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It's hard to know, without a major conflict answer these questions in the field (or sky). Air forces played huge role in WW2. Fighters were important for estab
by dalbasal 10y ago
It's hard to know, without a major conflict answer these questions in the field (or sky).
Air forces played huge role in WW2. Fighters were important for establishing air control and that determined outcomes. There have been few examples since. The 1967 war between Israel & the Syrian-Egyptian alliance and follow up in 1973 were influential conflicts between modern (at the time) air forces.
In 1967, Israel won the air-war early. This basically won the war and fighters played a primary role. In 1973, Egypt successfully established a forward front using ground forces. Their missile air-defence made this possible, missiles made fighters ineffective in a limited area. If modern missile defence can do this for a 100x larger area, fighters might be confined to a much smaller role.
That was 45 years ago. Who knows where we are now, what's redundant and what's crucial. When WW2 broke out, there was a long process of figuring out what worked in a modern war. It's hard to know in advance. Big gun ships were thought to be very important, but aircraft carriers and smaller battle ships ended up being more important.
The US, Russia etc haven't fought a modern enemy in 2 generations. That's like building factories for 40 years which may one day need to produce goods. There's a high likelihood you are building the wrong thing entirely.
- whazor 10y agoPlanes are still useful for controlling air and ground. Maybe not against nations, but definitely against terrorist groups and unknown flying objects.
- valuearb 10y agoDrones are becoming as useful fir ground support and are far more cost effective.
- tbonza 10y agoIt's a good point. Terrorizing an urban population with $200 drones doesn't seem like an unrealistic scenario. How would a tool like the F-35 be used to combat this situation? I think it would be fairly useless. Here's a link to an article about a cheap drone being shot with a Patriot missile: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39277940 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39277940
- Godel_unicode 10y agoYou think that F-35s, specifically designed for shooting other aircraft out of the sky, would have trouble shooting down drones?
- valuearb 10y agoYes, we aren't going to risk $150M+ planes at low altitude trying to shoot $200 drones with a gun that only carries a few seconds of ammo, or try destroying them with million dollar air to air missiles. The F35 is entirely unsuited for low altitude operations, or dog fighting with other fighter planes. It's only good for hiding miles away at higher altitudes and firing missiles.
- luhn 10y agoHe said a $200 drone, which would be something similar to the tiny, low-flying commercial offerings. You couldn't take that out with an F-35 without destroying an entire city block along with it.
- astrodust 10y agoAn A-10 could probably deal with it, but yeah, it'd also obliterate anything in the background.
- astrodust 10y agoThey would. They're terrible at it, and they're probably no better at shooting down a 1 foot wide drone than they are geese. They're designed to shoot jets and helicopters, big things with a well-defined thermal or radar image.
- samstave 10y agoWe still fly nukes on 58 in service B-52s -- so fighters this advanced are good to protect those massive bombers and make quick surgical strikes such as the syrian one mentioned.
- valuearb 10y agoAgain Drones should be far more cost effective at taking out SAM sites, as well as safer. We don't have drones big enough to carry the weapons load of a B52, and those capabilities are pretty far off. Buts it's still hard to imagine a scenario where you need a F-35 to protect a B-52, there simply isn't an effective air threat to us outside of China/USSR and those wars would be nuclear. A scenario like war with Iran makes more sense, but it's likely that very quickly their fighters are swept from the sky (Iraqs lasted days). At that point the air defense is all SAM sure and the F-35 is not the best tool for that. And F-22s are probably close to as effective as F-35 in air to air combat. So why do we need 2,400 F-35s?