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Comment by bawolff

10 hours ago

In the intro:

> Meanwhile, modern conflict, from Ukraine’s drone war to naval engagements in the Red Sea to Iran’s own mass missile and drone salvos, increasingly favors systems that can be produced at scale and replaced when lost.

In the conclusion:

> The lesson of the Iran campaign is that the F-35 performed superbly in exactly the kind of fight it was built for. The lesson for force designers is that the next war may not be that fight.

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

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

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

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bawolff

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dinfinity  10 hours ago

> I have no idea but the article didn't really make any convincing arguments about it.

It did.

It pointed out that the bases from which the F-35s would have to operate in a war with China would be very vulnerable:

"The concentration of high-value equipment and personnel at each operating location makes the F-35’s basing problem qualitatively different from that of simpler aircraft. The loss is not just one jet but the capacity to generate sorties from that site."

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

"At over eighty million dollars per airframe, with Lockheed Martin delivering fewer than two hundred aircraft per year across all variants and all customers worldwide, there is no surge capacity waiting to be activated and no precedent for accelerating a program of this complexity on wartime timelines. When one side can produce weapons by the hundreds and thousands — missiles, loitering munitions, and one-way attack drones — while the other relies on small numbers of exquisite platforms, the advantage shifts toward the side with scale."

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

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

  • CMay  6 hours ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • 2trill2spill  9 hours ago

    > "At over eighty million dollars per airframe, with Lockheed Martin delivering fewer than two hundred aircraft per year across all variants and all customers worldwide, there is no surge capacity waiting to be activated and no precedent for accelerating a program of this complexity on wartime timelines. When one side can produce weapons by the hundreds and thousands — missiles, loitering munitions, and one-way attack drones — while the other relies on small numbers of exquisite platforms, the advantage shifts toward the side with scale."

    The article gets this wrong as well, the f35 can be built at scale, no other fighter aircraft is produced in such high numbers, its also significantly cheaper on a per airframe basis vs Gen 4 aircraft and its more advanced. This article is nonsense and the author doesn't know what they are talking about.