Is the F-35 a Trillion-Dollar Mistake?

1. Drones can handle much higher G-forces than manned fighter jets. This is a huge advantage.

2. AI technology is progressing very rapidly so there will soon be no benefit to having a human in the aircraft. Even today the US military probably has AI that can beat any human in a simulated dogfight.

3. Pilots are very expensive. Not just to train but also in terms of the political cost of having pilots killed or captured by the enemy.

4. Eliminating the pilot opens up a range of options. For example, instead of a $200 million fighter jet it may be more effective to build 10 drones for $20 million each, or even 100 drones for $2 million each. Maybe half the drones will have stealth capabilities and half will have AWCS-like communication and control features.

5. During WWII German and Russian tanks were roughly equivalent. But the Russians could build tanks at a far greater rate than the Germans, making the German loss almost inevitable. Similarly, in future the country that can produce many drones quickly and cheaply may dominate air warfare. In this regard China will likely have an advantage over the US.

6. The military-industrial complex is a huge bureaucracy in which many people have a financial and psychological incentive to continue development of manned fighter jets. For this reason I expect such development to continue well beyond its use-by date, probably until there is a real-world battle where a large, previously dominant air force is soundly beaten by a small power using new drone technology.

Ah, my old foe. We meet again. I have to admire your resilience. Sometimes I wonder what we could achieve if we were on the same side.

It was likely a mistake to base a multi role fighter on a design aimed primarily the first strike role that were the first of the airfoces roles to be handed over to robots(cruise missiles), and it was most definitely a mistake to pick the one role where manned planes are least likely to be replaced by drones as the lowest priority roles.

The problem with the F-35 is that it's good at low level first strike missions and bad at visual range fighting weather it's dogfighting or close air support as it's what had to be sacrificed to make radar stealth possible, despite the fact that those are the primary roles where you cannot replace the pilot with a smart missile or drone.

And all of this in a plane that have the same crucial weakness that got the F-22 canceled, in that it's too expensive to build in number and requires way to much maintenance to fly as often as some of the less sophisticated airframes that can be pressed into service and do as good a job as the F-35 in the primary roles where you need to keep pilots in the battle space for prolonged periods, at a far lower pr hour cost.

In a lot of ways the US air-force is setting itself off for the same kind of failure as the luftwaffe had doing WWII where their advanced planes was bombed out of existence without ever getting in the air because, cost and maintenance issues prevented them from being in a constant state of in-air rotation.

A cruise missile on final approach don't need forward radars or datalink back to base, and the same goes for almost any kind if missile used since the 2nd world war. Just because remote controlled drones don't work under heavy ECM don't mean the military don't have robots that can. And some of the US's drone use a directed signal towards an satellite instead of omni directional RF signals for control.

The Problem here is that stealth don't add a whole lot of value to the observe first then shoot kind of missions where you really do want an human in the pilot seat, so multiplying the cost pr air hour by a order of magnitude to get some level of radar stealth is the kind of economics that causes mission failures in real conflicts where real life supply problems dominate.

For the F-35 with it's dependence on BVR missiles for defense going silent also means that if it can be spotted by a ground observer(which it likely can) it faces a high risk if the enemy have enough time to scramble an interdiction patrol into visual range, a tactic that was perfected by the RAF doing the battle of Britain(using radars that could probably see the F-35).