F-35 is built for the wrong war

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

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

And the latter hurts the US (and the rest of the world) way more that the blockade by the US hurts Iran.

No amount of F35s will change that. Iran has no reason to try to attack US military vessels or aircraft.

Surprisingly (actually unsurprisingly) relevant: https://acoup.blog/2026/03/25/miscellanea-the-war-in-iran/

Especially the part about who blinks first ...

The psychology of Ukraine's drone campaign as a response to Russia's original drone launches is very interesting. It's a classic boiling frog move.

Drones are seen as an improvised amateur threat. Unlike a bombing campaign, which is seen as "proper war", drones are an annoyance. They're fragile, cheap, unglamorous, unsophisticated, easy to shoot down, and wasteful, because you need tens or hundreds to make sure a few get through.

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

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

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

But psychologically, they're not seen as such.

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

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

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

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

indicates what the author said is true.

The majority of these losses are on the ground.

Oh yeah, I'd like to see you try that.

Maduro was a clown. Iran is two orders of magnitude above Venezuela and the US (plus friends) are already struggling.

Russia is at least one order of magnitude above Iran.

I have no doubt that the US would win at the end, but at a massive cost of life and money. You cannot afford that, you cannot even afford a 1/10th of that.

I live in America, I'm obviously pro-America, but losing touch with reality will only make things worse.

The world is not like your RTS games.

The Chinese are going to spam literally MILLIONS of drones all over the Pacific...

> And naturally F-35s on that theatre would have been a game changer making mass strikes on Moscow possible.

And then what? Kyiv has been under relentless strikes from drones and missiles for 5 years. And Moscow was hit by Ukrainian drones several times.

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

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

The last few wars started by the US were based on scenarios that looked good on paper and in reality they did not went so well.

Look at the Iran war: "we're gonna kill their supreme leader and the regime will fall". Almost two months later nothing changed in any significant way despite bombing it relentlessly.

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

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

The hype is it's own product.

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

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

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."

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

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

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

Not if every jet takes 20 years to develop.

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

Which would accomplish nothing since the rot is so deep.

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.

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.

* 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.

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'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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The industry obviously wants more and more profits.

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

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

They are interested in profits, not national security.

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

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

They're only interested in making more money.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

China is massively building up arms

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

Its clearly something war planners are worried about.

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

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

A thousand sparrows does not an eagle make.

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

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

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

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

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

Pick on a less useful animal.

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

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

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

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

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

>mistaking uncontested airspace for actual invincibility.

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

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

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

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

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

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