16 ms·

F-35 is built for the wrong war

• themafia 6mo ago
  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.
  • philipallstar 6mo ago
    Well yes, we have a load of taxpayer funded people to decide what to build.
    • consumer451 6mo ago
      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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_door_(politics)
      • philipallstar 6mo ago
        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.
  • Terr_ 6mo ago
    > 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".
    • Jtsummers 6mo ago
      > 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.
      • doctorpangloss 6mo ago
        part of its mission is being expensive, but surely you can see how that changes with the stroke of a pen?
      • dralley 6mo ago
        > 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
        • jemmyw 6mo ago
          After reading your comment I did read up on the Gripen. Seems very interesting. Procurement is about the same as the F-35 but the running costs are about 1/4 so over its expected lifetime it'll be considerably cheaper. On the procurement front though Saab seems to offer factory set up as part of the deal, so you make back some of the cost into your economy. Being able to build and maintain them yourself seems like a big plus. Capability wise the gap isn't as large as I thought either. The latest Gripen-E has similar radar, possibly better software, and they can be kitted out to fire the same air to air weapons. What they don't have is a stealthy airframe and they aren't designed for some of the same mission profiles. If you're a country that doesn't make your own aircraft then having access to both, or just the Gripen for interceptors would make some sense.
  • wnc3141 6mo ago
    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.
    • dlcarrier 6mo ago
      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.
  • robocat 6mo ago
    Camels are very well designed. Pick on a less useful animal.
• the__alchemist 6mo ago
  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.
  • underdeserver 6mo ago
    It's not VTOL. It has STOVL and CATOBAR variants.
    • deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
• softwaredoug 6mo ago
  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.
  • Sol- 6mo ago
    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?
    • M3L0NM4N 6mo ago
      > 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.
      • platinumrad 6mo ago
        Thanks for the assurance!
    • nradov 6mo ago
      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.
      • mr_toad 6mo ago
        Not to mention US air bases dotted all over the Middle East, the near East, Europe, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Ocean the Arctic…
• tpurves 6mo ago
  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.
  • trvz 6mo ago
    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.
  • notpachet 6mo ago
    I feel like there's a brute-force analogy to be drawn with the "Bitter Lesson" that we saw in AI development.
  • usrnm 6mo ago
    That's not a new idea, it's the same thing Germany learned about tanks in WWII.
    • dmos62 6mo ago
      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.
      • wredcoll 6mo ago
        Not really, the tanks were both inefficient to operate and inefficient to build (lack of standardization, constantly changing plans, have to redesign every single part..)
      • the_af 6mo ago
        That's not true. They could have standardized on a few rugged platforms -- and in fact, some in Nazi Germany advocated for that -- but their industry and engineering were generally self-sabotaging and a mess.
• JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
  "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."
• PowerElectronix 6mo ago
  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.
  • bigfudge 6mo ago
    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).
    • PowerElectronix 6mo ago
      There is a win condition achievable in a US-China war. You leave the army in shambles and take over the political power structures, like with nazi germany or any other conventional country in the world. It'd be hell, for sure, but it is a war that can end in victory for either side.
      • bigfudge 6mo ago
        You’ve missed or are ignoring my point that any victory would be pyrrhic.
  • tehjoker 6mo ago
    First, in a war with China, China would be in the (more) morally just position. Second, as you can see in Iran, in Korea, in Vietnam, etc (and that's just US wars), aircraft only inflict pain, they do not win. US imperialists would really really like for that not to be the case, but it is just not. You would need a boots on the ground, and a draft, and will still probably lose and maybe cause our own government to topple. The Vietnam war was lost not because we didn't have fancy toys, but because the revolutionaries fought so hard and well that the U.S. army about on the verge of rebellion. China very successfully built a rich economic system that is the factory of the world while eroding our own domestic capacity. In a war they can cut us off. We are not even as strong as we were during the Vietnam war, though we have fancier toys. Good luck!
• zitterbewegung 6mo ago
  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.
  • XorNot 6mo ago
    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.
    • hurubaw 6mo ago
      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-saab-fighter-through-life-costs-study-may-2023-final-report.pdf 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.
      • rstupek 6mo ago
        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.
  • aftbit 6mo ago
    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.
• varjag 6mo ago
  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.
  • virtue3 6mo ago
    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.
    • BobbyJo 6mo ago
      "A significant number of jets it entered the war with" does not mean they haven't also gotten newer jets.
      • nickff 6mo ago
        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-Ukrainian_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_warfare_in_the_Russo-Uk... https://aerospaceglobalnews.com/news/how-many-aircraft-losses-russia-ukraine/ 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.
• slibhb 6mo ago
  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.
  • TimorousBestie 6mo ago
    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.
    • slibhb 6mo ago
      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.
  • bawolff 6mo ago
    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.
• nalekberov 6mo ago
  Is there a “right” war?
  • platinumrad 6mo ago
    Of course HN would downvote this.
    • celsoazevedo 6mo ago
      I didn't down/up voted anything, but the title/article/thread is about piece of equipment not being a good fit for a war that happens in 2026, not if war is good/bad or right/wrong. It's like saying that war is bad in a discussion about developing biplanes before WW2. Yes, war is bad, but that's what people are talking about.
      • platinumrad 6mo ago
        WW2 happened. It is not a foregone conclusion that there will be a WW3.
        • celsoazevedo 6mo ago
          I don't know if there will be a WW3, but there's a war in Iran, there have been drones entering NATO airspace, etc, and the F-35 is used right now for that. Is it a good plane for the threats you find today? That's what the thread/article is about, not if there will be a WW3 or if war is good or not, and that's why we shouldn't be surprised to see downvotes on comments that are talking about something completely different.
      • nalekberov 6mo ago
        You are talking as if war in Iran is a natural process that people have no involvement. Having such articles in 2026 is a shame to begin with. “A piece of equipment” is used to attack living bodies, if you don’t get the point, well.. there is no point to argue with you.
• morning-coffee 6mo ago
  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.
  • jandrewrogers 6mo ago
    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.
  • anon84873628 6mo ago
    People not paying attention need it explained to them.
• j_leboulanger 6mo ago
  [dead]
• freediddy 6mo ago
  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.
  • XorNot 6mo ago
    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.
    • freediddy 6mo ago
      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.
      • coredog64 6mo ago
        If you want to target a large area, there’s already cluster munitions and/or thermobarics.
      • XorNot 6mo ago
        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.
• munk-a 6mo ago
  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.
• fooker 6mo ago
  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.
  • ceejayoz 6mo ago
    > 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.
    • fooker 6mo ago
      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.
• shevy-java 6mo ago
  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).
• metalman 6mo ago
  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.
  • dralley 6mo ago
    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
• lanthissa 6mo ago
  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.
  • anon84873628 6mo ago
    The article isn't critiquing the F-35, in fact describes how "exquisite" it is multiple times.
• nextstep 6mo ago
  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!
• xd1936 6mo ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxJLUZWPEb8 (Re-Upload: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8__8--YAm4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8__8--YAm4)
• bawolff 6mo ago
  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.
  • deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  • dinfinity 6mo ago
    > 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."
• jleyank 6mo ago
  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).
• worik 6mo ago
  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
• vanviegen 6mo ago
  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.
  • ExoticPearTree 6mo ago
    > 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.
    • wahern 6mo ago
      The Iran War never looked good on paper. The only people who thought it would succeed were Trump and the cast of characters he surrounded himself with. I doubt if many congressional Republican chickenhawks thought it would succeed. The only way to oust the regime is with ground troops, ripping out the Revolutionary Guard and its tentacles. For all its corruption, Iran is far from a failed state, and there aren't factions waiting in the wings, ready and willing to take over the government with force. (There are political factions, to be sure, but they're already integrated into the government, though without leverage over the Revolutionary Guard.) The only armed group remotely capable of even trying would be the Kurds, but the US and in particular Trump screwed them over in the past, multiple times. Even if they thought they could go it alone (which they couldn't), there was zero chance they were going to enter the fray without the US committing itself fully with their own invasion force (i.e. success was guaranteed), because failure would mean ethnic Kurds would be extirpated from Iran, and might induce Iraq and Syria to revisit the question of Kurdish loyalty to their own states. And, indeed, Kurdish groups took a wait and see approach, assembling some forces but waiting to see how the US played their cards.
• analog8374 6mo ago
  we could do a moonbase for 2 trillion
  • carefree-bob 6mo ago
    But why? I'm not against the idea in principle, but there has to be a motivation beyond "It's possible". Even the search for knowledge, which is a good reason to invest in R&D, but how much would we learn on the moon for that 2 trillion that we couldn't learn more cheaply through other means?
    • analog8374 6mo ago
      "what could we learn?". that's an interesting question. something unexpected I'd guess. but that's rather beside my point.
    • NegativeLatency 6mo ago
      Seems like a better use of money than weapons and killing each other with said weapons on Earth
• jmyeet 6mo ago
  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 https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/19/politics/f-35-damage-iran-war [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standoff_weapon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standoff_weapon
• pharos92 6mo ago
  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.
• xkcd-sucks 6mo ago
  > 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.
  • _kulang 6mo ago
    I think they mean that everyone in the orchestra does not get a Stradivarius
  • maratc 6mo ago
    > 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.
  • nomadygnt 6mo ago
    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 :)
  • wavemode 6mo ago
    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.
  • bayindirh 6mo ago
    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.
• protastus 6mo ago
  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.
• ericd 6mo ago
  So we’ve made a small number of exquisite King Tigers, and they’re making huge numbers of Shermans?
• riazrizvi 6mo ago
  This would be an interesting article 4 years ago. Now I think it's old news and we've got the War Department spending $50bn on a new autonomous warfare wing.
• jjk166 6mo ago
  > Meanwhile, modern conflict, from Ukraine’s drone war to naval engagements in the Red Sea to Iran’s own mass missile and drone salvos, increasingly favors systems that can be produced at scale and replaced when lost. The F-35 is a masterpiece. But a force designed around a masterpiece is not designed for long, protracted wars, and U.S. adversaries know this. The problem is that the F-35 was intended to be the low cost, mass produce-able workhorse for long protracted wars against technologically inferior adversaries where extremely high performance would be unnecessary. Yes it incorporates advanced stealth and electronics that make it a very capable aircraft, especially when it's going up against F-4s, but these weren't driving the cost. The US had already developed these technologies, and once you have them putting them on another aircraft isn't too expensive. And in particular the main focus was on lifetime cost - keeping flight hours reasonable and maintenance down compared to a higher performance aircraft like the F-22. This plane was designed around exactly this sort of conflict. The problem was horrific project mismanagement. Building factories before the design was complete, delays due to development operations being done in parallel, making essentially 3 different aircraft with radically different requirements use a common design - the initial program cost skyrocketed and the only way out was to keep upping the order quantity to keep unit costs low. Cost per flight hour was supposed to be $25k, it's now $50k. Engine maintenance time was supposed to be 2 hours, it wound up being 50. And the issues didn't stop after initial development - with each successive iteration there have been new issues resulting in further delays, with airframe delivery on average still being 8 months behind schedule. None of that had anything to do with the F-35's core capabilities. For comparison, the F-35 has lower production costs than the non-stealth F-15EX which is based on a 50 year old airframe, but it has a 30% higher flight hour cost, and the program cost is 100X for 20X airframes. This sort of botched procurement has caused terrible issues for multiple military projects, such as the Navy's failed Constellation-class frigate program, or the Army's immediate cancellation of the M10 Booker. These aren't masterpieces built for the wrong war, these are failures at producing what was intended. One has to wonder how you can mess up Epiphone guitar production so bad you accidentally wind up with a Stradivarius. It does not bode well for the orchestra.
  • dmix 6mo ago
    The same issues with fighter jets procurement infect everything these days. Public transit, space, government software, etc.
• kp988 6mo ago
  it seems to be worse than both Chinese planes and American planes, and was easily shot down by Iranians
• einpoklum 6mo ago
  So, an author who takes no issue with the war of aggression against Iran, and is preoccupied with planning a war against China. Well that's just great.
• giannicmptr1000 6mo ago
  tiktok is the ultimate weapon still, nothing bombs minds more than that
• 0xbadcafebee 6mo ago
  The American military is a jobs program for defense contractors. They build the most expensive thing possible because they know we will pay for it, and that we'll just keep increasing our military budget. They build for war with nuclear-equipped, highly developed nations, specifically because the smaller nations aren't a threat to us. So when we do decide to go knock out a smaller nation, we don't have the warfighting capability to tackle a small nation. When we try to blockade with our ships, a single drone can do so much damage that the ship is useless, so we don't use them. They aren't practical for anything other than launching inland sorties. And we have a relatively small infantry, so we can't fight big land wars. And the military is corrupt. They misplace hundreds of millions of dollars (cash) when they go overseas. The IRS is responsible for finding massive fraud schemes that the military never noticed. Why didn't they notice? Because there's no consequence. The military isn't a business; they can practically write blank checks with taxpayer dollars, and if they lose the money, what're we gonna do, fire them? Same for contractors. They can overcharge us or build faulty weapon systems/vehicles/etc, and it's not like we have 10 alternatives around the corner.
• chrisss395 6mo ago
  I would just point out that 10-15 years ago Defense executives were talking about drone warfare (search "The Third Offset Strategy"). I recall an executive client being obsessed with this, and in fairness back then they had lost major contracts because their components (think electronic warfare) were designed for max power, i.e., max size and weight. Again, this was 10-15 years ago. Now with the Ukraine war everyone acts like it is obvious...and I agree, it has been for awhile. We just never had a theater to test this stuff in. I suspect US defense contractors were on-board for Ukraine and Iran to advance development efforts significantly.
  • angry_octet 6mo ago
    It was obvious to many, and it was obvious also that air forces would oppose this because it was a massive shift in thinking. They have only come around a little at present. US Army is still buying Apache. The US primes were caught napping in Ukraine, all the new tech is indigenous. They haven't deployed anything new successfully. The traditional exquisite weapons could win the war early, but of course Biden held them back because he's an idiot, and Trump spent them against Iran. Now they are gone. In the mean time, Trump cancelled the infrastructure to design and build armaments during DOGE cuts, now he wants to scale back up, but the money will be wasted because industrial capacity is not there.
• eduction 6mo ago
  Bizarre to call this an F-35 problem, it's with the entire US supply chain and the F-35 is the least of it. The F-35 at least has been produced in quantity and the unit cost has come down and they're finally rolling out some decent upgrades. Yes it's a messed up program in so many ways as its literal decades of history shows but: The bigger issues is our industrial base cannot replace our many missile systems quickly enough, including surface to air, antiship, and surface to surface. We can't build ships or planes very quickly, either. We are woefully low on stocks and can't meet commitments in NATO, mideast, and against China and N Korea. Taiwan is and has been waiting years on billions in backorders. The other issues is everything is as expensive as f-ck. We're shooting down dirt cheap drones costing in the thousands with missiles costing in the millions. The article at least mentions this. And what is the proposed solution to this? A giant, expensive, long range fighter that will coordinate expensive drone buddies (google NGAD). Because we think it's realistic to try and defeat Chinese forces when we're thousands of miles from base and they're at home. First off we need to replenish systems we already know how to make and that are effective. We need to learn to build sh-t quickly, at home and with allies, and it's bizarre no politician has taken the lead on this because it involves popular stuff like spending government money, creating blue collar manufacturing jobs, growing small businesses with more reliable gov contracts, and so forth. Then we need to develop cheaper systems including lots of drones, anti drone stuff, and low cost interceptors and antisurface missiles. Then we need to reform contracting infrastructure and rules to move much much faster and with less cost to experiment and iterate more rapidly going forward like the Ukrainians (and even the Iranians) are doing. We need to do all of this and quickly and no one from either party is providing leadership. This is the biggest reason the US and west are at risk of becoming paper tigers - we have cut our infrastructure and defense spending and microoptimized inventory to the point where we can't restock quickly enough to be a credible deterrent force.
• warbaker 6mo ago
  One of the authors is a retired general, so he probably knows a bit more than us internet randos. Still, the last paragraph says: "The lesson of the Iran campaign is that the F-35 performed superbly in exactly the kind of fight it was built for." I feel like it's hard to gainsay the utility of the F-35 when it's useful in a real war we're actually in. The author's main argument against the F-35 is that it can be easily destroyed on runways now, as drones and missile developments have outpaced missile defense, leaving the US and US allies vulnerable to a preemptive strike by China. That might be true, but it's also strategically valuable to diminish the military capabilities of allies of China (e.g. the Iranian theocracy), which may make up for the tactical weaknesses of the F-35 against China in a direct confrontation. It's also possible that drone/missile defense will catch up (e.g. lasers), but that's hard to say at this point.
• johnsmith1840 6mo ago
  So none of them lost on ground in Iran. No US ship was to my knowledge even hit by a drone/missle. Iran has been prepping forever for this with Russian/Chinese equipment. This sounds identical to previous arguments I saw of how hard it would be for US to beat Iran in open conflict. China is different but comparing theoretical ability with reality is different also. The only reality we have as of now is that f35 completely dominated the enemy on every single front. It's insane to see discussions like these when we just witnessed one of histories greatest showcases of technological dominance. There is no technology or method in this conflict that would have changed the current state. If a nation wants to toss cheap drones at you there's basically nothing that can be done. Another example is US blockade, without something that can take an F35 down there is actively nothing Iran or China could do to prevent a complete crippling of their country.
  • santoshalper 6mo ago
    So we should expect the Strait of Hormuz to be open tomorrow, then?
    • johnsmith1840 6mo ago
      Nothing in the world would have stopped iran launching cheap drones at civilian ships. Article is trying to say F35 is a problem when clearly it's not.
    • donavanm 6mo ago
      You're conflating operational efficacy and strategic incompetence. Operationally, and tactically AFAIK, the US has been dominant. Strategically it appears to be a massive failure, mainly because there was no actual achievable strategic goals going in to this war. Read some of the reporting on JCS advice and cabinet level decision making leading up to the war. It's illuminating (again and again) of the risks on overly loyal advisors and getting the advice you want, not the advice you need.
    • hcurtiss 6mo ago
      [dead]
• techteach00 6mo ago
  Skynet "It’s not Mildred sitting at a switchboard saying ‘Joe, you go to the corner of 42nd and Broadway,’ no it’s the AI. It’s not that hard given the state of current computing to imagine a system where the targeting grid is quote commanding and control itself.”
• golemiprague 6mo ago
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• ardanur 6mo ago
  F-35 is a stealth vehicle that works, but when you are withholding munitions from the war that can bring it to a close it becomes far less useful. Every F-35 is capable of carrying multiple nuclear bunker busters each of which is far more powerful than the GBU-57A/B MOP.
• laughing_man 6mo ago
  >Meanwhile, modern conflict, from Ukraine’s drone war to naval engagements in the Red Sea to Iran’s own mass missile and drone salvos, increasingly favors systems that can be produced at scale and replaced when lost. Oh, do they? How many F-35s have been lost in combat? As far as I know we had one that was damaged by an IR guided missile and subsequently landed in friendly territory. You don't have to replace what you don't lose. Drones aren't magic. Sure, you can build swarms of easy to jam, short range, small payload drones that are easy to track back to the base station on a budget. Will they work against a tech-savvy enemy? Maybe. Hope all your targets are really close to the launch site. And yes, you can upgrade your drones. You can give them longer range, larger payload, higher speed, and more sophisticated electronics. But then they're not cheap anymore and building a swarm will break the bank.
• glass1122 6mo ago
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• linzhangrun 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• daft_pink 6mo ago
  I just wanna say that it’s not realistic to think that the United States defending Taiwan is anything but a bluff. Westerners aren’t willing to die for a small crummy island a few hundred miles off the coast of China that’s 5000 miles away for most other western countries. It’s just not practical. They will sanction China and make it a pariah state if they invade and call it a day. The idea that we would actually risk our lives or nuclear war to defend them is ridiculous.
• hyperific 6mo ago
  "If we all reacted the same way, we'd be predictable, and there's always more than one way to view a situation. What's true for the group is also true for the individual. Over-specialize and you breed in weakness. It's slow death." - Major Motoko Kusanagi, Ghost in the Shell (1995)
• ekelsen 6mo ago
  https://www.baen.com/Chapters/1439133476/1439133476___5.htm https://www.baen.com/Chapters/1439133476/1439133476___5.htm Arthur c Clarke's short story, "Superiority," describes this dynamic perfectly.
• Beijinger 6mo ago
  No plane is invisible. It is totally unclear if Russian or Chinese technology can detect them. I mean, there is one way to find out.... This being said, should the "invisibility" fail, it becomes a plane that can't dog fight, cant fly very high, can't fly very fast, can't carry a lot of load, needs an insane amount of maintenance (10h per 1h flight) and is expensive. Big bet! Superiority comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_(short_story) Fun fact: German stealth figthers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horten_Ho_229 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horten_Ho_229 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MBB_Lampyridae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MBB_Lampyridae The modern background of stealth figthers comes from the soviet union: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_technology
  • KylerAce 6mo ago
    Dog fighting is not a serious concern in modern fighter combat because missiles have gotten so effective that the current strategy has been forced into beyond visual range combat. And stealth doesn't just "fail". In bvr the first side that sees the other is the side that gets to fire a salvo first, which is the primary advantage of stealth technology: so that the enemy doesn't see you from as far as you can see them. All stealth does is linearly lower the radar return of your plane for a given distance and angle, but radar return is inversely proportional to the fourth power of distance. This means that if you get close enough then any decent radar can eventually make out an f35. The whole point of stealth is to make that distance as small as possible.
    • Beijinger 6mo ago
      "Dog fighting is not a serious concern in modern fighter combat" We heard this before and it was a disaster. "And stealth doesn't just "fail"." Nothing is invisible. It depends on your frequency that you use for detection and other technologies. You will find out if your are "invisible" for an able opponent (speak, China, Russia, not Iran) in battle. But then it may be too late. Read the Sci Fi story "Superiority", formerly required reading at MIT engineering courses.
• qtwhat 6mo ago
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• threethirtytwo 6mo ago
  You know what else is built for the wrong war? The united states military.
• etempleton 6mo ago
  I see what the author is saying and I agree to some extent, but I think the F35 is mostly irrelevant in terms of the argument being made. I think it is needed and does it's job as a deterrent. The F35 means that that no one can really control the skies against the US. Iran was considered to have fairly robust air defenses and that was all but destroyed within days. So the F35, as the author states, is performing well along with the rest of the United States Airforce. The issue the US has is that they really do not want to lose US soldiers in this war and because of that they are unwilling to fully occupy or destroy Iran. And the reason they don't want to do that beyond all the normal reasons is that this is a phenomenally unpopular war and every lost life is considered unacceptable by the American people. Similarly, causalities of innocent Iranians is not going to play well domestically or internationally, since one of the ever shifting reasons for war that was given was that the Iranian government was killing it's people. Helping the current Iranian regime kill innocent civilians seems counter productive to that point. The US nor any country will ever be good at fighting a war where there is no clear objective and they are not fully committed. Winning for Iran is not losing and the US isn't playing to win, so Iran wins by default. This entire campaign is a textbook example of how not to go to war. No military equipment or capability is going to change that.
  • threethirtytwo 6mo ago
    F-35 isn't a deterrent. Nukes are the deterrent. Iran and Venezuela lacked nukes. North Korea doesn't lack nukes. The F-35 is just peacocking but ultimately useless. If these war games were realistic the game ends on the first move which is asking the question "Do they have nukes." If the answer is yes, then the game doesn't even start.
    • discodave 6mo ago
      Nuclear weapons are a deterrent against somebody invading the US (or another NATO country) but that doesn't make conventional forces not a deterrent against other kinds of aggression. Many attacks have been made against the US and not resulted in nuclear retaliation, like 9-11. India and Pakistan have nukes and have fought each other recently so your assertion that "has_nukes() == no_game_start()" is *false*. Nukes, however probably will deter India from doing the full-Putin into Pakistan.
• rich_sasha 6mo ago
  As an armchair military hobbyist, I read this with interest. The question is, what should be the alternative? Large numbers of "cheap" F-15/16/18 planes? They're not exactly cheap. Military kit prices are notoriously hard to reason with, but some googling tells me a new F-15 costs about the same as a new F-35. Adjusting for total lifetime costs and availability, according to Claude (lazy I know), Gripen is the cheapest western plane to fly at around 28k/hr, Rafale/F-15..18 sit around 50-60k/hr, F-35 around 100k. Eurofighter allegedly even higher at 120k. I'm not saying these are good numbers! But if they aren't total nonsense, you could have, allegedly, twice the number of gen-4 fighters (4x with Gripen). That's a lot, but not an order of magnitude. It's not like you could swarm the sky over China with gen-4 fighters Vs homeopathic amounts of F-35. And I can well believe in a real big war, preserving a smaller number of more capable planes and pilots is better than starting with a lot of still-expensive planes and lose them more quickly. At the same time, Israel is reported to have lost over a dozen of pricey, advanced, but more expendable non-stealth drones over Iran. They were probably used in riskier fashion, but I'm not sure what would happen if you replaced them with gen-4 fighters. It's also possibly one of the most mass produced fighters at the moment. Production numbers exceed 1000 iirc. So hard to argue it cannot be produced in volume. Finally, the comparison to cheap lawnmower drones is also IMO a bit out of place. They're so cheap because their capabilities are near 0. It just so happens that they have a niche they are perfect for. For sure there's going to be more and more autonomous planes in the sky, but not sure about the general usefulness of the Shahid-style drones. They are perfect for terrorising Ukrainian civilians and disrupting woefully under defended Russian industry. I'm not saying I know better than the expert article, it just misses to me the alternative, and it's not obvious what it should be. And if youre making a bad choice, when the other choices are actually worse then your choice might be, in fact, good.
• energy123 6mo ago
  Article misses the main thing that matters in air superiority fighting: who gets to protect their industrial production. Low tempo is irrelevant. What matters is whether you can deliver those munitions to the factories early in the fight to prevent it from becoming an attritional war. In Ukraine, they both have air parity so they can't do that.
• dwd 6mo ago
  I'm just happy the Australian Government invested in the MQ-28 Ghost Bat program. Unit cost is currently estimated to be USD$8-10m according to Boeing and we get a "loyal wingman" platform to force-multiply our small fleet of F-35s and F/A-18 Supers. It can also be remotely directed from the E-7 Wedgetail.
  • defrost 6mo ago
    At a cost of $2.3 billion (AU(?)) to date so far and with costs set to increase going forward, are the flagship UAV Ghost Bat and Ghost Shark programs really bang for the buck "good investments" or examples of the ongoing Australian Defence habit of going all in for bespoke capability acquisition projects while ignoring the purchasing of “Military Off The Shelf” (MOTS) systems ? I have a gut feeling more use (if and when required) would come from the parallel program of spending of $2.3 billion on a multitude of broadly spread smaller drone programs than from flagship drones .. or submarines when and if the US can spare one or get back in the building enough subs to sell extras game. Related, for general interest: * Yet another blunder at Defence, where ‘off the shelf’ is ignored for expensive bespoke solutions - https://www.crikey.com.au/2026/03/31/defence-procurement-military-off-the-shelf-anao-report/ https://www.crikey.com.au/2026/03/31/defence-procurement-mil... * Australia banks on Ghost Bat and Ghost Shark in drone warfare shift - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-18/australia-military-drone-warfare-push-ghost-bat-ghost-shark/106563072 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-18/australia-military-dr...
    • dwd 6mo ago
      Except we are now in a leadership position on these technologies. We can also ensure it meets our requirements as we did with the Wedgetail. As far as off-the-shelf systems, we do that with the avionics and sensors. Maybe if we had waited we could have expended our partnership with Anduril and worked with them on their CCA "Fury" program?
• SanjayMehta 6mo ago
  This is a strange article. He's damning the f-35 but with more than faint praise. Instead of saying outright that war has evolved and the plane is not really fit for purpose, he ends indecisively.
• GuB-42 6mo ago
  An interesting piece, but it doesn't tell in how the F-35 is built for the wrong war. In fact, it is a mostly positive take on the F-35. It is more about how it should be used according to the author than a criticism about the plane itself.
• bcjdjsndon 6mo ago
  Great for bombing hospitals and other infrastructure at least...
• calandoa 6mo ago
  [dead]
• taohiro82 6mo ago
  Curious why they committed so hard to stealth over electronic warfare capability — was that purely a doctrine decision, or did the sensor fusion architecture actually preclude both approaches simultaneously?