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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

#381

Post by jandrewrogers »

dinfinity wrote: post #344
carefree-bob wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20,000 drones could hit a carrier and not sink it. 100,000 drones would not sink it. Not if they all landed direct hits. It's like firing a handgun against a tank. You need more oomph. To sink an aircraft carrier you really need like 10 direct hits with hypersonic missiles. Or a couple of hits with a torpedo. If you are lucky, maybe even a single torpedo hit. People underestimate how hard it is to sink a ship. You re…

You do realize that underwater drones exist and have been successfully used against Russian ships, right?

In the navy they call long-range underwater drones a "torpedo". It has been assumed to be a primary threat against ships for a century. Modern navies have many systems purpose-built to deal with that threat.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#382

Post by cjbgkagh »

lesuorac wrote: post #374
cjbgkagh wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is asinine, what do you think happens to those institutions when incompetence is what gets rewarded. The real threat to the US military is not the lack of weapons, or that the F35 is not as good or as cheap as it could have been, it's because it is a lumbering bureaucracy full of people who couldn't get better jobs elsewhere.

> it's because it is a lumbering bureaucracy full of people who couldn't get better jobs elsewhere So, raise the amount of money paid to the military so the most qualified candidates apply?

Sounds like boiling the ocean, a cultural overhaul is probably in order.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#383

Post by laughing_man »

>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.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#384

Post by fooker »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #373
fooker wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you should read the article? Quantity is back in the game again thanks to drones, right now we would lose without escalating to a nuclear war.

Cheap drones are extremely limited in the kinds of targets they can reach and damage while evading air defenses. I understand this domain well. Upgrading drones so that they have sufficient range and carry a sufficiently capable warhead and have a decent probability of surviving a modern air defense environment has been done many times by many countries. The price always comes in ~$1M/drone. It doesn't matter who bui…

> The price always comes in ~$1M/drone.

You're off by an order of magnitude. Russian jet powered versions of the Iranian drones cost less than 100k.

Chinese ones reportedly are a third of the cost for the same capabilities, but are not being sold at scale.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#385

Post by lenerdenator »

virtualritz wrote: post #346
gpt5 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing the point above - the F35 has enabled complete air dominance over Iran, and ability to perform any operation with impunity over Iran's land. Iran is leveraging its geography and asymmetrical warfare against civilian ship (as done by its proxies), but if the US has build tons of cheap attack drones, that wouldn't have changed anything about this equation. The US already has the ability to strike anywhe…

Maybe re-read the last sentence of parent which my reply was to? Your presumably Ai-generated reply missed that, unsurprisingly, because you probably just copypasta'd parent and my reply in there? P.S. air dominance in Iran is meaningless in this conflict. Read e.g. the blog post I linked to for context.

> P.S. air dominance in Iran is meaningless in this conflict. Read e.g. the blog post I linked to for context.

It's meaningless now.

If the US, for some reason, decided to say, "For each drone or missile that you fire at one of your Arab neighbors or Israel, we launch an old-fashioned B52 raid on your industry or infrastructure. Come to the negotiating table." and actually carried out that threat, well, there would be nothing the Iranians would be able to do about it.

That's not the case because of the currently scattered nature of US leadership, but it is a possible contingency that the Iranian government has to take into account. There's a reason they're not actively targeting US warships in the region.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#386

Post by fc417fc802 »

dgroshev wrote: post #288
benoau wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's crazy is there's lots of videos of Ukranians shooting drones from open-cockpit propeller planes that barely cost more than the drones! I think in a serious drone war we would just have fleets of Cesnas flying around with a person hanging out the door with a shotgun lol.

In a serious war drone factories are getting bombed (by F-35s) and there is no need to handle a never-ending stream of drones. The war in Ukraine is special because neither side is capable of air supremacy. Note that the original article doesn't say anywhere that F-35-like capability is not needed.

So Ukraine isn't a serious war then? And I take it you believe we failed to employ that strategy in Iran ... why, exactly? The alternative interpretation being that isn't how things work. Swarms of cheap drones are the new reality thus appropriate countermeasures are required on the front lines.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#387

Post by Thaxll »

johnsmith1840 wrote: post #287

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 compl…

You completely oversell Iran capability, I guarantee you that f35 would go down in a war with a country with decent anti air such as Russia or China.

Iran never invested in such technology, they put all their money in drones and ballistic missiles which were extremely effective, we are a month in and the strait is still close.

Their strategy was never to try to sink us ships, it was disruption in the region to extend the conflict which was again very successful.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#389

Post by bluGill »

acdha wrote: post #334
bluGill wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the us is a manufacturing superpower. China is visible for cheap, but the us is a major power.

We’re a fading manufacturing power and corporate profit-maximization since the 80s has made things very brittle. The most obvious example for HN is semiconductors but there are many other things which we either don’t make in sufficient quantity at all or which have significant dependencies on countries like China. In a war, it doesn’t help, if, say your factory is in Utah when it depends on Chinese rare earth until s…

A global supply chain does not say anything about our manufacturing power.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#390

Post by celsoazevedo »

platinumrad wrote: post #355
celsoazevedo wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

WW2 happened. It is not a foregone conclusion that there will be a WW3.

I don't know if there will be a WW3, but there's a war in Iran, there have been drones entering NATO airspace, etc, and the F-35 is used right now for that. Is it a good plane for the threats you find today? That's what the thread/article is about, not if there will be a WW3 or if war is good or not, and that's why we shouldn't be surprised to see downvotes on comments that are talking about something completely different.
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