Comment by dmix

> It will still need all or most of the advanced avionics that make F-35s expensive.

Those jets are catch-all do-everything machines, almost entirely because it's so crazy expensive to build jets + the political/contracting games played, that they are forced to jam everything into them. There's lots of efficiency and tactical gains in small niche applications where each platform is specialized for the job.

> Ukraine is ingeniously working to defeat Russian drones at ever lower costs, as Russia tries to send ever more and more of them at lower and lower prices. It's not enough to make something cheaply - it comes down to "value" for money. If these super-simple super-cheap Chinese drones can likewise be defeated by cheap weaponry, the impact is limited.

Even in Ukraine we really haven't seen 'cheap' defenses properly scale up to deal with the drone problem. Ukraine was getting 90% shoot downs in the early days but that's changed in the past year where Russia's tactics adapted. They've have been getting hammered weekly, even deep into their air defences along the polish border.

With Chinese SAMs and extreme range air-to-air missiles all of the fancy F-35 avionics will mostly be just them doing everything trying to survive those encounters far away from the frontline in Taiwan... where they mostly become very expensive missile launch platforms (bombers) and some radar networking. If you remove maximum survivability + narrow into niches those get a lot cheaper.