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F-35 is built for the wrong war

warontherocks.com

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Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#451

Post by 8note »

nradov wrote: post #447
Sabinus wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The red line is an invasion of Moscow or a strike on Russian nuclear capabilities. Everything else is just an order for preemptive suicide.

Ukraine already executed a successful strike on Russian nuclear capabilities. In 2025 Operation “Spider’s Web” completely destroyed several irreplaceable nuclear-capable strategic bombers. https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-ukraines-spider-web-operat... There is no "red line".

that didn't cross the red line, and the US has a phone call to talk it over and that Russia's policy for using nukes hadnt been breached

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#452

Post by 8note »

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.

if the US ever trains with ukraine like the brits did, youll find that the current doctrine has no ability to move against ukrainian defensive lines.

this is the current state of the art. it will be a major innovation if somebody figures out something better than "travel during fog"

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#453

Post by cjbgkagh »

kiba wrote: post #444
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.

These capabilities don't stick around for free. A corporation isn't going to keep around design staff doing nothing. Even if you move the design staff to the military stuff, you still need to give them work or their skills atrophy.

Incentives matter and incentivizing bugs in software is a very bad idea, it’s how you forget how to write software without so many bugs. And what was the point of it all, it was obvious even back then that the future was cheap missiles / drones.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#454

Post by 8note »

moralestapia wrote: post #265
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…

>mass strikes on Moscow Oh yeah, I'd like to see you try that. Maduro was a clown. Iran is two orders of magnitude above Venezuela and the US (plus friends) are already struggling. Russia is at least one order of magnitude above Iran. I have no doubt that the US would win at the end, but at a massive cost of life and money. You cannot afford that, you cannot even afford a 1/10th of that. I live in America, I'm obviou…

the world is getting close to being an rts though.

real time top down view everywhere all at once, but with commands and targets being set with a ton of parallelism - many rts players at once picking who to send where for the same team

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#455

Post by Beijinger »

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)

Fun fact: German stealth figthers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horten_Ho_229

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

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#456

Post by LastTrain »

johnsmith1840 wrote: post #350
virtualritz wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US blockade of the strait does not affect Iran's ability to blockade the strait. And the latter hurts the US (and the rest of the world) way more that the blockade by the US hurts Iran. No amount of F35s will change that. Iran has no reason to try to attack US military vessels or aircraft. Surprisingly (actually unsurprisingly) relevant: https://acoup.blog/2026/03/25/miscellanea-the-war-in-iran/ Especially the pa…

If US destroys Iran it will be the dominate energy supplier for the next 100 years. Iran will be in shambles for 50 years. If Iran surrenders US will be the dominate energy supplier for the next 30 years. Iran will be in shambles for 10 years. The former would cause a worldwide depression but the clear winner of that is the US by a very large margin. If Iran wants to destroy itself and its neighbors US would be happy…

It is almost like you think it is 1965.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#457

Post by 8note »

wredcoll wrote: post #422
nerdsniper wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lin…

> 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. Why not just put a nuke in their instead? Like, how is this supposed to work, china just has…

the weapons are put in container slots.

something like a spiderweb container isnt going to be visible just looking at the ship

you wouldnt think ukraine would be able to drive its semi trucks right up to russian nuclear bombers, but they did

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#458

Post by tick_tock_tick »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #418
lenerdenator wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Bombing civilian infrastructure never works like this. As we saw in The Blitz (and in Vietnam, and in Ukraine), it just draws the bombed together, unifying them and hardening their resolve.

Can you use an example that doesn't prove the exact opposite?

Bombing absolutely worked in Vietnam so much that the south didn't actually lose the war until 2 years after the USA left. The war becoming a political nightmare is why the USA left not because the horrendously effective bombing stopped working.

Ukraine is really weird to put in here because Russia has fail to establish any effective air superiority so I can't make heads or tails why you put it in here.

As for the Blitz is was absolutely effective vs the British but USA factories and supply shipments were largely out of reach of the Axis.

Add in the fact that the people of Iran are largely opposed to being governed by a Muslim theocracy (most of the population is not Muslim) I'm frankly struggling to see how you get any of your viewpoints.

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#459

Post by tick_tock_tick »

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...

But we are making a fuckton of them.....

Re: F-35 is built for the wrong war

#460

Post by anigbrowl »

carefree-bob wrote: post #239
nerdsniper wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lin…

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…

I think you're imagining 'drones' as 'small quadcopters with hand grenades' as deployed in Ukraine. To be sure even a large swarm of these would struggle against an aircraft carrier, but you need to also consider things like Shahed drones that can carry 1-200kg of munitions and are much cheaper than missiles. Depending on where a conflict takes place, I can see a large number of small disposable drones being used to overwhelm targeting systems while a moderate number of medium drones with a serious payload carry out the actual attack.

Also, while you're completely right about the ruggedness of the ship itself, image recognition electronics are dirt cheap nowadays. You can buy COTS camera-IR modules from under $100 and train them on whatever you want. If I were opposing an enemy that had carriers while I had only drones, I'd target specific parts of the superstructure rather tha the hull.

lightning up with mushroom clouds anyway

I think you are wildly overestimating the appetite for using tactical nuclear weapons. Whoever deploys those first in an offensive capacity is going to gain instant pariah status. The US is torching a lot of its traditional alliances as is, deploying a nuclear weapon in anger would result in international criminal status and probable internal collapse soon after. nor do I see any likelihood of China using them against Taiwan since that would undermine the entire purpose of a military undertaking.

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