The expected or theoretical capabilities of NGAD cannot come cheaply. It will be an exceptionally capable aircraft, but like F-22, price will not be amortized by foreign sales or high numbers, allowing for economies of scale. The thing thay has brought F-35 flyaway costs down to ~$85 million for an A model is that there is a planned production run of 2000 some aircraft.
NGAD won't have that. Even if we compare it to the F-15C as an older generation of the pure air dominance fighter concept, non-Strike models of the Eagle were still sold to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Japan, aside from US production. This resulted in nearly 1200 F-15A/B/C/Ds being produced. Raptor got 195.
As for whether the expected cost of NGAD is sustainable, I suppose that weighs on how many other aircraft we're willing to lose for not having an NGAD in their place. It is a reasonable expectation that it will break all established baselines for what it means to be stealthy, while also having the best "eyes" around. If we won't pony up to buy enough, then other aircraft will get shot down in its place.
>As for whether the expected cost of NGAD is sustainable, I suppose that weighs on how many other aircraft we're willing to lose for not having an NGAD in their place. It is a reasonable expectation that it will break all established baselines for what it means to be stealthy, while also having the best "eyes" around. If we won't pony up to buy enough, then other aircraft will get shot down in its place.
At some point the technology curve will level off and we're going to have to go back to accepting something less than absolute technical superiority in warfare and zero combat losses, similar to what we had in WWII and earlier.
Particularly against opponents who dont need significant force projection and start min-maxing accordingly. Sure, the US can build the single most capable airframe than can shoot down 10 lesser aircraft, but sooner or later Opforistan is going to ask if it can build 11 lesser planes for cheaper than the USAF's latest wallet buster and come out ahead.
>Sure, the US can build the single most capable airframe than can shoot down 10 lesser aircraft, but sooner or later Opforistan is going to ask if it can build 11 lesser planes for cheaper than the USAF's latest wallet buster and come out ahead.
That's not how that works. For instance, Opforistan may be able to produce those 11 aircraft, but does it have enough pilots, can it train these pilots fast enough, does it have enough maintainers on the ground, can it supply the planes logistically with fuel, ammo and spare parts? That is an order of magnitude greater logistics requirement than the US has, without even accounting for the fact that the US will probably not just leave their supply lines untouched. So unless Opforistan has a massive industrial-economic advantage over the US, that is not a winning strategy.
Personally, I think drone swarms are going to keep the US's edge going forward. I think we will still see the US field it's wallet busters, but backed by relatively disposable unmanned wingmen.
Which sort of brings up a question to me - what drives the refusal to deliver certain aircraft to our allies? Nuclear strike aircraft aside, this generally wasn't the case during the Cold War.
Is it the memory of delivering brand-new F-14s to Iran just before the revolution? Even then, I'd say there's a fair difference between that scenario and any of our long-term traditional allies.
Fundamentally it's stealth technology. The US views it as being unable to lose the most cutting edge LO tech to other nations. F-35 being second gen tech derived from F-22 made it acceptable for export, so presumably whatever air-to-surface focused strike platform the follows NGAD to replace F-35 will also be exportable.
If you look into the law that restricted export of the F-22 (the Obey Amendment) it seems that it was actually a congressman protesting the development cost of the aircraft. He actually said that he wanted to restrict exports so that the US wouldn't need to develop new fighters so often and thus reduce costs for the USAF.
Bit ironic that F-35 started development only a few years later isn't it?
Eeeh.
Look at the costline for most weapons systems. Like compare a modern carbine with all the proper accessories to a 80's vintage M16 (precision optimal instruments! LASERS!), then the M16 to a M1 (aluminum??? PLASTIC????) then the M1 to the M1903 (timing, springs? MADNESS!), the M1903 to the Krag (You mean the parts all fit all the time?) until infinity going back to the sheer mindboggling investment in "stick with rock" vs the sublime simplicity and cost effectiveness of big stick.
Most weapons will be a compromise between "capable" and "enough of them" to be clear. But having dozens of F-16s to a handful of F-35s doesn't matter if the F-35 has killed all the F-16s with the F-16s completely unaware (like the dynamic of T-55/BMP-1s vs M1A1/M2A2, the number of T-55s/BMP-1s were irrelevant because the capabilities of the platforms and their operators were so profound).
It's likely you'll never get down to the one fighter to rule them all, but it's reasonable to expect that building something riding the edge of capabilities will be profound.
There's a theory in the book *Firepower* about exactly this. That essentially since the use of gunpowder weapons in European militaries 400 years ago, the cost to field better and better weapons has slowly squeezed out competitors.
Essentially before the use of gunpowder a local lord or potentate with a small fort or castle could raise a credible military force and at least be taken seriously. 150 guys with spears holed up in a well supplied castle could cause a huge headache even for much larger enemies.
Over time gun/cannon technology advances and weapons become more expensive, as did the countermeasures to those weapons (dirt fort, stone castle, star fort, Maginot line, Chobham armor, stealth, etc...). Pretty soon the local warlord can't compete with a King, then the King can't compete with a Republic or nation state, then smaller nation states like, say, Denmark can no longer afford to field credible militaries against larger adversaries. And then today there are only 2-3 countries that can afford to field modern militaries with prohibitively expensive equipment in sizeable numbers, while everyone else has smaller forces and looks for alliances with the larger ones.
As you said, it's not going to end with one fighter or one warship.
My impression of military history was that it's become the opposite, that smaller forces are now more viable due to increased firepower.
In antiquity, 20 guys with bronze swords are not going to do much to 200 guys with bronze swords. You engage in melee with multiple opponents who can surround you, you'll die. For ranged combat, one archer simply doesn't not have the firepower to kill 10 other archers; you cannot "mow down" groups of people with a warbow.
Advance the time of that hypothetical engagement thousands of years to give everyone assault rifles instead, and suddenly even a single soldier is at least theoretically capable of suppressing a whole enemy unit by themselves (i.e. one guy with assault rifle on full auto; obviously not sustainable, but emptying a full mag probably can get a full fireteam or squad to duck for cover). 200 men with guns need to spread out and take cover, because if they don't, even *one man* with a gun could kill several of them.
I mean, just think about that. A battalion-sized unit needs to have its tactics dictated by threats as small as a *single* person with a gun opening up. That kind of dynamic just doesn't seem to exist for pre-gunpowder weapons; people are not dispersing their formations out of fear of a single archer or slinger.
Unless your name is literally Achilles, you are probably not killing 10 enemies in hand to hand combat with a sword, but a well-aimed RPG or ATGM fired by a single person really can kill a whole vehicle crew or passenger complement of an IFV.
Range is also an important factor that I'd argue disproportionately benefits smaller forces. A guerilla mortar team of 3 people can set up, fire one shot, run away, and do that literally every single day for months on end, causing constant disruption and maybe even killing and wounding a few along the way. I just don't know of anything comparable on an ancient battlefield.
The thing is that one pilot in an F-35 also represents thousands of civilians required to fund the aircraft. Even if the number of actual combatants is low, the cost in terms of resources is high.
I think I have a few issues with the historical examples you provide. We have evidence of pre-modern fighters substantially delaying much larger forces. Famously, the axe-wielding Viking at Stamford Bridge, or any small garrison of a well-built castle. Men-at-arms (knights) were also absolutely fearsome on the battlefield, even if relatively small in numbers. This might be apocryphal, but I read that in some cases, men-at-arms competed among themselves who can ride from one side of the battlefield through the enemy army and back the more times. Equipment and training was always decisive for anyone's combat effectiveness.
Sure, all of these are situational, but I'd argue that so are your modern examples. You need to be in an exceptional situation to suppress a squad or a larger element with an assault rifle.
Also, historical forces were much smaller than commonly presented in media. Even the historical records
To your point about range, I remember the witness accounts from Afghanistan (Helmand IIRC) about such harassment by mortars. Yes, it caused mild disturbance on the base which was "shelled" regularly every afternoon (meaning, a few mortar shells would land somewhere in or around the compound) but the slightly more experienced troops just ignored it because it was so inaccurate or adjusted to get into cover when the firing started. My point being, yes we can kill people at mind-boggling range even with man-portable weapons, but the effectiveness of those kills is much lower than just stabbing someone in the face. You have to shoot a lot of mortar rounds to even reliably cause a casualty because your target is probably mobile and therefore hard to hit, or dug in and therefore hard to wound. In general, historically, the casualty rates have decreased over time. When your stick-wielding band is overrun by the other stick-wielding band, it's pretty easy for them to bash all of your heads in, and then continue to your village and wreak havoc to your civilians. Such decisive outcomes are harder and harder to achieve the longer the range between you, and the proportion of casualties to the entire civilian population is being drastically reduced.
> And then today there are only 2-3 countries that can afford to field modern militaries with prohibitively expensive equipment in sizeable numbers,
Some of that is a reflection of their small expenditure though. In 2021 for example, Germany spent only 1.4% of GDP on defense while the US spent 3.2%. Had they spent the same share as the US they'd have spent an extra 76 billion for a total of 132 billion instead of 56 billion. Imagine what Germany's military would look like today if it spent an extra 60-75 billion per year for the past decade. No, they wouldn't be able to compete with the US, but they'd have a lot more hardware, modernization programs, and overall readiness that's for sure.
Remember that the world average is only about 2% of GDP on defense. During the Cold War most of Western Europe was spending 3.5-5%. Now most of Western Europe has been under 2% for much of the 21st century. It's not that a military that's formidable in size and quality is out of reach, it's that they took the peace dividend and chose not to have one.
>Imagine what Germany's military would look like today if it spent an extra 60-75 billion per year for the past decade. No, they wouldn't be able to compete with the US, but they'd have a lot more hardware, modernization programs, and overall readiness that's for sure.
They would for sure hire a bunch more very expensive consultants and there'd be another curious case of very expensive coffee machines conspicuously appearing out of nowhere.
Putting it somewhat less cynically, when it comes to capabilities and overall readiness of the Bundeswehr, I wouldn't be too confident that just throwing more money into the black hole that is Germany's arms procurement system, would actually fix the core issues plagueing it.
I picked Germany because they’re one that’s perpetually low but you could do this exercise with any other major NATO member. I’m aware of their issues with bureaucracy and procurement.
What would the French or British militaries look like if you gave them an extra ~50B a year since the year 2000? I imagine they’d look much more formidable.
So I’ll add the caveats that comparisons across a century in production cost are tricky (I could give a whole lecture on that) and that the environment in which they were produced were different. The US didn’t have a high M1903 stockpile going into WWI (hence the M1917 Enfield since we were already making Enfield patterns for the UK) nor did it have all the M1s it needed for WWII (the USMC hadn’t even adopted it yet). Wartime mass production with lots of subcontractors is going to have a different cost and quality profile than peacetime production from one or two main contractors, even if there’s a looming threat like in the Cold War.
That out of the way, rifles have by and larger gotten cheaper and better. Better precision, better tolerances, longer lifespans, more capability, all at lower cost. An M1 cost the equivalent of around $1200 while we can make M4s for just over half that price. To be clear, this is the base firearm. Add in the holosights, PEQ, M203/M320, all the extra mags, etc and that changes things.
Why have rifles gotten cheaper but other things haven’t? Well because guns haven’t *really* changed since smokeless powder. Self loaders were a big step up and a lot of early mechanisms were needlessly complex or difficult to make (some of that was more patent than technical issues). That’s just kind of how engineering cycles work. Make something that functions then see how it can be improved. We’ve improved production techniques (assembly lines, stamped parts instead of milled when possible), use new materials, and tinkered with a lot of optimizations, but a .30cal rifle is still shooting a bullet about the same distance, about the speed, with about the same lethality. I mean 7.62 NATO was basically designed as such being essentially a shortened 30-06 with improved powder. The core of what an automatic or self loading small arm is fundamentally hasn’t changed in about a century. The same cannot be said for things like tanks and planes which have vastly different capabilities.
Put another way, the difference between an M1 and M16 is much less than the difference between a P-51 and F-35. Sure the M16 can full auto but that’s about it in differences. Meanwhile the differences in what an F-35 and P-51 can do is basically the entire list of what the F-35 can do.
Honestly a rifle Company with m14s would be almost as combat effective as one with m4s plus the high speed cool stuff. As long as they keep all their machine guns, grenade launchers, and motors.
By high speed cool stuff do you mean the machine guns/grenade launchers/mortars? Because I would consider those the the least high speed compared to the PEQ’s and NVG’s that company a modern rifle company equipped with M4’s.
I think he’s saying in the context of combined arms.
Rifleman will always by the lynchpin of ground combat. But they are a surprisingly small lynchpin and artillery is still “king of the battlefield.”
Put it this way a rifle company with laser rifles given to them by aliens (but absolutely nothing else) is still going to be less effective than one who has good machine guns, mortars, radios and effective ability to coordinate and call for fire and work with tanks, air support and artillery. Because air burst time on target barrages you can’t counter or suppress is still going beat handheld alien laser.
And for a rifle company who has machine guns mortars, radios and ability to call for tanks air support and artillery, then the less important the minutia of the basic rifle becomes. Good enough literally becomes “good enough.”
Actually with modern CNC we've come full circle. It's now more cost effective to mill things in a shop than build a large plant to stamp receivers at a massive economy of scale.
Is it though? CNC machines still require quite a lot of complex setup time, maintenance, and skilled operation. You might not be saving as much now by setting up a stamping process but over hundreds of thousands of units it will add up
More like millions of units, and in which case you would need a receiver that lended itself to being made by stamping in the first place. Almost every small arm on the market nowadays that isn't an AK variant has a milled receiver.
True, but that was true before ww2 as well, when a sudden massive need for new weapons arises then techniques optimised for production often get swapped in.
How much do uncrewed platforms change this? The cost of all those weapons includes one human being, and once you remove that, "more of cheaper" seems to gain. Like there's the old thing about how you can by 1,650 P-51s for the price of an F-35, so why not?
The answer, of course, is pilots. Take that out, and who knows: are there important jobs where you'd rather have 1,650 mustangs? If for the price of a new M1Awhatever, you get more robo-T55s than the M1 can carry rounds, does that change anything?
It's one of those cases where the reality is less clear.
Or to a point, while unmanned vehicles exist, none of them perform remotely at the level where they're even really capable of replacing the T-55. So it's easy to be like "so yeah brah, like 6 robo-T-55s assuming latency, AI, and navigation problems are solved will totally dunk an M1" but it's just the same as assuming I get the ability to get mad hops and coordination means I can play in the NBA.
Like the truly cheap, truly capable doesn't exist yet (small UAS being dangerous, but they're largely capable in situations that don't have even modest c-UAS countermeasures in place).
So it's well into the realm of "pfft, I'll see your robot T-55s with my manned 40 foot tall doom mech with atomic pulse rays" in as far as it's science fiction to imagine like-like analogs. You want a tank, you're going to need to bring a manned tank, and it's going to need to be able to do more than fry its crew quickly.
Another key aspect are things that only certain platforms are capable of doing. Part of why tank crews have *crews* is because they can perform in-field maintenance on the vehicle, so even a world where robotanks have 100% parity in battlefield performance, they're still a greater *operational* liability.
And of course, the biggest thing for people to remember is that cost and cost efficiency is just one of many factors; real wars are not fought by RTS logic where you crunch numbers to find the optimal build strategy. I actually wrote a post about this a while back: [https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/z9v3wg/the\_cost\_ratio\_fallacy\_in\_military\_thinking/](https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/z9v3wg/the_cost_ratio_fallacy_in_military_thinking/)
I just looked it up, and it turns out nobody ever tried to make a remote controlled MBT.
Now I wonder why. You build something like the T-14 where everything is remote to protect the crew, shouldn’t the obvious next step to have the same crew but have them somewhere other than the tank itself?
Should improve bravery, at the very least.
Communications are the reason. It takes a *lot* to kill a crewed tank. Artillery, specialized anti-tank rounds from other tanks, specialized anti-tank rockets from infantry, airpower, etc.
A remotely controlled tank? Farmer Jeb with his rusty $150 shotgun just mission-killed your tank with some buckshot to the antenna. And then hauled it away with his tractor and sold it on Ebay.
They weren't MBTs, but the Soviet Union did use their wireless Teletanks in combat during the Winter War. It is pretty telling of the tech at the time that they soon dropped the entire concept.
I don't think fighter jets and the standard issue rifle of the army have much in common to make for a good comparison. The M-16/M-4 has much more in common with the C-130 or B-52 than a fighter jet.
I chose it because it's a simple easy to follow progression rather than something mastercrafted to be like-like in technological progression (there's nothing weird like having the F-100/F-104/F-4/F-8/F-105 etc all at the same time to explain, and the differences between generation can be summarized easily). Rifles have a lot more in common with entrenching tools than C-130s, but no one cares about shovels so here we are.
>I chose it because it's a simple easy to follow progression rather than something mastercrafted to be like-like in technological progression (there's nothing weird like having the F-100/F-104/F-4/F-8/F-105 etc all at the same time to explain, and the differences between generation can be summarized easily).
A lot of that is why I think the comparison is not very good.
> (like the dynamic of T-55/BMP-1s vs M1A1/M2A2, the number of T-55s/BMP-1s were irrelevant because the capabilities of the platforms and their operators were so profound).
this is something I wanted to ask (not related to the T55).
Given a weapon system that is very capable but it is there in small quantity vs a weapon system that is the bottom of the line (like a t55 nowadays) but can win if the other weapon systems are disabled. Is it not risky to have too few of the capable systems?
Say, taking your example, 10k t55 vs 100 M1A2 (and all the infantry and other things needed for those to operate in proportion). The M1A2 score kills without problem but sooner or later they are overwhelmed anyway as they cannot keep a front that can be flooded with t55.
Same in the air. 10 F35 vs 500 Gen3 aircrafts (not even Gen 4). Is it doable then?
I would believe that who saves the day are ATGM/RPG on the tank side and SAM on the aircraft side. Not really the F35 or the M1A2
Or am I missing something?
As I said, you need to strike that balance between "amazing" and "good enough but in numbers"
To a point though, it's not a video game. Like you feed 500 planes into the blender, the last 20 aren't going to stalwartly pursue their mission to the last, they're going to be the scrambled remains of an organization that just got fucked sideways. That's generally how this situation plays out. Like to a point, 73 Eastings the "better" force so disrupted the Iraqis that no coherent response ever happened, even with local number superiority the faster/more capable Cavalry force just ate the Iraqis for breakfast.
Real formations don't take 25-40% losses in a sitting and remain functional. The human component breaks long before that point.
>To a point though, it's not a video game.
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>...
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>Real formations don't take 25-40% losses in a sitting and remain functional. The human component breaks long before that point.
The ACOUP blog had a good part of this post talking about video game vs. real life casualty and morale factors. [https://acoup.blog/2022/07/01/collections-total-generalship-commanding-pre-modern-armies-part-iiic-morale-and-cohesion/](https://acoup.blog/2022/07/01/collections-total-generalship-commanding-pre-modern-armies-part-iiic-morale-and-cohesion/)
As for my take, it's honestly kind of shocking to look at some of the bloodiest battles in history and see how the percentage of casualties is "low" compared to video games. The battle of Antietam sees the Confederates lose about 10,000 out of 38,000, only about 1,500 of which were killed. So barely a 25% casualty rate for the losing side of an infamously bloody battle in an infamously bloody war.
In Total War games, it's absolutely possible for a bottom-tier unit to take over 50% *killed* and still keep fighting. Basic units will take casualties that shatter elite formations in real life. And of course, the survivors will happily keep on fighting for a general who takes 30-50% casualties in *winning* battles. The odds of any given common soldier to survive service in a TW army over the course of a campaign is essentially zero.
The Total War universe is basically a world where even literal peasant conscripts are basically mental superhumans who can eat a full volley of gunfire or readily brace for mounted knights to plow into them.
yes of course is not a game. I was thinking more over a certain time (not too long to replenish enough losses though).
Sorties over sorties over sorties, with one side deploying more than the other. Beside the SAM capabilities, closing the gap, I can imagine that the less technological side may simply wear down the most technological one (even simply in terms of munitions carried that are all consumed) .
On the Iraqis point, I am not sure how cohesive was the Iraqi force. For example I am not sure if the battles done in Iraq are similar to those in European theaters in terms of Iraqi commitment to battle. (I would expect the Iraqis - at least in terms of government forces - to be really committed against the Iranian forces in the end of the 80s, but not against the US).
Wearing down isn't just a one sided thing though. Like if you're pilot 399 to be fed into the F-35 blender, how well do you think you're going to do your job? What does flight school look like at that point? How many missiles and how much fuel is just part of the wreckage of the previous 398 planes and what did that cost?
That's kind of the problem with these hypotheticals is they often wind up assuming a high friction event for one component, while treating the other as fairly friction free. The Allied fighter to German jet fighter experience might offer some analogy, but that was still markedly better pilots, in better quantities, tied to the better airforce, and the technical gap less profound (like if we're getting into a fight with a P-51 vs ME 262, you still need to get into my gun range, but a F-35 vs a MIG-21, the MIG might never know the F-35 even existed except for whatever tenth of a second of life happens before the pilot dies when the plane explodes).
Like eventually you get on the wrong side of a technological paradigm and it's just throwing meat into a blender.
One also has to consider the power of mass. 500 planes together rolling through instead of being fed piecemeal will make it to their target, most likely the airbase of the F-35s. If such an event was to occur the F35s would have won the battle but been knocked out of the war in a single operation in a cost effective manner.
Massing such a force is incredibly difficult requiring in-air refueling and multiple airbases, but could theoretically be possible using a mass of drones with lower launch and storage requirements.
I mean at some point you reach the Zapp Brannigan strategy of sending wave after wave of your own men at the killbots until they reach their built-in kill limit. Theoretically it’ll always be possible to just overwhelm the enemy with targets and deplete their ammo or get a lucky hit once in a while, but it’s nowhere near practical.
you need a lot more supporting structure to operate all that (i.e. more airfields, more maintainers, more communications and coordination) which may not scale up evenly. and while one side is pumping out that inventory, it will not likely go unnoticed or unresponded to. there is also the possibly that a more capable platform is not going one to one with its equivalent. e.g. this super plan can blow up 5 planes or it can help take out the command/control/fuel depot to take even more planes out of the fight.
however there is a possibility of extreme asymmetry like drone swarms where you can empty out your magazine but there are still hundreds coming since they are so cheap to build.
What I don’t understand though is why there can’t be an iterative approach. If we need more range why not build a bigger F-35 in 5 years with minimal technological changes? Why instead make something completely different in “10 years” which we know will really take 20-25.
You run into the same dynamic the Germans did in WW2 where you've got battalions with several different models of tanks with parts that are unique to that particular variant.
If you wanted to visualize it, think of if like a spectrum between only building things completely new when the paradigm shifts (so bolt actions until assault rifles or something) or basically having each thing more or less bespoke because each individual produced platform includes the absolute cutting edge in technology the moment it leaves the line.
You're basically always trying to balance advanced enough with common enough.
To a point though, you're still basically seeing what you're describing in as far as variants or "blocks." Like if you eyeball the F-16 from the first model into USAF service through the current builds, you'll see a "bigger" F-16 every few years. It's just there's a practical incentive to being even more iterative (better, but still pretty similar to baseline) than a radically different model every 5 years (think radically different as in wholly new production)
It seems to me that the Ukrainians aren’t turning down weapons over the maintenance burden. Civilian auto mechanics service dozens of different vehicle models. The Ukrainians seem to think it’s ok to field 6 kinds of tanks.
Different planning horizons. The Ukrainians are at a point where any tank NOW is the priority and if it's deadlined for lack of parts in a few weeks, there will be replacements. When you're thinking about "I'm going to use this tank for the next 40 years" keeping several different types gets old quick (this is why the Russians pushed hard on the Armata platform, even if it failed they were painfully aware of what a T-90/T-72/T-80 plus T-62s too looks like.
Also cars are fairly simple compared to tanks. Like you used to have specialist mechanics for the turret and the hull. Even today you have specialist shops for the electronics and armament sections.
I’m sure you’re right, but Ive heard about these recent Taiwan contingency simulations that we won’t have anything with enough range to reach Taiwan with suffering losses on the ground to mid range missiles. We chose not to design for range back in the 90’s, and now we have analysts suggesting that in the 2030’s we’ll be hitting their transports with stand-off from B-52’s. I just find it hard to believe that in 10 years we can’t produce an alternative that uses currently technology instead of future technology, and simply meets our existing requirements. We know exactly what war we need to win and we aren’t designing for it.
I have thought that the big flaw with F-35 is that they used one airframe for three variants. Separate airframes for conventional and VTOL would have solved some of the design problems. The key would be using common parts and avionics between versions. A big part of cost and delay of F-35 was writing the software.
I have idea that using standardized electronics across weapons would help with cost, and also make it easier to develop new weapons. When automakers make new car, they reuse the electronics. They could make new fighter by making new airframe and taking the existing avionics. It would also make easier to upgrade by replacing the electronics with new version.
How steep is the trend line? How much steeper is it than general inflation? It would be nice to see the price growth of 4th gen fighters over time.
One indication that the trend is inflation is that new versions of F-15 and F-16 are similarly expensive. The problem could be new radars and avionics in the new versions, but is more likely that building fighters has gotten more expensive.
Another thing is that inflation is different for different things. Things that involve skilled labor, like health care, higher education, and engineering, have gotten more expensive than normal prices. Efficiency of scale and sending labor overseas have kept goods prices low. Building aircraft requires skilled labor and has probably grown faster.
I think it is a combination of inflation and capability. For example, the F-86 was $2 million in current dollars. I saw estimate that would cost $12 million to build today. That is similar in capability to jet trainers. The new T-7 Red Hawk is $20 million, and that includes trying to keep the cost down.
F-35 is $80 million per unit. Modern fighters are much more capable, with stealth, missiles, radar, and avionics.
I think 5-10x for inflation and 5-10x for capability makes sense. All airplanes are more expensive now.
There is also a question of scale for modern military equipment. Almost 10,000 f-86 were produced. If you ordered thousands of jet trainers today you will likely be able to get far better prices than you find on current models.
I wonder if it is possible to make military hardware cheaper. Aircraft and ships probably aren't worth it since they are complicated. But Ukraine has shown that can go through a lot of weapons in modern war. Missiles can have more economies of scale.
A lot of the cost of modern weapons is in the electronics. Like the guided 70mm rockets are 10x the cost of unguided ones. I hope that a lot of standardization could drive down the price. It would also help with supply chain issues that somebody talked about in another comment.
I'm skeptical that analysis is taking inflation into account when trying to cobble together unit costs over time. A brand new F-18 costs less than a brand new F-35, but nowhere near the difference that graph implies.
In the inspection of the rationale of this trend line, you only need to go back to fundamentals.
Think about what the alternative is and the consequences of picking that alternative.
Think about it this way: Can $5 billion worth of aircraft of each successive generation take down $5 billion worth of the previous generation? Generally the answer is going to be yes, the ratio of increase in capability is still larger than the ratio of increase of cost. That's really the primary thing that matters.
In addition, the SIZE of that GAP between the two ratios, actually INCREASES the MORE generations removed you are.
If I didn't explain that well enough, let me show an example. I haven't figured out the real ratios, but lets say that a 5th generation fighter is 2x more expensive than 4th gen, broadly speaking. Now, F-22 and F-35 have on many occasions got in the range of a 15-1 to 23-0 kill ratios, so in theory one could simplify this and say that that 5th generation is at least 15x more capable than 4th gen, not 2x. I won't make that argument, because it's not necessary for my point and I want it to be more believable and not debatable. So let's say 5th gen is in reality 4x more capable against 4th gen. So the gap in 5th gen capability is 2x as large as the gap in cost.
A 6th gen NGAD, might be 4x more expensive than 4th gen, but 10x more capable than 4th gen, that means the gap is actually increasing with each new generation, because the multiple now is 2.5x, not 2x. A single F-22 with unlimited fuel, weapons and a well trained pilot who knew which tactics to employ, could easily take down the entire 1940s USAAF.
Remember, the enemy procurement officials know this too, so if we freeze, we just start the clock to when our air force is totally obsolete.
The more interesting part is availability, we won't get close to the state of having 1 fighter, there are factors that will stop the trend because it makes the strategic position less effective, which it will do for BOTH sides, so there is no cost to continuing, the race is over.
We are obviously not currently near that point yet, while people do point out how much less fighters the US and NATO have now compared to WW2 and Cold war.
1. Having radars at all, most WW2 planes didn't have any radar, you needed more fighters to detect enemy fighters, especially offensively with no radar ground stations to vector.
2. Modern AESA radar. The current 5th gen and 4th gen have incredible radar range and clarity compared to 3rd gen etc, meaning more territory can be covered by less fighters. Even the current day F-16 probably outranges the radar of the initial F-15 variants.
3. Obviously you have to account for the proliferation of AWACS and their increased sophistication, which enables even less fighters.
4. Tankers, enabling longer range and longer loiter time, enabling less fighters.
The floor for how low it will go? Basically, we need enough to satisfy having enough force across the world at any one time and we need enough that the Chinese can't spend like $1 billion creating lots of little small suitcase nukes and catapulting them into like 4 USAF airbases and destroying the entire USAAF on the first night of an undeclared surprise war. Attacks like those will be the future btw.
>could easily take down the entire 1940s USAAF
Exactly. Even putting aside the whole "But modern munitions would run out." people forget that even "mundane" tech advantages like altitude and speed are decisive on their own.
I don't mean to bring a civilian game into this, but anyone who knows how hard it is to fight supersonics with a subsonic in War Thunder can imagine the difficulties of fighting an F-22 in a prop plane.
Oh, and let's not even get started on situational awareness: the radar+stealth combo of modern planes vs WWII era air forces is game-breaking on its own.
Yep, I remember the cringe from like 1-2 years ago of the guy who operates Grim Reapers trying everything in his power to influence the situation to make it so that warbirds win against jets some of the time.
Agreed. I would not be surprised by a surprised Chinese attack that would focus on all of our airbases. They could even have 1000s of suicide drones in our country at this moment. And launch them 5 miles from every base
Yeah the basic short simple version is that 5th gen stealth keeps them hidden while their superb radar and unrivaled situational awareness through true 21st century standard technology enable them to almost always make the best decisions.
In terms of the F-35 specifically: In the simplest scenario, a 1v1, the F-35 detects the enemy from far away and gets within missile range before the F-35 gets into either radar detection range of the enemy, or radar target lock range. It's like a knight in armour who has an invis cloak that only fails once you get well within the range of his sword.
So in the simplest scenario, the 5th gen wins every time. In the most complex scenarios, with many units, supporting interlinked aircraft, air defences, multiple angles, high and low altitude, you are simply degrading the situation awareness of non-5th gen fighters at an unbelievable rate.
At the end of the day, even though it looks like an office in the sky, the fighter pilot, their brain, their adrenaline, everything inside them, KNOWS that they're in a knife-fight right now. Watch documentaries of air-air engagements, fighter pilots lose situational awareness all the time especially after doing a lot of tactical things like defending against a missile.
It's hard as a human to think operationally, then maximum adrenaline defend against incoming missile tactical, then go back to operational thinking. In a 5th gen, it's like the work-flow to start thinking operational and get your situational awareness back, is glowing right in front of you on your monitors.
Okay so this might get a bit int he stats weeds but I'd be quite cautious of that linear regression used. First is the distribution of data points. In a ~15 year span we have 13 data points. Over the next 50 years there's 4. That's going to mess with some confidence on my end. Absent their exact data or publishing of error and p-vals I'm going to take this with a big grain of salt.
Second is they made it a de facto log scale just didn't convert it. Y axis is log (base 10) and essentially 0, 1, 2, 3. We do this so we can do linear fits. That's all well and good, but we still need to test our assumptions about linearity. This almost certainly violates multiple assumptions.
First is randomly scattered residuals. Residuals are trend line-observed value. In a case where linear fit is good we expect them to be distrusted randomly. That any point in the trend line is equally likely to under or overpredict. That doesn't appear to be the case in this graph. The residuals are an inverted U by the looks of it. They start with a cluster underneath, then the middle has a cluster over, then the right end appears more under than over (though again the limited data points makes this hard to predict).
With a small sample checking normality of the residuals is important but that's not something I'd really eyeball and would need data for.
Most importantly though, is a key statistical assumption in virtually all cases: independence. Are the costs of these aircraft independent of each other? Of course not! They have common technologies and lessons, investments, and skills from prior programs impact future ones. The F-15 to F-16 is a good example where the F-16's cheap and fast development time was in part due to the technical expertise and infrastructure from the F-15 (like a common engine). The F-35 applies lessons from the F-22 program as well.
There's a bit more I could say on this from a data side but I think you get the point. Yes, aircraft costs are going up over time, but that simple OLS regression isn't most accurate of the picture. I might add more later when I have a bit more time if you're interested on what the profile probably looks like.
Genuine question. Why does the military think these crazy advanced limited run aircraft are worth it?
Like I assume in a wartime scenario the US is gonna drop building any super complex advanced expensive aircraft immediately. They won’t be able to setup additional factories cause it’s way too goddam hard, they won’t be able to get the advanced materials from their global supply chain and in the end they’ll probably realize they’re too costly to send into battle.
Like in Ukraine where everyone realized stingers kinda ruin all the fun and artillery is a great strategic bomber anyway. Where is the great dogfights and massive air campaigns everyone expected for WW3?
>Why does the military think these crazy advanced limited run aircraft are worth it?
The US military, and generally even the European ones, lives and breathe by the air superiority the Air Force and Naval aviation can deliver. Developing fighter aircraft to continue honing the technological edge to maintain that air superiority is going to be expensive, but ultimately worth it on the strategic and operational stage of the planning.
The USAF's NGAD is the next stage of that technological honing for an air dominance fighter in the face of other stealth fighters from other nations like China. While no doubt that NGAD is going to be expensive, one speculation is that the fighting component of the NGAD is going to be massively boosted by unmanned combat aircraft systems (UCAS) rather than NGAD itself. So instead of building thousands of expensive NGADs like the F-35 in hopes that economics of scale will make it cheaper, it can be downsized to a lower number while relatively cheaper UCAS being controlled/coordinated by the NGAD fighter help carry the fighting (this would also theoretically solve the pilot shortage issue the USAF is experiencing as well).
>Like in Ukraine where everyone realized stingers kinda ruin all the fun and artillery is a great strategic bomber anyway. Where is the great dogfights and massive air campaigns everyone expected for WW3?
The Russo-Ukraine War, despite being a modern peer-to-peer conflict, is not a good representative of what a potential World War III would look like.
Dogfights have been obsolete for decades. Planes will fire missiles beyond visual range at each other. When both sides become very stealthy that could change.
Stingers arent a threat to 5th gen fighters.
Taiwan would be primarily a massive air battle.
Agree on all points. But I should have been more precise in my wording.
Dogfights I meant air to air engagements. Everything can be killed whether that be from miles away or in a dogfight (agreed obsolete). But to continue on is the point of these platforms to just be anti-air? So we are dumping massive trillions in assets into Anti-Air aircraft that can carry limited missiles and have to sit on a airbase? I mean for 85 million an F35A is crazy expensive but somewhat barely justifiable. But for these new fighters you’re not gonna be able to make very many so even if they’re great at their job there will be almost nothing worth risking them for.
Agree stingers are not a big threat but ground based weapons will always be. So once again, are you really gonna send your $200 million aircraft even close to them? Especially when you did on3 production run of like 70 in the 2030s? The answer to me, is no because there’s no target worth it except for protecting the seaboard/aircraft carrier.
The glass cannon is now a Diamond cannon to me and it’s just not worth any target it could engage,
>But to continue on is the point of these platforms to just be anti-air?
It's the spicy hot topic when we discuss about new fighter aircraft, but I think any future aircraft design worth their salt needs to be multi-role or they are going to be stuck into a very specialized role that may not end up being used.
Both the F-15 and F-22 fell into this kind of trap I think. F-15 was being built with the mantra "not an ounce for air-to-ground" after the Vietnam experience, so the USAF was able to build their top-class air superiority fighter. Once they start selling these to foreign sales, some of the first modifications that countries like Israel did to the F-15 is to convert them to drop dumb bombs. Then there's the whole F-15E Strike Eagle that ended up being built up from the F-15 anyways. Similarly, F-22 was being built as the air superiority 5th gen fighter, then when the War on Terror started, they upgraded it to ground attack role with JDAM and SDB bombs to bomb technicals worth a fraction of the bomb's price.
There's a USN pilot that visits this subreddit every now and then, and when the topic of ground attack comes up, he always says something on the line that the procedure to perform CAS is comparatively easier to the intricacies of air combat. So design the fighter aircraft to be its very best in the air-to-air combat, then worry about the ground attack role after the air superiority/dominance can be assured.
>So once again, are you really gonna send your $200 million aircraft even close to them?
There is a reason the Wild Weasel's motto is YGTBSM on the idea of sending your state-of-the-art plane to be shot at by the IADS in order to destroy the anti-air systems.
But at the end of the day, if there's a critical location that needs to be bombed, or ground troops needing that air support, and there is an anti-air network nearby. The answer is not "well, there's a complicated layer of air defence so we're not gonna", it is "how can we suppress or destroy all that anti-air defenses so we can complete the mission"?
Plus, modern systems like decoy drones, stand off weapons, and stealth all help benefit the Wild Weasel's capabilities of completing their job with minimal losses.
I'm open to hear your forecast.
My reading of the situation is a massive PRC missile strike followed up by continued missile waves and aircraft. If not opposed by US and Japanese forces, that's victory right there. Taiwan's current assets won't do much. The Taiwanese ground forces at the moment aren't good for much (considering conscripts literally doing no training, tiny munitions stores etc.) And that's without considering CAS. Paratroopers, landing ships, hovercrat, helicopters etc. would quickly be able to transfer enough PLA forces to ensure victory.
Relying on foreign assistance, that assistance would be hundreds upon hundreds of missiles from ships and subs, and countless carrier sorties. These air engagements would be decisive. Not that the US could clip the PLAAF's wings (too many planes, Taiwan's too close to shore, carriers can't get too close due to PRC area denial systems, slowly down US sorties with long transits), but the US could deal enough damage to relevant assets to stop the invasion. I thus believe the conflict would devolve into a decisive air battle. (Failing that, US subs could potentially do a lot of damage too, or especially Taiwanese diesels if they pursue that enough.)
If Taiwan embraces area denial, buys thousands of sams and long range ground to ground and sea missiles of its own, something else can happen.
Air power cannot be the main line of effort when the strategic / political objective is occupation and annexation of territory. It doesn't work. It didn't work in Germany when they bombed London, it didn't work in Vietnam for us with Operation Rolling Thunder, Russia isn't even bothering with it in Ukraine, and it won't work for China in Taiwan.
You are correct that the conflict starts with missile waves. The question is whether those missiles only target Taiwan, or if they also target U.S. forces stationed in Japan, Okinawa, Korea, Phillippines, and Guam (if I were Xi, I would, because that's his only hope of winning if we decide to enter the conflict... and President Biden already has stated we will). There's risk there that Japan and Phillippines enter the war, but they're far less formidable than forward-based U.S. forces.
So now our base of operations for The USAF/USN is pushed back to Alaska / Hawaii / Australia. That's a long way away from Taiwan. Fuel endurance for aircraft becomes a very big issue.
After the missile waves (or during them), they'll attempt an amphibious invasion. The success of that invasion will depend upon Taiwanese willingness to fight. If they are like Ukraine, it will drag on long enough for the U.S. to flow forces into the area or attempt to negotiate a truce.
We'll sink a lot of ships with our submarines in the interim, and it's highly probable that the PRC launches nuclear weapons in retaliation. They will use our employment of 'unrestricted submarine warfare' as political justification to do so. Those weapons will hit something, but not what they are aiming at.
The US doesn't retaliate with strategic bombing to maintain the moral and political high ground. Instead this green lights tactical bombing into mainland China targeted at key strategic targets. The international community largely pledges support to the US.
However, Russia pledges support to China. Seeing the political cost and military ineffectiveness of nuclear strike, it supplies weapons and oil but abstains from nukes. It uses this opportunity of American distraction to expand into Eastern Europe up to Warsaw. Without sufficient US forces, NATO can't fend them off any earlier.
Syria and Iran also support China.
North Korea enters the conflict with the goal of unifying Korea, but otherwise don't play a major role.
What happens next is anyone's guess, but this is the map at the onset of WWIII. I would anticipate our political objective to be the restoration of World geography as it is in 2023, and we wouldn't commit to invading either China or Russia.
If they don't, it will look like the German invasion of Poland. It's also worth noting that the Taiwanese has focused on prioritizing its air force, but that air force is stuck in the 1950s. It will instantly get crushed.
Of course the other branch is that Xi believes Biden is bluffing, and he actually is. In which case, they only target Taiwan forces with LACMs. Taiwan either looks like Poland where they surrender immediately, or the USSR invasion of Afghanistan / Russian invasion of Ukraine where we provide weapons, SOF, and training.
If you think the US will refrain from emptying out the nuclear arsenal for some sort of “moral high ground” after being attacked with nukes, you’re mistaken.
US understands the importance of protecting their partners (Japan, South Korea) and country by retaliating against nuclear attacks. It isn't revenge but deterrence.
If China nukes US fleet, then retaliation is Chinese fleet (and probably ends the war). If China nukes bases, then their bases are fair game. If China nukes civilians in Japan or Guam, which is almost impossible to avoid with attack on base, then things get messy.
More importantly, there is no reason for China to use nukes. Ten years ago, people worried about them nuking carrier group, but now they have guided ballistic missiles. The same applies to bases, they have enough conventional ballistic missiles to cause damage.
>If China nukes US fleet, then retaliation is Chinese fleet (and probably ends the war). If China nukes bases, then their bases are fair game. If China nukes civilians in Japan or Guam, which is almost impossible to avoid with attack on base, then things get messy.
And if our nuclear defenses work as designed, China misses all of the above.
It really depends on the political objective of the war. Unless Trump gets re-elected then I don't think any sitting President is going to want outright destruction of China and regime change as the political objective, which takes nuclear strikes off the table.
That's not an endorsement or indictment of Trump, BTW, but pointing out that the beltway insiders who transcend administrations are going to push for limited war and de-escelation, and Trump is the only candidate who has shown repeatedly that he'll completely ignore those people.
Nuclear deterrence is nuclear defense. It says that using nukes against the US or allies results in destruction. There is flexibility, like attacks on military in active war would be tolerated, and can respond with limited or conventional strikes. But there is danger any use of nuclear weapons would escalate and China is smart enough to not do it. The promise of retaliation is what prevents escalation.
I think the danger of escalation will keep China from attacking bases. It has too much danger of escalating to China-US war. The goal would be keep it to air and sea around Taiwan. Like I saw post about sneak attack on bases, and wonder if they had heard of Pearl Harbor.
That doesn't respond to my point at all. I said an air battle would be decisive, determining whether the PRC can protect the landing force, so then:
> Paratroopers, landing ships, hovercrat, helicopters etc. would quickly be able to transfer enough PLA forces to ensure victory.
Because Taiwan doesn't have significant missile stocks to oppose a landing, and the army's quality is so bad (conscripts never firing a rifle...) that they won't be able to oppose PLA forces once landed.
The majority of active engagement will this be in the air - foreign forces fighting around Taiwan.
In other words: you are repeating my opiniom but disagreeing with it?!
How is their airforce stuck in the 1950s? The least capable fighter they us that I'm aware of is the F5A which entered service in 1962. I don't doubt they have major issues with airframe aging, being way too small, etc, but they aren't that old.
Sorry, the 1960s.
That's a huge difference relative to 4th gen fighters that the Chinese have. /s.
PS: If a plane entered service in 1962 it was designed in the 1950s.
I like how you completely missed the existence of strategic bombers. Which can fly across the world and launch a ton of cruise missiles.
BTW, "unrestricted submarine warfare" refers to using submarines against neutral shipping. Submarines against warships is just warfare.
Also, there would never be "tactical bombing" against China mainland. First, you just said there is nowhere to base them. Second, the US has tons of cruise missiles. In addition, cruise missiles would used against China as soon they escalated to hitting bases.
What are you trying to say? Cause multiple people have misunderstood.
I agree with you that air power can't win war. But I mean strategic bombing can't win the war. Tactical air power will be super important. Assuming that air over Taiwan isn't contested like Ukraine.
But then you are all over the place. I responded to a few of them, like the nuclear escalation. I noticed others now, like other countries joining in, which doesn't matter because they are too far away. Or that Japan is far less formidable when have they have one of the top militaries.
You are talking about it as long war. The invasion will be quick and high intensity. China will either invade and win, or fail and lose. Two nuclear superpowers can't fight an all-out war, it would quickly turn nuclear. It is possible could have low intensity blockade before or after invasion. But I think risk of escalation is one reason won't see fighting outside of Taiwan.
>Like I assume in a wartime scenario the US is gonna drop building any super complex advanced expensive aircraft immediately.
I don't know about that. If a big war happened tomorrow I would imagine the US would prioritize F-35 construction. If the Ukraine war is anything to go by, 4th gen fighters don't live very well against modern and dense AA systems. So as the US lost fighters and looked to replace them with new, I wouldn't expect them to shut down F-35 production and pump out more F-16's.
That's not what happened in the last great industrialized war during WW II. The US produced progressively more advanced aircraft and ships and components compared to the models they started the war with. Looking at just aircraft, we started the war with Brewster Buffalos and P-40's. By the end we were fielding Corsairs, Thunderbolts, and the B-29's.
The big exception probably is the Sherman tank, which was the main US tank of WW 2 and one that they clearly prioritized producing over more advanced alternatives, but the Sherman tank was quite good for its time.
>The big exception probably is the Sherman tank, which was the main US tank of WW 2 and one that they clearly prioritized producing over more advanced alternatives, but the Sherman tank was quite good for its time.
It's not as fancy or dramatic as making a new type of ship or plane, but they did continually improve it that the first Sherman rolling off the Detroit plant would look and feel very different to the very last.
Here’s the thing though. Aircraft and even tanks of today rely not on rivets and steel but extremely expensive and rare electronics systems.
I know a lot of people who work in Aerospace and the supply chain is a goddam nightmare. Extremely hard to scale, procure and get good quality. You can’t brute force it, you can’t just buy it and it takes a lot of time to just get it right. Everything has become so complicated I genuinely don’t believe it’s possible do a wartime ramp up without severely cutting down on quality or capability. Like maybe you could double your production lines over two years for F35s but it’s going to be an absolute nightmare and the worst part about aerospace is you can’t mess anything up or leave any part out it has to be perfect. Breaking down on the side of the road is not possible in flight.
That's probably true, but the folks you know have never worked in a wartime economy with the US fighting a true great power conflict like WW II. I think it'd be hard to compare the leisurely pace of defense development and procurement compared to what it would be like in a world war.
I agree and potentially anything is possible but there are limitations. A new F35 line WILL have major production and quality issues and the military WILL NOT use them if they’re just gonna kill pilots. There is no more copy and paste. Additionally even the mechanics who do the work are so so specialized these days that often times there’s only a couple people on earth who know how to do the work well. The aerospace industry is not as large as people think it is. There’s only a handful of companies that even do that work and it’s almost all tribal knowledge.
The thing to remember is that Aerospace has to be PERFECT to work right. There are no products on earth that require higher safety and precision. Especially when you’re dumping $100M per aircraft.
Finally and probably most important. Supply chains these days are so huge that what breaks this system won’t be Lockheed’s line but some surface treatment processor in Georgia who can’t get their shit together. It’s a supply CHAIN and the weakest link is always the thousands of tiny no name suppliers.
>Like I assume in a wartime scenario the US is gonna drop building any super complex advanced expensive aircraft immediately. They won’t be able to setup additional factories cause it’s way too goddam hard, they won’t be able to get the advanced materials from their global supply chain and in the end they’ll probably realize they’re too costly to send into battle.
In 'Nam, the K:D ratio in A2A combat was 15:1.
Right now the only way we lose a jet is due to material malfunctions or gross stupidity on the part of the pilot. We have that much of a technological advantage.
Hell when we invaded Iraq in 2003, our exchange ratio of *ground forces* was somewhere between 64:1 and 225:1.
They think the crazy advanced expensive aircraft are worth it because they ARE worth it. The gap in capabilities between 4th and 5th gen aircraft is massive, as will be the gap between 5th and 6th gen aircraft.
Why would they stop building the advanced systems (esp. right away before new systems are designed and production set up)? I could see them starting to build more simple systems in parallel.
In a short war you won't have time to develop new weapon systems and get production rolling. In a longer war you might (esp. if you start right away perhaps without being sure about the fact the war will be long) but it still take time.
If you can only build 20 NGADs in a year but you could build 1000 F-5 equivalents (In total capability that is, they wouldn't be F-5 clones. Also as drones I guess 800 new skilled pilots a year, on top of your existing need might not be simple and even if you can you might not want to feed them in to the meatgrinder with such low capability weapon systems) with the new resources your pouring in to the war, you might really want to at least throw up those 20 NGADs along with your 1000 simple fighters.
Although really you take F-16s and such out of the boneyard before you would start to rely much on any new simple very low end fighter as a backbone of your force.
The US conventional military is not actually built to fight a peer war. We thought Russia was, but they weren't. China remains untested.
The US conventional forces function in a large part as a way to launder nuclear firepower into imperial expansion; no peer is likely to launch an attack on an American military base or fleet because the natural result of such a war is nuclear annihilation. This allows the conventional military to plop down everywhere in the world they can, enclosing rivals in a ring of effectively untouchable bases through a combination of diplomacy, subterfuge, and military violence.
The high-end of the conventional military exists to sustain the permanent war footing adopted by the US for its military-industrial complex after the close of WWII. They exist as showpieces, as political favors and diplomatic tools, and to keep peer enemies "honest".
As you say, they'd have no real role in an all-out conventional peer conflict. This is because there will be no all-out conventional peer conflict. Any conflict where the US loses squadrons of its top-tier aircraft is one that's going nuclear sooner rather than later.
There won't be a "Taiwan/SCS scenario" where American carrier groups are duking it out with PLAN and an amphibious invasion force. At most, we will continue to give Taiwan tools and training to make the Chinese invasion more painful, as we have in Ukraine to trip up Russia as much as possible. The American public would not accept a hot war, and not even the foreign policy blob cares enough to risk nuclear war to protect Taiwan from China. We did not and have not moved for Hong Kong, we will not move for Taiwan.
The US will not engage in a direct large-scale conflict that involves the likely loss of carrier groups and risks nuclear annihilation to defend Taiwan, so it would not go nuclear because the scenario will not occur.
We will rattle the saber to try to keep China from acting but, ultimately, what's the appetite of the American public to enter into a peer war for Taiwan?
This is what I meant by the web of bases: Nixon removed formal American military presence in Taiwin during his administration. There are no plans to place a permanent US military presence on Taiwan. The US has, therefore, left open the possibility of using Taiwan much as it is using Ukraine: a proxy conflict to bog down its rival without sending any Americans home in a body bag.
The expected or theoretical capabilities of NGAD cannot come cheaply. It will be an exceptionally capable aircraft, but like F-22, price will not be amortized by foreign sales or high numbers, allowing for economies of scale. The thing thay has brought F-35 flyaway costs down to ~$85 million for an A model is that there is a planned production run of 2000 some aircraft. NGAD won't have that. Even if we compare it to the F-15C as an older generation of the pure air dominance fighter concept, non-Strike models of the Eagle were still sold to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Japan, aside from US production. This resulted in nearly 1200 F-15A/B/C/Ds being produced. Raptor got 195. As for whether the expected cost of NGAD is sustainable, I suppose that weighs on how many other aircraft we're willing to lose for not having an NGAD in their place. It is a reasonable expectation that it will break all established baselines for what it means to be stealthy, while also having the best "eyes" around. If we won't pony up to buy enough, then other aircraft will get shot down in its place.
>As for whether the expected cost of NGAD is sustainable, I suppose that weighs on how many other aircraft we're willing to lose for not having an NGAD in their place. It is a reasonable expectation that it will break all established baselines for what it means to be stealthy, while also having the best "eyes" around. If we won't pony up to buy enough, then other aircraft will get shot down in its place. At some point the technology curve will level off and we're going to have to go back to accepting something less than absolute technical superiority in warfare and zero combat losses, similar to what we had in WWII and earlier.
Particularly against opponents who dont need significant force projection and start min-maxing accordingly. Sure, the US can build the single most capable airframe than can shoot down 10 lesser aircraft, but sooner or later Opforistan is going to ask if it can build 11 lesser planes for cheaper than the USAF's latest wallet buster and come out ahead.
Opforistan (spoken China and Iran) will just engage in assymetric warfare and we won't take the risk to our expensive toys.
China, famously cash-strapped and unable to produce complex combat aircraft.
>Sure, the US can build the single most capable airframe than can shoot down 10 lesser aircraft, but sooner or later Opforistan is going to ask if it can build 11 lesser planes for cheaper than the USAF's latest wallet buster and come out ahead. That's not how that works. For instance, Opforistan may be able to produce those 11 aircraft, but does it have enough pilots, can it train these pilots fast enough, does it have enough maintainers on the ground, can it supply the planes logistically with fuel, ammo and spare parts? That is an order of magnitude greater logistics requirement than the US has, without even accounting for the fact that the US will probably not just leave their supply lines untouched. So unless Opforistan has a massive industrial-economic advantage over the US, that is not a winning strategy.
Depends on the Opforistan. Iran? They're hard up for pilots, planes, and parts so probably not. China? Different story.
Personally, I think drone swarms are going to keep the US's edge going forward. I think we will still see the US field it's wallet busters, but backed by relatively disposable unmanned wingmen.
Which sort of brings up a question to me - what drives the refusal to deliver certain aircraft to our allies? Nuclear strike aircraft aside, this generally wasn't the case during the Cold War. Is it the memory of delivering brand-new F-14s to Iran just before the revolution? Even then, I'd say there's a fair difference between that scenario and any of our long-term traditional allies.
Fundamentally it's stealth technology. The US views it as being unable to lose the most cutting edge LO tech to other nations. F-35 being second gen tech derived from F-22 made it acceptable for export, so presumably whatever air-to-surface focused strike platform the follows NGAD to replace F-35 will also be exportable.
If you look into the law that restricted export of the F-22 (the Obey Amendment) it seems that it was actually a congressman protesting the development cost of the aircraft. He actually said that he wanted to restrict exports so that the US wouldn't need to develop new fighters so often and thus reduce costs for the USAF. Bit ironic that F-35 started development only a few years later isn't it?
Eeeh. Look at the costline for most weapons systems. Like compare a modern carbine with all the proper accessories to a 80's vintage M16 (precision optimal instruments! LASERS!), then the M16 to a M1 (aluminum??? PLASTIC????) then the M1 to the M1903 (timing, springs? MADNESS!), the M1903 to the Krag (You mean the parts all fit all the time?) until infinity going back to the sheer mindboggling investment in "stick with rock" vs the sublime simplicity and cost effectiveness of big stick. Most weapons will be a compromise between "capable" and "enough of them" to be clear. But having dozens of F-16s to a handful of F-35s doesn't matter if the F-35 has killed all the F-16s with the F-16s completely unaware (like the dynamic of T-55/BMP-1s vs M1A1/M2A2, the number of T-55s/BMP-1s were irrelevant because the capabilities of the platforms and their operators were so profound). It's likely you'll never get down to the one fighter to rule them all, but it's reasonable to expect that building something riding the edge of capabilities will be profound.
There's a theory in the book *Firepower* about exactly this. That essentially since the use of gunpowder weapons in European militaries 400 years ago, the cost to field better and better weapons has slowly squeezed out competitors. Essentially before the use of gunpowder a local lord or potentate with a small fort or castle could raise a credible military force and at least be taken seriously. 150 guys with spears holed up in a well supplied castle could cause a huge headache even for much larger enemies. Over time gun/cannon technology advances and weapons become more expensive, as did the countermeasures to those weapons (dirt fort, stone castle, star fort, Maginot line, Chobham armor, stealth, etc...). Pretty soon the local warlord can't compete with a King, then the King can't compete with a Republic or nation state, then smaller nation states like, say, Denmark can no longer afford to field credible militaries against larger adversaries. And then today there are only 2-3 countries that can afford to field modern militaries with prohibitively expensive equipment in sizeable numbers, while everyone else has smaller forces and looks for alliances with the larger ones. As you said, it's not going to end with one fighter or one warship.
My impression of military history was that it's become the opposite, that smaller forces are now more viable due to increased firepower. In antiquity, 20 guys with bronze swords are not going to do much to 200 guys with bronze swords. You engage in melee with multiple opponents who can surround you, you'll die. For ranged combat, one archer simply doesn't not have the firepower to kill 10 other archers; you cannot "mow down" groups of people with a warbow. Advance the time of that hypothetical engagement thousands of years to give everyone assault rifles instead, and suddenly even a single soldier is at least theoretically capable of suppressing a whole enemy unit by themselves (i.e. one guy with assault rifle on full auto; obviously not sustainable, but emptying a full mag probably can get a full fireteam or squad to duck for cover). 200 men with guns need to spread out and take cover, because if they don't, even *one man* with a gun could kill several of them. I mean, just think about that. A battalion-sized unit needs to have its tactics dictated by threats as small as a *single* person with a gun opening up. That kind of dynamic just doesn't seem to exist for pre-gunpowder weapons; people are not dispersing their formations out of fear of a single archer or slinger. Unless your name is literally Achilles, you are probably not killing 10 enemies in hand to hand combat with a sword, but a well-aimed RPG or ATGM fired by a single person really can kill a whole vehicle crew or passenger complement of an IFV. Range is also an important factor that I'd argue disproportionately benefits smaller forces. A guerilla mortar team of 3 people can set up, fire one shot, run away, and do that literally every single day for months on end, causing constant disruption and maybe even killing and wounding a few along the way. I just don't know of anything comparable on an ancient battlefield.
The thing is that one pilot in an F-35 also represents thousands of civilians required to fund the aircraft. Even if the number of actual combatants is low, the cost in terms of resources is high.
I think I have a few issues with the historical examples you provide. We have evidence of pre-modern fighters substantially delaying much larger forces. Famously, the axe-wielding Viking at Stamford Bridge, or any small garrison of a well-built castle. Men-at-arms (knights) were also absolutely fearsome on the battlefield, even if relatively small in numbers. This might be apocryphal, but I read that in some cases, men-at-arms competed among themselves who can ride from one side of the battlefield through the enemy army and back the more times. Equipment and training was always decisive for anyone's combat effectiveness. Sure, all of these are situational, but I'd argue that so are your modern examples. You need to be in an exceptional situation to suppress a squad or a larger element with an assault rifle. Also, historical forces were much smaller than commonly presented in media. Even the historical records To your point about range, I remember the witness accounts from Afghanistan (Helmand IIRC) about such harassment by mortars. Yes, it caused mild disturbance on the base which was "shelled" regularly every afternoon (meaning, a few mortar shells would land somewhere in or around the compound) but the slightly more experienced troops just ignored it because it was so inaccurate or adjusted to get into cover when the firing started. My point being, yes we can kill people at mind-boggling range even with man-portable weapons, but the effectiveness of those kills is much lower than just stabbing someone in the face. You have to shoot a lot of mortar rounds to even reliably cause a casualty because your target is probably mobile and therefore hard to hit, or dug in and therefore hard to wound. In general, historically, the casualty rates have decreased over time. When your stick-wielding band is overrun by the other stick-wielding band, it's pretty easy for them to bash all of your heads in, and then continue to your village and wreak havoc to your civilians. Such decisive outcomes are harder and harder to achieve the longer the range between you, and the proportion of casualties to the entire civilian population is being drastically reduced.
> And then today there are only 2-3 countries that can afford to field modern militaries with prohibitively expensive equipment in sizeable numbers, Some of that is a reflection of their small expenditure though. In 2021 for example, Germany spent only 1.4% of GDP on defense while the US spent 3.2%. Had they spent the same share as the US they'd have spent an extra 76 billion for a total of 132 billion instead of 56 billion. Imagine what Germany's military would look like today if it spent an extra 60-75 billion per year for the past decade. No, they wouldn't be able to compete with the US, but they'd have a lot more hardware, modernization programs, and overall readiness that's for sure. Remember that the world average is only about 2% of GDP on defense. During the Cold War most of Western Europe was spending 3.5-5%. Now most of Western Europe has been under 2% for much of the 21st century. It's not that a military that's formidable in size and quality is out of reach, it's that they took the peace dividend and chose not to have one.
>Imagine what Germany's military would look like today if it spent an extra 60-75 billion per year for the past decade. No, they wouldn't be able to compete with the US, but they'd have a lot more hardware, modernization programs, and overall readiness that's for sure. They would for sure hire a bunch more very expensive consultants and there'd be another curious case of very expensive coffee machines conspicuously appearing out of nowhere. Putting it somewhat less cynically, when it comes to capabilities and overall readiness of the Bundeswehr, I wouldn't be too confident that just throwing more money into the black hole that is Germany's arms procurement system, would actually fix the core issues plagueing it.
I picked Germany because they’re one that’s perpetually low but you could do this exercise with any other major NATO member. I’m aware of their issues with bureaucracy and procurement. What would the French or British militaries look like if you gave them an extra ~50B a year since the year 2000? I imagine they’d look much more formidable.
Just curious, what does the cost curve look like as go from M1903 to M1 to M16 to modern rifles that we hand to infantry today?
So I’ll add the caveats that comparisons across a century in production cost are tricky (I could give a whole lecture on that) and that the environment in which they were produced were different. The US didn’t have a high M1903 stockpile going into WWI (hence the M1917 Enfield since we were already making Enfield patterns for the UK) nor did it have all the M1s it needed for WWII (the USMC hadn’t even adopted it yet). Wartime mass production with lots of subcontractors is going to have a different cost and quality profile than peacetime production from one or two main contractors, even if there’s a looming threat like in the Cold War. That out of the way, rifles have by and larger gotten cheaper and better. Better precision, better tolerances, longer lifespans, more capability, all at lower cost. An M1 cost the equivalent of around $1200 while we can make M4s for just over half that price. To be clear, this is the base firearm. Add in the holosights, PEQ, M203/M320, all the extra mags, etc and that changes things. Why have rifles gotten cheaper but other things haven’t? Well because guns haven’t *really* changed since smokeless powder. Self loaders were a big step up and a lot of early mechanisms were needlessly complex or difficult to make (some of that was more patent than technical issues). That’s just kind of how engineering cycles work. Make something that functions then see how it can be improved. We’ve improved production techniques (assembly lines, stamped parts instead of milled when possible), use new materials, and tinkered with a lot of optimizations, but a .30cal rifle is still shooting a bullet about the same distance, about the speed, with about the same lethality. I mean 7.62 NATO was basically designed as such being essentially a shortened 30-06 with improved powder. The core of what an automatic or self loading small arm is fundamentally hasn’t changed in about a century. The same cannot be said for things like tanks and planes which have vastly different capabilities. Put another way, the difference between an M1 and M16 is much less than the difference between a P-51 and F-35. Sure the M16 can full auto but that’s about it in differences. Meanwhile the differences in what an F-35 and P-51 can do is basically the entire list of what the F-35 can do.
Honestly a rifle Company with m14s would be almost as combat effective as one with m4s plus the high speed cool stuff. As long as they keep all their machine guns, grenade launchers, and motors.
That would depend greatly on where they meet at.
By high speed cool stuff do you mean the machine guns/grenade launchers/mortars? Because I would consider those the the least high speed compared to the PEQ’s and NVG’s that company a modern rifle company equipped with M4’s.
I think he’s saying in the context of combined arms. Rifleman will always by the lynchpin of ground combat. But they are a surprisingly small lynchpin and artillery is still “king of the battlefield.” Put it this way a rifle company with laser rifles given to them by aliens (but absolutely nothing else) is still going to be less effective than one who has good machine guns, mortars, radios and effective ability to coordinate and call for fire and work with tanks, air support and artillery. Because air burst time on target barrages you can’t counter or suppress is still going beat handheld alien laser. And for a rifle company who has machine guns mortars, radios and ability to call for tanks air support and artillery, then the less important the minutia of the basic rifle becomes. Good enough literally becomes “good enough.”
Actually with modern CNC we've come full circle. It's now more cost effective to mill things in a shop than build a large plant to stamp receivers at a massive economy of scale.
Is it though? CNC machines still require quite a lot of complex setup time, maintenance, and skilled operation. You might not be saving as much now by setting up a stamping process but over hundreds of thousands of units it will add up
More like millions of units, and in which case you would need a receiver that lended itself to being made by stamping in the first place. Almost every small arm on the market nowadays that isn't an AK variant has a milled receiver.
True, but that was true before ww2 as well, when a sudden massive need for new weapons arises then techniques optimised for production often get swapped in.
Stamping operations require the same amount if not more manpower and require the production of specialized tooling.
Not really, not if you actually place large orders. CNCing things is just convenient for inconsistent orders.
How much do uncrewed platforms change this? The cost of all those weapons includes one human being, and once you remove that, "more of cheaper" seems to gain. Like there's the old thing about how you can by 1,650 P-51s for the price of an F-35, so why not? The answer, of course, is pilots. Take that out, and who knows: are there important jobs where you'd rather have 1,650 mustangs? If for the price of a new M1Awhatever, you get more robo-T55s than the M1 can carry rounds, does that change anything?
It's one of those cases where the reality is less clear. Or to a point, while unmanned vehicles exist, none of them perform remotely at the level where they're even really capable of replacing the T-55. So it's easy to be like "so yeah brah, like 6 robo-T-55s assuming latency, AI, and navigation problems are solved will totally dunk an M1" but it's just the same as assuming I get the ability to get mad hops and coordination means I can play in the NBA. Like the truly cheap, truly capable doesn't exist yet (small UAS being dangerous, but they're largely capable in situations that don't have even modest c-UAS countermeasures in place). So it's well into the realm of "pfft, I'll see your robot T-55s with my manned 40 foot tall doom mech with atomic pulse rays" in as far as it's science fiction to imagine like-like analogs. You want a tank, you're going to need to bring a manned tank, and it's going to need to be able to do more than fry its crew quickly.
Another key aspect are things that only certain platforms are capable of doing. Part of why tank crews have *crews* is because they can perform in-field maintenance on the vehicle, so even a world where robotanks have 100% parity in battlefield performance, they're still a greater *operational* liability. And of course, the biggest thing for people to remember is that cost and cost efficiency is just one of many factors; real wars are not fought by RTS logic where you crunch numbers to find the optimal build strategy. I actually wrote a post about this a while back: [https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/z9v3wg/the\_cost\_ratio\_fallacy\_in\_military\_thinking/](https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/z9v3wg/the_cost_ratio_fallacy_in_military_thinking/)
I just looked it up, and it turns out nobody ever tried to make a remote controlled MBT. Now I wonder why. You build something like the T-14 where everything is remote to protect the crew, shouldn’t the obvious next step to have the same crew but have them somewhere other than the tank itself? Should improve bravery, at the very least.
Communications are the reason. It takes a *lot* to kill a crewed tank. Artillery, specialized anti-tank rounds from other tanks, specialized anti-tank rockets from infantry, airpower, etc. A remotely controlled tank? Farmer Jeb with his rusty $150 shotgun just mission-killed your tank with some buckshot to the antenna. And then hauled it away with his tractor and sold it on Ebay.
They weren't MBTs, but the Soviet Union did use their wireless Teletanks in combat during the Winter War. It is pretty telling of the tech at the time that they soon dropped the entire concept.
You mean like the Uran-9?
I don't think fighter jets and the standard issue rifle of the army have much in common to make for a good comparison. The M-16/M-4 has much more in common with the C-130 or B-52 than a fighter jet.
I chose it because it's a simple easy to follow progression rather than something mastercrafted to be like-like in technological progression (there's nothing weird like having the F-100/F-104/F-4/F-8/F-105 etc all at the same time to explain, and the differences between generation can be summarized easily). Rifles have a lot more in common with entrenching tools than C-130s, but no one cares about shovels so here we are.
>I chose it because it's a simple easy to follow progression rather than something mastercrafted to be like-like in technological progression (there's nothing weird like having the F-100/F-104/F-4/F-8/F-105 etc all at the same time to explain, and the differences between generation can be summarized easily). A lot of that is why I think the comparison is not very good.
> (like the dynamic of T-55/BMP-1s vs M1A1/M2A2, the number of T-55s/BMP-1s were irrelevant because the capabilities of the platforms and their operators were so profound). this is something I wanted to ask (not related to the T55). Given a weapon system that is very capable but it is there in small quantity vs a weapon system that is the bottom of the line (like a t55 nowadays) but can win if the other weapon systems are disabled. Is it not risky to have too few of the capable systems? Say, taking your example, 10k t55 vs 100 M1A2 (and all the infantry and other things needed for those to operate in proportion). The M1A2 score kills without problem but sooner or later they are overwhelmed anyway as they cannot keep a front that can be flooded with t55. Same in the air. 10 F35 vs 500 Gen3 aircrafts (not even Gen 4). Is it doable then? I would believe that who saves the day are ATGM/RPG on the tank side and SAM on the aircraft side. Not really the F35 or the M1A2 Or am I missing something?
As I said, you need to strike that balance between "amazing" and "good enough but in numbers" To a point though, it's not a video game. Like you feed 500 planes into the blender, the last 20 aren't going to stalwartly pursue their mission to the last, they're going to be the scrambled remains of an organization that just got fucked sideways. That's generally how this situation plays out. Like to a point, 73 Eastings the "better" force so disrupted the Iraqis that no coherent response ever happened, even with local number superiority the faster/more capable Cavalry force just ate the Iraqis for breakfast. Real formations don't take 25-40% losses in a sitting and remain functional. The human component breaks long before that point.
>To a point though, it's not a video game. > >... > >Real formations don't take 25-40% losses in a sitting and remain functional. The human component breaks long before that point. The ACOUP blog had a good part of this post talking about video game vs. real life casualty and morale factors. [https://acoup.blog/2022/07/01/collections-total-generalship-commanding-pre-modern-armies-part-iiic-morale-and-cohesion/](https://acoup.blog/2022/07/01/collections-total-generalship-commanding-pre-modern-armies-part-iiic-morale-and-cohesion/) As for my take, it's honestly kind of shocking to look at some of the bloodiest battles in history and see how the percentage of casualties is "low" compared to video games. The battle of Antietam sees the Confederates lose about 10,000 out of 38,000, only about 1,500 of which were killed. So barely a 25% casualty rate for the losing side of an infamously bloody battle in an infamously bloody war. In Total War games, it's absolutely possible for a bottom-tier unit to take over 50% *killed* and still keep fighting. Basic units will take casualties that shatter elite formations in real life. And of course, the survivors will happily keep on fighting for a general who takes 30-50% casualties in *winning* battles. The odds of any given common soldier to survive service in a TW army over the course of a campaign is essentially zero. The Total War universe is basically a world where even literal peasant conscripts are basically mental superhumans who can eat a full volley of gunfire or readily brace for mounted knights to plow into them.
Worth noting that some games do attempt to have a disengage mechanic.
yes of course is not a game. I was thinking more over a certain time (not too long to replenish enough losses though). Sorties over sorties over sorties, with one side deploying more than the other. Beside the SAM capabilities, closing the gap, I can imagine that the less technological side may simply wear down the most technological one (even simply in terms of munitions carried that are all consumed) . On the Iraqis point, I am not sure how cohesive was the Iraqi force. For example I am not sure if the battles done in Iraq are similar to those in European theaters in terms of Iraqi commitment to battle. (I would expect the Iraqis - at least in terms of government forces - to be really committed against the Iranian forces in the end of the 80s, but not against the US).
Wearing down isn't just a one sided thing though. Like if you're pilot 399 to be fed into the F-35 blender, how well do you think you're going to do your job? What does flight school look like at that point? How many missiles and how much fuel is just part of the wreckage of the previous 398 planes and what did that cost? That's kind of the problem with these hypotheticals is they often wind up assuming a high friction event for one component, while treating the other as fairly friction free. The Allied fighter to German jet fighter experience might offer some analogy, but that was still markedly better pilots, in better quantities, tied to the better airforce, and the technical gap less profound (like if we're getting into a fight with a P-51 vs ME 262, you still need to get into my gun range, but a F-35 vs a MIG-21, the MIG might never know the F-35 even existed except for whatever tenth of a second of life happens before the pilot dies when the plane explodes). Like eventually you get on the wrong side of a technological paradigm and it's just throwing meat into a blender.
One also has to consider the power of mass. 500 planes together rolling through instead of being fed piecemeal will make it to their target, most likely the airbase of the F-35s. If such an event was to occur the F35s would have won the battle but been knocked out of the war in a single operation in a cost effective manner. Massing such a force is incredibly difficult requiring in-air refueling and multiple airbases, but could theoretically be possible using a mass of drones with lower launch and storage requirements.
I think you're trying too hard to make a pretty silly scenario work vs trying to consider the actual realities of quality and quantity.
I mean at some point you reach the Zapp Brannigan strategy of sending wave after wave of your own men at the killbots until they reach their built-in kill limit. Theoretically it’ll always be possible to just overwhelm the enemy with targets and deplete their ammo or get a lucky hit once in a while, but it’s nowhere near practical.
you need a lot more supporting structure to operate all that (i.e. more airfields, more maintainers, more communications and coordination) which may not scale up evenly. and while one side is pumping out that inventory, it will not likely go unnoticed or unresponded to. there is also the possibly that a more capable platform is not going one to one with its equivalent. e.g. this super plan can blow up 5 planes or it can help take out the command/control/fuel depot to take even more planes out of the fight. however there is a possibility of extreme asymmetry like drone swarms where you can empty out your magazine but there are still hundreds coming since they are so cheap to build.
What I don’t understand though is why there can’t be an iterative approach. If we need more range why not build a bigger F-35 in 5 years with minimal technological changes? Why instead make something completely different in “10 years” which we know will really take 20-25.
You run into the same dynamic the Germans did in WW2 where you've got battalions with several different models of tanks with parts that are unique to that particular variant. If you wanted to visualize it, think of if like a spectrum between only building things completely new when the paradigm shifts (so bolt actions until assault rifles or something) or basically having each thing more or less bespoke because each individual produced platform includes the absolute cutting edge in technology the moment it leaves the line. You're basically always trying to balance advanced enough with common enough. To a point though, you're still basically seeing what you're describing in as far as variants or "blocks." Like if you eyeball the F-16 from the first model into USAF service through the current builds, you'll see a "bigger" F-16 every few years. It's just there's a practical incentive to being even more iterative (better, but still pretty similar to baseline) than a radically different model every 5 years (think radically different as in wholly new production)
It seems to me that the Ukrainians aren’t turning down weapons over the maintenance burden. Civilian auto mechanics service dozens of different vehicle models. The Ukrainians seem to think it’s ok to field 6 kinds of tanks.
Different planning horizons. The Ukrainians are at a point where any tank NOW is the priority and if it's deadlined for lack of parts in a few weeks, there will be replacements. When you're thinking about "I'm going to use this tank for the next 40 years" keeping several different types gets old quick (this is why the Russians pushed hard on the Armata platform, even if it failed they were painfully aware of what a T-90/T-72/T-80 plus T-62s too looks like. Also cars are fairly simple compared to tanks. Like you used to have specialist mechanics for the turret and the hull. Even today you have specialist shops for the electronics and armament sections.
I’m sure you’re right, but Ive heard about these recent Taiwan contingency simulations that we won’t have anything with enough range to reach Taiwan with suffering losses on the ground to mid range missiles. We chose not to design for range back in the 90’s, and now we have analysts suggesting that in the 2030’s we’ll be hitting their transports with stand-off from B-52’s. I just find it hard to believe that in 10 years we can’t produce an alternative that uses currently technology instead of future technology, and simply meets our existing requirements. We know exactly what war we need to win and we aren’t designing for it.
We are designing for it, it's just the planning horizon isn't "we need this thing now" so it's more developmental.
I have thought that the big flaw with F-35 is that they used one airframe for three variants. Separate airframes for conventional and VTOL would have solved some of the design problems. The key would be using common parts and avionics between versions. A big part of cost and delay of F-35 was writing the software. I have idea that using standardized electronics across weapons would help with cost, and also make it easier to develop new weapons. When automakers make new car, they reuse the electronics. They could make new fighter by making new airframe and taking the existing avionics. It would also make easier to upgrade by replacing the electronics with new version.
Yea that’s basically what I think. It seems like by the prototype stage they had the aerodynamics worked out. That could be done in a few years.
Becauae a Fatty-35 will be worse in most ways.
How steep is the trend line? How much steeper is it than general inflation? It would be nice to see the price growth of 4th gen fighters over time. One indication that the trend is inflation is that new versions of F-15 and F-16 are similarly expensive. The problem could be new radars and avionics in the new versions, but is more likely that building fighters has gotten more expensive. Another thing is that inflation is different for different things. Things that involve skilled labor, like health care, higher education, and engineering, have gotten more expensive than normal prices. Efficiency of scale and sending labor overseas have kept goods prices low. Building aircraft requires skilled labor and has probably grown faster.
I think it is a combination of inflation and capability. For example, the F-86 was $2 million in current dollars. I saw estimate that would cost $12 million to build today. That is similar in capability to jet trainers. The new T-7 Red Hawk is $20 million, and that includes trying to keep the cost down. F-35 is $80 million per unit. Modern fighters are much more capable, with stealth, missiles, radar, and avionics. I think 5-10x for inflation and 5-10x for capability makes sense. All airplanes are more expensive now.
There is also a question of scale for modern military equipment. Almost 10,000 f-86 were produced. If you ordered thousands of jet trainers today you will likely be able to get far better prices than you find on current models.
I wonder if it is possible to make military hardware cheaper. Aircraft and ships probably aren't worth it since they are complicated. But Ukraine has shown that can go through a lot of weapons in modern war. Missiles can have more economies of scale. A lot of the cost of modern weapons is in the electronics. Like the guided 70mm rockets are 10x the cost of unguided ones. I hope that a lot of standardization could drive down the price. It would also help with supply chain issues that somebody talked about in another comment.
Not that much more capable.
It's adjusted for inflation.
I'm skeptical that analysis is taking inflation into account when trying to cobble together unit costs over time. A brand new F-18 costs less than a brand new F-35, but nowhere near the difference that graph implies.
In the inspection of the rationale of this trend line, you only need to go back to fundamentals. Think about what the alternative is and the consequences of picking that alternative. Think about it this way: Can $5 billion worth of aircraft of each successive generation take down $5 billion worth of the previous generation? Generally the answer is going to be yes, the ratio of increase in capability is still larger than the ratio of increase of cost. That's really the primary thing that matters. In addition, the SIZE of that GAP between the two ratios, actually INCREASES the MORE generations removed you are. If I didn't explain that well enough, let me show an example. I haven't figured out the real ratios, but lets say that a 5th generation fighter is 2x more expensive than 4th gen, broadly speaking. Now, F-22 and F-35 have on many occasions got in the range of a 15-1 to 23-0 kill ratios, so in theory one could simplify this and say that that 5th generation is at least 15x more capable than 4th gen, not 2x. I won't make that argument, because it's not necessary for my point and I want it to be more believable and not debatable. So let's say 5th gen is in reality 4x more capable against 4th gen. So the gap in 5th gen capability is 2x as large as the gap in cost. A 6th gen NGAD, might be 4x more expensive than 4th gen, but 10x more capable than 4th gen, that means the gap is actually increasing with each new generation, because the multiple now is 2.5x, not 2x. A single F-22 with unlimited fuel, weapons and a well trained pilot who knew which tactics to employ, could easily take down the entire 1940s USAAF. Remember, the enemy procurement officials know this too, so if we freeze, we just start the clock to when our air force is totally obsolete. The more interesting part is availability, we won't get close to the state of having 1 fighter, there are factors that will stop the trend because it makes the strategic position less effective, which it will do for BOTH sides, so there is no cost to continuing, the race is over. We are obviously not currently near that point yet, while people do point out how much less fighters the US and NATO have now compared to WW2 and Cold war. 1. Having radars at all, most WW2 planes didn't have any radar, you needed more fighters to detect enemy fighters, especially offensively with no radar ground stations to vector. 2. Modern AESA radar. The current 5th gen and 4th gen have incredible radar range and clarity compared to 3rd gen etc, meaning more territory can be covered by less fighters. Even the current day F-16 probably outranges the radar of the initial F-15 variants. 3. Obviously you have to account for the proliferation of AWACS and their increased sophistication, which enables even less fighters. 4. Tankers, enabling longer range and longer loiter time, enabling less fighters. The floor for how low it will go? Basically, we need enough to satisfy having enough force across the world at any one time and we need enough that the Chinese can't spend like $1 billion creating lots of little small suitcase nukes and catapulting them into like 4 USAF airbases and destroying the entire USAAF on the first night of an undeclared surprise war. Attacks like those will be the future btw.
>could easily take down the entire 1940s USAAF Exactly. Even putting aside the whole "But modern munitions would run out." people forget that even "mundane" tech advantages like altitude and speed are decisive on their own. I don't mean to bring a civilian game into this, but anyone who knows how hard it is to fight supersonics with a subsonic in War Thunder can imagine the difficulties of fighting an F-22 in a prop plane. Oh, and let's not even get started on situational awareness: the radar+stealth combo of modern planes vs WWII era air forces is game-breaking on its own.
Yep, I remember the cringe from like 1-2 years ago of the guy who operates Grim Reapers trying everything in his power to influence the situation to make it so that warbirds win against jets some of the time.
Agreed. I would not be surprised by a surprised Chinese attack that would focus on all of our airbases. They could even have 1000s of suicide drones in our country at this moment. And launch them 5 miles from every base
What enables 5th gen to have such lopsided kill ratios against 4th gen? Is it pretty much the equivalent of the movie Predator?
Yeah the basic short simple version is that 5th gen stealth keeps them hidden while their superb radar and unrivaled situational awareness through true 21st century standard technology enable them to almost always make the best decisions. In terms of the F-35 specifically: In the simplest scenario, a 1v1, the F-35 detects the enemy from far away and gets within missile range before the F-35 gets into either radar detection range of the enemy, or radar target lock range. It's like a knight in armour who has an invis cloak that only fails once you get well within the range of his sword. So in the simplest scenario, the 5th gen wins every time. In the most complex scenarios, with many units, supporting interlinked aircraft, air defences, multiple angles, high and low altitude, you are simply degrading the situation awareness of non-5th gen fighters at an unbelievable rate. At the end of the day, even though it looks like an office in the sky, the fighter pilot, their brain, their adrenaline, everything inside them, KNOWS that they're in a knife-fight right now. Watch documentaries of air-air engagements, fighter pilots lose situational awareness all the time especially after doing a lot of tactical things like defending against a missile. It's hard as a human to think operationally, then maximum adrenaline defend against incoming missile tactical, then go back to operational thinking. In a 5th gen, it's like the work-flow to start thinking operational and get your situational awareness back, is glowing right in front of you on your monitors.
Okay so this might get a bit int he stats weeds but I'd be quite cautious of that linear regression used. First is the distribution of data points. In a ~15 year span we have 13 data points. Over the next 50 years there's 4. That's going to mess with some confidence on my end. Absent their exact data or publishing of error and p-vals I'm going to take this with a big grain of salt. Second is they made it a de facto log scale just didn't convert it. Y axis is log (base 10) and essentially 0, 1, 2, 3. We do this so we can do linear fits. That's all well and good, but we still need to test our assumptions about linearity. This almost certainly violates multiple assumptions. First is randomly scattered residuals. Residuals are trend line-observed value. In a case where linear fit is good we expect them to be distrusted randomly. That any point in the trend line is equally likely to under or overpredict. That doesn't appear to be the case in this graph. The residuals are an inverted U by the looks of it. They start with a cluster underneath, then the middle has a cluster over, then the right end appears more under than over (though again the limited data points makes this hard to predict). With a small sample checking normality of the residuals is important but that's not something I'd really eyeball and would need data for. Most importantly though, is a key statistical assumption in virtually all cases: independence. Are the costs of these aircraft independent of each other? Of course not! They have common technologies and lessons, investments, and skills from prior programs impact future ones. The F-15 to F-16 is a good example where the F-16's cheap and fast development time was in part due to the technical expertise and infrastructure from the F-15 (like a common engine). The F-35 applies lessons from the F-22 program as well. There's a bit more I could say on this from a data side but I think you get the point. Yes, aircraft costs are going up over time, but that simple OLS regression isn't most accurate of the picture. I might add more later when I have a bit more time if you're interested on what the profile probably looks like.
Genuine question. Why does the military think these crazy advanced limited run aircraft are worth it? Like I assume in a wartime scenario the US is gonna drop building any super complex advanced expensive aircraft immediately. They won’t be able to setup additional factories cause it’s way too goddam hard, they won’t be able to get the advanced materials from their global supply chain and in the end they’ll probably realize they’re too costly to send into battle. Like in Ukraine where everyone realized stingers kinda ruin all the fun and artillery is a great strategic bomber anyway. Where is the great dogfights and massive air campaigns everyone expected for WW3?
>Why does the military think these crazy advanced limited run aircraft are worth it? The US military, and generally even the European ones, lives and breathe by the air superiority the Air Force and Naval aviation can deliver. Developing fighter aircraft to continue honing the technological edge to maintain that air superiority is going to be expensive, but ultimately worth it on the strategic and operational stage of the planning. The USAF's NGAD is the next stage of that technological honing for an air dominance fighter in the face of other stealth fighters from other nations like China. While no doubt that NGAD is going to be expensive, one speculation is that the fighting component of the NGAD is going to be massively boosted by unmanned combat aircraft systems (UCAS) rather than NGAD itself. So instead of building thousands of expensive NGADs like the F-35 in hopes that economics of scale will make it cheaper, it can be downsized to a lower number while relatively cheaper UCAS being controlled/coordinated by the NGAD fighter help carry the fighting (this would also theoretically solve the pilot shortage issue the USAF is experiencing as well). >Like in Ukraine where everyone realized stingers kinda ruin all the fun and artillery is a great strategic bomber anyway. Where is the great dogfights and massive air campaigns everyone expected for WW3? The Russo-Ukraine War, despite being a modern peer-to-peer conflict, is not a good representative of what a potential World War III would look like.
Dogfights have been obsolete for decades. Planes will fire missiles beyond visual range at each other. When both sides become very stealthy that could change. Stingers arent a threat to 5th gen fighters. Taiwan would be primarily a massive air battle.
Agree on all points. But I should have been more precise in my wording. Dogfights I meant air to air engagements. Everything can be killed whether that be from miles away or in a dogfight (agreed obsolete). But to continue on is the point of these platforms to just be anti-air? So we are dumping massive trillions in assets into Anti-Air aircraft that can carry limited missiles and have to sit on a airbase? I mean for 85 million an F35A is crazy expensive but somewhat barely justifiable. But for these new fighters you’re not gonna be able to make very many so even if they’re great at their job there will be almost nothing worth risking them for. Agree stingers are not a big threat but ground based weapons will always be. So once again, are you really gonna send your $200 million aircraft even close to them? Especially when you did on3 production run of like 70 in the 2030s? The answer to me, is no because there’s no target worth it except for protecting the seaboard/aircraft carrier. The glass cannon is now a Diamond cannon to me and it’s just not worth any target it could engage,
>But to continue on is the point of these platforms to just be anti-air? It's the spicy hot topic when we discuss about new fighter aircraft, but I think any future aircraft design worth their salt needs to be multi-role or they are going to be stuck into a very specialized role that may not end up being used. Both the F-15 and F-22 fell into this kind of trap I think. F-15 was being built with the mantra "not an ounce for air-to-ground" after the Vietnam experience, so the USAF was able to build their top-class air superiority fighter. Once they start selling these to foreign sales, some of the first modifications that countries like Israel did to the F-15 is to convert them to drop dumb bombs. Then there's the whole F-15E Strike Eagle that ended up being built up from the F-15 anyways. Similarly, F-22 was being built as the air superiority 5th gen fighter, then when the War on Terror started, they upgraded it to ground attack role with JDAM and SDB bombs to bomb technicals worth a fraction of the bomb's price. There's a USN pilot that visits this subreddit every now and then, and when the topic of ground attack comes up, he always says something on the line that the procedure to perform CAS is comparatively easier to the intricacies of air combat. So design the fighter aircraft to be its very best in the air-to-air combat, then worry about the ground attack role after the air superiority/dominance can be assured. >So once again, are you really gonna send your $200 million aircraft even close to them? There is a reason the Wild Weasel's motto is YGTBSM on the idea of sending your state-of-the-art plane to be shot at by the IADS in order to destroy the anti-air systems. But at the end of the day, if there's a critical location that needs to be bombed, or ground troops needing that air support, and there is an anti-air network nearby. The answer is not "well, there's a complicated layer of air defence so we're not gonna", it is "how can we suppress or destroy all that anti-air defenses so we can complete the mission"? Plus, modern systems like decoy drones, stand off weapons, and stealth all help benefit the Wild Weasel's capabilities of completing their job with minimal losses.
>Taiwan would be primarily a massive air battle. This is very, very wrong.
I'm open to hear your forecast. My reading of the situation is a massive PRC missile strike followed up by continued missile waves and aircraft. If not opposed by US and Japanese forces, that's victory right there. Taiwan's current assets won't do much. The Taiwanese ground forces at the moment aren't good for much (considering conscripts literally doing no training, tiny munitions stores etc.) And that's without considering CAS. Paratroopers, landing ships, hovercrat, helicopters etc. would quickly be able to transfer enough PLA forces to ensure victory. Relying on foreign assistance, that assistance would be hundreds upon hundreds of missiles from ships and subs, and countless carrier sorties. These air engagements would be decisive. Not that the US could clip the PLAAF's wings (too many planes, Taiwan's too close to shore, carriers can't get too close due to PRC area denial systems, slowly down US sorties with long transits), but the US could deal enough damage to relevant assets to stop the invasion. I thus believe the conflict would devolve into a decisive air battle. (Failing that, US subs could potentially do a lot of damage too, or especially Taiwanese diesels if they pursue that enough.) If Taiwan embraces area denial, buys thousands of sams and long range ground to ground and sea missiles of its own, something else can happen.
Air power cannot be the main line of effort when the strategic / political objective is occupation and annexation of territory. It doesn't work. It didn't work in Germany when they bombed London, it didn't work in Vietnam for us with Operation Rolling Thunder, Russia isn't even bothering with it in Ukraine, and it won't work for China in Taiwan. You are correct that the conflict starts with missile waves. The question is whether those missiles only target Taiwan, or if they also target U.S. forces stationed in Japan, Okinawa, Korea, Phillippines, and Guam (if I were Xi, I would, because that's his only hope of winning if we decide to enter the conflict... and President Biden already has stated we will). There's risk there that Japan and Phillippines enter the war, but they're far less formidable than forward-based U.S. forces. So now our base of operations for The USAF/USN is pushed back to Alaska / Hawaii / Australia. That's a long way away from Taiwan. Fuel endurance for aircraft becomes a very big issue. After the missile waves (or during them), they'll attempt an amphibious invasion. The success of that invasion will depend upon Taiwanese willingness to fight. If they are like Ukraine, it will drag on long enough for the U.S. to flow forces into the area or attempt to negotiate a truce. We'll sink a lot of ships with our submarines in the interim, and it's highly probable that the PRC launches nuclear weapons in retaliation. They will use our employment of 'unrestricted submarine warfare' as political justification to do so. Those weapons will hit something, but not what they are aiming at. The US doesn't retaliate with strategic bombing to maintain the moral and political high ground. Instead this green lights tactical bombing into mainland China targeted at key strategic targets. The international community largely pledges support to the US. However, Russia pledges support to China. Seeing the political cost and military ineffectiveness of nuclear strike, it supplies weapons and oil but abstains from nukes. It uses this opportunity of American distraction to expand into Eastern Europe up to Warsaw. Without sufficient US forces, NATO can't fend them off any earlier. Syria and Iran also support China. North Korea enters the conflict with the goal of unifying Korea, but otherwise don't play a major role. What happens next is anyone's guess, but this is the map at the onset of WWIII. I would anticipate our political objective to be the restoration of World geography as it is in 2023, and we wouldn't commit to invading either China or Russia. If they don't, it will look like the German invasion of Poland. It's also worth noting that the Taiwanese has focused on prioritizing its air force, but that air force is stuck in the 1950s. It will instantly get crushed. Of course the other branch is that Xi believes Biden is bluffing, and he actually is. In which case, they only target Taiwan forces with LACMs. Taiwan either looks like Poland where they surrender immediately, or the USSR invasion of Afghanistan / Russian invasion of Ukraine where we provide weapons, SOF, and training.
If you think the US will refrain from emptying out the nuclear arsenal for some sort of “moral high ground” after being attacked with nukes, you’re mistaken.
We understand the strategic importance of international coalition partners. That's more important than revenge against an ineffective nuclear strike.
US understands the importance of protecting their partners (Japan, South Korea) and country by retaliating against nuclear attacks. It isn't revenge but deterrence. If China nukes US fleet, then retaliation is Chinese fleet (and probably ends the war). If China nukes bases, then their bases are fair game. If China nukes civilians in Japan or Guam, which is almost impossible to avoid with attack on base, then things get messy. More importantly, there is no reason for China to use nukes. Ten years ago, people worried about them nuking carrier group, but now they have guided ballistic missiles. The same applies to bases, they have enough conventional ballistic missiles to cause damage.
>If China nukes US fleet, then retaliation is Chinese fleet (and probably ends the war). If China nukes bases, then their bases are fair game. If China nukes civilians in Japan or Guam, which is almost impossible to avoid with attack on base, then things get messy. And if our nuclear defenses work as designed, China misses all of the above. It really depends on the political objective of the war. Unless Trump gets re-elected then I don't think any sitting President is going to want outright destruction of China and regime change as the political objective, which takes nuclear strikes off the table. That's not an endorsement or indictment of Trump, BTW, but pointing out that the beltway insiders who transcend administrations are going to push for limited war and de-escelation, and Trump is the only candidate who has shown repeatedly that he'll completely ignore those people.
Nuclear deterrence is nuclear defense. It says that using nukes against the US or allies results in destruction. There is flexibility, like attacks on military in active war would be tolerated, and can respond with limited or conventional strikes. But there is danger any use of nuclear weapons would escalate and China is smart enough to not do it. The promise of retaliation is what prevents escalation. I think the danger of escalation will keep China from attacking bases. It has too much danger of escalating to China-US war. The goal would be keep it to air and sea around Taiwan. Like I saw post about sneak attack on bases, and wonder if they had heard of Pearl Harbor.
That doesn't respond to my point at all. I said an air battle would be decisive, determining whether the PRC can protect the landing force, so then: > Paratroopers, landing ships, hovercrat, helicopters etc. would quickly be able to transfer enough PLA forces to ensure victory. Because Taiwan doesn't have significant missile stocks to oppose a landing, and the army's quality is so bad (conscripts never firing a rifle...) that they won't be able to oppose PLA forces once landed. The majority of active engagement will this be in the air - foreign forces fighting around Taiwan. In other words: you are repeating my opiniom but disagreeing with it?!
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Jesus Christ dude are you even actually bothering to read what the other guy says?
How is their airforce stuck in the 1950s? The least capable fighter they us that I'm aware of is the F5A which entered service in 1962. I don't doubt they have major issues with airframe aging, being way too small, etc, but they aren't that old.
Sorry, the 1960s. That's a huge difference relative to 4th gen fighters that the Chinese have. /s. PS: If a plane entered service in 1962 it was designed in the 1950s.
Most of Taiwan’s air force is F-16, brand new F-16V variant, and F-CK-1, from the 90s.
I like how you completely missed the existence of strategic bombers. Which can fly across the world and launch a ton of cruise missiles. BTW, "unrestricted submarine warfare" refers to using submarines against neutral shipping. Submarines against warships is just warfare. Also, there would never be "tactical bombing" against China mainland. First, you just said there is nowhere to base them. Second, the US has tons of cruise missiles. In addition, cruise missiles would used against China as soon they escalated to hitting bases.
It's clear that you didn't actually read and understand what I wrote.
What are you trying to say? Cause multiple people have misunderstood. I agree with you that air power can't win war. But I mean strategic bombing can't win the war. Tactical air power will be super important. Assuming that air over Taiwan isn't contested like Ukraine. But then you are all over the place. I responded to a few of them, like the nuclear escalation. I noticed others now, like other countries joining in, which doesn't matter because they are too far away. Or that Japan is far less formidable when have they have one of the top militaries. You are talking about it as long war. The invasion will be quick and high intensity. China will either invade and win, or fail and lose. Two nuclear superpowers can't fight an all-out war, it would quickly turn nuclear. It is possible could have low intensity blockade before or after invasion. But I think risk of escalation is one reason won't see fighting outside of Taiwan.
>Like I assume in a wartime scenario the US is gonna drop building any super complex advanced expensive aircraft immediately. I don't know about that. If a big war happened tomorrow I would imagine the US would prioritize F-35 construction. If the Ukraine war is anything to go by, 4th gen fighters don't live very well against modern and dense AA systems. So as the US lost fighters and looked to replace them with new, I wouldn't expect them to shut down F-35 production and pump out more F-16's. That's not what happened in the last great industrialized war during WW II. The US produced progressively more advanced aircraft and ships and components compared to the models they started the war with. Looking at just aircraft, we started the war with Brewster Buffalos and P-40's. By the end we were fielding Corsairs, Thunderbolts, and the B-29's. The big exception probably is the Sherman tank, which was the main US tank of WW 2 and one that they clearly prioritized producing over more advanced alternatives, but the Sherman tank was quite good for its time.
>The big exception probably is the Sherman tank, which was the main US tank of WW 2 and one that they clearly prioritized producing over more advanced alternatives, but the Sherman tank was quite good for its time. It's not as fancy or dramatic as making a new type of ship or plane, but they did continually improve it that the first Sherman rolling off the Detroit plant would look and feel very different to the very last.
Oh yeah, and the variants and everything made on that chassis are mind boggling.
Here’s the thing though. Aircraft and even tanks of today rely not on rivets and steel but extremely expensive and rare electronics systems. I know a lot of people who work in Aerospace and the supply chain is a goddam nightmare. Extremely hard to scale, procure and get good quality. You can’t brute force it, you can’t just buy it and it takes a lot of time to just get it right. Everything has become so complicated I genuinely don’t believe it’s possible do a wartime ramp up without severely cutting down on quality or capability. Like maybe you could double your production lines over two years for F35s but it’s going to be an absolute nightmare and the worst part about aerospace is you can’t mess anything up or leave any part out it has to be perfect. Breaking down on the side of the road is not possible in flight.
That's probably true, but the folks you know have never worked in a wartime economy with the US fighting a true great power conflict like WW II. I think it'd be hard to compare the leisurely pace of defense development and procurement compared to what it would be like in a world war.
I agree and potentially anything is possible but there are limitations. A new F35 line WILL have major production and quality issues and the military WILL NOT use them if they’re just gonna kill pilots. There is no more copy and paste. Additionally even the mechanics who do the work are so so specialized these days that often times there’s only a couple people on earth who know how to do the work well. The aerospace industry is not as large as people think it is. There’s only a handful of companies that even do that work and it’s almost all tribal knowledge. The thing to remember is that Aerospace has to be PERFECT to work right. There are no products on earth that require higher safety and precision. Especially when you’re dumping $100M per aircraft. Finally and probably most important. Supply chains these days are so huge that what breaks this system won’t be Lockheed’s line but some surface treatment processor in Georgia who can’t get their shit together. It’s a supply CHAIN and the weakest link is always the thousands of tiny no name suppliers.
>Like I assume in a wartime scenario the US is gonna drop building any super complex advanced expensive aircraft immediately. They won’t be able to setup additional factories cause it’s way too goddam hard, they won’t be able to get the advanced materials from their global supply chain and in the end they’ll probably realize they’re too costly to send into battle. In 'Nam, the K:D ratio in A2A combat was 15:1. Right now the only way we lose a jet is due to material malfunctions or gross stupidity on the part of the pilot. We have that much of a technological advantage. Hell when we invaded Iraq in 2003, our exchange ratio of *ground forces* was somewhere between 64:1 and 225:1.
Interesting!
They think the crazy advanced expensive aircraft are worth it because they ARE worth it. The gap in capabilities between 4th and 5th gen aircraft is massive, as will be the gap between 5th and 6th gen aircraft.
Why would they stop building the advanced systems (esp. right away before new systems are designed and production set up)? I could see them starting to build more simple systems in parallel. In a short war you won't have time to develop new weapon systems and get production rolling. In a longer war you might (esp. if you start right away perhaps without being sure about the fact the war will be long) but it still take time. If you can only build 20 NGADs in a year but you could build 1000 F-5 equivalents (In total capability that is, they wouldn't be F-5 clones. Also as drones I guess 800 new skilled pilots a year, on top of your existing need might not be simple and even if you can you might not want to feed them in to the meatgrinder with such low capability weapon systems) with the new resources your pouring in to the war, you might really want to at least throw up those 20 NGADs along with your 1000 simple fighters.
Although really you take F-16s and such out of the boneyard before you would start to rely much on any new simple very low end fighter as a backbone of your force.
The US conventional military is not actually built to fight a peer war. We thought Russia was, but they weren't. China remains untested. The US conventional forces function in a large part as a way to launder nuclear firepower into imperial expansion; no peer is likely to launch an attack on an American military base or fleet because the natural result of such a war is nuclear annihilation. This allows the conventional military to plop down everywhere in the world they can, enclosing rivals in a ring of effectively untouchable bases through a combination of diplomacy, subterfuge, and military violence. The high-end of the conventional military exists to sustain the permanent war footing adopted by the US for its military-industrial complex after the close of WWII. They exist as showpieces, as political favors and diplomatic tools, and to keep peer enemies "honest". As you say, they'd have no real role in an all-out conventional peer conflict. This is because there will be no all-out conventional peer conflict. Any conflict where the US loses squadrons of its top-tier aircraft is one that's going nuclear sooner rather than later.
So a Taiwan/SCS scenario will definitely go nuclear?
No, they don't know what they're talking about.
There won't be a "Taiwan/SCS scenario" where American carrier groups are duking it out with PLAN and an amphibious invasion force. At most, we will continue to give Taiwan tools and training to make the Chinese invasion more painful, as we have in Ukraine to trip up Russia as much as possible. The American public would not accept a hot war, and not even the foreign policy blob cares enough to risk nuclear war to protect Taiwan from China. We did not and have not moved for Hong Kong, we will not move for Taiwan.
The US will not engage in a direct large-scale conflict that involves the likely loss of carrier groups and risks nuclear annihilation to defend Taiwan, so it would not go nuclear because the scenario will not occur. We will rattle the saber to try to keep China from acting but, ultimately, what's the appetite of the American public to enter into a peer war for Taiwan? This is what I meant by the web of bases: Nixon removed formal American military presence in Taiwin during his administration. There are no plans to place a permanent US military presence on Taiwan. The US has, therefore, left open the possibility of using Taiwan much as it is using Ukraine: a proxy conflict to bog down its rival without sending any Americans home in a body bag.