F-35 is built for the wrong war

Post by red-iron-pine » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 12:58 PM UTC

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #469

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. I don’t think that they exploit the military industrial complex for personal job security and fortune makes it likely that they’re incompetent. In fact, as a society we seem to praise those who are exceedingly successful at such exploitation, and even elect them to the highest levels of government and hang onto every w…

Post by modo_mario » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 1:00 PM UTC

jandrewrogers wrote: post #506

kalleboo wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can see that in that it's very popular for export It's very popular for export since the US has been forcing their allies to buy them over any alternatives, this was shown in the WikiLeaks cables.

Nothing else is remotely as capable in the modern threat environment that most countries can actually buy. That's the cold truth. They can't buy anything else that compares and the best isn't for sale.

Post by red-iron-pine » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 1:02 PM UTC

8note wrote: post #442

fc417fc802 wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBF a proxy of one of the nuclear superpowers (ie Ukraine using US arms) is quite different from a run of the mill non-nuclear country retaliating against an invasion using conventional arms manufactured at home. The former invites MAD while the latter is predictable and boring. Seeing as they are the substantially larger aggressor presumably they can pull out of this war of attrition whenever they feel like it.

you can look into game theory and crisis bargaining to see when and when not nukes make sense. theyre very expensive to use, so the benefits of war have to be extraordinary to match

Post by pjc50 » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 1:05 PM UTC

energy123 wrote: post #518

tpurves wrote: post #8

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…

That's a stale insight from an old era of warfare. The purpose of quality is to remove quantity. Iran is the case study. A large stockpile of munitions counts for something, but once the factories are gone, you're on a 3 month clock. Factories being deleted can only be achieved with quality (expensive stand-off munitions + F-35s for SEAD, then missile trucks with cheap JDAMs to take out the factories). 30-50 years ag…

Post by ethbr1 » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 1:10 PM UTC

cm2012 wrote: post #352

jjk166 wrote: post #158

> 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 co…

A lot of big words, but also inaccurate. If you compare the F-35 to basically any plane worldwide with similar capabilities, it's very reasonably priced. You can see that in that it's very popular for export, with pre-sales already sold out until 2035. There are plenty of articles out there on this for those who want to Google it.