Comment by tpurves
14 hours ago
The insight here is, that in current warfare, quantity is the quality that matters. And with quantity, cost of replacement needs to be low, platforms expendable, cheap to maintain and resupply. It, and it's support infrastructure, need to not easily be detected and targeted by drones while on the ground. F35 is not these things. It's powerful but brittle, and like many US platforms, too much value packed into too few platforms. Not enough sustain in prolonged modern conflict. A one-punch military.
>The insight here is, that in current warfare, quantity is the quality that matters. And with quantity, cost of replacement needs to be low, platforms expendable, cheap to maintain and resupply. It, and it's support infrastructure
The irony, of course, is that the US military knew that back in WWII in how the Sherman tank was able to defeat the "better" German tanks for all the same reasons listed above.
Now the US has the same small set of defence contractors who are staffed by ex-government officials and no one asks any hard questions when every single project is 10yrs late and overbudget.
That's a stale insight from an old era of warfare. The purpose of quality is to remove quantity. Iran is the case study. A large stockpile of munitions counts for something, but once the factories are gone, you're on a 3 month clock. Factories being deleted can only be achieved with quality (expensive stand-off munitions + F-35s for SEAD, then missile trucks with cheap JDAMs to take out the factories).
30-50 years ago you just couldn't do this kind of warfare, the technology and intelligence didn't exist. Now you can. People haven't updated on this paradigm shift.
People are over-learning the wrong lessons from Ukraine. That is a unique war with air parity. That's why the Ukraine war is shaped the way it is. Not because this is how wars ought to be fought.
This is not to discount quantity. But you can't have only quantity unless you want to fight an attritional war for 10 years (or worse, lose your own industrial production to an enemy that achieves air superiority over your skies because they had the foresight to invest in quality).
I think the insight is that you need a high-low mix. Some threats call for top of the line capabilities (like early days of the Iran conflict with stand-off munitions and top-spec interceptors being used against Shahed drones and cheap cruise missiles). Some threats can be more economically serviced by a less capable, cheaper, and more available system.
Ukraine is using old school propeller trainer craft to shoot down some of the slower Russian drones. https://theaviationist.com/2024/06/26/ukrainian-yak-52-kill-... There's usually new footage of this every week on social media.
Don't really see or hear about the USA building or using propeller driven planes in military outside of special ops.
It isn't reasonable to expect that propellor drones will be used long term - they are too easy to shoot down. you need just enough ability to force the enemy to not waste they energy making them when something more expensive is harder to shoot down and thus more likely to work.
100% this.
It's always been about the biggest, fastest, longest range punch. That is extremely useful for deep strike (which has always been NATO doctrine), but when the range is short you need quantity and mobility far more than you need quantity.
Being able to cut off your enemy is an extremely effective weapon if your enemy needs massive supply. Drop the major bridges between Moscow and Ukraine and the war would soon be over.
But when you can't do that for whatever reason you need quantity and mobility far more than you need quality.
I mean the armed forces already know this well. They have a bunch of units of regular soldiers, and then they have a few special forces units.
The ideas that I as a civilian was sold over the past decades don't appear to hold up any longer.
As someone a while back put it, Russia lost several Bundeswehrs worth of equipment and keeps on grinding. Neither side is able to mass large forces, in a large part due to drones. And Iran can punish the US despite being comically outgunned.
Modern equivalents of Sherman and T-34 tanks over burdensome Tigers and a population willing to support heavy losses.
A Bundeswehr worth of equipment is so little nowadays that Bundeswehr itself lost several Bundeswehrs worth of equipment while being at peace for the last few decades.
Can't argue with that. The context of that quote was Europe defending itself and the reality that most European states are simply not ready for such a high level of attrition.
While Iran has faired better than I expected, it's a reach to say they've punished the US. The US losses are comically small. Of course wars aren't won solely based on battles...
> The US losses are comically small.
Just international respect, potentially the loss of the petrodollar, trust of allies, etc.
Small beer stuff really - although the kinds of things that feature in historical retrospectives published 50 years after turning points.
The US' immediate material losses are peanuts, of course. And Iran's are massive.
Weeks after declaring victory, it remains a strategic blunder with no obvious way out.
The Hormuz quagmire was expected and the vile Iranian regime has a long history of murdering and sacrificing its population for political gains.
Since we're discussing a WoR article:
https://warontherocks.com/tactical-success-strategic-failure...
That's not a new idea, it's the same thing Germany learned about tanks in WWII.
I heard it argued that Germany didn't have the raw resources and production capacity to go for quantity. Especially later in the war. So quality it was.
Not really, the tanks were both inefficient to operate and inefficient to build (lack of standardization, constantly changing plans, have to redesign every single part..)
That's not true. They could have standardized on a few rugged platforms -- and in fact, some in Nazi Germany advocated for that -- but their industry and engineering were generally self-sabotaging and a mess.
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I mean not really? People focus on quantity but the German late war tank designs just sucked.
When people say things like the GP, they are talking about German early war tanks, not the late ones.
The problem is that the early WWII arms race was so fast that I don't know how anybody can say with confidence that Germany lost to worse tanks than theirs. By the time the allies got any volume into battle, they also got better designs than their earlier ones.
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Depends what type of models you look at. There were many German designs that were much less prone to technical breakdowns due to pragmatic and mission focused design choices e.g. many of the Jagdpanzer ("tank destroyer") class like StuG II and Herzer were produced en masse and was very successful. Also, the Jagdpanther was a strong design.
There are three stances that I can see in the debate at the moment.
* Quantity has a quality all of its own.
* Innovation and agility allows you to adapt and survive.
* Low capability platforms often can't be used to deliver useful effect & commanders will try every option not to use them in a fight. When they get committed it can be disastrous.
The first two clearly have merits, but every military professional I have ever worked with has cited them at me, so I don't think that they are underweighted in discussion. I believe that the last one is not treated with enough weight in the debate. The best example I have of it is the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Platforms with glaring problems, fielded and maintained at huge cost, completely unable to achieve their strategic purpose. Even when sulking in port these ships have proven to be deadly for their crews and maintainers. Another example is the TB3 drone. It had a staring role for about 10 days in the Ukraine, but those were 10 days where the Russians ran out of petrol to run their air defence systems on. It hasn't been in evidence since because it just can't be used in the current environment.
One that worries me is the upcoming T31 (uk arrowhead variant) frigate. The argument for it is that it is a relatively affordable platform that the RN will have enough of to actually be able to get out and about. However, it doesn't have a sonar, so... what actual use is it as a frigate (I know the story about the helicopter and some other bits and bobs... but... really?)
Sure, when the other side has run out of the good kit dragging crap out of storage might work, but until then you are going to be sending good men to their death in second rate equipment. Is that going to build war winning morale?
Second rate equipment is for playing lets pretend, or for fighting wars of national survival. We should avoid both.
Quantity has a quality *if* it can get to the battlefield.
The big stuff is for trying to keep the small stuff away from the battlefield. When you can't do that for whatever reason you need a bunch of small stuff of your own.
But a frigate without sonar isn't inherently horrible--lots of places don't have subs.
>But a frigate without sonar isn't inherently horrible--lots of places don't have subs.
True, but it's one less mission that it can do. My fear (which I think will be 100% confirmed) is that we will only get a handful even though they are unit cost cheap, because they still cost money to crew and maintain. I need to spend some time modelling the economics of it I guess.
The total cost of the entire program over its projected lifetime is $1.7 trillion. The F-35 is made by one company, Lockheed Martin (with some pieces made by a couple others). This entire program is a massive transfer of taxpayer money into one company.
Another data point is that it's estimated that all student debt in the US combined is $1.7 - 1.8 trillion.
No wonder America keeps falling behind.
I think you're ignoring subcontractors and other suppliers. It's probably more like a thousand or so companies.
Yeah, congress forces the military to contract out to companies in enough congressional districts to secure passage of the legislation. We basically force these companies into byzantine and inefficient supply chains because we treat it all as a jobs program.
$1.7 trillion over 70 years. So $24B/year.
> The F-35 is made by one company, Lockheed Martin (with some pieces made by a couple others)
This isn't even remotely true, who is paying you to post this drivel?
You can just do both. The US does have some cheaper, more expendable drone platforms, and it's continuing to work on more. It should probably scale up production of them, though.
You don't scale up today - you just make sure you can. Otherwise next year you have a ton of obsolete drones to scrap.
I feel like there's a brute-force analogy to be drawn with the "Bitter Lesson" that we saw in AI development.
Pawns are the only piece that matter on a chess board?
That’s no insight, just a fact from the entire history of warfare except when one side had rifles/guns and the other didn’t.
One thing you and the OP are not addressing is that most of these modern tactics are also necessitated by the fact that building an air force, navy, or cavalry that can beat modern superpowers is just a complete non-starter.
I'm not so sure the F-35 is built for the wrong war as much as the war would probably call for the F-35 if it didn't already exist.