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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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."
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.
> 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.
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 ...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
To be fair the US is making steps into this realm and it's definitely a known issue. Their Shahed derivative, laser weapons becoming more ubiquitous.
I'm surprised how many drones countries are starting to manufacture. e.g the UK delivered 150k drones to Ukraine recently, based on the current state of the UK armed forces that kind of surprised me and definitely shows a change in ethos on how modern first world militaries will wage war in the future.
The US took the old Vietnam-era unguided rocket pods (Hydra 70), of which they produce hundreds of thousand every year, and slapped a dirt-cheap guidance kit to the front of each rocket. Supposedly 90-95% effective. A bunch of countries are developing their own clones of the concept.
A single F-16 can carry 42 missiles. They've been rapidly expanding the number of platforms they can attach these to.
Yes a 99% success rate versus like 600 incoming still means some of them will get through.
Which is the same reason no level of military power is going to keep the Strait of Hormuz open (or at least, no level beyond a truly absurd one and even then - see the Kerch bridge in Crimea).
> Increased defense spending actually makes the US less, not more, safe.
It just makes us spend more money on defense, which is the entire point.
The industry obviously wants more and more profits.
They are never going to recommend getting rid of $200m F22s and replacing them with 30 $300k drones that would be more effective and cost 5% as much money.
That's 5% as much profit for them. They're not interested.
They are interested in profits, not national security.
And as you pointed out, they'd prefer a LESS secure world that inherently demands more money going to security.
You could spend more on security to actually be more secure. It's just that no one with any power is interested in that world.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One thing you and the OP are not addressing is that most of these modern tactics are also necessitated by the fact that building an air force, navy, or cavalry that can beat modern superpowers is just a complete non-starter.
I'm not so sure the F-35 is built for the wrong war as much as the war would probably call for the F-35 if it didn't already exist.
The 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.
> 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.
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.
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 :)
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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 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).
"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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Ukraine, in operation spiderweb, has already launched drones from containers deep within Russia to damage "... one third of Russia's strategic cruise missile carriers, estimated to be worth $US7 billion ..."
So you know. Glide bombs. Which already exist and are already used and have a range of about 130km for a high altitude launch and a lot payload.
Or some absurdly heavy ballistic missile...which would be worse then existing ballistic missiles and is the type of target for which Patriot is specifically designed for (along with a number of other systems now).
This is an amazingly unserious post to the point I hope you're trolling. Or just twelve.
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.
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 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 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.
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).
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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."
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.
> 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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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 thousand every year, and slapped a dirt-cheap guidance kit to the front of each rocket. Supposedly 90-95% effective. A bunch of countries are developing their own clones of the concept.
A single F-16 can carry 42 missiles. They've been rapidly expanding the number of platforms they can attach these to.
Yes a 99% success rate versus like 600 incoming still means some of them will get through.
Which is the same reason no level of military power is going to keep the Strait of Hormuz open (or at least, no level beyond a truly absurd one and even then - see the Kerch bridge in Crimea).
> 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.
> 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.
[delayed]
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I feel like there's a brute-force analogy to be drawn with the "Bitter Lesson" that we saw in AI development.
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.
One thing you and the OP are not addressing is that most of these modern tactics are also necessitated by the fact that building an air force, navy, or cavalry that can beat modern superpowers is just a complete non-starter.
I'm not so sure the F-35 is built for the wrong war as much as the war would probably call for the F-35 if it didn't already exist.
The 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.
> 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.
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.
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 :)
> 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
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.
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)
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
"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 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.
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.
Why not just drop a container of tnt instead of drones with tiny bombs ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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
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).
we could do a moonbase for 2 trillion
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.
Is there a “right” war?
Of course HN would downvote this.
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 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.
> 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.
> 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
part of its mission is being expensive, but surely you can see how that changes with the stroke of a pen?
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.
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.
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