Ukraine is still struggling to manufacture a domestic ballistic missile four years into the war, despite having tons of funding, a ballistic program pre-war, and Western experts willing to help. If western countries stopped low-rate production that normally goes into stockpiles, the timeline to start manufacturing up would be similar.
> 33% of Iran’s cruise missile stockpiles
Which cruise missiles are you referring to?
christ, sounds like mcnamara. the americans killed north vietnamese faster than they killed americans, so how come they lost?
Because the North Vietnamese were not bombing and destroying American home soil schools, apartment blocks, utilities, etc. on a daily basis.
Lacking any real home soil peer citizen engagement the US saw the Vietnam War as a costly pointless loss of money, resources, and life on the far side of the planet.
The Ukrainians are somewhat more engaged.
The difference is, as the other comment points out, the Americans could have (and eventually did) leave South Vietnam any time they wanted with no negative consequences. It was a pure war of choice.
Everyone on the Ukranian side knows that their options are: victory, death, a deeply miserable time in a POW camp, or abandoning their life and becoming a refugee. Regardless of what your rank or social status is.
Different situation. The Americans were killing Vietnamese in Vietnam. There was a near unlimited number of those, including innocent ones.. The Ukrainians are killing Russian soldiers in Ukraine. There's a limited number and if they don't like it they could go back to Russia.
It's rough on the killed soldiers but that's really Putin's fault - I think he was basically the only one who wanted the war. Most Russians looked horrified.
Ukraine has already launched several mass strikes on Moscow.
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?
TBF a proxy of one of the nuclear superpowers (ie Ukraine using US arms) is quite different from a run of the mill non-nuclear country retaliating against an invasion using conventional arms manufactured at home. The former invites MAD while the latter is predictable and boring. Seeing as they are the substantially larger aggressor presumably they can pull out of this war of attrition whenever they feel like it.
you can look into game theory and crisis bargaining to see when and when not nukes make sense.
theyre very expensive to use, so the benefits of war have to be extraordinary to match
game theory assumes rational actors
It wouldn’t be wrong. Nixon got drunk and called for a nuclear strike on North Korea. Kissinger told everyone to ignore this order and the world did not blow up that day.
Putin seems to fairly consistently do what is best for Putin. Using nukes would probably have him rapidly end up like Khamenei senior.
> Russian nuclear doctrine would have treated that as an existential threat.
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.
Just because he hasn’t pulled the trigger doesn’t mean there isn’t an actual red line.
"So what is the last resort? Piccadilly?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgkUVIj3KWY
The red line is an invasion of Moscow or a strike on Russian nuclear capabilities.
Everything else is just an order for preemptive suicide.
Ukraine already executed a successful strike on Russian nuclear capabilities. In 2025 Operation “Spider’s Web” completely destroyed several irreplaceable nuclear-capable strategic bombers.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-ukraines-spider-web-operat...
There is no "red line".
The red line attack on Russia's nuclear capabilities has to present a credible and deliberate threat to Russia's nuclear strike capacity.
Operation spider web was attack on Russian airfields primarily to reduce capacity to bomb Ukraine.
You can't nuke a country for hitting some nuclear strike capabilities you're using to conventionally bomb them.
that didn't cross the red line, and the US has a phone call to talk it over and that Russia's policy for using nukes hadnt been breached
Red lines have been crossed repeatedly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_lines_in_the_Russo-Ukraini...
Russian stated nuclear doctrine has been treated by the Russians as an existential threat to Russia if followed through on.
Then it's fine, as conventional bombing of Moscow is not an existential threat.
I suspect Israel and Russia are looking at each other with "You first!" so that they can start nuking and blame the other for starting it.
Israel is not under existential threat even if there are occasional rockets hitting Ashkelon or downtown Tel Aviv
The rest of the Arab world is mostly placated by alliances w/ the US and thus Israel, but if Israel drops an nuke all bets are off.
The Saudis will probably have a bomb before too long following a nuclear deal: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-removing-guardrails-prop...
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.
I basically agree and think it's a great shame that the US didn't say don't invade Ukraine or we'll have the USAF bomb the invading troops. Russia couldn't reasonably use nukes just because they were being stopped invading a country that they'd signed an agreement not to invade when Ukraine gave up its nukes. Many thousands or lives would have been saved.
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.
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 would never nuke Ukraine to begin with
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.
Everyone keeps forgetting about the French independent at sea nuclear deterrent.
I wonder when Poland will decide it's time for them to have The Bomb?
> Russia would never nuke Ukraine to begin with.
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
> Russia is not fighting Ukraine, it is fighting NATO in Ukraine.
If that is the case they are doing a poor job at doing so, without even fighting the full might of NATO.
however, nato is fighting the full might of china, russia, iran, and north korea. the whole set. and china is fighting for both ukraine and russia at the same time. why arent you worried about nato randomly attacling china so china stops supplying russia with drone materials? or north korea so they stop providing shells and soldiers?
russia isnt going to attack nato because it knows it isnt currently fighting nato, and bringing nato into the war will be worse for russia than keeping nato as an arms supplier only.
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.
> most of the world would unite against them
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.
I think if Russia drops a nuke on Ukraine then even China will desert them.
India for sure will stop trading with Russia, lest it be seen to condone such insanity (India has a nuclear armed rival next door-India will not want Pakistan get any ideas).
I think this is the only reason Russia did not nuke Ukraine.
Well, yes. Stop trading with them? I can believe that.
I don't believe for a second that even a single country will openly declare war on Russia over it or attempt to nuke Russia in return.
" many, including Putin, would be on the chopping block."
I think that's the above comment's point. Attack moscow -> existential threat -> they're already on the chopping block -> nukes.
[dead]
[dead]
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.
Don't have Germany be so dependent on Russian gas. Don't tear down nuclear power plants, build more of them instead.
Electrifying the economy with renewables (and I’ll count nuclear as renewable) is the single most important thing countries can do right now to ensure their own military and economic security.
Distributed solar and wind are more difficult to bomb than nuclear, so they’re probably a slightly better choice (especially if they’re built to island / work off grid).
Non-nuclear renewables ("intermittables") need something else as back up. That is almost always natural gas.
That's been causing a lot of problems for Europe for years now.
There's the dependence on Russia, there's the dependence on the North Sea supply -- and the full-scale invasion started while the Danish fields were off-line -- and there's the dependency on LNG imports from actors that are either unreliable (the US) or far away (the US and Qatar) or both. LNG is also quite expensive.
Batteries help a lot. So do things like hydro and nuclear.
Of course, they also stretch strategic reserves.
if the US ever trains with ukraine like the brits did, youll find that the current doctrine has no ability to move against ukrainian defensive lines.
this is the current state of the art. it will be a major innovation if somebody figures out something better than "travel during fog"
The US Army doctrine is "have more stuff". The US military budget is about 450% of Ukranian GDP. The F-35 is part of that. As are the nukes.
That is totally false.
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.
"A significant number of jets it entered the war with" does not mean they haven't also gotten newer jets.
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:
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.
Pretty sure almost all of the functional ones were destroyed or were kept in such reserve for security they weren't being used.
No there are still tens of original UAF jets that by now clocked thousands of sorties. Sometimes they get shot down or otherwise lost and we get photographic evidence (tail number, sometimes even pre-war colors) that it's one of the OGs.
They're still flying SU-27 frequently, and those weren't replaced by donations.
>mass strikes on Moscow
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 world is getting close to being an rts though.
real time top down view everywhere all at once, but with commands and targets being set with a ton of parallelism - many rts players at once picking who to send where for the same team
Ukraine fighters are operating out of long-term soviet-era reinforced concrete hangars, while transport aviation is operating out of Romania and Poland which makes striking them a political issue
both solutions are a lot less relevant in case of USA remote-from-home conflicts
It's too bad the USA found itself without allies to stow their transports to. How did that happen, was it F-35? Yeah, it has to be F-35 to blame.
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'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.
And at the same time, drones are eating the AD every day, with videos of multiple strikes often coming out on a single day. Most in Crimea, but now more often also elsewhere.
An it shows with how the drone attacks on oil ports, refineries a even on navy ships in harbor have been successful lately.
> They are at most used to lob gliding bombs from far behind the front lines.
You write that, and literally quote my point about F-35 making deep strikes against dense air defense possible in the very next sentence.
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.
Oh I love shopping lists, let's see. The FSB HQ, SVR HQ, Rosgvardiya HQ; tens of Army offices across the city. Roscosmos HQ, listening stations for the satellite network. Precision mechanics, optics and electronic foundries manufacturing sites in Khimki, Lubertsy, Lytkarino, Krasnogorsk and Zelenograd. Kosmos concert hall on Militia Day. Am sure there's more good spots along Rublevskoye highway too.
And if there are still some GBUs left after all that, the Kremlin and even the bloody Mausoleum.
F-35s have done pretty well in both Israeli and US hands against the Russian supplied SAM systems.
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.
_All_ the classic anti-air is useless against drones, as the US also found out. It can be easily saturated, and ground-hugging drones are not a good target for missiles anyway. Ukraine is now using interceptor drones for this reason.
The issue with stealth fighters is that they have nothing to do. The enemy can launch barrages of drones from hundreds of kilometers away, outside the F-35's effective range. Or if you're moving ground forces, they'll be attacked by mobile units armed with short-range drones, also making F-35 less than useful.
That's also the reason why Russia right now is at a full stalemate. Its only semi-working strategy is to filter infantry through killzones that can be tens of kilometers in depth. Russia can easily bomb Ukrainian positions with gliding bombs or missiles like S-300. But there's just nothing to bomb, Ukrainian army is spread out.
The US has not found that out, they knew it, that's why things like lasers and other systems have seen so much development.
Yes the war showed some new aspects, but relentless low capability drone attacks is not the same as flying an F-35 into enemy air space and bombing their critical resources with high accuracy thanks to sensors.
Mass manaufacture and drones and such need to be take into account in the future, but when it comes to what is easer to counter, mass drone attacks or F-35, ill be money on the mass drones being countered first.
There are already many system that can deal with drones quite well. Old school FLAC with improved sensors, fast shooting system, even cheaper drones as counters and of course lasers and so on in the future.
Yes S-300 doesn't deal with drones either, but its pretty clear what to develop to counter-them, how to counter F-35s is not nearly as easy.
> The enemy can launch barrages of drones from hundreds of kilometers away, outside the F-35's effective range.
If they are doing that these drones are no longer as cheap and if you fly against modern anti drone weapon that have costs of a few $ per shot down drone, the economics is no longer in your favor.
> The US has not found that out, they knew it, that's why things like lasers and other systems have seen so much development.
Yes, the US was not prepared. The laser systems were nowhere to be seen, and there are no interceptor drones on the field right now. Or at least not in the quantity needed to protect valuable targets (like AWACS planes).
Also, lasers are just a waste of resources anyway. They only work when the LoS is available, and tracking a small target over large distances requires highly precise machinery. Exactly something that you want on a battlefield.
> Yes the war showed some new aspects, but relentless low capability drone attacks is not the same as flying an F-35 into enemy air space and bombing their critical resources with high accuracy thanks to sensors.
F-35 is not designed to bomb critical resources. It's a fighter jet.
> Yes S-300 doesn't deal with drones either, but its pretty clear what to develop to counter-them, how to counter F-35s is not nearly as easy.
It's not the point. The enemy doesn't need to suppress F-35s to keep launching salvos of hundreds of Shaheed drones into YOUR critical infrastructure that you can't protect. That's the whole point of the article.
Not to argue with most of your points (which I agree with), but the F-35 is really meant to be more of a fighter-bomber than a true air-superiority fighter. It's not really in the same class as F-22/J-20/Su-30/F-15EX kinematically, and that's fine because counter-air really isn't its role.
> tracking a small target over large distances requires highly precise machinery. Exactly something that you want on a battlefield.
Lots of things on the battle field now, would have been considered highly precise in the past. The current generation is more relevant for ships.
> F-35 is not designed to bomb critical resources. It's a fighter jet.
No it isn't. That's complete nonsense.
> launching salvos of hundreds of Shaheed drones into YOUR critical infrastructure that you can't protect.
And my point that you ignored was that technology to do mass shoot-down of Shaheed is much more likely to exists then technology to prevent F-35.
If its a poor economic war the question is if your interceptor can be cheaper then what its preventing. And drones while cheap are not as cheap as, bullets, lasers or smaller drones.
And you say, 'launch from greater distances' that also comes with longer time to intercept because these things don't have radars and aren't that fast. Plus launching ever larger drones at longer range also increases the cost per drone.
But they can't do and F-35 can is that they can go in and take out exactly the vital air defense and other points so that your other aviation assets have an easier time.
Any conception that war in the future will just be two mass manufacturing lines splinting drones at each other is silly, technology and stealth have a major roll to play.
> That's the whole point of the article.
I think the point of the article likely is to convince people that drones should get more funding in the full knowledge of that F-35 wont go away.
Its funny how some of the people who know a lot about this stuff are still going forward with other next generation planes despite cheap drones existing.
Cheap drones are new part of the battle field, but just like with most weapons, the old stuff doesn't go away. Tanks and rifles are still useful. And so is the F-35 and stealth jets.
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.
Hmm, this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aviation_shootdowns_an...
indicates what the author said is true.
The majority of these losses are on the ground.
The US not going full in on drones reminds me of the British ridiculing submarines.
The Chinese are going to spam literally MILLIONS of drones all over the Pacific...
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.
> Drones have a limited range and limited capacity to inflict damage.
This drone has greater range than an F-35 and is cheaper to make:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_MQ-28_Ghost_Bat
https://www.boeing.com.au/products-services/defence-space-se...
China’s selling cheap cruise missiles. They come in unmarked shipping containers, so they can reach any target globally, as long as it is within a few hundred miles of a shipping route.
Now, consider how many drones can be manufactured in garages using a shipping container full of components and 3d printer filament.
(Doing it that way means the drone designs improve continuously and with minimal manufacturing lag after tactics shift.)
Ukraine has been launching aerial drones from drone boats for quite a while now - you can look for a video of a black sea drone platform being engaged like that. A lot of the videos of drones hitting AD in Crimea (that usually just show the terminal phase of flight) might have a drone carrier involved in some way.
And a few days ago they unveiled also unmanned interceptor drone launching drone ships, used to hit Russian Shaheed one-way-drones while still over water.
> 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".
I wonder when drone carrier subs become a thing.
All you need to do is trojan horse a container ship or three and the US is on its knees.
But we are making a fuckton of them.....
When did Britain ridicule submarines?
Around 1900. They were held in very dubious regard in the early days of development.
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1941/january/chap...
On British naval luminary compared submarine warfare to piracy, leading to the emergence a few years later of a tradition of Royal Navy submarine captains flying the Jolly Roger after completing successful missions.
Britain had the biggest navy in the world at that point, it didn't need to be the first to adopt the submarine.
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.
A carrier battle group can easily be seen and tracked by commercial satellite constellations.
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.
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
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)
edit: aha that company literally lists it on their website https://www.planet.com/industries/maritime/
This is literally the point: it's easy to tell them to point a satellite at beirut and get pictures every 3 hours or whatever, it's much more difficult to tell them to point at a location in the middle of the pacific ocean... because you don't know the location in the first place.
Beirut doesn't move around a lot. Carriers do. While there are a lot of satellites pointing at the earth at any one moment, this isn't some kind of Hollywood super screen showing a real time image of the entire pacific. You just see whatever small patch the satellite happens to be pointing at.
And again, ignoring the part where america would probably start shooting down satellites.
>because you don't know the location in the first place
Do you seriously think China doesn't track US carrier movements?
Do you seriously think the US Navy doesn't avoid Chinese tracking? What kind of a question is that? Like, there's probably a magazine that lists the cruising destinations of most of the carriers, what ports they're going to stop at next, etc, because, you know, they're not at war and trying to maintain secrecy.
> Do you seriously think the US Navy doesn't avoid Chinese tracking?
How would they avoid having a Chinese satellite continuously track their movement? They have the capability to do that, there is nothing USA can do about it except shoot down all the Chinese satelites.
https://defencesecurityasia.com/en/china-three-satellites-tr...
US carrier groups probably pose the #1 strategic threat to the PRC in the Pacific. You can safely assume they throw whatever resources are necessary at the task of knowing their whereabouts.
I mean, you can try all you want, but there's limits to hiding a fleet of ships on the open sea. They are huge, emit immense heat signatures, and produce miles-long wakes while moving. As long as there are satellites overhead, they will be able to find them.
I suspect we might be talking past one another because we have different degrees of precision in mind: I'm not saying the Chinese could have a missile target lock on a carrier whenever they wanted, much less in wartime. Far from it. But I highly doubt you can reposition a carrier group without them catching wind of it within hours.
This is the sort of arms race that is going to change every year. I just read an article that claimed that China has launched a system of satellites that use non-visual means to track ships in the pacific (via.. emissions or radar or something?) and china can certainly afford to put a bunch of them in orbit.
It's not impossible to track a carrier group via satellites, but it's not trivial either, you can't just, like, open up your windows gui and click on a satellite and click the button that says "follow this carrier" because like satellites orbit and fly around the earth and the ships can alter course when you don't have eyes on them and so on and so forth.
And yeah, as you point out, there's a big difference between having a satellite picture showing a probable carrier group at X and Y coordinates and being able to actually strike the thing.
I found this worthwhile read on the topic: https://warontherocks.com/carrier-strike-groups-should-be-re...
Now I’m contemplating just how small and light of an instrument could be carried on a Starlink-style satellite that could detect a large ship. A smallish COTS telescope, e.g. a Celestron 8SE ($1700 retail) could easily see a ship from the Starlink constellation altitude.
Never mind that the Starlink radio arrays are, well, radio arrays that quite effectively cover the whole planet. If you think of each satellite as a radio telescope, its resolution is crap and probably cannot disambiguate a carrier group from anything else (at least according to disclosed specs). But it would be quite interesting to build a synthetic aperture array out of multiple satellites. This would rely on emissions from the ships themselves, but I bet it could be done and could locate ships quite nicely.
Seeing it isn't the issue. Scanning the oceans is the issue.
Carrier groups also don't emit radio when they aren't interested in being detected!
> 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.
https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Ty...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon
Do you think a carrier can very far in the couple of hours it takes for a satellite to orbit around the Earth?
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.
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.
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.
https://eos.com/blog/types-of-satellites/
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.
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)
The Chinese Yaogan-41 satellite is in geostationary orbit and might have a mirror in the 4m range.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/no-place-hide-look-chinas-geos...
> It would have a field of view roughly the size of Houston (50x50 miles)
Wait, what?
Like, this is a whole bunch of extremely unreliable numbers being stacked on top of each other to reach an unsupported conclusion, but how is a 50 square mile field of view supposed to find something in the middle of the pacific?
The satellite moves, so every orbit it captures a globe spanning strip that is 50 miles wide (here uncritically accepting the 50 miles figure).
And the carrier isn't going to be in the middle of the pacific, its going to want to launch strikes, so its going to be within (say 500 miles) of Chinese military targets, which does narrow down the size of the haystack somewhat.
But yes, this is a significant challenge. On the modern battlefield it is usually significantly harder to find something than to kill something after you have found it.
You only need to find the aircraft carrier once (say, when it docks) and then the satellite can remain pointed at it forever.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but satellites... orbit. They don't just fly in arbitrary directions following a target.
Even something like a rain storm can lose visual track of a carrier group, or even just night time, at which point you've now got an increasingly large area to search again to find the carrier which can be anywhere inside a several hundred mile circle.
> but satelites don't stay in one place
What?
> unless they're on the equator
What?
> because otherwise they have to be moving
What?
It was admittedly a bit sloppy. The more accurate version (IANAKSPP, I am not a kerbal space program player) would be that the only way to maintain a satelite in one position (without expending an infeasible amount of energy) is to position it above the equator and sync its speed with the Earth's rotation, allowing it to stay in a single position above the Earth. Satelites always have to be moving fast enough such that the centripetal force is sufficient to counteract the Earth's gravitational pull, otherwise they would fall back onto the planet.
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).
Why not? It's not exactly hard? The exact capabilities aren't public, but there are companies that provide daily synthetic radar captures for the whole globe and similarly companies that do this for imagery. It would take ages but I think you and I could both right an algorithm to classify if an image or high map has an aircraft carrier in it? Even if you can't get data for the whole globe taking a photo of a 10 mile of ocean every 10 minutes and shifting the center based on where a boat isn't hard. There aren't that many aircraft carriers. Aircraft carriers and tanks are both capable machines built and designed for a different environment than we have now. They can still be useful. Most countries don't have the ability to image the whole globe or lob weapons across an ocean, but I'm pretty skeptical they'd survive long in a war with say China
I understand you don't think it's hard. It's hard. I'm trying to provide information to help people here understand why. What you're proposing doesn't work. Are you interested in understanding why it doesn't work?
Yes, I am interested in understanding why this is hard
> Aircraft carriers and tanks are both capable machines built and designed for a different environment than we have now.
People have been saying this for approximately the last 50 years. Maybe it's true today, but the odds are against it.
I mean we haven't had major power conflict in 50 years and they haven't seemed very useful in Ukraine
The problem with killing a carrier is not finding it. They're not difficult to spot and not very stealthy. They're massive. The only real problem with killing carrier is getting close. They're constantly protected by a fleet and a small air force whose primary purpose is to protect the carrier.
> The problem with killing a carrier is not finding it. They're not difficult to spot and not very stealthy. They're massive. The only real problem with killing carrier is getting close. They're constantly protected by a fleet and a small air force whose primary purpose is to protect the carrier.
The pacific ocean is over 60 million square miles. A full sized carrier group probably takes up like 100 square miles when it's fully spread out, but that's a very, very, small percentage of the available search space.
And beyond that, you need to actually see the carrier with something, a laser sensor, a direct radar hit, even the human eyeball; you can't just fire a bunch of missiles in the general direction you think the carrier is at and expect them to hit anything (for one thing there's a whole bunch of other ships that will distract the targeting sensors).
Like, I cannot stress this enough, even if you knew the exact location of a carrier at a given moment, down to like 4 decimals of lat/long, and you knew which direction it was sailing, if your missile launcher is 1000 miles away you can't just program it in and fire it off and expect it to fly 1000 miles and then hit the carrier. Even with some kind of amazing on board sensors, there's a dozen other ships just existing near by, the carrier itself is moving unpredictably, not to mention the actual decoying/spoofing systems specifically designed to interfere with targeting sensors.
And this is the problem, you now say "oh well just use a platform that's closer to the carrier so it can get accurate targeting data for a weapon to hit the specific carrier", which is technically possible... until the carrier destroys your targeting platform because why wouldn't it? Whatever distance you have to be within to "lock on" to the carrier will be, pretty much by definition, in range of the carrier to shoot back at.
Hell, as far as I know, they could put literal anti-satellite missiles on carrier aircraft and just fly straight up and shoot down targeting satellites. I don't know if that's something they're currently planning/practicing, but I don't know if any reason they couldn't.
Exactly my point: getting close is the hard part.
Despite which US carriers are frequently "sunk" during war games.
All that protection didn't stop the Swedish diesal-electric HSMS Gotland seamlessly torp'ing the Ronald Reagan in 2005.
France pulled a similar score 2015, Canada "got" a UK carrier in 2007, IIRC even Australia's taken out a US ship or two in various fun ways over the years.
Diesel-electric subs seem to be the bane of carriers. I'm aware of Dutch, Portuguese and Swedish subs that have "sunk" carriers during exercises, and often together with a significant part of their fleet.
But I do wonder what the starting conditions for those exercises were. The sub's underwater range is limited (although Swedish subs seem to be better than others) and the have to come up every once in a while, at which point they're vulnerable. There's plenty of places to hide near coasts, but I can imagine that on the open ocean, it might be a lot harder for a sub to get close enough.
Carriers are not unstoppable super fortresses, which is why the americans have like 11 of the things, and it's definitely important not to become over confident after years without serious naval challenges, but it's also reasonable to consider all of the mitigating factors involved in large scale military exercises.
I haven't studied the HSMS Gotland incident in any great detail, but just in general for wargames, ships are required to be in certain locations at certain times, stay inside sea lanes, use transponders, ignore certain other ships and in general not completely mess up the existing sea commerce traffic that is trying to go past the exercise area.
If your carrier group is literally 1000 miles away from any piece of land and you have full authorization to sink anything that looks even slightly suspicious, it probably becomes considerably more difficult to sneak up and torpedo a carrier.
But yes, carriers will get sunk, modern warfare is in large part attritional, but if you send out, dunno, $100m worth of subs and sink a $10b carrier, that's a great return on investment, but doesn't help you in the slightest if you're now out of submarines and the enemy sails two more carriers into range.
> Carriers are not unstoppable super fortresses
I'm geting fairly old now and I have no recollection of ever thinking such a thing ...
> but if you send out, dunno, $100m worth of subs and sink a $10b carrier,
Even better if you can send out $80m worth of torpedoes attached to cheap arse unmanned drone delivery units all embedded within a 10x magnitude swarm of cheap arse drone units that have no torpedoes.
High chance of penetration, good chance there'll be some left over to confound and confuse the next carriers.
Absolutely that keeps the high end gear standing well off from tight spaces.
Yeah, but what's stopping the side with carriers from just attacking your torpedo launchers? That's literally the entire point of aircraft carriers, you get to attack things while the ship itself is out of range of retaliation.
If we're postulating magical "ai" attack drones loitering off the coast, what's stopping the americans from sending in their own fleet of equally magical ai attack drones to blow up all the defenders and then sail the carriers up?
Also, again, you'd have to know exactly where the carriers even are, right now $80m worth of torpedo drones would cover like .01% of china's coastal waters.
> Yeah, but what's stopping the side with carriers from just attacking your torpedo launchers?
Numbers game, what's the maximum number of targets that can be covered in a window, the cost of dealing with non torpedo launch capable platforms is the same as the cost of taking out an actual torpedo carrying launcher - the overwhelming threshold is something that is tested in games, of course.
> If we're postulating magical "ai" attack drones loitering off the coast
I'm not, I'm looking at a reasonable near term extrapolation of what China already has and tested.
> what's stopping the americans from sending in their own fleet of equally magical ai attack drones to blow up all the defenders
The usual constraints of hunting and finding in vast area
> Also, again, you'd have to know exactly where the carriers even are
Well, approximately .. and that's what China provides to Iran via sat coverage.
> right now $80m worth of torpedo drones would cover like .01% of china's coastal waters.
I thought the carriers were off Iran and staged well back? I can't see them being as far back as China myself, but perhaps you have some curious reason for wanting to spread them out some place far far away from the conflict. I have no knowledge of that, obviously.
> The usual constraints of hunting and finding in vast area
So how are you hunting and finding the carriers in the first place? You can't have it both ways.
> I thought the carriers were off Iran and staged well back? I can't see them being as far back as China myself, but perhaps you have some curious reason for wanting to spread them out some place far far away from the conflict. I have no knowledge of that, obviously.
We're talking about a hypothetical US carrier war against china. Is there something interesting to talk about with regards to iran trying to defend against carriers?
It's 2026, PRC has GEOsync ISR (optic+SAR) with persistent coverage of Pacific and beyond. Combined with 500+ other ISR sats, they basically have full coverage in relevant theatres, with hand offs for tracking/queuing/targeting. There's really nowhere for surface combatants to evade/hide anymore vs PRC tier adversary. US doesn't have ASAT capabilities to shootdown beyond LEO. Without ranting too much, highend C4ISR is basically massive enabler/coordination force multiplier, technically it's feasible to synergize highend C4ISR and upgraded COTs low end drones swarms to kill carrier groups, either via mathematically guaranteed saturation salvos or push A2D2 past max carrier standoff range, i.e. no viable sorties without entering no escape zone. Of course tier1 response is still hypersonics (including drones), but theoretically the techstack now exists for low end loitering swarms (well relative to PRC low end) to also do so for much less.
This is just nonsense. An unmanned platform that can stay on station for a significant time and strike at hundreds of miles and have enough payload to deal significant damage and be fast enough to arrive in meaningful time and somehow survive approaching a carrier group (those planes have guns, remember? it's not just SM-6 spam) cannot be cheap because of hard physical constraints like the energy required to stay in the air. There are no such "COTS" platforms, DJI quads don't cut it across multiple dimensions.
Clearly I'm not talking about hobbyist quads. We're talking shaheed tier loitering munitions, which is completely COTS (i.e. moped piston engines and for Iran sanctioned electronics stripped from washing machines). That's what PRC acquired 1M units of except with indigenous PRC supply chain which can also enhance Iran's D- execution, i.e. add resilient barrage EW proof mesh networking (all commoditized by now), more efficient hfe propulsion to extend ~2500km to ~4000km with some planform improvements. Synergize with high end orbital C4ISR = any carrier fleet within 3000km = swarm loitering no escape zone = as in carriers (must) bolt in opposite direction and drone will geometrically catchup. 3000km also basically max carrier sortie / stand off range with tanking, i.e. functionally A2D2 to push carriers to effectively 0 sortie range.
It's more or less simple VLS and CVW magazine math to figure out total carrier group saturation numbers. This also assuming prioritizing carrier survival... i.e. CVWs may not even be geometrically recoverable if carriers has to GTFO.
Napkin math hypothetical, if a stacked carrier group with 3DDGs quad packed antiair and CVWs where most tasking dedicated to shooting down drones... PRC needs to launch ~3000 enhanced shaheed136 tier moped munitions to fully deplete magazine and saturate. Considering PRC procurement likely getting them at fraction price of Iran (i.e. 10-20k, remember Iran has sanction tax), this probably actually cheaper than PRC hypersonic salvos. We're talking sub 100m swarms that effectively defeat carriers or at minimum draw billions in interceptors. VS 100m tier1 hypersonic ashm salvos that can do so in 1/20th time.
The TLDR is knowing where carriers are is theoretically a solved problem, and knowing where carriers are enables conemps/ops vs those who do not, i.e. if Iran can somehow launch 10000 drones, simply having shit C4ISR means they can't use same tactic.
You keep saying "loitering" and then use one way ranges. If "loitering", where does the time on station come from? Are the drones refuelled? Do they land or do they just crash when they run out of fuel? Or is "loitering" just as a buzzword devoid of meaning?
No, prop drones don't "geometrically catchup". Shahed's extreme range achieved by flying really slow, the top speed (which they don't sustain constantly to conserve fuel) is about 185kph, for the maximum flight time of about 13 hours. US carriers officially can sustain 60kph indefinitely, and in practice they can go faster. That means on a straight line a Shahed can only gain 1600km in the absolute best scenario. In reality it's much less, because launching takes time and the average speed is slower.
The capabilities that you're describing are a fantasy.
Loitering just means extended endurance, i.e. piston engine that can stay on station for 20+ hours / enhanced range of ~4500km, but can also function as attritable max range munitions. They're loitering because definitionally they can loiter, especially with datalink for midcourse corrections (again PRC specialty). It's basically value engineered TLAMs (which you know, loiters) on props instead of turbofan, where props trade speed advantage for range, but speed completely negated by massive A2D2 no escape zone because props still significantly faster than any surface fleet.
>geometrically catchup
A carrier at 3000km and GTFO sprint opposite direction at max speed, i.e. 30knots / 60km, will have prop drones closing speed/gap at 120km per hour. AKA intercept time distance around ~24 hours at 4500km. Hence why I said ENHANCED shaheeds, i.e. swap propulsion with 30% more efficient heavy fuel engines, increase aspect ratio and improved shaheed basically makes carriers operating within 3000kms unable to reach ~4500km endurance no escape zone. This within the platforms SWAP potential, technically can also just swap payload for fuel but HFE and planform improvements simply more efficient.
3000km also VASTLY optimistic scenario for carriers and limits of prop planform/SWAP potential, it's functionally carrier at 0 sortie scrap metal range. Realistically carriers max effective standoff is ~2200km, at which point effective sorties down to 20% (rest tanking/support). So no, mathematically, carriers cannot fastandfurious straight line out of this, and definitely not surface fleet escorts. The capabilities I'm describing is pedestrian for PRC. Unless one thinks PRC cannot build a better shaheed than Iran who literally built them in caves with box of scraps.
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.
> IIRC no fewer than 5 naval drones attacked the Moskva missile carrier at once, and successfully sank it eventually.
That's a hallucination, Moskva was by all accounts sunk by a couple of conventional anti-ship cruise missiles.
Also, the ship appears to not have been operating any of its defensive systems at the time. It was a proverbial sitting duck.
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.
> 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.
Yeah, except missiles are better at it and the navy has spent the last 30+ years innovating ways to defeat missile attacks. What exactly do you think is the difference between a "drone" and a missile here?
> Once the big valuable vessel is found, it can be reasonably tracked from orbit.
Satellites orbit. They move. They have a limited area they can see at any given time and that area is constantly shifting.
Something with the budget of the US Navy can do the math to figure out where the satellite can look and then move. If your sat is orbiting the earth every 4 hours, a carrier group could be 100+ miles away by the time it comes back around.
And, even if you manage to get a satellite picture that shows that at 8:32pm the carrier group was at lat 32/long 42; you can't exactly just open up your missiles and program that in and sink a carrier.
If a network of hydrophones can track submarines, why can't they also track carriers?
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS
Both the US and China have newer more advanced capabilities than a 50 year old system...
> [SOSUS] was the primary cuing system that antisubmarine forces used to localize and potentially destroy targets for over forty years, but secrecy largely kept that fact from the fleet. The lack of strong fleet support was a factor when budget cuts after the Cold War fell heavily on the surveillance program.
Driving cars down every street in every advanced country to take photos seems ridiculous, but Google did it (StreetView) and the US DoD has more money than Google...
Yes but the scope limits coverage.
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.
> 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.
Why not just put a nuke in their instead? Like, how is this supposed to work, china just has a totally not suspicious container ship sitting in every major port not moving or carrying cargo or letting anyone inspect it and nobody notices that its full of weapons???
> 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.
If there's a state of war, you don't get to just sail your container ship next to a carrier, that's uh, not how that works.
Like, if this was a tom clancy novel maybe china could do some kind of super clever first strike where they attack a bunch of carriers at the start of a war with their super secret attack ships, but at that point why don't they just sneak their ninja assassins on to the carriers and take them over for the glory of china.
> How is this supposed to work, china just has a totally not suspicious container ship sitting in every major port not moving or carrying cargo or letting anyone inspect it and nobody notices that its full of weapons?
Actually, exactly like that. It looks completely normal. Container ships are super massive, and generally containers are only searched after they're offloaded, before leaving the port. So they don't get searched if they remain on the vehicle.
> you don't get to just sail your container ship next to a carrier
A lot of drones have surprisingly long range.
> Actually, exactly like that. It looks completely normal. Container ships are super massive, and generally containers are only searched after they're offloaded, before leaving the port. So they don't get searched if they remain on the vehicle.
And nobody is searching them during a state of war?
> A lot of drones have surprisingly long range.
I guarantee a missile launched from a f35 launched from a carrier has a much longer range.
the weapons are put in container slots.
something like a spiderweb container isnt going to be visible just looking at the ship
you wouldnt think ukraine would be able to drive its semi trucks right up to russian nuclear bombers, but they did
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?
I think you're imagining 'drones' as 'small quadcopters with hand grenades' as deployed in Ukraine. To be sure even a large swarm of these would struggle against an aircraft carrier, but you need to also consider things like Shahed drones that can carry 1-200kg of munitions and are much cheaper than missiles. Depending on where a conflict takes place, I can see a large number of small disposable drones being used to overwhelm targeting systems while a moderate number of medium drones with a serious payload carry out the actual attack.
Also, while you're completely right about the ruggedness of the ship itself, image recognition electronics are dirt cheap nowadays. You can buy COTS camera-IR modules from under $100 and train them on whatever you want. If I were opposing an enemy that had carriers while I had only drones, I'd target specific parts of the superstructure rather tha the hull.
lightning up with mushroom clouds anyway
I think you are wildly overestimating the appetite for using tactical nuclear weapons. Whoever deploys those first in an offensive capacity is going to gain instant pariah status. The US is torching a lot of its traditional alliances as is, deploying a nuclear weapon in anger would result in international criminal status and probable internal collapse soon after. nor do I see any likelihood of China using them against Taiwan since that would undermine the entire purpose of a military undertaking.
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).
nothing would prevent putting a nuke on the drone, and making a it a tactical nuke delivery system. you can have them as big or small as you want, and in air, on the surface, or under the water.
you are applying arbitrary constraints to a thing thats just "put an rc controller on it"
ukrainian drones are doing something like 700 miles to hit the oil ports in primorsk. its not the 2500 miles that a missile might do for hitting diego garcia, but nothing says you could get one to. after all, a b2 bomber can go on long flights. put controller on it, and control it via a satellite, and the b2 becomes a drone
You do realize that underwater drones exist and have been successfully used against Russian ships, right?
In the navy they call long-range underwater drones a "torpedo". It has been assumed to be a primary threat against ships for a century. Modern navies have many systems purpose-built to deal with that threat.
Plus these things have a range of about 50 miles. It's not like if you are a carrier floating in the pacific, you will be swarmed with a thousand torpedoes. To launch one requires a submarine, and while one may hide, it's not so easy to penetrate the defenses of a carrier group in the middle of the pacific.
Ukraine has had success against mostly unarmored and a few lightly armored Russian ships (and let's face it, these are small ships compared to carriers) in the black sea because the front lines are there and they can launch from a port, travel 5 miles, and hit one of these ships. That's a completely different situation.
> To launch one requires a submarine
Torpedoes cannot be launched from manned / unmanned surface vessels?
Wow.
Good job China isn't getting into water surface drone swarms.
Still, easy to see why close waters near Iran keep the US carrier groups away.
> Torpedoes cannot be launched from manned / unmanned surface vessels?
They're getting close enough to target the carriers without being sunk.. how exactly?
Relatively low cost, numbers and sheer persistance.
Post WWII US has always struggled with asymmetric wars that can't be solved with military dominance and rarely addressed on deeper issues.
This current Iran conflict is reminiscent of the Taliban in Afghanistan, who survived 20 years in a frozen conflict with the US before taking back control of the country when the US withdrew.
The betting is strong on Iran still standing when Trump gets bored and carried off stage.
> Post WWII US has always struggled with asymmetric wars that can't be solved with military dominance and rarely addressed on deeper issues.
I mean, yeah, we're talking about the part of the war that is unrelated to the weapon systems involved.
> we're talking about the part of the war that is unrelated to the weapon systems involved.
I'm talking about asymmetric strategies that can be used by a less armed actor to stand off and occassionally clearly best a better resourced actor.
You know, wooden wing hand carved swarms Vs floating fortress cities with orbiting overwatch.
The Taliban, NVA, and likely Iran will be future examples of mice left still standing after the biggest cat on the planet failed to move them on or wipe them out.
That's like equating a cruise missile with an aerial drone (which is nonsensical).
Now I'm not saying defense against UUVs is impossible, but plenty of defenses against torpedoes don't work against them.
Note also that part of the approach of drone warfare is sheer quantity. Stopping 1 may be trivial, stopping 5 may be doable, but stopping 20 simultaneous ones might already be too hard to do consistently and repeatedly.
A drone of this type and a cruise missile are literally the same type of thing, they just occupy different points on the capability spectrum.
You assert "plenty of defenses against torpedoes don't work against [UUV]". Based on what? What is this hypothetical property of a UUV that is superior to a torpedo?
A UUV with sufficient range and warhead is going to be big and heavy. Long-range torpedos weigh 2 tons each for a good reason. Calling something a "drone" or "UUV" does not imbue it with magic physics. It still has to cross some long span of water with enough speed and a large enough warhead and a guidance package capable of finding the target.
What kind of vessel are you going to use to bring these UUV within range of the target? 20 torpedos would be almost the entire magazine depth of an attack submarine. Surface combat ships carry even fewer.
You seem to be ignoring all evidence from how modern naval systems actually work when discussing your hypothetical UUVs.
> A drone of this type and a cruise missile are literally the same type of thing, they just occupy different points on the capability spectrum.
You have a "this type" in your mind. I do not. Even then you're wrong. A drone can loiter and is thus not "literally the same type of thing" as a cruise missile or torpedo.
> What is this hypothetical property of a UUV that is superior to a torpedo? [...] It still has to cross some long span of water with enough speed and a large enough warhead and a guidance package capable of finding the target.
The huge advantage of drones (besides relatively low cost) is not how they cover the distance, but their flexibility in getting to the target, striking with high precision. An underwater drone can technically even circle the target before striking it at its weakest point (although this isn't going to work well if the target is at full speed).
> What kind of vessel are you going to use to bring these UUV within range of the target?
Bigger UUVs. Note that 'within range of the target' is also much higher for UUVs versus torpedoes, easily 160km for UUVs. Note that ambushes with these UUVs may also be an option, if they can loiter or just lie on the sea floor.
Are you oblivious to the fact that cruise missiles can loiter? You are making a distinction without a difference.
All of this reads like you are not familiar with modern military capabilities.
Longer ranger UUVs is equivalent to "even bigger torpedoes". Do you not understand the subject matter? There is a lot of evidence in this post that you do not. You are making up magical scenarios where your UUVs have properties that can't be replicated by any other real system that is literally supposed to execute the same mission.
> Are you oblivious to the fact that cruise missiles can loiter?
At which point we more commonly call them drones or loitering munition. Even using a broad definition, 95% of what technically could fall under cruise missiles is of the traditional non-loitering kind. Same goes for torpedoes.
> Longer ranger UUVs is equivalent to "even bigger torpedoes".
The term UUV covers an enormously diverse set of devices, from fullblown autonomous nuclear subs to tiny industrial inspection drones.
Narrow-mindedly handwaving new technology into bins you're already familiar with and approaching them as such is exactly the type of cognitive failure that lies at the basis of the phrase "generals are always fighting the last war".
Since you are being willfully ignorant, haven't properly addressed the answers I gave you and are throwing out ad hominems I will not spend any more time on you.
And what platform do you imagine is launching these dozens of torp-- drones?
This is the thing everyone fails to understand about carrier warfare: anything you can use to attack the carrier can be outranged by the carrier because it can just employ the same weapons but from airplanes that fly closer to you.
Bigger UUVs, also called LUUV and XLUUVs.
What is the carrier for if the jets it carries cannot stop swarms of drones?
The only thing I can come up with is “war crimes”, but, as Iran pointed out, if you can afford an aircraft carrier, you have trillions of dollars of easily hit civilian targets, so you pretty much automatically lose if the other side retaliates in kind.
> What is the carrier for if the jets it carries cannot stop swarms of drones?
What makes you think they can't?
Ignoring some kind of dedicated anti-drone missile systems that they could equip (if you're just hitting drones you could probably carry like 500 tiny missiles or something, who knows), you can just go and destroy whatever platform is carrying the drones, since your carrier aircraft is pretty much going to outrange it by definition.
Yes, if you keep your carriers out of striking range they are invincible! lmao
You don't need to be out of striking range if they can't find you, that's the entire point.
I meant the carriers striking range. They’re invincible but useless.
Iran pushed our carrier group far outside of striking range without midair refueling (very dangerous to do in an active war zone). This is because they can blow holes in the ships from the shore.
In the Vietnam War (“the resistance war against america to save the nation” as the vietnamese term it officially), American carriers were stationed 90mi off the coast at point yankee because there were not sufficient anti ship capability. This resulted in the horrific pounding of the country (Operation Linebacker I, II for example). Things have changed (for the better).
ukraine has planes because it can't fly them except in limited circumstances with limited objectives.
So none of them lost on ground in Iran.
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.
> So none of them lost on ground in Iran.
Do we really need to play these semantic games?
An F-35 was confirmed successfully targeted and hit by Iranian Air Defenses.
The pilot was confirmed (by the DoW) to have been injured.
The plane in question seems to have been able to make its way back to friendly territory.
Every other detail about this incident is cloaked in fog of war with Vietnam-era narrative stealth technology and semantic evasive maneuvering. Since it didn't crash in enemy territory the Americans claim it wasn't 'downed' by the enemy. But did the F-35 actually land? like on its own wheels on an actual runway or was it a 'hard landing' (i.e. crash) as NPR's sources claim. Did the pilot eject? What is his condition? What is the condition of the airframe?
>No US ship was to my knowledge even hit by a drone/missle.
Again if one was, would we every know? Would we be told? The f-35 incident has been broadly emblematic of this entire war. Lot of bluster and downplaying and covering up losses. Its like Russia in the Ukraine War; Frequently having to check with Iranian sources to corroborate claims made by the Americans. Whether it is with satellite imagery, or on the true status of the Hormuz or control of Iranian airspace.
https://www.twz.com/air/usaf-f-35-makes-emergency-landing-af...
https://x.com/gbrumfiel/status/2034972525222838351
US lost more planes to friendly fire and accidents than the enemy.
We've killed more senior leadership than total US deaths in the war.
Iran has not killed a single pilot or sailor.
That's a generational ass whooping.
The triumphant US have succeeded in reversing the pre-War Iranian offer to give up HEU and the pre-War state of the Strait being open to traffic.
They have also very possibly succeeded in upending the strength of petro dollar that has been bouying up US economic dominance for much of the past 50 years.
USA! FTW!
Talk about muddled goals.
Somehow Iran is still in control of the strait. This sounds a lot like Russia declaring victory after three days in Ukraine.
Funnily that's all utterly irrelevant.
Like Vietnam showed, it doesn't matter how much better numbers than the enemy you have, because kill counts don't win wars.
Iran is still the one closer to achieving its objectives (survival for the regime), because they don't need to do much for that to happen. Apply pressure to the Gulf states and global energy and fertiliser markets and at some point, the US will cave. The American public will not tolerate high gas and everything related prices for long, and especially with an election coming up, there will be significant pressure.
US/Israel's war goals are basically unachievable. They can't enforce regime change on a regime backed by millions of fanatical loyal men, with defence and terrain on their side. They can certainly try a land invasion, but that would take years and cost a lot in casualties.
So, hypothetical.
If US lost public support then destroyed all oil and major iranian infra then left what would happen?
Think 20 years down the line what that would do.
> If US lost public support then destroyed all oil and major iranian infra then left what would happen?
Israel would go in and bomb the country to shit, since Israel is much more brutal than USA is.
The Iranian regime still has the millions of fanatically loyal men, so they'll still retain control, probably. Just over a much poorer country.
> US lost more planes to friendly fire and accidents than the enemy
Truly a force to be reckoned with.
The US blockade of the strait does not affect Iran's ability to blockade the strait.
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 ...
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.
Eventually, defense capabilities against drones may catch up and change the equation, but this is all research at this point.
Your definition of "complete dominance" is different from most people's.
If you completely dominate your enemy, you prevent them from being able to affect the situation. Iran is maintaining a blockade over a major shipping lane that the USA does not want them to. The USA's inability to prevent this shows that they are not "completely dominating" Iran.
No, "air dominance" is a well recognized term, it means you can fly your planes basically anywhere you want, to take out whatever target you want, without risk from AA. They are using it exactly how anyone familiar with warfare terminology would understand it.
I think the accepted term is "air supremacy" which is a completely different set of words (and meaning) from "complete dominance"
"Air supremacy" would be dominance of the air such that enemy cannot effectively interfere. "Air superiority" is the lesser level (enemy interference is not prohibitive).
At least in NATO lingo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_supremacy
I can't tell if this comment chain is a factual disagreement (ability to interference) or a linguistic one (supremacy vs superiority).
Kinda both, really.
Air supremacy (using your useful NATO definition) is not stopping Iran from flying drones and missiles. I don't know if that therefore contradicts the US/Israeli forces having Air Supremacy, or if Air Supremacy itself is an outdated term because it doesn't allow for the kind of drone bombardment we see now.
Either way, it's not "complete dominance" which is where we started from ;)
Maybe re-read the last sentence of parent which my reply was to?
Your presumably Ai-generated reply missed that, unsurprisingly, because you probably just copypasta'd parent and my reply in there?
P.S. air dominance in Iran is meaningless in this conflict. Read e.g. the blog post I linked to for context.
> P.S. air dominance in Iran is meaningless in this conflict. Read e.g. the blog post I linked to for context.
It's meaningless now.
If the US, for some reason, decided to say, "For each drone or missile that you fire at one of your Arab neighbors or Israel, we launch an old-fashioned B52 raid on your industry or infrastructure. Come to the negotiating table." and actually carried out that threat, well, there would be nothing the Iranians would be able to do about it.
That's not the case because of the currently scattered nature of US leadership, but it is a possible contingency that the Iranian government has to take into account. There's a reason they're not actively targeting US warships in the region.
Bombing civilian infrastructure never works like this. As we saw in The Blitz (and in Vietnam, and in Ukraine), it just draws the bombed together, unifying them and hardening their resolve.
If you ignore Japan and Germany, this is absolutely true.
Japan was nuked, different thing.
Germany was not bombed into submission. Millions of Russian soldiers invaded their capital city and forced them to surrender.
Can you use an example that doesn't prove the exact opposite?
Bombing absolutely worked in Vietnam so much that the south didn't actually lose the war until 2 years after the USA left. The war becoming a political nightmare is why the USA left not because the horrendously effective bombing stopped working.
Ukraine is really weird to put in here because Russia has fail to establish any effective air superiority so I can't make heads or tails why you put it in here.
As for the Blitz is was absolutely effective vs the British but USA factories and supply shipments were largely out of reach of the Axis.
Add in the fact that the people of Iran are largely opposed to being governed by a Muslim theocracy (most of the population is not Muslim) I'm frankly struggling to see how you get any of your viewpoints.
That is a unique view of what happened in Vietnam.
But let's look at a more modern example that makes your case: Syria. The US starved that country, seizing the food and oil, funding/arming terror groups - not just the kurds but also Al Nusra and other islamic terror groups, invading portions of the country and placing military bases there to give air support to terror operations and maintain control of the oil wells, blowing up pipelines, for over a decade. Finally after years of starvation and hyperinflation, the government collapsed as the generals were bribed by Qatar (or the Qataris were just intermediaries, we don't know) to lay down their arms and let the Jolani regime take over. When you are convinced your nation doesn't have a future, suitcases of cash and exit visas to mansions in London do wonders.
So yeah, you can punish a nation so much that it is easy to take over.
But, can the world survive 10 years of the straight of Hormuz being closed? I doubt it. Syria was a small country and it held out for a decade. Sure, it had help from Russia and China, but so does Iran now. When the US was strangling Syria, we already controlled the oil and food producing regions of the country. But there is no such arrangement in Iran, and Syria was not able to close off a major shipping lane like Iran can.
So I am skeptical that the US can outlast Iran and inflict enough misery on them to overthrow the region before this Iran adventure is brought to a close by world oil prices and US domestic political unrest.
You're suggesting that bombing civilian infrastructure will cause the Iranians to surrender (or to concede negotiating points in order to stop the bombing).
My point is that this doesn't work - the British under The Blitz famously had "Blitz Spirit" that was all about enduring the bombing and showing the Germans that they couldn't be beaten like this. The Vietnamese did not try to stop the bombing by surrendering or negotiating, and neither have the Ukrainians; again, if anything, they are more unified and more resolute because of the Russians attacks on their infrastructure.
Can you give me a single example where prolonged bombing of civilian infrastructure has brought a country to the negotiating table? Or made them surrender?
Japan and Germany.
Even if it doesn't cause them to "surrender" - I still don't know what the point of this whole "limited operation" is - it would effectively set back Iran's ability to operate a nuclear materials enrichment program, among other things.
I'd also like to point out that German raids on Britain, American raids on Vietnam, and Russian raids on Ukraine are not exactly comparable to the sort of bombing raids carried out by the Allies (particularly the US and UK) in Germany and Japan in scale.
If anything, the Iranians are trying the same strategy the Nazis did with the V1 and V2 with their drones and missiles: use them as a weapon of stochastic terror against the population of the region and on the occasional industrial target.
Again, as I replied above, Japan was nuked. There were 2 bombs. That is not "sustained bombing". Also, they were losing the conventional war and US troops had set foot on Japanese soil.
The Germans surrendered because millions of Russian troops invaded their capital city. The bombing had nothing to do with it (and I would argue, even hardened their resolve against surrendering).
Japan?
sure, if you think kicking off a nuclear war is a viable option ;)
If US destroys Iran it will be the dominate energy supplier for the next 100 years. Iran will be in shambles for 50 years.
If Iran surrenders US will be the dominate energy supplier for the next 30 years. Iran will be in shambles for 10 years.
The former would cause a worldwide depression but the clear winner of that is the US by a very large margin. If Iran wants to destroy itself and its neighbors US would be happy with the untold billions that would flow into the country and its energy infra investments in venezuela. All the wealth of middle east would leave and not be reinvested as now it's risky to invest in the ME.
Iran has the choice of a deal US likes or to make the middle east a wasteland for Israel to dominate for generations while US grows to a power that is hard to comprehend.
The only thing that has to happen for US to win is not surrender to a country with no military whose only threat they can make is to harm everyone else in the world but the US.
It is almost like you think it is 1965.
Orange man seems to think so.
You completely oversell Iran capability, I guarantee you that f35 would go down in a war with a country with decent anti air such as Russia or China.
Iran never invested in such technology, they put all their money in drones and ballistic missiles which were extremely effective, we are a month in and the strait is still close.
Their strategy was never to try to sink us ships, it was disruption in the region to extend the conflict which was again very successful.
Pretty sure Iran didn't plan on being obliterated.
Why did they have a navy if this was their only plan?
Also blocking the straight is funny because the only people it hurts is everyone in the world but the US.
I'm sure Americans are finding it funny to pay for $3+ a gallon. The entire economy suffers from it.
$3 a gallon is less than a dollar per liter. Do you live in Saudi Arabia or a gulf state?
Here are historical real (inflation adjusted) gas prices for the US. You can decide how terrible this is:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1UWwx
I can’t decide if the economy has bifurcated or if these inflation stats are totally bogus.
Diesel is almost $7/gallon here. All the stuff we buy (food, services, electronics) are up 30-100% since the beginning of last year, but federal inflation stats claim 3%.
Gas is certainly bifurcated. The west coast is paying up to $5.80 and Texas/midwest are paying $3.20 or so. NY and New England is paying a lot, but from Virginia on down, they are paying less. All the midwest is paying close to texas prices except Illinois, which is paying California prices.
Some of that is differences in taxes, but some of it is due to getting gas from different sources. If we had a pipeline from Texas to CA, there would be less bifurcation.
In terms of food being bifurcated, that too is happening, but to a smaller degree.
Basically the entire West coast is suffering from high inflation.
For the national 3% average to hold, for the low end of my range (30%) to hold on the west coast, the rest of the country would have to be suffering from deflation.
There is not 30% inflation in any region. Not even 15%.
I think you have to go back to the civil war era and greenback inflation to find numbers like that in any region.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-pri...
Whose the largest oil exporter in the world?
US about to be scroogemcducking in oil money
> I guarantee you that f35 would go down in a war with a country with decent anti air such as Russia or China
How many F-35s went down due to the Russian and Chinese anti-air systems in Venezuela and Iran?
They did not have any.
> If a nation wants to toss cheap drones at you there's basically nothing that can be done.
Ukraine is doing something. It has to, because this is what it faces from Russia.
The blockade is like a nuclear bomb detonated on all countries. 30% of World's oil supply is at risk. Not to mention critical elements needed for semiconductor production. Even the US is suffering passively because of this. Only saving grace for US is to restore navigation in the straits. Quicker it does it the quicker we can stop hell that'll be unleashed on the World. You really don't want to be responsible for 30% of Earth starving and dying of hunger because critical fertilizers never reached the masses for food production.
The fertilizer and helium shortages are unfortunate, but expensive gas has ~ doubled global demand for EVs. That’s an ecological miracle, given the idiocy of the US government. That’s probably where the good news ends though.
If spent on humanitarian aid shortfalls, the funds wasted by just the US on this war could have saved 87M lives:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/20/us-spending-on...
To put that in relative terms: WWII killed ~85M globally; 2/3 of them were civilians. So that’s killed 150% as many as the war crimes committed by Stalin, Hitler and the Japanese occupation of China combined.
I don’t mean to minimize the famine that’s definitely coming later this year.
Sounds like mass famine in the global South would be a feature to them, not a bug.
IIRC Israeli special forces knocked out almost all of Iran's advanced radar systems last summer right before the nuclear program strikes so to say the F35 dominated is somewhat disingenuous.
So we should expect the Strait of Hormuz to be open tomorrow, then?
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.
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.
Don't be silly. There's a third option, neither side gives up for a while.
[dead]
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.
aka the preparedness paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox
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.
We were burning a year worth of global patriot manufacturing capacity every day at the beginning of the war. Math says we slowed down and are also running out.
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.
I can't see the interceptor burn through being so low. Doctrine is 2-4 missiles per ballistic target. I've know the OSINT kids have a hard time with something like this since it's all classified and compared to Ukraine much harder to get visual confirmation, but I suspect Patriot use much higher. Hopefully the US has been using more of the PAC-2 than PAC-3 but they may have not been that discreet.
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.
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.
I think people are pointing out how little it actually takes to wage this war against Iran and that there are basically zero costs to the USA to do so. A classic "political exhaustion" requires some degree of meaningful hardship on the USA and a slight gas price increase just isn't enough.
Wait until the fertilizer shortage hits food prices, and the helium shortage actually shuts down semiconductor manufacturing.
Those things should be hitting just before election season.
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.
What do you mean by "losing TSMC"? It's not ours.
Do you know what does belong to the west? ASML. What makes TSMC actually work.
ASML is not "yours" too in that case as it happens to be european.
ASML's largest shareholder is Intel, and they rely on a supply chain from American, German, and other western European countries, all on the US leash.
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.
Intel does not hold a significant share in ASML anymore.
I agree that the US has other 'western' countries 'on a leash'. That used to be an arrangement that was mutually beneficial...
I mean it's literally beholden to the USA congress and it's most meaningful parts are made in the USA. There is a reason why they fall in line with every USA export control and restriction.
If ASML is Europe's then I'd say all of Europe is the USA's.
> it's literally beholden to the USA congress
Could you explain what you mean by that?
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.
Just want to drop this link to the excellent https://acoup.blog/2026/02/13/collections-against-the-state-... which discusses the different costs of war, including how significantly weaker powers can win by increasing political costs.
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.
This map should be eye opening. https://gasprices.aaa.com/
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.
Gas is Texas is not that much cheaper than national average and will hit $4 soon if this “war” continues. I have several friends in Texas who are livid about gas prices.
Do you know what percentage of THAADs have been used in Iran?
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.
Take a peek at last year's budget for missile production. It's amazingly small, and the production capacity is limited as well. RTX makes both Patriot and SM2/3 missiles, and production is so low that the Navy is going to be using the Patriot in its VLS launchers.
Lockheed makes THAAD, around 100/year. That's nothing. A veritable drop in the bucket.
PAC-3 production MIGHT hit 650 this year, with a goal of 2000 per annum by 2033!!!
SM-6 is about 300/year, and they're hoping to get to 500/year by roughly the same timeframe.
SM-3 is even lower at maybe 75/year. The USN has just never prioritized filling their weapons magazines.
It's hard to know what missiles were expended in the current Iran War, but you can figure out how many were purchased over the years since it's public info. Then subtract what's been used for training, fighting the Houthis in Yemen etc.
Before the war started, total purchases of all PAC-3 were approximately 2500. Some of these were used in training, some donated to Ukraine, and some were part of FMS.
Approximately 500 SM-3 missiles have been delivered. Approximately 1100 SM-6 missiles have been delivered.The majority of both the SM-3 and SM-6 are used by the USN, though some allies have made small purchases of both.
Unclassified estimates have Iran launching over 3000 ballistic missiles and 4500 drones. US policy for BMs is two missiles each. Not all of these would have been engaged by the US (Israeli systems such as Arrow etc would be tasked with missiles targeting Israel, though Israel also has Patriot through FMS). But it's easy to see where 3000 to 4000 interceptor missiles could have been consumed.
Now add in what the USN burned through in the Red Sea when the Houthis started targeting shipping and it's easy to be concerned about magazine depth.
And this is just interceptors. It doesn't count Tomahawks, JAASM, etc.
I don't think the US will become too war exhausted for another war. We just got out of one and we're back in one again. Taiwan would get politicians and people fired up.
[dead]
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 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 does seem that way based on this article[1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/us/politics/trump-iran-wa... https://archive.ph/gaHnu
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.
> 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.
Not to nitpick, but “looked good on paper” was an euphemism for “the powers that be think its doable”. Amd yes, yiu are right: Trump surrounded himself with “loyalist” this time that won’t go against hime like in the previous administration, but with the very undesirable effect of amplifying the echo chamber he lives in.
And like someone said in this thread, lots of hubris.
I am no expert on Iran, but all documentaries that I’ve seen about this reach the same conclusion: you don’t invade Iran using ground forces.
An invasion likely would turn into a quagmire, but what keeps regime proponents eternally hopeful is that unlike Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, etc, Iran has a robust political system. The dictatorship notwithstanding, it has a vibrant parliament and, by global standards, a decent electoral system. The Ayatollah rules by following the maxim, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. If you could excise the Revolutionary Guard (a big if), you wouldn't necessarily need to change the government or its institutions. The existing liberal and moderate factions could quickly fill the vacuum, and would be happy to do so. You wouldn't get a pliant Iran, but that's for the better.
So by invasion the idea would be to rapidly, physically excise the apparatus the Ayatollahs use to maintain control. The structure and identity of that group is well known. It's a large group, and you couldn't catch all the leaders, but so long as you can stop their ability to enforce their rule through execution, you give the rest of the country time to shut them out of the institutions. In theory just weeks.
The problem is the very thing that makes regime change a plausibly good idea--a stable polity and modern, liberal-ish institutions--is the very thing that could result in failure. The Ayatollahs understood that a fragile, backwards system would be a weakness to their rule. Their military and bureaucracy are professional; they know how to follow orders, without being micromanaged, and even if everyone wants regime change, there's a huge collective action problem.
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 estimates I’ve seen say they lost/used 33% of their conventional capacity, 33% was rendered inoperable but recoverable.
I’d guess with the ceasefire, they’re probably back to 40-50% online.
The nuclear capability story is even worse: they were mostly mothballed prewar, suffered partial refinement damage and minimal stockpile loss. Refinement will be back online sometime in the next few years (unless this is a forever war), with weapons following shortly after that.
> 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.
> 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.
So .. ICBM nuclear exchange? Or are we suddenly expecting a large conventional war between nuclear powers in which both sides decide not to bother with them?
Military planners may believe it to be inevitable, the interesting question to chase is why they think that and who the aggressor would be and in response to what.
That aside, it would likely be unconvential and ground breaking in several respects, eg: likely the first conflict with a large initial space based element, each country wanting to blind the other, with each having large constellations of satellites.
Killing farout geostationary spy sats wouldn't be visible .. but fragging the entire LEO space with "sufficient shrapnel" to initiate a cascading sat failure should(?) make for an interesting global skyshow.
I'm convinced War Hawks in all countries are much like WWE performers.
The hype is it's own product.
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.
the us is a manufacturing superpower. China is visible for cheap, but the us is a major power.
The days of China manufacturing cheap junk is long past. These same arguments were made against Japan. Look at a BYD EV and it will have a fit and finish comparable to any US manufacturer. In aviation, they're catching up quickly to the US, and are arguably ahead of Europe and Russia.
yes and no - they do make plenty of quality too - but they are most visible for the cheap junk.
I suppose visible is subjective. But they are also key component and raw material suppliers for essentially everything high value as well. The west simply does not have the heavy industrial or resource extraction base to account for anything else to be the case. Every time I’ve looked into literally any product China is at the start of the supply chain if lot much further into it.
And yes, I am alleging outright fraud and misrepresentation when it comes to stuff supposedly required to be entirely domestically sourced due to national security. If China froze all exports to the US and its allies, the US manufacturing base would simply cease to exist in rather short order. The China link might be 35 steps down the supply chain and buried 4 countries deep - but it’s almost always there.
The military is concerned about that and developing alternatives where there is real risk. The supply chain is global and china too has areas where they are missing something critical.
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.
A global supply chain does not say anything about our manufacturing power.
The people advocating for war against china will complain bitterly and weep the soon as their snacks and new electronic devices stop arriving by ship.
In the intro:
> 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."
I don't think that's the key message.
He says basing is a problem, but doesn't mention that we have answers to basing problems. He says F-35 production doesn't scale. Then he says F-35 production doesn't need to scale.
The F-35 is a multi-role jet. It wasn't built for what it's doing in Iran, it's just that it can do it. There are other older jets doing similar things in Iran just fine. Compared to past jets we lose fewer of them, so that has to be factored into the overall cost.
If we say, ok, let's just put fewer of them on this base to reduce concentration. They are still there. He didn't get rid of the F-35s, he didn't get rid of his argument that bases are vulnerable. So what is the point? Now if a successful attack gets through and takes out some F-35s....you now have less spare F-35s to do the critical mission you wanted, because you put fewer there to start with.
We have other solutions for this problem, but in peace time it's more efficient to concentrate things. The nature of escalation tends to mean you have some time to reorganize before the real battle comes.
We're still going to have F-35s _and_ drones _and_ missiles. If the enemy has anti-missile and anti-drone defenses, it won't necessarily be the drones and missiles taking those out.
> "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.
> the f35 can be built at scale
Really? Can you indicate how many can be produced yearly?
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.
> The base scenario in recent war games
January 2023. Specifically focused on an invasion of Taiwan. And the analysis report hardly mentions drones. Not saying it isn't useful info, but it is in essence not much more than an educated (but outdated) guess. Using terms like "showed that" is thus highly unwarranted.
> 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.
You make that sound as if it is not that much, even though the losses (were theorized to have) occurred within a matter of weeks. If anything, it strengthens the point that F-35 production is going to be inadequate in a longer-lasting conflict.
Which specific drone models are likely to be effective in a major air and naval conflict in and around the Taiwan Strait?
Sea Baby
Doubt it. The sea states tend to be higher around Taiwan.
There are semi- and fully submersible variants on the way, that can stay underwater for prolonged periods of time! Sea Baby is growing into quite a few different things over the months.
The submersible drones are quite slow, and require significant support from external sensor platforms. They're useful for defending or denying constrained areas but they can't do much to protect a Chinese invasion fleet near Taiwan.
It remains to be seen whether your assay is correct or not
Wargames for things that will never happen is not a good reason to build more planes now, in the real world.
There are over 1300 F35s in service, 500 in the US and the rest with various allies. It is the most successful weapons system in the last century.
And you want to build more of them? Because of a wargame?
Yeah, you're not producing 5000 a year.
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.
> 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.
Unlikely that pilots would work for drones in a fight with China over the pacific, the jamming and electronic warfare environment would make remote piloting nearly impossible, which is why CCA efforts are looking at onboard AI piloted aircraft. Even in Ukraine the EW environment is so harsh that FPV drones have resorted to using physical fiber optic cable connections so the drones cant be jammed out of the sky.
Any sort of drone that has the range, speed(shaheds only go ~180 km/h), and survivability to last in or near Chinese airspace is going to be expensive and complicated.
I'm using pilots in the loosest sense, it wouldn't be FPV. Regardless, there is a significant skill requirement.
The lesson from Ukraine and Iran is that 180km/h is fine if you have enough of them. If you have a Jetson Nano and comms link on each one they could be a real PITA to intercept.
Toward the end of WW2, even though the US and UK were turning German cities into rubble, the manufacture of german planes was still so great that empty planes sat around in warehouses because they could not find pilots to fly them.
That is why autonomous drones are very promising, because for manned flight, you will run out of pilots long, long, long, before you run out of planes. I don't think it's ever happened, that a nation with a large air force ran out of planes before running out of pilots.
So complaining about manufacturing capacity of planes is a bit goofy. I'd worry about surge capacity of things that are not gated by human operators. And only in the context of a regional war of choice overseas, since we'd just nuke anyone who tried to invade us at home.
Once you understand these constraints, you can better interpret why US production is allocated the way it is.
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.
The pacific theater is a way different combat environment then Ukraine. The ranges involved and china's IADS is just a whole different beast. The cheap drones that we have been seeing in Ukraine and Iran are just not as useful in a war against china. Cheap drones don't have the range or survivability to penetrate china's airspace or hit moving targets(most go to fixed gps coordinates), this is a job for stand off munitions and manned stealth aircraft. There's no current UAV or CCA that exists that has the capabilities needed to replace manned aircraft for the majority of missions that would need to be flown. Wargaming shows that the b21 and f47 as well as stand off munitions are the workhorses. Although something like a Barracuda-500 seems very interesting but again its like 10x the cost of the drones being used in the Ukraine theater and its production lines are just now being set up.
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.
They delivered 191 last year. So roughly 1.5 days per plane currently?
Yes, and surge requirements are generally quadruple of the normal runtime, but with lead-time. Still, no way we can train pilots at a rate of even 1 pilot every 1.5 days. And imagine the lead times on that!
The F-22 or F-15 would have also performed superbly in Iran, they don't have modern anti-air capabilities.
I see what the author is saying and I agree to some extent, but I think the F35 is mostly irrelevant in terms of the argument being made. I think it is needed and does it's job as a deterrent. The F35 means that that no one can really control the skies against the US. Iran was considered to have fairly robust air defenses and that was all but destroyed within days. So the F35, as the author states, is performing well along with the rest of the United States Airforce.
The issue the US has is that they really do not want to lose US soldiers in this war and because of that they are unwilling to fully occupy or destroy Iran. And the reason they don't want to do that beyond all the normal reasons is that this is a phenomenally unpopular war and every lost life is considered unacceptable by the American people. Similarly, causalities of innocent Iranians is not going to play well domestically or internationally, since one of the ever shifting reasons for war that was given was that the Iranian government was killing it's people. Helping the current Iranian regime kill innocent civilians seems counter productive to that point.
The US nor any country will ever be good at fighting a war where there is no clear objective and they are not fully committed. Winning for Iran is not losing and the US isn't playing to win, so Iran wins by default. This entire campaign is a textbook example of how not to go to war. No military equipment or capability is going to change that.
I think that tech people presume too much overlap between their own domain knowledge and war. The analysis isn't particularly bad, it's just wildly overconfident. Replacing F-35s with drones is like replacing cell towers with bluetooth mesh networks. You can hate the F-35 and love drone swarms, but they aren't in the same niche.
Cheap (~1k USD) drones are easy to intercept, vulnerable to EM/GPS jamming, require nearby operators, break easily, and can't carry enough payload to make a difference. Try to fix any one or two of these and the price will go up. As the price goes, reliability becomes more important. Try to fix them all and you're going to reinvent the missile.
One comment in this thread argued that drone factors can be protected from F-35s by burring them underground, misunderstand that such logistical hurdles are what causes military hardware to be more expensive than civilian equivalents in the first place.
F-35 isn't a deterrent. Nukes are the deterrent. Iran and Venezuela lacked nukes. North Korea doesn't lack nukes.
The F-35 is just peacocking but ultimately useless. If these war games were realistic the game ends on the first move which is asking the question "Do they have nukes." If the answer is yes, then the game doesn't even start.
Nuclear weapons are a deterrent against somebody invading the US (or another NATO country) but that doesn't make conventional forces not a deterrent against other kinds of aggression. Many attacks have been made against the US and not resulted in nuclear retaliation, like 9-11.
India and Pakistan have nukes and have fought each other recently so your assertion that "has_nukes() == no_game_start()" is *false*. Nukes, however probably will deter India from doing the full-Putin into Pakistan.
Russia has nukes and there seems to be some game going on.
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.
Mass produced means something very different when it comes to wars between comparable powers.
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.
Quantity has been replaced by precision.
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.
Maybe you should read the article?
Quantity is back in the game again thanks to drones, right now we would lose without escalating to a nuclear war.
Cheap drones are extremely limited in the kinds of targets they can reach and damage while evading air defenses. I understand this domain well.
Upgrading drones so that they have sufficient range and carry a sufficiently capable warhead and have a decent probability of surviving a modern air defense environment has been done many times by many countries. The price always comes in ~$1M/drone. It doesn't matter who builds it. Those economics get expensive fast for a weapon system you can't reuse. Much cheaper drones either have no useful range or are susceptible to even cheaper defenses; in either case they don't do any meaningful damage. That point on the price-performance curve wasn't picked at random by competent weapon designers.
Even the Ukrainian FP-5 is ~$0.5M, and it is significantly less capable than some western weapons with a similar profile.
The US has assumed drone swarm attacks would be a thing for decades and has both tested and fielded many systems purpose-built for those scenarios.
> The price always comes in ~$1M/drone.
You're off by an order of magnitude. Russian jet powered versions of the Iranian drones cost less than 100k.
Chinese ones reportedly are a third of the cost for the same capabilities, but are not being sold at scale.
Exactly, drones enable quantity and precision. Geran type drones can easily fly 1000nm, and that kind of range needs wide area sensing and patrols to intercept, really expensive at present.
I don't know that a loss right now would be likely, probably a stalemate which would be ruinously expensive for everyone.
Drones favor defenders by making movement costly, there is a considerable advantage to being dug in. Air dominance no longer guarantees being free from low altitude aerial threat. Long range drones require basing further away, which means A2A refuelling, or a massive innovation in drone defence (cheap missiles, autonomous drone interceptors, sensor nets).
> 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.
You are aware that China is producing two fifth gen stealth fighters, and is flight testing two sixth gen platforms? And that Chinese AAMs are world class? Read up on how Pakistan crushed the Indian Air Force recently flying fourth gen Chinese fighters using their current AAMs.
There is no evidence to show that Pakistan crushed the Indian Air force infact it's the other way around. A lot of Chinese equipment was blown out by Indian Brahmos.
Brahmos isn't an A2A missile...
This is why I specifically didn't say "if china made 10,000 of their current 6th gen air superiority fighter", I said f16s.
The idea that China would lose 10k fighters when we barely have enough AAMs and aircraft in comparison is silly. The days of F-22s clubbing baby seals is long past.
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.
> engagement geometry means an 4:1 fight is always going to be costly
That's not how 6th gen fighter combats work. You get hit by missiles and explode without ever even detecting the opponent.
Does china have better stuff than f16s? Sure (and modern f16s are not the same as 1970s f16s which makes my point harder to understand in the first place anyways) but at some point, with some military technologies, you can't beat them with quantity.
That's how your imagination of 5th fighters work (because there are no 6th gen fighters in service), as if they are somehow invisible. This is a misunderstanding of RADAR.
Lower frequency RADAR will pick up F-35s, but not with enough precision to generate a target track. Pilots spend a lot of thought on the problem of signature management.
A Chinese Wedgetail would be extremely dangerous, as it could provide a very good detection, and with a close enough X-band RADAR you will get a target, and then it is up to kinetic escape/EW/decoys. That is a bad situation to be in during a large force engagement.
The PLAAF is of course working on longer range and faster AEW&C and jam resistant data link and expendable sensors. It is just a matter of time.
I'm not trying to say that f35s are immune to modern chinese technology, I'm trying to say they're immune to previous generation stuff. They don't need to be literally invisible, you can know where they are all you want if you can't actually hit them with a missile.
There's a lot of things that complicate actual fights, people get lucky, people get unlucky, you do clever things like predict incoming sortie directions and saturate that area, but while the f35 is not produced in the same numbers as say, the p51, it's not "the last starfighter" either, the opponent has to get lucky a whole bunch of times before their ability to resist has been removed.
> I'm trying to say they're immune to previous generation stuff
S400 works just fine for detecting F-35s.
Practically speaking there are between 0 and 1 S-400 systems to worry about, and they will be one of the very first targets. Prompt global strike, JASSM-ER/LR, Tomahawk, AARGM-ER, JATM, even AIM-174B and 260s, they're all coming for it, and all the lesser S-300 (SA-10) / HQ-15, HQ-16/FK-3s etc.
The S-300 systems in Iran were completely ineffective against IDF F-35s. Doubtful they even got a detection.
S300 and S400 are a bit different
For certain definitions of "works".
They don't seem to have fared all that well against US/Israeli F-35s in Iran, and seem to struggle in Ukraine against far less sophisticated opponents.
> seem to struggle in Ukraine against far less sophisticated opponents
Yes, that's the recurring theme in modern warfare. Cheap mass produced shit makes sophisticated tech struggle. The US is now going to be immune from this, especially since we have stopped mass producing anything for thirty years.
Ukraine used cheap drones to destroy a few S400 setups.
The previous poster was claiming that not only can the S400s not detect f35s, they can't adequately combat previous generation stuff either.
I can't comment on how accurate that is, but as for "cheap mass produced shit", I refer you to both times the US invaded iraq. Kill ratios on the order of literally 100 to 1. This is the point at which you can't actually overwhelm better technology with quantity.
Wars are, of course, incredibly more complicated than just measuring kill ratios and highscores as if it were a video game. There's usually multiple factions involved, all with differing objectives and those factions and objectives can change and mutate during the course of the war anyways.
If we look at a war the US unequivocally lost, defending south vietnam from the north vietnam invasion, there are a whole bunch of factors but exactly none of them involved some kind of "high tech too advanced" weapon system being defeated by "lower tech but more mass produced" systems.
Doing some incredibly basic research shows that the actual dollar cost of the vietnam war was, relative to the american economy and so on, pretty small, and not a major factor in the ultimate result of the war. Producing fighter jets or whatever that were 10% cheaper doesn't seem like it would have made much of a difference.
This actually kind of proves my point, we can "go to war" with iraq or iran and as long as we're not implementing literal conscription, the US is willing to maintain those wars for a very long time. There's a gigantic difference in public response between "2 pilots died when f35s were ambushed" and "10,000 american soldiers died in this month's battles around Baghdad". One of those gets you some headlines and a few protests, the other gets you voted out of office.
It depends a little bit on how many bang bangs the boom boom has.
You fire all your missiles then.. you turn around and leave. The enemy isn't in range to engage you, you're flying away at least the same speed they're chasing, what are they going to do?
The enemy isn't in range to engage you
That's convenient. Hopefully they don't use their massive numerical advantage in some sort of scheme to make it not true.
What are they going to do, fly over and bomb washington??
You are absolutely right ;) If the US keeps maintaining a several decade technology lead forever, that is..
That has never really happened in history, so good luck I guess.
> If China produces 100 times or 1000 times their current numbers…
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.
If you read my comment (or the article!) a bit more carefully, you'll see I mentioned comparable opponents.
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.
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.
That's a stale insight from an old era of warfare. The purpose of quality is to remove quantity. Iran is the case study. A large stockpile of munitions counts for something, but once the factories are gone, you're on a 3 month clock. Factories being deleted can only be achieved with quality (expensive stand-off munitions + F-35s for SEAD, then missile trucks with cheap JDAMs to take out the factories).
30-50 years ago you just couldn't do this kind of warfare, the technology and intelligence didn't exist. Now you can. People haven't updated on this paradigm shift.
People are over-learning the wrong lessons from Ukraine. That is a unique war with air parity. That's why the Ukraine war is shaped the way it is. Not because this is how wars ought to be fought.
This is not to discount quantity. But you can't have only quantity unless you want to fight an attritional war for 10 years (or worse, lose your own industrial production to an enemy that achieves air superiority over your skies because they had the foresight to invest in quality).
The Iran war isn't over yet. Plenty of time for it to become attritional, especially if the people who want Big Gaza / "mowing the nuclear lawn" to become the status quo are in charge. After all, Afghanistan was a quick victory, 20 years of attrition, and eventual exit.
Without factories? I doubt it. I'm not saying the US is going to win (in the sense of achieving objectives), but it's not going to be an attrition war like in WW2 or Ukraine. Japan had factories. Ukraine has factories. You can't sustain a modern war without factories.
Afghanistan wasn't an attrition war (where the outcome is a collapse of one side). The CENTCOM commander explains best why the US lost, it's because of sanctuary:
> The core of the Taliban’s command and control was in the mountainous town of Quetta in southern Pakistan, and the most violent branch of the movement, the Haqqanis, were safely ensconced farther north, also in Pakistan. All were off limits to our forces. Occasionally, Pakistan would apply some pressure, but it was never enough to reduce their ability to operate. I came to see this as the absolutely critical failure of all our plans, and I grew to believe that there weren’t enough U.S. forces in all the world to establish order in Afghanistan, so long as Pakistan was open to the Taliban. It was a logical error in our approach to counterinsurgency that could not be papered over or compensated for.
> You can't sustain a modern war without factories
No, but somehow Iranian backed Hamas and Hizbollah forces manage it from factoryless regions of Palestine and Lebanon. That's what I meant by "big Gaza": a region that's substantially damaged but still capable of fighting, where US/Israeli forces have to keep bombing militants in civilian areas forever. Every few weeks a new pile of dead kids for social media. Is that the plan for Iran?
> US/Israeli forces have to keep bombing militants in civilian areas forever
It's not forever. A common misconception about insurgencies is that they're impossible to defeat because they're an "ideology". But it's more about sanctuary and state sponsorship. Afghanistan was a loss because of sanctuary, as per my quote above. This article provides quantitative analysis on that:
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2010/R...
Hezbollah had sanctuary in Syria before Assad's collapse, and their state sponsorship is under strain because their supply route through Syria has been cut off and their state sponsor in Iran has degraded industrial production and finances.
> Is that the plan for Iran?
The plan for Iran is to prevent a fait accompli, defined as 10000 ballistic missiles (exceeding interceptor stockpiles) or a nuclear weapon. The best case scenario is regime change. The second best case scenario is coercing them into terms. The worst case scenario is to degrade their power projection capabilities without a negotiated agreement. But all three scenarios are considered better than the status quo trajectory by the belligerents. The status quo trajectory is seen as leading to a bigger war later (e.g. once they reach 9000 ballistic missiles instead of 5000), or worse.
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.
100% this.
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.
Ukraine is using old school propeller trainer craft to shoot down some of the slower Russian drones. https://theaviationist.com/2024/06/26/ukrainian-yak-52-kill-... There's usually new footage of this every week on social media.
Don't really see or hear about the USA building or using propeller driven planes in military outside of special ops.
There's a very interesting fallacy at play here. It's true that Ukraine is doing absolutely amazing and ingenious things on a shoestring budget across all military domains. It's also true that the armed forces of other world powers have a lot to learn from them, especially when it comes to drone warfare.
The fallacy comes in when blindly transferring these lessons to other wars and other armies.
In a perfect world with unlimited production and budgets, Ukraine would love to use Patriot or SAMP/T to shoot down every slow moving drone. In the real world, they make do with what they have, because the alternative is defeat and annihilation.
Ukraine is using propeller trainer planes to shoot down Russian drones because they have them and they can be quickly modified for the mission. That doesn't mean that an air force starting with a clean slate would prefer to use a cheap propeller plane in an anti-drone role. Instead, given enough time and budget, they'd probably prefer to build a custom-designed, more expensive and more capable solution, which still lands in a better spot on the shot exchange curve than Patriot vs Shahed. Think interceptor drone (which are usually several times more expensive and capable than their targets, but that's air defense) or 21st century gun systems.
Ukraine is a post Soviet state with a huge stockpile, engaged in a drawn out attritional defensive conflict where neither side has claimed air superiority. They have no choice but to be efficient, and to make everything they have go as far as they can. From an economic point of view, the USA can afford to be less efficient when fighting into Iran.
For the USA, shot exchange as an economic problem is mostly theoretical. The real problem is supply exhaustion. It doesn't matter if the air defense interceptors cost $10,000 or $10,000,000 if the total stockpile and yearly production capacity of them is only enough to fight for 3 months.
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.
I mean the armed forces already know this well. They have a bunch of units of regular soldiers, and then they have a few special forces units.
The armed forces know this well but many of the internet commentators do not. Many have over-learned the lesson from Ukraine, going all the way from "drones are an important (and even potentially dominant) new tool of warfare" to "everything more expensive than a drone is a huge waste of money - just buy more drones". The real world is rarely so simple.
There are strategic winners and losers of a drone dominated world, just like there were when the machine gun or the airplane began to dominate combat. Calvary charges did not play a major role in WWII for a good reason. I would guess that the F-35 (and in general, fast stealthy attack jets) will continue to deliver a lot of value even in a world with drones. Think more like destroyer and less battleship or horse.
If you made me guess which systems would become obsolete as a result of this, my first guess would probably be attack helicopters. Much of their role can be filled by other less expensive and less vulnerable systems.
That's not a new idea, it's the same thing Germany learned about tanks in WWII.
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.
I suggest reading Len Deighton's Blitzkrieg (among other WW2 books by him) because it goes into unusual detail on the industrial design and resource allocation decisions that went into tank production leading up to WW2.
Except that the "quality" of their tanks was not exactly top notch, worse they used a lot of resources. At that point it was just a desperate gamble: "if we can make an invincible tank, then it won't matter how few we have", we both know it did not pay off, not even close.
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.
They actually did standardize pretty quickly. Panzer III and Panzer IV were the workhorses in Russia, paired up with the StuG (which used the Pz III chassis). I think that it's arguable that no production strategy could have led to German success. Had they tried to produce T-34 or Sherman type tanks (and the Panther was kind of intended to be that tank), they still would have been overwhelmed by the sheer number of tanks built buy the Allies. The Soviets at their peak year produced over 29K tanks, with the US contributing around 21K. The Germans maxed out at around 8k.
IMHO, the Soviets alone could have eventually defeated Germany, thought at much greater cost (as if over 20m casualties wasn't already incredible).
Agreed that arguably no strategy could have helped them against the Soviet Union, it was a major blunder going to war with them.
But the Nazis self-sabotaged constantly. The Panzer IV and the Stug III (with the outdated Panzer III chassis) were arguably the closest standard for armor, but they were constantly diverting effort to alternative platforms that were too complex to mass produce and maintain. And the same for other weapons.
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..)
I mean not really? People focus on quantity but the German late war tank designs just sucked.
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.
Not necessarily worse, just different design philosophies. German design philosophies changed throughout the course of the war too.
And people don't really know much about the tanks the Germans were using in France and in Barbarossa. The Pz 2 was used extensively in Barbarossa and it was intended as a training tank! The Pz 3 was woefully underarmed compared to T-34 and god forbid come up against a KV1.
But at the end of the war, the Panther was one of the best tanks on the battlefield. Good crew ergonomics, a gun that was perfect, optics that allowed it to be used well. Comparing that to even a Firefly Sherman? Not a fair fight.
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.
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.
Can't argue with that. The context of that quote was Europe defending itself and the reality that most European states are simply not ready for such a high level of attrition.
While Iran has faired better than I expected, it's a reach to say they've punished the US. The US losses are comically small. Of course wars aren't won solely based on battles...
> The US losses are comically small.
Just international respect, potentially the loss of the petrodollar, trust of allies, etc.
Small beer stuff really - although the kinds of things that feature in historical retrospectives published 50 years after turning points.
The US' immediate material losses are peanuts, of course. And Iran's are massive.
Weeks after declaring victory, it remains a strategic blunder with no obvious way out.
The Hormuz quagmire was expected and the vile Iranian regime has a long history of murdering and sacrificing its population for political gains.
Since we're discussing a WoR article:
https://warontherocks.com/tactical-success-strategic-failure...
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.
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.
>But a frigate without sonar isn't inherently horrible--lots of places don't have subs.
True, but it's one less mission that it can do. My fear (which I think will be 100% confirmed) is that we will only get a handful even though they are unit cost cheap, because they still cost money to crew and maintain. I need to spend some time modelling the economics of it I guess.
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.
No wonder America keeps falling behind.
I think you're ignoring subcontractors and other suppliers. It's probably more like a thousand or so companies.
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.
$1.7 trillion over 70 years. So $24B/year.
> The F-35 is made by one company, Lockheed Martin (with some pieces made by a couple others)
This isn't even remotely true, who is paying you to post this drivel?
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.
You don't scale up today - you just make sure you can. Otherwise next year you have a ton of obsolete drones to scrap.
I feel like there's a brute-force analogy to be drawn with the "Bitter Lesson" that we saw in AI development.
Pawns are the only piece that matter on a chess board?
That’s no insight, just a fact from the entire history of warfare except when one side had rifles/guns and the other didn’t.
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.
I agree to a point.
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...
Restraint, my unbleached asshole.
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 ...
The uncomfortable truth is that is absolutely restraint.
For the areas of Ukraine Russia controls, the Russians have distributed food and in some cases identifying documents.
From what I can tell Russia’s goal is to assimilate, not annihilation.
After all is said and done, I suspect some Ukrainians will become Russian citizens or be granted the opportunity to leave.
Or the war will continue forever
No one is fire-bombing cities yet, despite Ukraine pulling a WWII Japan and distributing weapons production amongst residences.
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.
> No one is fire-bombing cities yet
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.
Wrong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0BttoqSbeE
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.
Hah. Ukraine has cut Russian petroleum production 40%...
And they've only recently cranked things up, seeming having given up on Trump who wanted restraint there.
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.
Why do you think this bridge is vital when there is a land bridge (Kherson) with multiple rail links all in Russian controlled territory containing the entry and exit points of the bridge?
That bridge is A) incredibly expensive and something a postwar Ukraine would prefer to exist for economic reasons, B) extremely overbuilt in certain ways, and C) not strictly required if Russia can keep rail going on the landbridge.
It might be in play if the land bridge fell.
It would be almost trivial in terms of range to make it a target of any number of strike munitions. If you can hit the Baltic ports or factories in the Urals...
As for drones vs cruise missiles - at this point every missile strike is associated with drone accompaniment, it's part of the counter SHORAD proposition.
I’m surprised that they are not dropping thermite on oil refineries. Most things there will burn if hit enough.
You think “morality” is what’s preventing the US or Russia to drop atomic bombs on their smaller targets?
> 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.
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.
IMO, modern sensors paired with robot controlled guns are one of the most promising hard kill solutions for drone combat. Gepard and the newer Skyranger 30 have proven themselves against low-spec threats in Ukraine. C-RAM (aka Land Phalanx Weapon System) is an already deployed system that is very effective against even higher spec threats like missiles.
Of course, there are always tradeoffs. Even the best guns have much shorter ranges than air defense missiles, and that means you need more systems to provide the same area coverage. As you mentioned, the guns themselves (and the sensors and networks feeding them) become a target.
As usual though, likely the solution will require a mix of capabilities across the spectrum, working to cover each others' weaknesses. Nothing is fool-proof, but all can force costly adaptations. Take EW for example. Nothing is cheaper than jamming out the drone's comms or nav. This forces adaptation to autonomy or fiber optic drones, which have their own costs, supply pinch points (Russia now consumes somewhere around 10% of the world's fiber, for example), and tradeoffs.
This is nothing new - layered air defense has been around a long time. The new thing is the explosion of cheap, low-spec threats forcing development of a cheap and sustainable answer to them.
Nets, EW, beam weapons, gun systems, interceptor drones, AMRAAM, Patriot, SAMP/T, etc etc... all fill an important role in targeting different threats.
There are videos on the internet of drones being shot down with an assault rifle out of a 50 year old training plane, 1914 style.
>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
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.
There’s credible evidence that the Shahed is itself a derivative of a late 20th century German drone designed as a loitering anti-radar munition.
Which has roots that can be traced to the V-1.
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.
Not to mention US air bases dotted all over the Middle East, the near East, Europe, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Ocean the Arctic…
Iran wouldn't have started to work in nuclear weapons if Bush didn't credibly threaten to invade them.
Hell, Iran didn't actually work into building them before Trump decided to attack them.
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.
Half? There were approximately 133 developing countries (depending on how you count) during the George W. Bush presidency so please to give us a list of 66 that he "denounced" for sponsoring terrorism.
Of course the reality is that going back to 2001 the US government has only ever designated seven countries as state sponsors of terrorism. Those were: Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, Sudan, Libya, and Iraq.
Elections in Iran don't necessarily mean much in terms of nuclear weapons policy. It's not clear whether Mahmoud Ahmadinejad actually had much power to impact weapons development one way or another. The real decision making authority appears to lie elsewhere.
This is laughably false. The leadership in Tehran is smart, and they know that nukes are the most assured path to the regime's self-preservation. (see: North Korea). They've been trying to build nukes since the 80s.
> Also seems that having a very capable military that lets you project power around the world also invites that power to be used.
I assure you that is a much better problem than the alternative.
Thanks for the assurance!
> A million dollar patriot missile to shoot down a cheap drone...
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.
Yet these cheap and effective weapons failed to protect high value targets, esp. radars.
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).
Iran's stuff is short range.
But Orange Dementia didn't even think about that.
That's a question of deployment, not capability. They've been used widely in the Middle East against drones since the 2010s with considerable success.
Which system are you talking about?
APKWS.
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, APKWS is a good solution, but it really wasn't used much for C-UAS before VAMPIRE was shipped to Ukraine.
> A million dollar patriot missile to shoot down a cheap drone, etc.
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.
The US just blew through a large percentage of its PAC-3/PAC-2 inventory fighting Iran. Other than Patriot, the US doesn't really have much GBAD anymore. A few Avenger systems, some Stinger MANPADs, etc. It's either Patriot or THAAD; and hopefully they're not dumb enough to be using THAAD against drones.
I'm sure they burned through quite a few AMRAAM and Sidewinders doing intercepts as well. Patriot is much more expensive than $1M (try $4M), Stinger is around 250K depending on who the customer is ($750K if you're non-US). AMRAAM is over $1M, Sidewinders $500K.
Even APKWS is $40k, and Shaheed prices are around $30k? So even that low cost option is losing.
There are many different flavors of APKWS, that is the most expensive type. There is real tension between reducing unit costs by maximally leveraging whatever systems they are attached to instead of putting everything in the guidance package and the overhead cost of the customization that entails.
They've been experimenting with variants for many years. There is some belief that they may be able to get unit costs down to $5k for some common variants. Everyone believes $10k is achievable.
> 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.
They're only interested in making more money.
There are so many companies working on this now (cheap anti-drone tech, cheap cruise missiles, cheap missile interceptors), what you're saying is kind of moot.
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.
It's not VTOL. It has STOVL and CATOBAR variants.
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.
> 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 that last bit translated well.
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.
[dead]
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.
I think they mean that everyone in the orchestra does not get a Stradivarius
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).
There is a win condition achievable in a US-China war. You leave the army in shambles and take over the political power structures, like with nazi germany or any other conventional country in the world.
It'd be hell, for sure, but it is a war that can end in victory for either side.
You’ve missed or are ignoring my point that any victory would be pyrrhic.
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!
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxJLUZWPEb8
(Re-Upload: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8__8--YAm4)
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.
Yeah, but the war drums are beating for it.
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.
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.
F-35 cost overruns are mostly solved. The cost of first-of-a-kind is always ludicrously expensive. Nth-of-a-kind, they're not so bad.
The F-35 is currently about the same price to procure as Gripen, a 4th generation non-stealthy fighter.
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.
Seems like the life cycle costs for F35:s are about double compared to that of a Gripen E/F, with straight up procurement cost about a third more.
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.
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.
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.
The article isn't critiquing the F-35, in fact describes how "exquisite" it is multiple times.
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.
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.
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.
No plane is invisible. It is totally unclear if Russian or Chinese technology can detect them. I mean, there is one way to find out....
This being said, should the "invisibility" fail, it becomes a plane that can't dog fight, cant fly very high, can't fly very fast, can't carry a lot of load, needs an insane amount of maintenance (10h per 1h flight) and is expensive. Big bet!
Superiority comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_(short_story)
Fun fact: German stealth figthers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horten_Ho_229
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MBB_Lampyridae
The modern background of stealth figthers comes from the soviet union: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_technology
Dog fighting is not a serious concern in modern fighter combat because missiles have gotten so effective that the current strategy has been forced into beyond visual range combat. And stealth doesn't just "fail". In bvr the first side that sees the other is the side that gets to fire a salvo first, which is the primary advantage of stealth technology: so that the enemy doesn't see you from as far as you can see them. All stealth does is linearly lower the radar return of your plane for a given distance and angle, but radar return is inversely proportional to the fourth power of distance. This means that if you get close enough then any decent radar can eventually make out an f35. The whole point of stealth is to make that distance as small as possible.
"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."
I'm just happy the Australian Government invested in the MQ-28 Ghost Bat program. Unit cost is currently estimated to be USD$8-10m according to Boeing and we get a "loyal wingman" platform to force-multiply our small fleet of F-35s and F/A-18 Supers. It can also be remotely directed from the E-7 Wedgetail.
At a cost of $2.3 billion (AU(?)) to date so far and with costs set to increase going forward, are the flagship UAV Ghost Bat and Ghost Shark programs really bang for the buck "good investments" or examples of the ongoing Australian Defence habit of going all in for bespoke capability acquisition projects while ignoring the purchasing of “Military Off The Shelf” (MOTS) systems ?
I have a gut feeling more use (if and when required) would come from the parallel program of spending of $2.3 billion on a multitude of broadly spread smaller drone programs than from flagship drones .. or submarines when and if the US can spare one or get back in the building enough subs to sell extras game.
Related, for general interest:
* Yet another blunder at Defence, where ‘off the shelf’ is ignored for expensive bespoke solutions - https://www.crikey.com.au/2026/03/31/defence-procurement-mil...
* Australia banks on Ghost Bat and Ghost Shark in drone warfare shift - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-18/australia-military-dr...
Except we are now in a leadership position on these technologies. We can also ensure it meets our requirements as we did with the Wedgetail.
As far as off-the-shelf systems, we do that with the avionics and sensors.
Maybe if we had waited we could have expended our partnership with Anduril and worked with them on their CCA "Fury" program?
Article misses the main thing that matters in air superiority fighting: who gets to protect their industrial production.
Low tempo is irrelevant. What matters is whether you can deliver those munitions to the factories early in the fight to prevent it from becoming an attritional war.
In Ukraine, they both have air parity so they can't do that.
"If we all reacted the same way, we'd be predictable, and there's always more than one way to view a situation. What's true for the group is also true for the individual. Over-specialize and you breed in weakness. It's slow death." - Major Motoko Kusanagi, Ghost in the Shell (1995)
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.
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).
https://www.baen.com/Chapters/1439133476/1439133476___5.htm
Arthur c Clarke's short story, "Superiority," describes this dynamic perfectly.
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.
A thousand sparrows does not an eagle make.
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.
Why not just drop a container of tnt instead of drones with tiny bombs ?
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.
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.
> like in Infinity War
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 ..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb
If you want to target a large area, there’s already cluster munitions and/or thermobarics.
Curious why they committed so hard to stealth over electronic warfare capability — was that purely a doctrine decision, or did the sensor fusion architecture actually preclude both approaches simultaneously?
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).
It's a camel designed by committee.
On paper it looks cool.
In practice it was /never/ the right plane. The contractors knew and didn't care.
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.
Yeah, military pricing isn't because of it's good quality, it's because it's compliant, and they are usually at odds with each other.
> designed by committee
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.
part of its mission is being expensive, but surely you can see how that changes with the stroke of a pen?
> 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
After reading your comment I did read up on the Gripen. Seems very interesting. Procurement is about the same as the F-35 but the running costs are about 1/4 so over its expected lifetime it'll be considerably cheaper. On the procurement front though Saab seems to offer factory set up as part of the deal, so you make back some of the cost into your economy. Being able to build and maintain them yourself seems like a big plus.
Capability wise the gap isn't as large as I thought either. The latest Gripen-E has similar radar, possibly better software, and they can be kitted out to fire the same air to air weapons. What they don't have is a stealthy airframe and they aren't designed for some of the same mission profiles. If you're a country that doesn't make your own aircraft then having access to both, or just the Gripen for interceptors would make some sense.
Camels are very well designed.
Pick on a less useful animal.
Well yes, we have a load of taxpayer funded people to decide what to build.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_door_(politics)
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.
An interesting piece, but it doesn't tell in how the F-35 is built for the wrong war.
In fact, it is a mostly positive take on the F-35. It is more about how it should be used according to the author than a criticism about the plane itself.
F-35 is a stealth vehicle that works, but when you are withholding munitions from the war that can bring it to a close it becomes far less useful.
Every F-35 is capable of carrying multiple nuclear bunker busters each of which is far more powerful than the GBU-57A/B MOP.
>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.
Oh, do they? How many F-35s have been lost in combat? As far as I know we had one that was damaged by an IR guided missile and subsequently landed in friendly territory. You don't have to replace what you don't lose.
Drones aren't magic. Sure, you can build swarms of easy to jam, short range, small payload drones that are easy to track back to the base station on a budget. Will they work against a tech-savvy enemy? Maybe. Hope all your targets are really close to the launch site.
And yes, you can upgrade your drones. You can give them longer range, larger payload, higher speed, and more sophisticated electronics. But then they're not cheap anymore and building a swarm will break the bank.
This is a strange article. He's damning the f-35 but with more than faint praise.
Instead of saying outright that war has evolved and the plane is not really fit for purpose, he ends indecisively.
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.
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 just wanna say that it’s not realistic to think that the United States defending Taiwan is anything but a bluff. Westerners aren’t willing to die for a small crummy island a few hundred miles off the coast of China that’s 5000 miles away for most other western countries. It’s just not practical. They will sanction China and make it a pariah state if they invade and call it a day. The idea that we would actually risk our lives or nuclear war to defend them is ridiculous.
The best defense policy for the USA, any country really, is to be a good neighbor, good "world citizen" and reliable friend
One can dream
So we’ve made a small number of exquisite King Tigers, and they’re making huge numbers of Shermans?
Great for bombing hospitals and other infrastructure at least...
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!
Skynet
"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.”
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.
People not paying attention need it explained to them.
tiktok is the ultimate weapon still, nothing bombs minds more than that
Is there a “right” war?
Of course HN would downvote this.
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.
You are talking as if war in Iran is a natural process that people have no involvement.
Having such articles in 2026 is a shame to begin with.
“A piece of equipment” is used to attack living bodies, if you don’t get the point, well.. there is no point to argue with you.
I'm not a native English speaker, so it's possible I'm misunderstanding something (my apologies in that case). Here's my reasoning:
- The title is "F-35 is built for the wrong war".
- The article suggests that the plane was designed to deal with other threats, not with many cheap drones and missile salvos. That it's a bad tool for the tasks it is now is used for. It's not about war being right/wrong or good/bad.
- You ask "Is there a “right” war?".
These are two different discussions.
A terrible example, but it's like having a title called "Hammer was built for the wrong DIY project" and an article that points out that "they designed/bought hammers when they actually needed a screwdriver!" and you ask if "any DIY project is right". Sure, it's related, but that's a different point/discussion, isn't it? Not exactly something I'd expect to be upvoted, hence my initial comment.
I didn't reply to defend any war or to justify the use of any weapon. I also don't have a problem with anti-war comments. But these guys are talking about the F-35 not being good at dealing with cheap drones and missile salvos, while you're talking about war being good or bad.
As long one doesn't twist what I wrote or assume bad faith, it should be easy to understand the point I was trying to make and where I was coming from.
With this out of the way, and since I'm neither qualified to talk about the F-35 nor see the need to discuss if war is good (it's not), I will now leave the thread.
Comparing DIY to war is another level of ignorance.
Well I guess the only thing I can ask you to please stop whataboutism and think about the consequences of the things rather than doing logical check.
I did not compare DIY to war, I gave you an example - even called it a terrible example! - to show how your comment and the article are about different subjects. If this is "whataboutism", then I don't know what that word means any more.
And I do think about the consequences of these weapons, both offensively and defensively, but I will focus on that on a thread about the consequences of war, not on one that asks if the plane is good at shooting down waves of offensive drones or not.
You know that part about not twisting what I wrote or assuming bad faith? This is why I wrote it. It's a shame that you've decided to ignore it... not a good way to have discussions online if one side does that.
WW2 happened. It is not a foregone conclusion that there will be a WW3.
I don't know if there will be a WW3, but there's a war in Iran, there have been drones entering NATO airspace, etc, and the F-35 is used right now for that. Is it a good plane for the threats you find today? That's what the thread/article is about, not if there will be a WW3 or if war is good or not, and that's why we shouldn't be surprised to see downvotes on comments that are talking about something completely different.
we could do a moonbase for 2 trillion
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?
Seems like a better use of money than weapons and killing each other with said weapons on Earth
"what could we learn?". that's an interesting question. something unexpected I'd guess.
but that's rather beside my point.
it seems to be worse than both Chinese planes and American planes, and was easily shot down by Iranians
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.
> - 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."
that's about 2 million or more killed vs 210,000
You know what else is built for the wrong war? The united states military.
As an armchair military hobbyist, I read this with interest.
The question is, what should be the alternative? Large numbers of "cheap" F-15/16/18 planes? They're not exactly cheap. Military kit prices are notoriously hard to reason with, but some googling tells me a new F-15 costs about the same as a new F-35. Adjusting for total lifetime costs and availability, according to Claude (lazy I know), Gripen is the cheapest western plane to fly at around 28k/hr, Rafale/F-15..18 sit around 50-60k/hr, F-35 around 100k. Eurofighter allegedly even higher at 120k.
I'm not saying these are good numbers! But if they aren't total nonsense, you could have, allegedly, twice the number of gen-4 fighters (4x with Gripen). That's a lot, but not an order of magnitude. It's not like you could swarm the sky over China with gen-4 fighters Vs homeopathic amounts of F-35. And I can well believe in a real big war, preserving a smaller number of more capable planes and pilots is better than starting with a lot of still-expensive planes and lose them more quickly.
At the same time, Israel is reported to have lost over a dozen of pricey, advanced, but more expendable non-stealth drones over Iran. They were probably used in riskier fashion, but I'm not sure what would happen if you replaced them with gen-4 fighters.
It's also possibly one of the most mass produced fighters at the moment. Production numbers exceed 1000 iirc. So hard to argue it cannot be produced in volume.
Finally, the comparison to cheap lawnmower drones is also IMO a bit out of place. They're so cheap because their capabilities are near 0. It just so happens that they have a niche they are perfect for. For sure there's going to be more and more autonomous planes in the sky, but not sure about the general usefulness of the Shahid-style drones. They are perfect for terrorising Ukrainian civilians and disrupting woefully under defended Russian industry.
I'm not saying I know better than the expert article, it just misses to me the alternative, and it's not obvious what it should be. And if youre making a bad choice, when the other choices are actually worse then your choice might be, in fact, good.
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.
1) you could at least be bothered to spell "Palestinian" correctly
2) not even true, they use F-15E for missions that don't need stealth, they have way more payload capacity
[dead]
[flagged]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
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.
[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/19/politics/f-35-damage-iran-war
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standoff_weapon
Calling the F-35 a masterpiece is rage-bait.
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.