F-35 is built for the wrong war

https://warontherocks.com/cogs-of-war/the-f-35-is-a-masterpiece-built-for-the-wrong-war/

by anjel • 3 months ago

299 677 3 months ago

warontherocks.com

themafia• 3 months ago

It's a camel designed by committee.

On paper it looks cool.

In practice it was /never/ the right plane. The contractors knew and didn't care.

philipallstar2• 3 months ago

Well yes, we have a load of taxpayer funded people to decide what to build.

consumer451• 3 months ago

The taxpayer funding is often the smaller part the complete lifetime pay package.

A 2014 study of U.S. Department of Defense appointees showed that 28% exited to industry. As of 2023, 80 per cent of U.S. four-star retirees are employed in defense industry.[0]

There are actually entirely reasonable, rational explanations for this, but it's not a great look.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_door_(politics)

Terr_• 3 months ago

designed by committee

I've seen an argument--which I don't have enough expertise to advocate for--that the F35's broad but shallow appeal ("jack of all trades, master of none") has an indirect strength: A wider base of demand goes with a manufacturing and supply chain that is constantly active and can be ramped-up if needed.

Speaking of military hardware in general, I can easily imagine there are cases where "best for logistics" completely trounces "best for the job".

Jtsummers• 3 months ago

A wider base of demand goes with a manufacturing and supply chain that is constantly active and can be ramped-up if needed.

Except it can't really be ramped up. It's enormously expensive to build a single F-35, let alone maintain them, and the geographic distribution of the effort only makes that worse.

And then they made it worse again by making many parts of the F-35 F-35 specific. You can't just drop in the same radio LRU from most other airframes and use it with the F-35, it has its own and its own maintenance cycles. The thing was designed to be expensive, it was not designed for manufacturing efficiency.

wnc3141• 3 months ago

I think it's more contractors were responsible for providing only their deliverables. The program design as a whole is done by the DoD when they bid out their requirements.

dlcarrier• 3 months ago

Yeah, military pricing isn't because of it's good quality, it's because it's compliant, and they are usually at odds with each other.

robocat• 3 months ago

Camels are very well designed.

Pick on a less useful animal.

the__alchemist• 3 months ago

Article hits on this: F-35 is probably the best SEAD plane ever made. And best VTOL. And can do the full mission set of a multirole fighter, although not as exceptional in those roles.

underdeserver• 3 months ago

It's not VTOL. It has STOVL and CATOBAR variants.

softwaredoug• 3 months ago

Increased defense spending actually makes the US less, not more, safe. Everyone we're going to fight is prepared for an asymmetric, cheap war. We're vulnerable in how much they can make us spend to wage that war. A million dollar patriot missile to shoot down a cheap drone, etc.

Sol-• 3 months ago

Also seems that having a very capable military that lets you project power around the world also invites that power to be used. See for instance the Iran war. Quite pointless by all accounts and wouldn't have happened if the US didn't have aircraft carriers to send around the world.

So perhaps thriftiness in defense spending would also invite a prioritization in actual defensive capabilities?

M3L0NM4N2• 3 months ago

Also seems that having a very capable military that lets you project power around the world also invites that power to be used.

I assure you that is a much better problem than the alternative.

nradov13• 3 months ago

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.

bawolff5• 3 months ago

I think the likely result would be more war. It wouldn't be with america, but without anerica providing protection to its allies in the region, the various countries in the region would probably be emboldened to fight it out themselves (im assuming in this scenario that russia and other great powers are also incapable of force projection. Obviously russia is busy right now, but historically they were knee deep in the middle east and much of us involvement now is a legacy of the cold war)

prism56• 3 months ago

To be fair the US is making steps into this realm and it's definitely a known issue. Their Shahed derivative, laser weapons becoming more ubiquitous. I'm surprised how many drones countries are starting to manufacture. e.g the UK delivered 150k drones to Ukraine recently, based on the current state of the UK armed forces that kind of surprised me and definitely shows a change in ethos on how modern first world militaries will wage war in the future.

coredog642• 3 months ago

There’s credible evidence that the Shahed is itself a derivative of a late 20th century German drone designed as a loitering anti-radar munition.

jandrewrogers19• 3 months ago

A million dollar patriot missile to shoot down a cheap drone...

I guess it is a good thing then that this isn't something they actually do.

They use cheap weapons to shoot down cheap drones. Their primary anti-drone missile was developed in the 2010s and costs less than a Shahed.

bayindirh3• 3 months ago

Yet these cheap and effective weapons failed to protect high value targets, esp. radars.

011000112• 3 months ago

I agree to a point.

But also look at Ukraine. They are punching well above their weight with asymmetrical tactics, but Russia is not defeated.

Drones and other autonomous, cheap weaponry changes a lot. Smaller states and non-state actors can inflict much more serious and expensive damage now more than ever.

Large weapons still matter though. If we ever were to enter an existential battle you would quickly see how big, expensive systems can still be advantageous. I am sure people will take issue with this comment but look at the relative restraint of Russia in Ukraine or the US in Iran vs, say, WWII. Modern morality prevents such scale and tactics until it does not. Then suddenly what matters are big weapons and the huge supply chains powering a war machine.

Both the US and Russia are also pivoting heavily towards drones, and they've been developing them for decades. Yes we have big, expensive weapons programs but we also have a lot of stuff ready or soon to be ready which is much, much cheaper.

fpoling2• 3 months ago

Yep, apparently Ukraine still cannot affect fuel production in Russia to any significant point. Drones with less than 100 kg of explosives do not do particularly significant damage. One really need to deliver like a ton or more of explosives and for that one needs bombers that can penetrate air defenses or very expensive stealth cruise missiles or big ballistic missiles.

dinfinity11• 3 months ago

I am sure people will take issue with this comment but look at the relative restraint of Russia in Ukraine [...] vs, say, WWII.

They have been bombing civilian infrastructure, abducting children, torturing and executing civilians and POWs, executing deserters or wannabe deserters the entire fucking Ukraine war. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_the_Russo-Ukrain...

Restraint, my unbleached asshole.

subw00f• 3 months ago

You think “morality” is what’s preventing the US or Russia to drop atomic bombs on their smaller targets?

renewiltord• 3 months ago

Modern morality prevents such scale and tactics until it does not.

In the sense that the tide of geopolitics means that if someone tried that they'd mark themselves as a defector in the current scheme of morality and would stand to lose a lot when the rest of Europe inevitably treats that as an example of how they are about to be treated.

onlyrealcuzzo• 3 months ago

Increased defense spending actually makes the US less, not more, safe.

It just makes us spend more money on defense, which is the entire point.

The industry obviously wants more and more profits.

They are never going to recommend getting rid of $200m F22s and replacing them with 30 $300k drones that would be more effective and cost 5% as much money.

That's 5% as much profit for them. They're not interested.

They are interested in profits, not national security.

And as you pointed out, they'd prefer a LESS secure world that inherently demands more money going to security.

You could spend more on security to actually be more secure. It's just that no one with any power is interested in that world.

They're only interested in making more money.

bawolff5• 3 months ago

A million dollar patriot missile to shoot down a cheap drone, etc.

Except this is more propaganda than truth. In general america does not use patriots to shoot down drones except in exceptional circumstances.

Not that the ecconomics of missile defense isnt a problem. It can be. But some of it has been highly exagerated.

greedo25• 3 months ago

The US just blew through a large percentage of its PAC-3/PAC-2 inventory fighting Iran. Other than Patriot, the US doesn't really have much GBAD anymore. A few Avenger systems, some Stinger MANPADs, etc. It's either Patriot or THAAD; and hopefully they're not dumb enough to be using THAAD against drones.

I'm sure they burned through quite a few AMRAAM and Sidewinders doing intercepts as well. Patriot is much more expensive than $1M (try $4M), Stinger is around 250K depending on who the customer is ($750K if you're non-US). AMRAAM is over $1M, Sidewinders $500K.

Even APKWS is $40k, and Shaheed prices are around $30k? So even that low cost option is losing.

aftbit6• 3 months ago

Shot exchange is indeed a problem, but it's far more complex than this makes it sound. The opportunity cost of _not_ shooting down the drone isn't the cost of the drone, it's the cost of whatever it's going to destroy if you don't shoot it down.

Sometimes it makes sense to use a million dollar missile to destroy a $5,000 drone, if that drone would otherwise destroy an even more expensive air defense radar or energy production facility. This says nothing about the cost and value of the lives that might be lost in an enemy strike.

We would not be safer if the enemy had cheap drones and we had no weapons capable of fighting back.

The main problem is that air defense interception is incredibly challenging and expensive primarily because a mid-course defensive interceptor needs considerably greater capabilities than the weapon it is intercepting, because it needs to catch up to the incoming missile or drone mid-flight.

Sure, this can lead to massive overkill problems. Yes, the US should invest more in the low end of the high/low mix. But no, this does not mean there's no place for the high end, or that they should never be used to destroy lower end targets if that's all that is available.

A more interesting challenge, if you ask me, is in the naval domain. Imagine a capital ship has two options for defending against incoming threats - either fire an expensive and limited stock interceptor missile with a 99% kill chance, or wait until the threat is inside the range of a cheap cannon or laser system with a 95% kill chance. There's a real command level tradeoff to be made here. If you shoot every drone with interceptors, you lose shot exchange badly, and you just run out of interceptors. But if you let every target through into the engagement range of your close range systems, you run the risk that one makes it through to your ship, potentially causing damage and casualties.

The future of war is going to be wild one way or the other.

LorenPechtel4• 3 months ago

I disagree on air defense inherently being very costly.

Old school was guns. Price per round was cheap. But the expensive missile kills the platform holding the cheap gun, you have to go with missiles. But the drone war is a different beast entirely. Drones can't shoot back. Thus the answer is guns. How well will their light drones fare against a Cessna armed with an automatic shotgun? How would the jet drones fare against a WWII warbird?

Lots of cheap, mobile guns. No meaningful self defense but doctrine is to always depart after shooting.

The naval one is much harder because you're not free to disperse your ship into many pieces. But, still, consider your cannon. Let's step down a bit, cheaper cannon with a 90% kill rate--but you put several of them.

FpUser2• 3 months ago

Sometimes it makes sense to use a million dollar missile to destroy a $5,000 drone, if that drone would otherwise destroy an even more expensive air defense radar or energy production facility. "

If that $5000 drone was alone then sure. However if they launch 200 drones (money equivalent of one missile) you'd be looking at totally different picture. Also they usually launch combo. Few missiles and whole bunch of drones. even worse

monideas• 3 months ago

There are so many companies working on this now (cheap anti-drone tech, cheap cruise missiles, cheap missile interceptors), what you're saying is kind of moot.

tpurves• 3 months ago

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 platforms. Not enough sustain in prolonged modern conflict. A one-punch military.

notpachet• 3 months ago

I feel like there's a brute-force analogy to be drawn with the "Bitter Lesson" that we saw in AI development.

usrnm2• 3 months ago

That's not a new idea, it's the same thing Germany learned about tanks in WWII.

dmos62• 3 months ago

I heard it argued that Germany didn't have the raw resources and production capacity to go for quantity. Especially later in the war. So quality it was.

XorNot5• 3 months ago

I mean not really? People focus on quantity but the German late war tank designs just sucked.

trvz• 3 months ago

That’s no insight, just a fact from the entire history of warfare except when one side had rifles/guns and the other didn’t.

titzer• 3 months ago

The total cost of the entire program over its projected lifetime is $1.7 trillion. The F-35 is made by one company, Lockheed Martin (with some pieces made by a couple others). This entire program is a massive transfer of taxpayer money into one company.

Another data point is that it's estimated that all student debt in the US combined is $1.7 - 1.8 trillion.

No wonder America keeps falling behind.

pohl• 3 months ago

I think you're ignoring subcontractors and other suppliers. It's probably more like a thousand or so companies.

scottyah3• 3 months ago

The F-35 is made by one company, Lockheed Martin (with some pieces made by a couple others)

This isn't even remotely true, who is paying you to post this drivel?

greedo25• 3 months ago

$1.7 trillion over 70 years. So $24B/year.

andrewstuart2• 3 months ago

One thing you and the OP are not addressing is that most of these modern tactics are also necessitated by the fact that building an air force, navy, or cavalry that can beat modern superpowers is just a complete non-starter.

I'm not so sure the F-35 is built for the wrong war as much as the war would probably call for the F-35 if it didn't already exist.

TulliusCicero• 3 months ago

You can just do both. The US does have some cheaper, more expendable drone platforms, and it's continuing to work on more. It should probably scale up production of them, though.

bluGill8• 3 months ago

You don't scale up today - you just make sure you can. Otherwise next year you have a ton of obsolete drones to scrap.

gherkinnn3• 3 months ago

The ideas that I as a civilian was sold over the past decades don't appear to hold up any longer.

As someone a while back put it, Russia lost several Bundeswehrs worth of equipment and keeps on grinding. Neither side is able to mass large forces, in a large part due to drones. And Iran can punish the US despite being comically outgunned.

Modern equivalents of Sherman and T-34 tanks over burdensome Tigers and a population willing to support heavy losses.

loglog2• 3 months ago

A Bundeswehr worth of equipment is so little nowadays that Bundeswehr itself lost several Bundeswehrs worth of equipment while being at peace for the last few decades.

greedo25• 3 months ago

While Iran has faired better than I expected, it's a reach to say they've punished the US. The US losses are comically small. Of course wars aren't won solely based on battles...

sgt1012• 3 months ago

There are three stances that I can see in the debate at the moment.

* Quantity has a quality all of its own.

* Innovation and agility allows you to adapt and survive.

* Low capability platforms often can't be used to deliver useful effect & commanders will try every option not to use them in a fight. When they get committed it can be disastrous.

The first two clearly have merits, but every military professional I have ever worked with has cited them at me, so I don't think that they are underweighted in discussion. I believe that the last one is not treated with enough weight in the debate. The best example I have of it is the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Platforms with glaring problems, fielded and maintained at huge cost, completely unable to achieve their strategic purpose. Even when sulking in port these ships have proven to be deadly for their crews and maintainers. Another example is the TB3 drone. It had a staring role for about 10 days in the Ukraine, but those were 10 days where the Russians ran out of petrol to run their air defence systems on. It hasn't been in evidence since because it just can't be used in the current environment.

One that worries me is the upcoming T31 (uk arrowhead variant) frigate. The argument for it is that it is a relatively affordable platform that the RN will have enough of to actually be able to get out and about. However, it doesn't have a sonar, so... what actual use is it as a frigate (I know the story about the helicopter and some other bits and bobs... but... really?)

Sure, when the other side has run out of the good kit dragging crap out of storage might work, but until then you are going to be sending good men to their death in second rate equipment. Is that going to build war winning morale?

Second rate equipment is for playing lets pretend, or for fighting wars of national survival. We should avoid both.

LorenPechtel4• 3 months ago

Quantity has a quality *if* it can get to the battlefield.

The big stuff is for trying to keep the small stuff away from the battlefield. When you can't do that for whatever reason you need a bunch of small stuff of your own.

But a frigate without sonar isn't inherently horrible--lots of places don't have subs.

dessimus• 3 months ago

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

The irony, of course, is that the US military knew that back in WWII in how the Sherman tank was able to defeat the "better" German tanks for all the same reasons listed above.

dmix3• 3 months ago

Now the US has the same small set of defence contractors who are staffed by ex-government officials and no one asks any hard questions when every single project is 10yrs late and overbudget.

aftbit6• 3 months ago

I think the insight is that you need a high-low mix. Some threats call for top of the line capabilities (like early days of the Iran conflict with stand-off munitions and top-spec interceptors being used against Shahed drones and cheap cruise missiles). Some threats can be more economically serviced by a less capable, cheaper, and more available system.

LorenPechtel4• 3 months ago

100% this.

It's always been about the biggest, fastest, longest range punch. That is extremely useful for deep strike (which has always been NATO doctrine), but when the range is short you need quantity and mobility far more than you need quantity.

Being able to cut off your enemy is an extremely effective weapon if your enemy needs massive supply. Drop the major bridges between Moscow and Ukraine and the war would soon be over.

But when you can't do that for whatever reason you need quantity and mobility far more than you need quality.

magicalhippo• 3 months ago

I mean the armed forces already know this well. They have a bunch of units of regular soldiers, and then they have a few special forces units.

stevenwoo• 3 months ago

Ukraine is using old school propeller trainer craft to shoot down some of the slower Russian drones. https://theaviationist.com/2024/06/26/ukrainian-yak-52-kill-... There's usually new footage of this every week on social media.

Don't really see or hear about the USA building or using propeller driven planes in military outside of special ops.

scottyah3• 3 months ago

Pawns are the only piece that matter on a chess board?

energy1234• 3 months ago

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 ago you just couldn't do this kind of warfare, the technology and intelligence didn't exist. Now you can. People haven't updated on this paradigm shift.

People are over-learning the wrong lessons from Ukraine. That is a unique war with air parity. That's why the Ukraine war is shaped the way it is. Not because this is how wars ought to be fought.

This is not to discount quantity. But you can't have only quantity unless you want to fight an attritional war for 10 years (or worse, lose your own industrial production to an enemy that achieves air superiority over your skies because they had the foresight to invest in quality).

pjc509• 3 months ago

The Iran war isn't over yet. Plenty of time for it to become attritional, especially if the people who want Big Gaza / "mowing the nuclear lawn" to become the status quo are in charge. After all, Afghanistan was a quick victory, 20 years of attrition, and eventual exit.

JumpCrisscross• 3 months ago

"Just as it took the brutal reality of naval warfare in the Pacific to shift the Navy’s love from the battleship to the aircraft carrier, it may take the catastrophic failure for limitations of exquisite tactical aircraft to overwhelm the forces keeping them drinking up most of the trough.

The corrective is not to abandon the F-35 but to redefine its role. A smaller fleet should be reserved for the missions that truly require its unique capabilities — penetrating advanced air defenses, gathering intelligence in contested environments, and orchestrating distributed networks of unmanned systems. The marginal procurement dollar should shift toward platforms that are cheaper to build, easier to replace, less dependent on vulnerable forward infrastructure, and expendable in ways that manned fighters are not.

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 may not be that fight. The future of airpower belongs to a larger orchestra, many of its instruments unmanned, inexpensive, and replaceable. Prudence demands that the United States start building it now."

PowerElectronix2• 3 months ago

The F-35 is the best stealth aircraft you can have in a war against china. But it alone is not going to win that war. I wouldn't say it's the wrong jet for that war just because of that.

If you put the f-35 along all the rest of the us military, the war can be won and the f-35 plays a critical role in that win.

bigfudge2• 3 months ago

There is no in winning a war between the US and China, even assuming it doesn't go nuclear. There would only be losers all over the world. It would make the current Iran conflict look like a tiny speedbump (albeit one which is likely to cause malnutrition and starvation for millions of people in subsaharan Africa within 6-12 months).

PowerElectronix2• 3 months ago

There is a win condition achievable in a US-China war. You leave the army in shambles and take over the political power structures, like with nazi germany or any other conventional country in the world.

It'd be hell, for sure, but it is a war that can end in victory for either side.

tehjoker4• 3 months ago

First, in a war with China, China would be in the (more) morally just position. Second, as you can see in Iran, in Korea, in Vietnam, etc (and that's just US wars), aircraft only inflict pain, they do not win. US imperialists would really really like for that not to be the case, but it is just not. You would need a boots on the ground, and a draft, and will still probably lose and maybe cause our own government to topple. The Vietnam war was lost not because we didn't have fancy toys, but because the revolutionaries fought so hard and well that the U.S. army about on the verge of rebellion.

China very successfully built a rich economic system that is the factory of the world while eroding our own domestic capacity. In a war they can cut us off. We are not even as strong as we were during the Vietnam war, though we have fancier toys. Good luck!

zitterbewegung• 3 months ago

The premise that it is built for the "wrong war" is two fold. Design by committee didn't help the aircraft and made cost overruns and timelines worse but, the bigger premise or problem doesn't take to account that we still have other aircraft that fulfills other roles.

Also, the collaborative combat aircraft is being developed with the F22 and F35. Arguably though the collaborative combat aircraft is a bigger challenge than the F35 program as a whole and it is still in development whether it can be completed. We could downsize the F35 fleet or provide it in military aid but, I don't we can truly say wrong war it will still be available when a different war occurs and Aircraft have a long shelf life.

XorNot5• 3 months ago

The F-35 is currently about the same price to procure as Gripen, a 4th generation non-stealthy fighter.

Anyone making claims about cost has a lot of work to do because the F-35 program is actually extremely cheap per unit now for what it is.

hurubaw• 3 months ago

Seems like the life cycle costs for F35:s are about double compared to that of a Gripen E/F, with straight up procurement cost about a third more.

https://ekonomickydenik.cz/app/uploads/2023/09/20230905-awn-...

The F35 is very, very impressive, just maybe not very suitable for a long war of attrition.

aftbit6• 3 months ago

F-35 cost overruns are mostly solved. The cost of first-of-a-kind is always ludicrously expensive. Nth-of-a-kind, they're not so bad.

varjag6• 3 months ago

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 remains a fighter without peers (unless you count F-22) or serious AD threat.

virtue3• 3 months ago

That is totally false.

They have been getting replacement MiG-29s and Su-25s from allies and are starting to use f-16s from NATO nations.

"A coalition of NATO countries, primarily the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and Belgium, are providing F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine. The United States authorized the transfer and is providing training and spare parts, with deliveries having begun in 2024 to strengthen Ukraine's air force against Russia."

So yes, they still have an airforce. They're just getting re-supplied.

Also the Ukrainian airforce was ULTRA conservative about sorties to make sure they conserved as many fighters as possible.

BobbyJo• 3 months ago

"A significant number of jets it entered the war with" does not mean they haven't also gotten newer jets.

TheOtherHobbes• 3 months ago

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 fragile, cheap, unglamorous, unsophisticated, easy to shoot down, and wasteful, because you need tens or hundreds to make sure a few get through.

That gives drone campaigns a huge advantage. You can do a lot of damage and your enemy doesn't quite get what's happening.

Psychologically, there's a Rubicon-level difference between someone dropping bombs on Leningrad from a plane and a drone swarm attacking the same targets.

In practice the threat level is similar. Drones have absolutely become an existential threat to Russia.

But psychologically, they're not seen as such.

cineticdaffodil• 3 months ago

I dont buy that anymore. We had that "escalation" yell at every stage, every new tech. Tanks, jets, everytime ukraine got help, the "moscow puppets" yelled about nuclear war and escalation. I m of the opinion we could have stopped 4 years of butchery if we had supported Ukraine decisevly from the start. The words of the peaceniks just dont hold value anymore. They lack predictive power so significantly those utterances seem delusional at time. Quite frankly if sb marches into a peaceful neighbor country, they dont get to call for the referee the moment they kick the shit out of them.

ceejayoz6• 3 months ago

Russian nuclear doctrine would have treated that as an existential threat.

They claimed that with basically every little sprinkle of new aid for like two years, until everyone realized it was a bluff.

Putin is many things, but actively suicidal looks like a no.

eek2121• 3 months ago

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.

nradov13• 3 months ago

Ukraine has already launched several mass strikes on Moscow.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/moscow-comes-under-one-of...

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/russia...

Even if Russia sees a particular tactic or weapons system as an existential threat it's questionable whether they have the capability to escalate further. I mean they can threaten nuclear strikes on Ukrainian population centers but would anyone believe that the threats are credible?

Animats• 3 months ago

Ukraine's top drone commander was interviewed by The Economist.[1] He used to be a commodities trader, and he looks at warfare from that perspective. His goal is to kill Russian soldiers faster than Russia can replace them, until they run out of young men. His drone units are currently doing this, he claims. They supposedly lose one Ukrainian drone unit soldier per 400 Russians dead. Material cost per dead Russian soldier is about US$850. He looks at attrition war as an ROI problem.

His risk management strategy is to have redundant everything, so there's no single point of failure. Lots of small drones. Distributed operators. Many small factories. Varied command and control systems. He makes the point that they use lots of different kinds of drones - some fast with wings, some slow with rotors, some that run on treads on the ground. There's no "best drone". Using multiple types in a coordinated way makes it hard for the enemy to counter attacks. No one defense will stop all the drones.

Ukraine built 4,000,000 drones in 2025. This year, more. The Ukrainian military needs a new generation of drones about every three months, as the opposition changes tactics. They view most US drones as obsolete, because the product development and life cycle is far too long. (See "OODA loop" for the concept.)

This is a big problem for the US military's very slow development process. Development of the F-35 started over 30 years ago.

[1] https://www.economist.com/europe/2026/03/22/ukraines-top-dro...

cyberax5• 3 months ago

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 to suppress all the anti-air defenses first, and it will likely be too costly.

morkalork• 3 months ago

It's like watching salami slicing happen in real time. It also forces a dilemma on Russia. Every move of GBAD to Moscow to defend against drone leaves an airfield uncovered. Move some to airfields and it leaves a refinery open. And on and on.

varjag6• 3 months ago

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.

expedition322• 3 months ago

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...

wredcoll28• 3 months ago

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 hide things like drones in big empty spaces.

If loitering drones became a serious threat (as opposed to the, you know, literally super sonic missiles the navy has spent the last 40 years planning for) itms pretty easy to imagine anti-drone planes/ships/drones sweeping a large radius around your carriers.

[1] Satellites can definitely do things, but they're not magical and people can track where they're looking and just... sail in a different direction. Also if someone was actually using satellites to target american carriers with munitions the americans would probably just destroy the satellites.

carefree-bob19• 3 months ago

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.

rjsw2• 3 months ago

When did Britain ridicule submarines?

tick_tock_tick4• 3 months ago

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

sobellian• 3 months ago

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.

peterfirefly4• 3 months ago

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

8note8• 3 months ago

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"

pjc509• 3 months ago

The US Army doctrine is "have more stuff". The US military budget is about 450% of Ukranian GDP. The F-35 is part of that. As are the nukes.

isubasinghe• 3 months ago

Hmm, this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aviation_shootdowns_an...

indicates what the author said is true.

The majority of these losses are on the ground.

moralestapia• 3 months ago

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 obviously pro-America, but losing touch with reality will only make things worse.

The world is not like your RTS games.

8note8• 3 months ago

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

NooneAtAll3• 3 months ago

Ukraine fighters are operating out of long-term soviet-era reinforced concrete hangars, while transport aviation is operating out of Romania and Poland which makes striking them a political issue

both solutions are a lot less relevant in case of USA remote-from-home conflicts

varjag6• 3 months ago

It's too bad the USA found itself without allies to stow their transports to. How did that happen, was it F-35? Yeah, it has to be F-35 to blame.

red-iron-pine4• 3 months ago

ukraine has planes because it can't fly them except in limited circumstances with limited objectives.

nalekberov3• 3 months ago

Is there a “right” war?

platinumrad3• 3 months ago

Of course HN would downvote this.

celsoazevedo4• 3 months ago

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.

slibhb2• 3 months ago

He keeps citing China but the US isn't at war with China. For the wars that the US is fighting, i.e. against Iran and similarly equipped adversaries, the f-35 seems to be performing well.

TimorousBestie• 3 months ago

A potential Chinese-American hot war is the conflict that today’s USAF and USSF should be preparing for.

Winning sub-peer conflicts is fine for projecting hard power (when it works...) and protecting allies (when you have them...) but it doesn’t really budge the needle on national security.

slibhb2• 3 months ago

Fighting a war against China (presumably over Taiwan) doesn't seem like it would have much to do with national security.

That aside, people are simply not able to model how the next peer conflict will be fought ahead of time. All sides will be learning as they go. Building complex systems like the F-35 seems like a good way to maintain engingeering/technology culture that can be adapted when the time comes.

Also, I'm fairly skeptical of China's military. They keep purging people, and the human element in war seems underrated.

bawolff5• 3 months ago

Yeah, but the war drums are beating for it.

USA is shifting focus to china in lots of their policy documents

China is massively building up arms

Lots of talk about a potential invasion of taiwan at some point.

Its clearly something war planners are worried about.

morning-coffee• 3 months ago

The F-35 was specified when the Joint Strike Fighter program began in 1995, with the development contract awarded in 2001, and the first flight in 2006 or thereabouts.

Of course it was built for a different war... the use of drones didn't proliferate until after the 2010s and really more since the 2020s with Russia/Ukraine.

So, thanks Captain Obvious and arm-chair quarterback, for the insightful article.

jandrewrogers19• 3 months ago

People forget just how old the F-22 and F-35 actually are, mostly because they are still the current state-of-the-art. That is 1990s tech.

The 6th gen platforms currently in testing address many of the issues raised with the 5th gen platforms. Which you would expect since they weren't designed in the previous century.

anon848736282• 3 months ago

People not paying attention need it explained to them.

freediddy3• 3 months ago

I think ultimately the real weapon of mass destruction will be long-range drones the size of a DJI drone, each holding a small but extremely powerful explosive.

And then send millions of them, with specific single targets. Each AI controlled to target single weakpoints in buildings, bridges, or even specific people. You can't stop a million of them even with EMPs because you can just end a million more. You can destroy entire cities with a technology like this. If each drone costs $10,000 and you send a million of them that's only $10 billion for a war and complete destruction of your enemy.

XorNot5• 3 months ago

You could also just write "magic" and say we should invest in wizards.

No DJI sized drone using any available or near future technology is going to have a range of more then whatever 20 to 30 minutes of well-below subsonic flight time can get you.

freediddy3• 3 months ago

You could drop them from B2 bombers and they could fall to the ground en masse at hundreds of miles an hour and then the propellers could open up as they get closer to the ground.

Or you could launch them in massive containers like in Infinity War and these containers filled with thousands of them would land on the ground and open up and release the drones.

You're just not imaginative enough to solve the problem you described.

credit_guy2• 3 months ago

I think the opposite. Drones are subject to the tyrany of the rocket equation: they need fuel (or batteries) to fly, then fuel (or batteries) to carry the fuel, etc, in a compounded way. Which makes long range drone inherently more expensive than short range ones.

Right now, the novelty of the technology means the offensive has an advantage. But long term it will be the defensive who will benefit the most from drones.

freediddy3• 3 months ago

I described below how you could launch thousands of them from a single massive container that gets dropped by B2 bombers. You have to use your imagination, you're not limited by today's technology anymore.

jandrewrogers19• 3 months ago

Explosives don't scale in the way you seem to think they do. Below a certain threshold of warhead mass, you won't do much more than scratch the paint. The effects aren't linearly additive. The warheads required to penetrate military targets are incredibly heavy; you won't be loading them on a DJI drone nor traveling far even if you could.

A thousand sparrows does not an eagle make.

munk-a• 3 months ago

The A10 Warthog is still in service due to the outsized volume of some incredibly wrong voices being able to shout down modern understandings of warfare. The role of CAS as an extension of the ground troops themselves controlled by infantrymen with tooling to automate that job is the future but the military industrial complex moves slowly.

fooker10• 3 months ago

The primary purpose of something like the F-35 program is not producing a bunch of jets that we can use to win wars. Similar to how NASA's purpose is not to make large rockets that send things to orbit for cheap.

It is to investigate new technologies (i.e. how do we control a thousand drones) and preserve domain knowledge in a large number of engineers spanning multiple generations. If all these engineers go work at $BIG_TECH optimizing ad revenue for watching short videos, we'll have to rediscover basics the next time.

When we have to fight the next serious war, we are not going to primarily use F-35 jets built twenty years ago, it's going to be something built on a similar platform in larger numbers to specifically address challenges of that era. If it can not be made cheap enough, whatever contractors involved are going to be nationalized. All major wars between comparable powers were fought with technology hot off the assembly lines, not billion dollar prototype models developed twenty years ago to bomb caves in deserts.

If you look at it from this angle, all the idiosyncrasies make sense. There's of course the inefficiency of defense contractors skimming off profits at multiple layers, but if you find a solution to that while preserving productivity, you'd win the economics nobel tomorrow.

ceejayoz6• 3 months ago

When we have to fight the next serious war, we are not going to primarily use F-35 jets, it's going to be something built on a similar platform in larger numbers to specifically address challenges of that era. If it can not be made cheap enough, whatever contractors involved are going to be nationalized.

That is, to some extent, what the F-35 is; the mass-produced plane that incorporates what we learned from the F-117 and F-22 and whatnot. We've already made 10x as many as the F-22's production run.

fooker10• 3 months ago

Mass produced means something very different when it comes to wars between comparable powers.

There are barely more than a thousand F-35s, the number of US aircrafts used in WW2 was about 300,000.

If China produces 100 times or 1000 times their current numbers (and they can), marginal differences in capability are not going to matter.

wmf• 3 months ago

The primary purpose of something like the F-35 program is not producing a bunch of jets ... It is to investigate new technologies

I thought the F-22 investigated the technologies and the F-35 is the mass-produced version.

When we have to fight the next serious war ... it's going to be something built on a similar platform in larger numbers to specifically address challenges of that era.

Not if every jet takes 20 years to develop.

If it can not be made cheap enough, whatever contractors involved are going to be nationalized.

Which would accomplish nothing since the rot is so deep.

fooker10• 3 months ago

I thought the F-22 investigated the technologies and the F-35 is the mass-produced version.

Sure, I'd think of it as a mass^2 produced version then ;)

Not if every jet takes 20 years to develop.

Think of F-35 variants, not entirely new platforms. If I have to guess, one reduced to a barebones autonomous version built for the purpose to commanding drone swarms and dealing with incoming drone swarms.

jandrewrogers19• 3 months ago

The F-35 was designed to be a partially-nerfed export version of some of the capabilities in the F-22. It was anticipated that the large production rate would significantly reduce the unit costs, which seems to have panned out. They probably shouldn't have tried to produce three significantly different variations of the same design, since that added materially to the development cost.

The 6th gen platforms appear to be coming in at significantly reduced cost relatively to what they are replacing, which was a major objective.

shevy-java• 3 months ago

I think cheap missiles and drones changed a lot of things. One could see this in Ukraine; more recently in Iran. USA is primarily focusing on heavy impact and expensive wars. This may be a more effective strategy, but it does not seem to be very realistic. I can't help but feel that this is especially much the case with regard to Iran, because the USA, despite what the orange bolo is saying, does not seem to be that eager to intensify the war (e. g. no ground invasion - and that's very telling if you remember the Iraq or Afghanistan invasion).

metalman• 3 months ago

Huh?The F35 has flown.more missions against the Palistinians than perhaps ANY aircraft that has ever been use in war, and the F35 is central to commiting genocide on the Palistinian people, and there is very very little they can do about it, so by the logic of obsenity, does war have another?, it plays the "tune" in the keys of screams and horror.

dralley5• 3 months ago

1) you could at least be bothered to spell "Palestinian" correctly

2) not even true, they use F-15E for missions that don't need stealth, they have way more payload capacity

lanthissa• 3 months ago

theres a lot of things to critique about the us, but the f35 isn't one of them.

Over the past few years we have seen it operate with impunity over multiple countries. It astounding to me that in the 12 day war and the iran conflict there hasn't been issues from maintance alone.

We dont know how well the F35 holds up against patriots or s400's, but what we do know for certain is that against virtually everything else it unstopable.

More so when you realize the us has 600 and is making another 200 a year, and in a real war, you would lose some but theres rough parity between the number of s400 systems that exist, and the number of f35s that exist, and all those s400's will never be in teh same war or same place.

anon848736282• 3 months ago

The article isn't critiquing the F-35, in fact describes how "exquisite" it is multiple times.

nextstep• 3 months ago

Writers of history or historical fiction often wonder how did average people in militaristic, fascist societies from the past view their society? I think it’s obvious from the present-day US: they were amused. They were entertained by it. Human suffering, a necessary feature of such cultures, is trivialized by draping the death machine behind the veneer of fun, exciting game!

xd1936• 3 months ago

Opponents of the Dragon Tank point to it's 10-Million-Dollar fangs and 35-Million-Dollar prehensile tail and say this is somewhat excessive... But developing new technology is essential to maintaining America's military advantage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxJLUZWPEb8

(Re-Upload: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8__8--YAm4)

bawolff5• 3 months ago

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 may not be that fight.

What a weird article. It starts out by saying f-35 is not fit for modern war. Concludes by saying it works perfectly in modern war.

The middle part talks about combining f-35 with drones to get the best of both worlds, but isn't that what people already are doing? Iran war allegedly had lots of drones on both sides.

And of course blowing up iran is going to be totally different from some hypothetical war with china. Will the f-35 work well in a conflict with china? I have no idea but the article didn't really make any convincing arguments about it.

dinfinity11• 3 months ago

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 the capacity to generate sorties from that site."

It pointed out that you can't produce F-35s at scale, which fucks you in the long run:

"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 key message of the article is simply this (which should not be "weird" to anyone):

"The corrective is not to abandon the F-35 but to redefine its role. A smaller fleet should be reserved for the missions that truly require its unique capabilities — penetrating advanced air defenses, gathering intelligence in contested environments, and orchestrating distributed networks of unmanned systems. The marginal procurement dollar should shift toward platforms that are cheaper to build, easier to replace, less dependent on vulnerable forward infrastructure, and expendable in ways that manned fighters are not."

2trill2spill4• 3 months ago

"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.

CMay• 3 months ago

I don't think that's the key message.

He says basing is a problem, but doesn't mention that we have answers to basing problems. He says F-35 production doesn't scale. Then he says F-35 production doesn't need to scale.

The F-35 is a multi-role jet. It wasn't built for what it's doing in Iran, it's just that it can do it. There are other older jets doing similar things in Iran just fine. Compared to past jets we lose fewer of them, so that has to be factored into the overall cost.

If we say, ok, let's just put fewer of them on this base to reduce concentration. They are still there. He didn't get rid of the F-35s, he didn't get rid of his argument that bases are vulnerable. So what is the point? Now if a successful attack gets through and takes out some F-35s....you now have less spare F-35s to do the critical mission you wanted, because you put fewer there to start with.

We have other solutions for this problem, but in peace time it's more efficient to concentrate things. The nature of escalation tends to mean you have some time to reorganize before the real battle comes.

We're still going to have F-35s _and_ drones _and_ missiles. If the enemy has anti-missile and anti-drone defenses, it won't necessarily be the drones and missiles taking those out.

micromacrofoot• 3 months ago

The F-22 or F-15 would have also performed superbly in Iran, they don't have modern anti-air capabilities.

jleyank• 3 months ago

The world has changed in many ways. Countries might now consider having weapons systems that are less-dependent on the US/China/Russian triumvirate. And much of the defensive threats don't require stealth - they require availability on short notice and the ability to work in various conditions (cold/hot/etc).

worik• 3 months ago

The best defense policy for the USA, any country really, is to be a good neighbor, good "world citizen" and reliable friend

One can dream

vanviegen3• 3 months ago

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.

Of course I understand wanting to be prepared even for grim scenarios such as these. Military strategists should of course continually be refining such plans. But casual discussions like this, without even so much as a disclaimer about it being a hypothetical and extremely undesirable outcome, may pave the way towards it through normalization.

ExoticPearTree2• 3 months ago

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 way despite bombing it relentlessly.

Coming back to your concern, I'm pretty sure some people at the Pentagon believe the US can fight China using an expeditionary force and somehow win.

wahern3• 3 months ago

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 factions waiting in the wings, ready and willing to take over the government with force. (There are political factions, to be sure, but they're already integrated into the government, though without leverage over the Revolutionary Guard.) The only armed group remotely capable of even trying would be the Kurds, but the US and in particular Trump screwed them over in the past, multiple times. Even if they thought they could go it alone (which they couldn't), there was zero chance they were going to enter the fray without the US committing itself fully with their own invasion force (i.e. success was guaranteed), because failure would mean ethnic Kurds would be extirpated from Iran, and might induce Iraq and Syria to revisit the question of Kurdish loyalty to their own states. And, indeed, Kurdish groups took a wait and see approach, assembling some forces but waiting to see how the US played their cards.

bluGill8• 3 months ago

The iran war - for all it was a bad idea eliminated a lot of iran's war capacity which seems to be the real goal - near as anyone can tell what they were. Regime change would be nice, but needs more than the us was ever gave indication they would do.

the followon effects like the closing of the straight were obvious which is why few Iran hatehs thought it was a good idea

jfengel• 3 months ago

A general war against China is impossible. But a "limited" war fought over Taiwan isn't beyond the realm of possibility.

Which does take it into a kind of Schroedinger's realm. The US takes it seriously, so it develops technology for it, and China doesn't invade. But would China have invaded if the US hadn't prepared for that war? Quite possibly, but you can never know.

0cf8612b2e1e4• 3 months ago

In the quite likely scenario that Iran goes on any longer, the US will become so war exhausted that we will be unable to provide any support for Taiwan.

lantry• 3 months ago

aka the preparedness paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox

tehjoker4• 3 months ago

The people advocating for war against china will complain bitterly and weep the soon as their snacks and new electronic devices stop arriving by ship.

jonnybgood• 3 months ago

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.

It’ll be more concerning if wasn’t discussed in such a way. War is rarely reasonable. China doesn’t find it unreasonable to go to war over Taiwan. And for what? National pride and unity? It’s completely unreasonable, but everything they’re developing militarily is exactly for that. We must approach the subject clearly and explore every possibility as a real one. These discussions are about ending wars as quickly and decisively as possible while causing the minimal amount death.

janalsncm• 3 months ago

The more I read about it, the more firmly I believe it is in the U.S.’s best interest to avoid military conflict with the world’s only manufacturing superpower.

Not that we could afford wars with non-superpowers either.

bluGill8• 3 months ago

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

vdqtp3• 3 months ago

an actual war against China, as if that were a reasonable scenario.

Most modern military planning considers it a foregone conclusion. Whether that's accurate or not is arguable, but approaching discussions of military spending from a perspective grounded in current planning is certainly reasonable.

pjc509• 3 months ago

So .. ICBM nuclear exchange? Or are we suddenly expecting a large conventional war between nuclear powers in which both sides decide not to bother with them?

9999000009992• 3 months ago

I'm convinced War Hawks in all countries are much like WWE performers.

The hype is it's own product.

analog83742• 3 months ago

we could do a moonbase for 2 trillion

carefree-bob19• 3 months ago

But why? I'm not against the idea in principle, but there has to be a motivation beyond "It's possible". Even the search for knowledge, which is a good reason to invest in R&D, but how much would we learn on the moon for that 2 trillion that we couldn't learn more cheaply through other means?

analog83742• 3 months ago

"what could we learn?". that's an interesting question. something unexpected I'd guess.

but that's rather beside my point.

NegativeLatency• 3 months ago

Seems like a better use of money than weapons and killing each other with said weapons on Earth

jmyeet• 3 months ago

People may not know how long the F-35 program has been going on. It's over 30 years. Discussions about what a next generation figher would be began in the Clinton administration. From the very start it was a series of compromises to be an all-in-one fighter. There are different needs in the military: air-to-air, ground bombardment, etc. Even stealth is a variable need. You just don't need it when you have air superiority. But having it also means not mounting weapons on the exterior of the airframe (as, say, the F-16 and F-14 did), which reduces how much ordinance it can deliver and indirectly how much fuel it can carry. F-35 operations are pretty much entirely dependent on in-air refuelling as a result.

Another fun fact in all this is the F-14. Did you the Navy has a policy of shredding all F-14s? Why? Because they were sold to Iran in the 1970s (pre-Islamic Revolution obviously) and the US wanted to make sure they could never get spare parts.

Anyway, as a result of that the US didn't want a repeat of selling the F-35 to a country that became an enemy so the US effectively has the ability to turn off the F-35 for every buyer... except one: Israel. Technically I think the avionics require daily activation and the US is the only supplier of those codes.

So, one nit I have about this article is the operational record of the F-35 in this current war. I don't think that's entirely correct. Iran's fairly primitive air defense has managed to damage the F-35 in at least one incident [1]. Also, you can assess the risk by how a fighter is used. As in, does the military use them with stand-off weapons [2] or not? This means using precision-guided munitions from a distance, possibly over-the-horizon. This wastes more payload on fuel. Those munitions are more expensive. The only reason you do it is because you fear the air defenses or otherwise can't guarantee air superiority. There have been a lot of reports the US military still primarily relies on standoff weapons in Iran. This is of course unconfirmed.

The bigger issue here is that post-Vietnam, and particularly since the 1990s, the US military has adopted a Strategic Air Doctrine. Rather than putting boots on the ground, the US projects military power by the ability to bombard. Unfortunately, that has limited utility. No regime has ever been overthrown by air power alone. And we're seeing that now. The entire Iranian military is built to resist strategic bombardment.

So yes, in this sense, the F-35 is built for Strategic Air Power and that's just not that relevant anymore.

So how do you put boots on the ground? Well, in Iran's case, it's like the country was specifically designed in a map editor to make this near-impossible. Iran is 5 times the size of Texas and has a population of ~93M people. It's surrounded on 3 sides by mountains and on the other by the Persian Gulf, which itself is bottlenecked by the Strait of Hormuz, which no US military ship has even approached in this conflict.

People just don't understand how complicated the logistics of this are and how many soldiers are required. You need, for example, tanks. You can't air lift multiple tank battalions. A plane can carry one, maybe two, tanks. They need fuel, munitions and maintenance. You need air defense and to establish bases. You need people to do all those things. Those people need to be fed.

Logistically, it's as complicated and large as D-Day.

It's also why I find the Taiwan question (also in this article) so frustrating, for two reasons:

1. China doesn't have the amphibious capability to cross 100 miles of ocean to land on Taiwan, establish a beach head and suppress a military of hundreds of thousands (as well as an insurgency) and to occupy the island. If you think they do, you have no idea what this takes;

2. More importantly, China has absolutely no reason to invade Taiwan and has shown no inclination to do so. this is the part that gets people mad for some reason. All but 10 countries on Earth have what's called the One China policy. This includes the US and Europe. That policy is that Taiwan is part of China and the question can simply remain unresolved. China belives the situation will be resolved eventually and there's absolutely no rush to do anything. The US agrees, policy-wise.

So any talk of a Taiwan invasion is just scaremongering to sell weapons. Like the F-35.

Maybe, just maybe, you should take with a grain of salt when the guy who sells you weapons tells you there's an imminent threat that requires you to buy the weapons they sell.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/19/politics/f-35-damage-iran-war

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standoff_weapon

pharos92• 3 months ago

America hasn’t faced a peer-level, modern military since the Korean War. For seventy years, it has specialized in "wars of choice" against overmatched opponents, mistaking uncontested airspace for actual invincibility.

U.S. weapons supremacy is increasingly exposed as a marketing facade. Despite a $1T annual budget, the industrial base is so brittle that strategic missile stocks were nearly depleted within a month of engagement with Iran. To keep the gears turning, Washington is now cannibalizing the stockpiles of its own allies.

You could make the case that the F-35 isn't a weapon; it’s a sophisticated wealth-extraction tool designed to fleece the American taxpayer. While it excels at deleting defenseless targets in lopsided conflicts, its primary mission is maintaining the flow of capital into a bloated military-industrial complex that prioritizes contractor profits over combat endurance.

Yes, the U.S. possesses the most lethal tactical hardware in history, but its industrial backbone is currently ill-equipped for a prolonged, peer-to-peer war of attrition.

  - Korean War (North Korea/China)
  - Rating: Competent
  - Note: North Korea began with a well-equipped, Soviet-backed armor force; China followed with massive, highly disciplined infantry waves that effectively fought the UN coalition to a stalemate.



  - Vietnam War (North Vietnam/Viet Cong)
  - Rating: Technologically Incompetent
  - Note: While technologically outmatched, they demonstrated elite level unconventional warfare, logistical persistence (Ho Chi Minh Trail), and sophisticated anti-aircraft defenses.



  - Invasion of Grenada (Grenadian Military)
  - Rating: Poor
  - Note: A very small force with limited heavy weaponry and minimal organizational depth.



  - Invasion of Panama (Panamanian Defense Forces)
  - Rating: Poor
  - Note: Though professionalized to an extent, they lacked the hardware and air defense to resist a modern concentrated assault.


  - Gulf War (Iraq)
  - Rating: Competent (on paper) / Incompetent (in execution)
  - Note: Iraq held the world's fourth-largest army at the time with modern Soviet equipment, but failed significantly in command, control, and air superiority.


  - Intervention in Somalia (Local Militias/Warlords)
  - Rating: Poor
  - Note: Characterized by decentralized "technical" vehicles and light arms; effective only in urban ambush scenarios rather than conventional warfare.




  - War in Afghanistan (Taliban/Al-Qaeda)
  - Rating: Incompetent (conventionally) / Competent (insurgency)
  - Note: Zero conventional capability (no air force/armor), but highly capable at sustained, low-tech asymmetric warfare.



  - Iraq War (Ba'athist Iraq)
  - Rating: Poor
  - Note: By 2003, the military was severely degraded by a decade of sanctions and previous losses; it collapsed within weeks of the conventional invasion.


  - Military Intervention in Libya (Gaddafi Loyalists)
  - Rating: Poor
  - Note: Largely reliant on aging Soviet hardware and mercenary units; unable to project power against NATO-backed air cover.



  - War against ISIS (Insurgent State)
  - Rating: Poor (conventionally) / Competent (tactically)
  - Note: They lacked a traditional air force or navy but utilized captured heavy equipment and "shock" tactics with high psychological impact.

fsckboy4• 3 months ago

China followed with massive, highly disciplined infantry waves that effectively fought the UN coalition to a stalemate.

just to clarify what "effectively fought" means, the Chinese entered the war when the ROK+US+UN forces had reached as far as the Yalu River, and yes their "infantry waves" response, i.e. lightly armed human waves, pushed the anti-communists back but at very, very high cost:

"North Korean casualties are estimated at around 1.5 million, including both military and civilian losses, while Chinese military casualties are estimated to be around 400,000 to 600,000."

"South Korean military losses during the Korean War were approximately 137,899 dead, with additional casualties including 24,495 missing and 8,343 captured. The United Nations forces, primarily composed of U.S. troops, suffered around 36,574 deaths, with total UN losses estimated at about 210,000 dead and missing."

that's about 2 million or more killed vs 210,000

fsckboy4• 3 months ago

America hasn’t faced a peer-level, modern military since the Korean War. For seventy years, it has specialized in "wars of choice" against overmatched opponents

America has not faced any wars in its own "theater", it's own backyard; rather, it has "chosen" to fight wars that seemed important enough to travel halfway round the world, bringing lots of stuff. One of the American military's strengths is logistics, both getting there and on the battlefield.

mistaking uncontested airspace for actual invincibility.

America pioneered and still leads in combined arms fighting doctrine and capabilities, and that basically requires air superiority as the first step. There's no mistake, it is creating uncontesed airspace (which starts with creating the capabilites) that enables victory at low casualty rates. It's not so much invincibility as "convincing vincibility" of opponents.

fsckboy4• 3 months ago

- Invasion of Grenada (Grenadian Military) - Rating: Poor - Note: A very small force with limited heavy weaponry and minimal organizational depth.
- Gulf War (Iraq) - Rating: Competent (on paper) / Incompetent (in execution) - Note: Iraq held the world's fourth-largest army at the time with modern Soviet equipment, but failed significantly in command, control, and air superiority.
- Iraq War (Ba'athist Iraq) - Rating: Poor - Note: By 2003, the military was severely degraded by a decade of sanctions and previous losses; it collapsed within weeks of the conventional invasion.

the lesson of those wars to the US is, like sports teams, we need to deploy our forces in kinetic actions regularly or we lose our edge, lose touch with the battlefield and capabilities of opponents.

peace is better than war, of course, but you need to look at the progress of history as a stochastic process, and if you skip all the little wars because you have a choice, you will be ill-prepared for the big wars when they are thrust upon you. maybe call the little conflicts "friendlies", we need to compete in the friendlies to be ready for the unfriendlies.

xkcd-sucks• 3 months ago

Think of a violin made by a master craftsman: beautiful, precise, capable of extraordinary performance, but impossible to produce quickly or cheaply. It takes time, rare expertise, and materials that cannot be sourced at scale. You would not equip an entire orchestra with instruments like that.

Kinda lost me at the first sentence with this metaphor; you can and do equip an orchestra with instruments of similar caliber to the violins. Woodwinds are expensive. Bigger strings are expensive. Percussion is expensive. Maybe brass is cheap idk but there aren't many of them in an orchestra. In fact the plurality of instruments in most orchestras is violins.

_kulang• 3 months ago

I think they mean that everyone in the orchestra does not get a Stradivarius

maratc• 3 months ago

the plurality of instruments in most orchestras is violins.

That only has to do with physics of sound intensity: to create a sound that is perceived as "twice as loud" as "one violin" you'd need ... ten violins.

nomadygnt• 3 months ago

I think it is more referring to the quality of craftsmanship of the violin compared to other violins. You can’t make a whole orchestra of Stradivarius violins and their equivalents for other instruments (though what the Stradivarius equivalent is for timpani I couldn’t tell you :)

wavemode• 3 months ago

He's not talking about the number of violins, he's talking about the quality of them. Top-notch violins cost hundreds of thousands or even millions. But it's mostly famous solo musicians who own such instruments - an entire orchestra is not playing with those.

bayindirh3• 3 months ago

Every instrument (brass, woodwind, even a simple triangle), past a certain threshold is expensive, and their sound is different to their lower priced peers, and yes, you can't equip every violinist with a $2MM violin, just because.

Also, saying that instrument X is higher caliber to instrument Y is completely wrong. They all needs immense workmanship to produce, and immense effort to play. This effort can't be compared. A double bassist's finger spread for the first three positions is almost equal to whole keyboard/fretboard of a violin, but a violin can play 8x more notes with a bow when compared to the double bass. Momentum is a strong adversary when you try to change direction with a full size German bow.

You might think woodwinds are easy. A French horn player needs to play adjacent notes with small lip movements. That's an unforgiving blade's edge. A tuba player needs lungs of a whale to keep that long notes, etc. etc.

Also, just because viola, cello and double bass looks like a violin is borderline insult to all of them at once, and ignoring the other heavy lifters like clarinets, oboes and fagots.

Like how the article outlines. An expensive violin is good for a solo performance, but loses its importance in an orchestra. Like how F-35 becomes the wrong thing when the theater of war calls for different conventions and operates with completely different dynamics.

P.S.: Yes, I have played double bass in a symphony orchestra.

wredcoll28• 3 months ago

Also, just because viola, cello and double bass looks like a violin is borderline insult to all of them at once, and ignoring the other heavy lifters like clarinets, oboes and fagots.

I don't think that last bit translated well.

Beyond that, what on earth are you talking about. Frankly what is the grandparent talking about? $2m violins cost that much because they're rare and famous and have a story, not because they somehow have a higher quality than a modern equivalent. Sort of like the mona lisa.

protastus• 3 months ago

Calling the F-35 a masterpiece is rage-bait.

The primary goal of this program is not to make a plane, it's to spend $2 trillion in military contracts. As a side effect, it runs as a jobs program for engineers and its US based supply chain. Technology gets developed but with a super low ROI.

ericd• 3 months ago

So we’ve made a small number of exquisite King Tigers, and they’re making huge numbers of Shermans?

riazrizvi• 3 months ago

This would be an interesting article 4 years ago. Now I think it's old news and we've got the War Department spending $50bn on a new autonomous warfare wing.

jjk1663• 3 months ago

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 cost, mass produce-able workhorse for long protracted wars against technologically inferior adversaries where extremely high performance would be unnecessary. Yes it incorporates advanced stealth and electronics that make it a very capable aircraft, especially when it's going up against F-4s, but these weren't driving the cost. The US had already developed these technologies, and once you have them putting them on another aircraft isn't too expensive. And in particular the main focus was on lifetime cost - keeping flight hours reasonable and maintenance down compared to a higher performance aircraft like the F-22. This plane was designed around exactly this sort of conflict.

The problem was horrific project mismanagement. Building factories before the design was complete, delays due to development operations being done in parallel, making essentially 3 different aircraft with radically different requirements use a common design - the initial program cost skyrocketed and the only way out was to keep upping the order quantity to keep unit costs low. Cost per flight hour was supposed to be $25k, it's now $50k. Engine maintenance time was supposed to be 2 hours, it wound up being 50. And the issues didn't stop after initial development - with each successive iteration there have been new issues resulting in further delays, with airframe delivery on average still being 8 months behind schedule. None of that had anything to do with the F-35's core capabilities. For comparison, the F-35 has lower production costs than the non-stealth F-15EX which is based on a 50 year old airframe, but it has a 30% higher flight hour cost, and the program cost is 100X for 20X airframes.

This sort of botched procurement has caused terrible issues for multiple military projects, such as the Navy's failed Constellation-class frigate program, or the Army's immediate cancellation of the M10 Booker. These aren't masterpieces built for the wrong war, these are failures at producing what was intended. One has to wonder how you can mess up Epiphone guitar production so bad you accidentally wind up with a Stradivarius. It does not bode well for the orchestra.

dmix3• 3 months ago

The same issues with fighter jets procurement infect everything these days. Public transit, space, government software, etc.

Rury• 3 months ago

I blame the four horsemen of project management: Brooke's Law, Metcalfe's law, the Ringelmann Effect, and Parkinson's law.

wakawaka28• 3 months ago

Not everything. Specifically things where the government is involved. That includes government-subsidized private enterprise.

scottyah3• 3 months ago

The F-35 is a massive success. It is a common design that brought together what would have been three to five different planes into one. Costs doubling is further proof of how amazing it is- inflation has basically outpaced that. Cost per flight hour has more to do with data analytics and the Socialism within the DoW (it's a jobs program) than actual need. A lot of delays were quasi-on purpose. It has crazy supply chain logistics, and has greatly strengthened ties with our allies, and helped boost their engineering and manufacturing capabilities.

ghaff• 3 months ago

Given budgets and slipped timeframes, there was a lot of criticism of the F-35 unifying platforms as opposed to just letting every service do their own one (or two) things as had been the norm. But, at the end of the day, not clear it was a bad strategy.

gozucito3• 3 months ago

But what would you rather have? 2000 Shahed/Lucas drones or a single F35? Same cost for both.

The saying "Quantity has a quality all of its own" is not obsolete in 2026.

angry_octet11• 3 months ago

The alternative future, of just producing non-STOVL, is particularly relevant now. The USMC needs some organic aviation, but it doesn't need an F-35C. Organic drones would be an excellent fit for Wasp class ships and beach head forces.

Of course it was all tied up with needing allies to buy to increase order size, and the UK Bukit the STOVL bits, so naturally they had to buy all STOVL jets to increase British industry buy.

It's a rat's nest of everyone trying to please all their stakeholders. It is, eventually, a great jet, but it could have been a better, cheaper jet, delivered sooner, and already past Block 5.

Oh yeah, did anyone mention how long it takes to integrate a new system onto the F-35? Fracking years. All of which has to be done by LM, forever. Because the F-35 is not a jet, it's a Master Contract.

palata• 3 months ago

and has greatly strengthened ties with our allies

If you count as "allies" the smaller countries that feel like they need to buy US planes otherwise they will get bullied, knowing that the US routinely threatens to invade them... I guess.

deletedie2• 3 months ago

I’m winning a War, BY A LOT, things are going very well, our Military has been amazing and, if you read the Fake News, like The Failing New York Times, the absolutely horrendous and disgusting Wall Street Journal, or the now almost defunct, fortunately, Washington Post, you would actually think we are losing the War. The enemy is confused, because they get these same Media “reports,” and yet they realize their Navy has been completely wiped out, their Air Force has gone onto darker runways, they have no Anti Missile or Anti Airplane Equipment, their former leaders are mostly gone (This has been, in addition to everything else, Regime Change!), and perhaps, most important of all, THE BLOCKADE, which we will not take off until there is a “DEAL,” is absolutely destroying Iran. They are losing $500 Million Dollars a day, an unsustainable number, even in the short run. The Anti-America Fake News Media is rooting for Iran to win, but it’s not going to happen, because I’m in charge! Just like these unpatriotic people used every ounce of their limited strength to fight me in the Election, they continue to do so with Iran. The result will be the same — It already is! President DONALD J. TRUMP

spongebobstoes• 3 months ago

$25k per flight hour is a lot more than what drones cost

benoau3• 3 months ago

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.

KumaBear• 3 months ago

There are no consequences and those who produced the product still get rich and can still maintain the product with more fees on top. It’s by design

greedo25• 3 months ago

The Booker was a perfect fit for the Army reqs, and filled a genuine need. But it didn't have a sponsor that was willing to pay for it. The Armor Branch didn't like it, and the Infantry Branch, which is the real user couldn't muster enough support in the DoD.

The Connie is a good ship and the two under contract will be fine vessels when they're commissioned. Frigates are no longer "cheap" ships, and the sticker shock was higher than expected despite the obvious changes that were going to be made to the FREMM design. But it's cancellation has more to do with dysfunction at the top of the Navy (and DoD) then the program of record.

Also, you're overestimating the flight hour costs of the F-35. Even the B model doesn't hit $50k. The other variants are closer to $35k/hour (adjusted for inflation) than $50K.

nradov13• 3 months ago

The Constellation class frigates had no mission. Just like the failed LCS classes before them, they aren't survivable in a modern high-threat missile environment: weak radars, small magazines. And if they can't survive themselves then they're useless as escorts.

I guess they can be put to work intercepting smugglers in the Caribbean Sea or something.

jjk1663• 3 months ago

The Booker was a perfect fit for the Army reqs, and filled a genuine need. But it didn't have a sponsor that was willing to pay for it.

The Booker was overweight, meaning it couldn't be air dropped, which was the entire purpose for the program. No one was willing to pay for it because it wasn't what anyone wanted.

Frigates are no longer "cheap" ships

The point was to produce a cheap ship. It's a ship that already exists and had a pricetag. The issue was it went from 85% commonality to 15% commonality, ballooning the price.

But it's cancellation has more to do with dysfunction at the top of the Navy (and DoD) then the program of record.

They are one in the same. They could have produced an invincible super battleship and it wouldn't change the fact that they failed to accomplish what they set out to do. All three programs suffer from exactly this dysfunction.

jandrewrogers19• 3 months ago

The US is converging on a single class of combat ships, which is whatever DDG-X turns into. It converges what was previously destroyers, cruisers, and frigates. It is more capable and has a higher displacement than any of them despite being called a "destroyer".

Much of the distinction separation historically was that ship category reflected command officer rank. They have been decoupling that, which honestly makes sense.

cjbgkagh5• 3 months ago

The program was intended to make money and it did. My university has ties to the military and I was talking to people working on the Joint Strike Fighter about ways to reduce software bugs, I was told candidly that software bugs are job security and they’ll be riding that gravy train all the way to retirement, which they did.

calvinmorrison• 3 months ago

well yes you need to keep the aerospace and engineering pipelines full if you ever need to actually go to war. So boeing and all the other chumps making gravy is part of the deal in downtime

pseudohadamard• 3 months ago

The F-35 is built for exactly the right defence contractors and pork-barrelling. As for war, can we get back to you on that?

NickC25• 3 months ago

This.

People don't understand that defense contractors are extremely wasteful in their spending, and the contractor's job is not to produce the latest and greatest. They have a dual mandate.

1. To keep supply chains active so we can continue to be able to wage tomorrow's war with yesterday's technology by introducing rent-seekers and middlemen into companies and processes where they shouldn't be.

2. To keep Wall Street, defense contractors, and defense lobbyists happy.

I gotta ask, while I have the attention of HN - why are defense contractors allowed to be public, for-profit corporations that serve Wall Street interests ahead of national defense interests? Am I the only one that sees a massive conflict of interest that can affect (or, probably has affected) our national security in profoundly damaging ways.

It almost feels like Healthcare companies, who are supposed to be focusing on our health and wellbeing, seem to focus on shareholder returns and denying service to the same people that pay the premiums. What's wrong here?

jcgrillo2• 3 months ago

This feels like what happens when the selection pressure isn't there. Building for "the next war" (or more broadly "the future") is always bound to be an utter boondoggle, because despite your best intentions and the most strenuous furrowing of your eyebrows you'll have literally no fucking idea what the actual demands of that situation will be. You have to react, that's it. Trying to predict is futile. So better to try to set yourself up to react better?

cm2012• 3 months ago

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.

deletedie2• 3 months ago

Pre-March 2026 sales will be drastically different to post-March 2026, for obvious reasons.

jjk1663• 3 months ago

If you compare the F-35 to basically any plane worldwide with similar capabilities, it's very reasonably priced.

If you compare corvettes to other sports cars, you'll find they are very reasonably priced. That doesn't make a corvette a good economical option for day to day commuting.

There are only 2 5th generation fighters available for export - the F-35 and the J-35. The F-35 is 40% more expensive than the J-35. No one is buying F-35s for the low price tag.

More to the point, the unit costs are low because the number of airframes scheduled to be built is enormous. The US needs to export hundreds of F35s to help distribute the massive cost of the development program. This development program was nearly 400% over initial budget, and the general managing the project was fired over it. The fact is the F-35 is far more expensive than it was intended to be.

kalleboo• 3 months ago

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.

Zardoz84• 3 months ago

Was. Having a remote "power off" button, have the effect of chaning the mind of many potential buyers. Specially with Trump.

pjc509• 3 months ago

Are those the right capabilities for the price, though?

If it was the right plane, full stop, wouldn't Ukraine be fielding a wing of them? No, because they're extremely cost constrained.

ethbr14• 3 months ago

The only features the F-35 doesn't have for a modern fight are IP ownership and range.

The former was a military procurement mistake and the latter has been worked on for years [0] but never prioritized.

Also, I'm kind of surprised this was published by War on the Rocks, because it leaves a number of extremely relevant topics unmentioned.

The B-21 explicitly addresses both issues above, while mostly resisting the urge to increase size and complexity.

The Air Force is aware of basing vulnerabilities and is looking at multiple solutions (ACE, autonomous tanking, stealth tanking, modular anti-drone aircraft shelters).

The CCA cross-service effort is already targeting pairing >1 UAV to each manned aircraft.

Replicator and other efforts are addressing the "low-at-industrial-scale" problem, and the US just used waves of Shahed clones against Iran.

The article's points would have been more valid 10-15 years ago, but all now have addressing in progress.

[0] https://www.twz.com/air/plans-to-finally-give-f-35-external-...

PearlRiver2• 3 months ago

In WW2 the biggest problem was not building aircraft it was training the pilots who flew them.

pjmlp• 3 months ago

And proudly written in C++!

I like having C++ on my toolbox, but when Bjarne Stroustoup proudly talks about "F-35 Fighter Jet’s C++ Coding Standards" I am not sure it lands how he thinks it does, given how it turned out to be.

Quite certain that it also contributed to all the software glichs F-35 suffers from.

Voultapher• 3 months ago

The whole Coding Standards talk has always felt like an own goal. Don't get me wrong I have extensive C++ experience and wouldn't work on a project that doesn't have guidelines. But the fact that one _needs_ plain english and hard to check in an automated fashion guidelines when using the tool that is C++ implies something about the deeper culture and issues at play.

Sir you're holding the wrong handle. <The audience looks at a hammer with 17 subtly different handles>

newsclues• 3 months ago

Military industrial congress complex

kp988• 3 months ago

it seems to be worse than both Chinese planes and American planes, and was easily shot down by Iranians

einpoklum3• 3 months ago

So, an author who takes no issue with the war of aggression against Iran, and is preoccupied with planning a war against China. Well that's just great.

giannicmptr1000• 3 months ago

tiktok is the ultimate weapon still, nothing bombs minds more than that

0xbadcafebee2• 3 months ago

The American military is a jobs program for defense contractors. They build the most expensive thing possible because they know we will pay for it, and that we'll just keep increasing our military budget. They build for war with nuclear-equipped, highly developed nations, specifically because the smaller nations aren't a threat to us. So when we do decide to go knock out a smaller nation, we don't have the warfighting capability to tackle a small nation. When we try to blockade with our ships, a single drone can do so much damage that the ship is useless, so we don't use them. They aren't practical for anything other than launching inland sorties. And we have a relatively small infantry, so we can't fight big land wars.

And the military is corrupt. They misplace hundreds of millions of dollars (cash) when they go overseas. The IRS is responsible for finding massive fraud schemes that the military never noticed. Why didn't they notice? Because there's no consequence. The military isn't a business; they can practically write blank checks with taxpayer dollars, and if they lose the money, what're we gonna do, fire them? Same for contractors. They can overcharge us or build faulty weapon systems/vehicles/etc, and it's not like we have 10 alternatives around the corner.

chrisss395• 3 months ago

I would just point out that 10-15 years ago Defense executives were talking about drone warfare (search "The Third Offset Strategy"). I recall an executive client being obsessed with this, and in fairness back then they had lost major contracts because their components (think electronic warfare) were designed for max power, i.e., max size and weight.

Again, this was 10-15 years ago. Now with the Ukraine war everyone acts like it is obvious...and I agree, it has been for awhile. We just never had a theater to test this stuff in. I suspect US defense contractors were on-board for Ukraine and Iran to advance development efforts significantly.

angry_octet11• 3 months ago

It was obvious to many, and it was obvious also that air forces would oppose this because it was a massive shift in thinking.

They have only come around a little at present. US Army is still buying Apache.

The US primes were caught napping in Ukraine, all the new tech is indigenous. They haven't deployed anything new successfully. The traditional exquisite weapons could win the war early, but of course Biden held them back because he's an idiot, and Trump spent them against Iran. Now they are gone. In the mean time, Trump cancelled the infrastructure to design and build armaments during DOGE cuts, now he wants to scale back up, but the money will be wasted because industrial capacity is not there.

eduction• 3 months ago

Bizarre to call this an F-35 problem, it's with the entire US supply chain and the F-35 is the least of it.

The F-35 at least has been produced in quantity and the unit cost has come down and they're finally rolling out some decent upgrades. Yes it's a messed up program in so many ways as its literal decades of history shows but:

The bigger issues is our industrial base cannot replace our many missile systems quickly enough, including surface to air, antiship, and surface to surface. We can't build ships or planes very quickly, either.

We are woefully low on stocks and can't meet commitments in NATO, mideast, and against China and N Korea. Taiwan is and has been waiting years on billions in backorders.

The other issues is everything is as expensive as f-ck. We're shooting down dirt cheap drones costing in the thousands with missiles costing in the millions. The article at least mentions this.

And what is the proposed solution to this? A giant, expensive, long range fighter that will coordinate expensive drone buddies (google NGAD). Because we think it's realistic to try and defeat Chinese forces when we're thousands of miles from base and they're at home.

First off we need to replenish systems we already know how to make and that are effective. We need to learn to build sh-t quickly, at home and with allies, and it's bizarre no politician has taken the lead on this because it involves popular stuff like spending government money, creating blue collar manufacturing jobs, growing small businesses with more reliable gov contracts, and so forth.

Then we need to develop cheaper systems including lots of drones, anti drone stuff, and low cost interceptors and antisurface missiles.

Then we need to reform contracting infrastructure and rules to move much much faster and with less cost to experiment and iterate more rapidly going forward like the Ukrainians (and even the Iranians) are doing.

We need to do all of this and quickly and no one from either party is providing leadership. This is the biggest reason the US and west are at risk of becoming paper tigers - we have cut our infrastructure and defense spending and microoptimized inventory to the point where we can't restock quickly enough to be a credible deterrent force.

warbaker• 3 months ago

One of the authors is a retired general, so he probably knows a bit more than us internet randos. Still, the last paragraph says: "The lesson of the Iran campaign is that the F-35 performed superbly in exactly the kind of fight it was built for." I feel like it's hard to gainsay the utility of the F-35 when it's useful in a real war we're actually in.

The author's main argument against the F-35 is that it can be easily destroyed on runways now, as drones and missile developments have outpaced missile defense, leaving the US and US allies vulnerable to a preemptive strike by China.

That might be true, but it's also strategically valuable to diminish the military capabilities of allies of China (e.g. the Iranian theocracy), which may make up for the tactical weaknesses of the F-35 against China in a direct confrontation. It's also possible that drone/missile defense will catch up (e.g. lasers), but that's hard to say at this point.

johnsmith18408• 3 months ago

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 completely dominated the enemy on every single front. It's insane to see discussions like these when we just witnessed one of histories greatest showcases of technological dominance.

There is no technology or method in this conflict that would have changed the current state. If a nation wants to toss cheap drones at you there's basically nothing that can be done. Another example is US blockade, without something that can take an F35 down there is actively nothing Iran or China could do to prevent a complete crippling of their country.

santoshalper• 3 months ago

So we should expect the Strait of Hormuz to be open tomorrow, then?

johnsmith18408• 3 months ago

Nothing in the world would have stopped iran launching cheap drones at civilian ships. Article is trying to say F35 is a problem when clearly it's not.

donavanm• 3 months ago

You're conflating operational efficacy and strategic incompetence.

Operationally, and tactically AFAIK, the US has been dominant. Strategically it appears to be a massive failure, mainly because there was no actual achievable strategic goals going in to this war. Read some of the reporting on JCS advice and cabinet level decision making leading up to the war. It's illuminating (again and again) of the risks on overly loyal advisors and getting the advice you want, not the advice you need.

knodi123• 3 months ago

Don't be silly. There's a third option, neither side gives up for a while.

virtualritz2• 3 months ago

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 part about who blinks first ...

gpt5• 3 months ago

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 anywhere in Iran.

Eventually, defense capabilities against drones may catch up and change the equation, but this is all research at this point.

johnsmith18408• 3 months ago

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 with the untold billions that would flow into the country and its energy infra investments in venezuela. All the wealth of middle east would leave and not be reinvested as now it's risky to invest in the ME.

Iran has the choice of a deal US likes or to make the middle east a wasteland for Israel to dominate for generations while US grows to a power that is hard to comprehend.

The only thing that has to happen for US to win is not surrender to a country with no military whose only threat they can make is to harm everyone else in the world but the US.

golden-face• 3 months ago

IIRC Israeli special forces knocked out almost all of Iran's advanced radar systems last summer right before the nuclear program strikes so to say the F35 dominated is somewhat disingenuous.

Thaxll3• 3 months ago

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.

johnsmith18408• 3 months ago

Pretty sure Iran didn't plan on being obliterated.

Why did they have a navy if this was their only plan?

Also blocking the straight is funny because the only people it hurts is everyone in the world but the US.

jawiggins• 3 months ago

I guarantee you that f35 would go down in a war with a country with decent anti air such as Russia or China

How many F-35s went down due to the Russian and Chinese anti-air systems in Venezuela and Iran?

marcus_holmes10• 3 months ago

If a nation wants to toss cheap drones at you there's basically nothing that can be done.

Ukraine is doing something. It has to, because this is what it faces from Russia.

kshri242• 3 months ago

The blockade is like a nuclear bomb detonated on all countries. 30% of World's oil supply is at risk. Not to mention critical elements needed for semiconductor production. Even the US is suffering passively because of this. Only saving grace for US is to restore navigation in the straits. Quicker it does it the quicker we can stop hell that'll be unleashed on the World. You really don't want to be responsible for 30% of Earth starving and dying of hunger because critical fertilizers never reached the masses for food production.

hedora12• 3 months ago

The fertilizer and helium shortages are unfortunate, but expensive gas has ~ doubled global demand for EVs. That’s an ecological miracle, given the idiocy of the US government. That’s probably where the good news ends though.

If spent on humanitarian aid shortfalls, the funds wasted by just the US on this war could have saved 87M lives:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/20/us-spending-on...

To put that in relative terms: WWII killed ~85M globally; 2/3 of them were civilians. So that’s killed 150% as many as the war crimes committed by Stalin, Hitler and the Japanese occupation of China combined.

I don’t mean to minimize the famine that’s definitely coming later this year.

ted_bunny• 3 months ago

Sounds like mass famine in the global South would be a feature to them, not a bug.

throwaway302340• 3 months ago

So none of them lost on ground in Iran.

Do we really need to play these semantic games?

An F-35 was confirmed successfully targeted and hit by Iranian Air Defenses.

The pilot was confirmed (by the DoW) to have been injured.

The plane in question seems to have been able to make its way back to friendly territory.

Every other detail about this incident is cloaked in fog of war with Vietnam-era narrative stealth technology and semantic evasive maneuvering. Since it didn't crash in enemy territory the Americans claim it wasn't 'downed' by the enemy. But did the F-35 actually land? like on its own wheels on an actual runway or was it a 'hard landing' (i.e. crash) as NPR's sources claim. Did the pilot eject? What is his condition? What is the condition of the airframe?

No US ship was to my knowledge even hit by a drone/missle.

Again if one was, would we every know? Would we be told? The f-35 incident has been broadly emblematic of this entire war. Lot of bluster and downplaying and covering up losses. Its like Russia in the Ukraine War; Frequently having to check with Iranian sources to corroborate claims made by the Americans. Whether it is with satellite imagery, or on the true status of the Hormuz or control of Iranian airspace.

https://www.twz.com/air/usaf-f-35-makes-emergency-landing-af...

https://x.com/gbrumfiel/status/2034972525222838351

johnsmith18408• 3 months ago

US lost more planes to friendly fire and accidents than the enemy.

We've killed more senior leadership than total US deaths in the war.

Iran has not killed a single pilot or sailor.

That's a generational ass whooping.

techteach00• 3 months ago

Skynet

"It’s not Mildred sitting at a switchboard saying ‘Joe, you go to the corner of 42nd and Broadway,’ no it’s the AI. It’s not that hard given the state of current computing to imagine a system where the targeting grid is quote commanding and control itself.”

ardanur• 3 months ago

F-35 is a stealth vehicle that works, but when you are withholding munitions from the war that can bring it to a close it becomes far less useful.

Every F-35 is capable of carrying multiple nuclear bunker busters each of which is far more powerful than the GBU-57A/B MOP.

laughing_man2• 3 months ago

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.

daft_pink• 3 months ago

I just wanna say that it’s not realistic to think that the United States defending Taiwan is anything but a bluff. Westerners aren’t willing to die for a small crummy island a few hundred miles off the coast of China that’s 5000 miles away for most other western countries. It’s just not practical. They will sanction China and make it a pariah state if they invade and call it a day. The idea that we would actually risk our lives or nuclear war to defend them is ridiculous.

hyperific• 3 months ago

"If we all reacted the same way, we'd be predictable, and there's always more than one way to view a situation. What's true for the group is also true for the individual. Over-specialize and you breed in weakness. It's slow death." - Major Motoko Kusanagi, Ghost in the Shell (1995)

ekelsen• 3 months ago

https://www.baen.com/Chapters/1439133476/1439133476___5.htm

Arthur c Clarke's short story, "Superiority," describes this dynamic perfectly.

Beijinger2• 3 months ago

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

KylerAce2• 3 months ago

Dog fighting is not a serious concern in modern fighter combat because missiles have gotten so effective that the current strategy has been forced into beyond visual range combat. And stealth doesn't just "fail". In bvr the first side that sees the other is the side that gets to fire a salvo first, which is the primary advantage of stealth technology: so that the enemy doesn't see you from as far as you can see them. All stealth does is linearly lower the radar return of your plane for a given distance and angle, but radar return is inversely proportional to the fourth power of distance. This means that if you get close enough then any decent radar can eventually make out an f35. The whole point of stealth is to make that distance as small as possible.

Beijinger2• 3 months ago

"Dog fighting is not a serious concern in modern fighter combat"

We heard this before and it was a disaster.

"And stealth doesn't just "fail"."

Nothing is invisible. It depends on your frequency that you use for detection and other technologies. You will find out if your are "invisible" for an able opponent (speak, China, Russia, not Iran) in battle. But then it may be too late.

Read the Sci Fi story "Superiority", formerly required reading at MIT engineering courses.

threethirtytwo2• 3 months ago

You know what else is built for the wrong war? The united states military.

etempleton• 3 months ago

I see what the author is saying and I agree to some extent, but I think the F35 is mostly irrelevant in terms of the argument being made. I think it is needed and does it's job as a deterrent. The F35 means that that no one can really control the skies against the US. Iran was considered to have fairly robust air defenses and that was all but destroyed within days. So the F35, as the author states, is performing well along with the rest of the United States Airforce.

The issue the US has is that they really do not want to lose US soldiers in this war and because of that they are unwilling to fully occupy or destroy Iran. And the reason they don't want to do that beyond all the normal reasons is that this is a phenomenally unpopular war and every lost life is considered unacceptable by the American people. Similarly, causalities of innocent Iranians is not going to play well domestically or internationally, since one of the ever shifting reasons for war that was given was that the Iranian government was killing it's people. Helping the current Iranian regime kill innocent civilians seems counter productive to that point.

The US nor any country will ever be good at fighting a war where there is no clear objective and they are not fully committed. Winning for Iran is not losing and the US isn't playing to win, so Iran wins by default. This entire campaign is a textbook example of how not to go to war. No military equipment or capability is going to change that.

threethirtytwo2• 3 months ago

F-35 isn't a deterrent. Nukes are the deterrent. Iran and Venezuela lacked nukes. North Korea doesn't lack nukes.

The F-35 is just peacocking but ultimately useless. If these war games were realistic the game ends on the first move which is asking the question "Do they have nukes." If the answer is yes, then the game doesn't even start.

discodave2• 3 months ago

Nuclear weapons are a deterrent against somebody invading the US (or another NATO country) but that doesn't make conventional forces not a deterrent against other kinds of aggression. Many attacks have been made against the US and not resulted in nuclear retaliation, like 9-11.

India and Pakistan have nukes and have fought each other recently so your assertion that "has_nukes() == no_game_start()" is *false*. Nukes, however probably will deter India from doing the full-Putin into Pakistan.

tim3336• 3 months ago

Russia has nukes and there seems to be some game going on.

tennysont2• 3 months ago

I think that tech people presume too much overlap between their own domain knowledge and war. The analysis isn't particularly bad, it's just wildly overconfident. Replacing F-35s with drones is like replacing cell towers with bluetooth mesh networks. You can hate the F-35 and love drone swarms, but they aren't in the same niche.

Cheap (~1k USD) drones are easy to intercept, vulnerable to EM/GPS jamming, require nearby operators, break easily, and can't carry enough payload to make a difference. Try to fix any one or two of these and the price will go up. As the price goes, reliability becomes more important. Try to fix them all and you're going to reinvent the missile.

One comment in this thread argued that drone factors can be protected from F-35s by burring them underground, misunderstand that such logistical hurdles are what causes military hardware to be more expensive than civilian equivalents in the first place.

rich_sasha• 3 months ago

As an armchair military hobbyist, I read this with interest.

The question is, what should be the alternative? Large numbers of "cheap" F-15/16/18 planes? They're not exactly cheap. Military kit prices are notoriously hard to reason with, but some googling tells me a new F-15 costs about the same as a new F-35. Adjusting for total lifetime costs and availability, according to Claude (lazy I know), Gripen is the cheapest western plane to fly at around 28k/hr, Rafale/F-15..18 sit around 50-60k/hr, F-35 around 100k. Eurofighter allegedly even higher at 120k.

I'm not saying these are good numbers! But if they aren't total nonsense, you could have, allegedly, twice the number of gen-4 fighters (4x with Gripen). That's a lot, but not an order of magnitude. It's not like you could swarm the sky over China with gen-4 fighters Vs homeopathic amounts of F-35. And I can well believe in a real big war, preserving a smaller number of more capable planes and pilots is better than starting with a lot of still-expensive planes and lose them more quickly.

At the same time, Israel is reported to have lost over a dozen of pricey, advanced, but more expendable non-stealth drones over Iran. They were probably used in riskier fashion, but I'm not sure what would happen if you replaced them with gen-4 fighters.

It's also possibly one of the most mass produced fighters at the moment. Production numbers exceed 1000 iirc. So hard to argue it cannot be produced in volume.

Finally, the comparison to cheap lawnmower drones is also IMO a bit out of place. They're so cheap because their capabilities are near 0. It just so happens that they have a niche they are perfect for. For sure there's going to be more and more autonomous planes in the sky, but not sure about the general usefulness of the Shahid-style drones. They are perfect for terrorising Ukrainian civilians and disrupting woefully under defended Russian industry.

I'm not saying I know better than the expert article, it just misses to me the alternative, and it's not obvious what it should be. And if youre making a bad choice, when the other choices are actually worse then your choice might be, in fact, good.

energy1234• 3 months ago

Article misses the main thing that matters in air superiority fighting: who gets to protect their industrial production.

Low tempo is irrelevant. What matters is whether you can deliver those munitions to the factories early in the fight to prevent it from becoming an attritional war.

In Ukraine, they both have air parity so they can't do that.

dwd2• 3 months ago

I'm just happy the Australian Government invested in the MQ-28 Ghost Bat program. Unit cost is currently estimated to be USD$8-10m according to Boeing and we get a "loyal wingman" platform to force-multiply our small fleet of F-35s and F/A-18 Supers. It can also be remotely directed from the E-7 Wedgetail.

defrost14• 3 months ago

At a cost of $2.3 billion (AU(?)) to date so far and with costs set to increase going forward, are the flagship UAV Ghost Bat and Ghost Shark programs really bang for the buck "good investments" or examples of the ongoing Australian Defence habit of going all in for bespoke capability acquisition projects while ignoring the purchasing of “Military Off The Shelf” (MOTS) systems ?

I have a gut feeling more use (if and when required) would come from the parallel program of spending of $2.3 billion on a multitude of broadly spread smaller drone programs than from flagship drones .. or submarines when and if the US can spare one or get back in the building enough subs to sell extras game.

Related, for general interest:

* Yet another blunder at Defence, where ‘off the shelf’ is ignored for expensive bespoke solutions - https://www.crikey.com.au/2026/03/31/defence-procurement-mil...

* Australia banks on Ghost Bat and Ghost Shark in drone warfare shift - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-18/australia-military-dr...

dwd2• 3 months ago

Except we are now in a leadership position on these technologies. We can also ensure it meets our requirements as we did with the Wedgetail.

As far as off-the-shelf systems, we do that with the avionics and sensors.

Maybe if we had waited we could have expended our partnership with Anduril and worked with them on their CCA "Fury" program?

SanjayMehta• 3 months ago

This is a strange article. He's damning the f-35 but with more than faint praise.

Instead of saying outright that war has evolved and the plane is not really fit for purpose, he ends indecisively.

GuB-42• 3 months ago

An interesting piece, but it doesn't tell in how the F-35 is built for the wrong war.

In fact, it is a mostly positive take on the F-35. It is more about how it should be used according to the author than a criticism about the plane itself.

bcjdjsndon• 3 months ago

Great for bombing hospitals and other infrastructure at least...

taohiro82• 3 months ago

Curious why they committed so hard to stealth over electronic warfare capability — was that purely a doctrine decision, or did the sensor fusion architecture actually preclude both approaches simultaneously?

F-35 is built for the wrong war

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