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F-35 is built for the wrong war

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Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#171

Post by carefree-bob »

expedition32 wrote: post #112
varjag wrote: post #20

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…

The US not going full in on drones reminds me of the British ridiculing submarines. The Chinese are going to spam literally MILLIONS of drones all over the Pacific...

Drones have a limited range and limited capacity to inflict damage. Yes, they are effective at hunting infantry, but you can't reach across an ocean and strike the US with "millions of drones".

Relatedly, aircraft carriers are great for beating up on small powers, but they are vulnerable and would not be effective at reaching across the ocean and bombing China.

Plus, both nations have nukes, so the idea of either China or the US "winning" a war against the other side is easily cancelled out.

What you are left with, is a lot of posturing about superpower wars which is a waste of time. All sort of people thumping their chest, wargaming things out, as if any of this nonsense isn't immediately squashed with the nuclear trump card.

There will be no superpower wars.

There will, however, continue to be wars against smaller states, and the F35, aircraft carriers, etc, are really effective at those kinds of things. That is, effective at waging the wars that will actually happen. Nukes and the pacific ocean stop any war of consequence against China.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#172

Post by cyberax »

varjag wrote: post #142
cyberax wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> They are at most used to lob gliding bombs from far behind the front lines. You write that, and literally quote my point about F-35 making deep strikes against dense air defense possible in the very next sentence.

It remains to be seen how well F-35s actually perform in that role against an adversary with modern anti-air defense and with modern drone-based tactics.

Both Russia and Ukraine learned to avoid concentrating forces, so what are you going to strike? Use an F-35 to attack a single Jeep with a mounted machine gun? F-35 has limited range and carries very limited armament, so you can't just carpet-bomb everything. At some point, you'll need to use much less survivable heavy bombers.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#173

Post by [deleted] »

eek2121 wrote: post #138
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fragil…

Tell that to the folks on the front lines, along with folks on both sides, military or not, who have had to deal with it. Russia would never nuke Ukraine to begin with. They know that by doing so, most of the world would unite against them, and many, including Putin, would be on the chopping block.

[deleted]

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#174

Post by nradov »

marcosdumay wrote: post #102
nradov wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Iran wouldn't have started to work in nuclear weapons if Bush didn't credibly threaten to invade them. Hell, Iran didn't actually work into building them before Trump decided to attack them.

The threat that President Bush issued in 2002 was due to Iran being a state sponsor of terrorist groups, which was true then and is still true today. Historians can argue over whether that threat was a good idea at the time but it's too late to retract it now. We have to deal with the actual situation as it obtains today.

As for what Iran's leadership decided and when, we really have very little visibility into that so don't believe anything you hear. We're not even certain which faction is really in control of nuclear weapons policy. (This isn't an endorsement of the recent attacks.)

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#175

Post by Cider9986 »

wahern wrote: post #167
ExoticPearTree wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 fact…

It does seem that way based on this article[1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/us/politics/trump-iran-wa... https://archive.ph/gaHnu

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#177

Post by 2trill2spill »

dinfinity wrote: post #118
bawolff wrote: post #66

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…

> 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 th…

> "At over eighty million dollars per airframe, with Lockheed Martin delivering fewer than two hundred aircraft per year across all variants and all customers worldwide, there is no surge capacity waiting to be activated and no precedent for accelerating a program of this complexity on wartime timelines. When one side can produce weapons by the hundreds and thousands — missiles, loitering munitions, and one-way attack drones — while the other relies on small numbers of exquisite platforms, the advantage shifts toward the side with scale."

The article gets this wrong as well, the f35 can be built at scale, no other fighter aircraft is produced in such high numbers, its also significantly cheaper on a per airframe basis vs Gen 4 aircraft and its more advanced. This article is nonsense and the author doesn't know what they are talking about.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#178

Post by nerdsniper »

wredcoll wrote: post #133
expedition32 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I don't know if you've looked recently, but the pacific is, likev pretty big. Maybe even bigger than that. The primary problem with killing carriers is, has been, and will be, finding the things.[1] Drone strikes on oil refineries work because, with few exceptions, the refineries rarely move. You can literally program a drone to go x miles in a specific direction and then drop a bomb. It's also considerably harder to…

China is putting containerized missile launch tubes and drone launch systems on their container ships. If these get widely deployed at some point, there could come a time when there will be weapon systems already on-location in all of the major ports of China's adversaries. Most naval facilities have civilian ports nearby.

Despite the nuclear reactor, aircraft carriers won't stay in the fight long if their supply lines are disrupted. And also it's not likely that a carrier group could fend off a wave of 10,000-20,000 drones launched from a container ship that happens to be sailing near it.

At the end of the day, we rely more on nuclear weapons and MAD to deter these kinds of major hostilities between powerful countries. Talking about how conventional weapons match up is a bit of a red herring. The only thing that would change that would be very reliable nuclear missile/warhead interception systems - and I don't think any country even has a roadmap to such a thing.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#179

Post by peterfirefly »

sobellian wrote: post #120
varjag wrote: post #20

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…

The thing about the Russo-Ukrainian war is that it is a failure for both sides. The primary lesson from this war is, how do we avoid ending up like those poor guys? If the US Army fights a war with anyone, let alone China, on the doctrine that it should set up a static attritional front line with drone warfare, the joint chiefs should all be fired.

Don't have Germany be so dependent on Russian gas. Don't tear down nuclear power plants, build more of them instead.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#180

Post by rjsw »

expedition32 wrote: post #112
varjag wrote: post #20

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…

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...

When did Britain ridicule submarines?
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