F-35は「時代遅れの戦い」に向けて設計されているのか？

F-35は、現代の戦争のあり方に対して、果たして適切な設計なのだろうか。

Increased defense spending actually makes the US less, not more, safe. Everyone we're going to fight is prepared for an asymmetric, cheap war. We're vulnerable in how much they can make us spend to wage that war. A million dollar patriot missile to shoot down a cheap drone, etc.

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.

Somewhat ridiculous piece. Ukraine, 4 years after, still operates a significant number of jets it entered the war with. This is despite hundreds of attempts to eliminate them on the ground with airstrikes, drones, cruise and ballistic missiles.

And naturally F-35s on that theatre would have been a game changer making mass strikes on Moscow possible. For all the dysfunctions of American military industrial complex it remains a fighter without peers (unless you count F-22) or serious AD threat.

The primary purpose of something like the F-35 program is not producing a bunch of jets that we can use to win wars. Similar to how NASA's purpose is not to make large rockets that send things to orbit for cheap.

It is to investigate new technologies (i.e. how do we control a thousand drones) and preserve domain knowledge in a large number of engineers spanning multiple generations. If all these engineers go work at $BIG_TECH optimizing ad revenue for watching short videos, we'll have to rediscover basics the next time.

When we have to fight the next serious war, we are not going to primarily use F-35 jets built twenty years ago, it's going to be something built on a similar platform in larger numbers to specifically address challenges of that era. If it can not be made cheap enough, whatever contractors involved are going to be nationalized. All major wars between comparable powers were fought with technology hot off the assembly lines, not billion dollar prototype models developed twenty years ago to bomb caves in deserts.

If you look at it from this angle, all the idiosyncrasies make sense. There's of course the inefficiency of defense contractors skimming off profits at multiple layers, but if you find a solution to that while preserving productivity, you'd win the economics nobel tomorrow.

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.

It concerns me how casual the article and some of the comments here discuss an actual war against China, as if that were a reasonable scenario.

Of course I understand wanting to be prepared even for grim scenarios such as these. Military strategists should of course continually be refining such plans. But casual discussions like this, without even so much as a disclaimer about it being a hypothetical and extremely undesirable outcome, may pave the way towards it through normalization.

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. The F-35 is a masterpiece. But a force designed around a masterpiece is not designed for long, protracted wars, and U.S. adversaries know this.

The problem is that the F-35 was intended to be the low cost, mass produce-able workhorse for long protracted wars against technologically inferior adversaries where extremely high performance would be unnecessary. Yes it incorporates advanced stealth and electronics that make it a very capable aircraft, especially when it's going up against F-4s, but these weren't driving the cost. The US had already developed these technologies, and once you have them putting them on another aircraft isn't too expensive. And in particular the main focus was on lifetime cost - keeping flight hours reasonable and maintenance down compared to a higher performance aircraft like the F-22. This plane was designed around exactly this sort of conflict.

The problem was horrific project mismanagement. Building factories before the design was complete, delays due to development operations being done in parallel, making essentially 3 different aircraft with radically different requirements use a common design - the initial program cost skyrocketed and the only way out was to keep upping the order quantity to keep unit costs low. Cost per flight hour was supposed to be $25k, it's now $50k. Engine maintenance time was supposed to be 2 hours, it wound up being 50. And the issues didn't stop after initial development - with each successive iteration there have been new issues resulting in further delays, with airframe delivery on average still being 8 months behind schedule. None of that had anything to do with the F-35's core capabilities. For comparison, the F-35 has lower production costs than the non-stealth F-15EX which is based on a 50 year old airframe, but it has a 30% higher flight hour cost, and the program cost is 100X for 20X airframes.

This sort of botched procurement has caused terrible issues for multiple military projects, such as the Navy's failed Constellation-class frigate program, or the Army's immediate cancellation of the M10 Booker. These aren't masterpieces built for the wrong war, these are failures at producing what was intended. One has to wonder how you can mess up Epiphone guitar production so bad you accidentally wind up with a Stradivarius. It does not bode well for the orchestra.

The American military is a jobs program for defense contractors. They build the most expensive thing possible because they know we will pay for it, and that we'll just keep increasing our military budget. They build for war with nuclear-equipped, highly developed nations, specifically because the smaller nations aren't a threat to us. So when we do decide to go knock out a smaller nation, we don't have the warfighting capability to tackle a small nation. When we try to blockade with our ships, a single drone can do so much damage that the ship is useless, so we don't use them. They aren't practical for anything other than launching inland sorties. And we have a relatively small infantry, so we can't fight big land wars.

And the military is corrupt. They misplace hundreds of millions of dollars (cash) when they go overseas. The IRS is responsible for finding massive fraud schemes that the military never noticed. Why didn't they notice? Because there's no consequence. The military isn't a business; they can practically write blank checks with taxpayer dollars, and if they lose the money, what're we gonna do, fire them? Same for contractors. They can overcharge us or build faulty weapon systems/vehicles/etc, and it's not like we have 10 alternatives around the corner.

One of the authors is a retired general, so he probably knows a bit more than us internet randos. Still, the last paragraph says: "The lesson of the Iran campaign is that the F-35 performed superbly in exactly the kind of fight it was built for." I feel like it's hard to gainsay the utility of the F-35 when it's useful in a real war we're actually in.

The author's main argument against the F-35 is that it can be easily destroyed on runways now, as drones and missile developments have outpaced missile defense, leaving the US and US allies vulnerable to a preemptive strike by China.

That might be true, but it's also strategically valuable to diminish the military capabilities of allies of China (e.g. the Iranian theocracy), which may make up for the tactical weaknesses of the F-35 against China in a direct confrontation. It's also possible that drone/missile defense will catch up (e.g. lasers), but that's hard to say at this point.

So none of them lost on ground in Iran.

No US ship was to my knowledge even hit by a drone/missle.

Iran has been prepping forever for this with Russian/Chinese equipment.

This sounds identical to previous arguments I saw of how hard it would be for US to beat Iran in open conflict. China is different but comparing theoretical ability with reality is different also.

The only reality we have as of now is that f35 completely dominated the enemy on every single front. It's insane to see discussions like these when we just witnessed one of histories greatest showcases of technological dominance.

There is no technology or method in this conflict that would have changed the current state. If a nation wants to toss cheap drones at you there's basically nothing that can be done. Another example is US blockade, without something that can take an F35 down there is actively nothing Iran or China could do to prevent a complete crippling of their country.