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Comment by x5n1 | Hacker News Reader

So what. It's not as if the US government is fighting anyone with any real air capability. You could use Vietnam aircraft and still win against the threat.

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Because nations tend to avoid starting wars they'll obviously lose.

If the US military falls behind technologically, other nations might start thinking defeat isn't so obvious any more.

South America isn't invading you any time soon and every other mob has a whopping great pile of water to cross and not much in the way of an active carrier fleet to support it, or they're already your allies.

The only one that falls into your threat category is Russia. Is Russia really about to invade the US at the first sign of air supremacy weakness? You still have enough nukes to cause literal worldwide armageddon 20 times over.

A lot easier to set up no fly zones (World Police) when your planes are a lot better than the competition.

Why even leave a shadow of a doubt that the enemy could win in a dogfight?

I think that's the rationale presented here

It's not about invading the US. It is about challenging their regional dominance. If the US isn't willing or able to commit to defending Japan, Taiwan or Philippines, then Mainland China will be happy to recreate a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere under CCP leadership and to claim the Pacific and Indian Ocean for itself.

While that wouldn't hurt the average American in the short run, the long-term consequences of it in geopolitical terms would be extreme.

considering how much evil was done by US in last 15 years worldwide and how many millions of innocents died/suffer daily just because of lust for money and power, i am perfectly happy with Chinese taking banner of world supreme power for next few decades. side-by-side comparison of last 20-30 years leaves US in shame. I have more trust in Chinese party leaders rather than joke US presidency had become, with all those shady machinations behind the scenes. No, it ain't great either, but definitely lesser of an evil and US is spiraling down faster than ever.

and it was once a beacon of democracy and free world...

also, US has no greater claim to be the ruler of pacific region compared to China. in fact, if you look at the map, opposite is true.

Chinese are much worse than the Americans, though born of the same cloth of Capitalism. Americans ideally rally under freedom, which means they will come fuck you up and then supply enough aid to keep you going and help you rebuild, I mean it's in their corporate interest to do so. Chinese rally under domination, that's their underlying ideology. If they ever start fucking people up, they will probably replace them with more Han Chinese. They are not just in it for the money, they are in it to take over the entire area. See Western Xinjiang province or Tibet.

Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it.

No country's ever been a beacon of democracy and freedom, that's just propaganda. You will not get a world where unconstrained powerful nations do not act amorally. A better hope is that multilateral organizations like the UN and World Court gain more strength and legitimacy.

I agree with you completely, but the US gets a lot of economic muscle from it's force projection. That's one of the hilarious things about Trump's isolationism - if the US pulls back it's military envelope, it'll stop getting all those sweetheart trade deals from other countries. The US itself is safe, but it needs effective force projection.

The US might be tired of playing 'world cop', but it's a role it chose itself, and it's been getting plenty of tasty kickbacks for doing so. I don't have a problem with that - nations have a right to think of themselves first in any deal - but it's still funny that so many people ignore that US military projection heavily protects it's economic muscle.

The problem is, starting military development when a credible threat emerges is far too late. This stuff takes years in the pipeline. If you want it to be ready when you need it, you need to be working on it when you don't need it. (And run the risk of never needing it, and discovered that you wasted years and years of development.)

When was the last time the US won a war against a threat that had comparable capabilities?

1865

1945 if we ignore the little fact it's mostly russians who kicked hitler down, not sure if japanese were in same ballpark with their army

The sheer number of people Russia lost in WWII is staggering. If I recall correctly the number was around 25 Million. Russia deserves so much credit for the defeat of hitler, but you won't hear it in America very often.

America loves to forget that China and Russia were allies in WWII. Or at least Hollywood does.

The US was willing to fight to the last Russian to defeat Hitler ;-)

> It's not as if the US government is fighting anyone with any real air capability.

The problem isn't air superiority (yet). Building a stealth aircaft isn't only about beating some enemy equivalent. The problem mainly, very simplified, is that advanced AA is getting better and more widespread at a faster rate than aircrafts are improving. In order to conduct operations in "denied airspace" you need a combination of stealth aircraft, drones, advanced standoff weapons etc that is becoming increasingly complex and expensive.

Advanced long-range anti air like S-300/400 and similar are becoming so accurate and so long range, that anyone who can field them can effectively deny enormous (country-sized) bits of airspace.

If not even 5th gen stealth aircraft are safe to fly in an airspace then the air superiority will require control of the ground. This changes the way the US can (or can't) project power abroad pretty significantly.

The Danish government have the same issue. The plan is to buy 27 F-35s, but that's not really enough for anything. They are suppose to replace 60 F-16s. Even if the F-35 is as good as it's claimed, and the Russians are coming, I think you'd be better of with twice the number of some less advanced planes.

At this point it's fair to say that anyone waiting on F-35 would have been better served by just ordering more Warthogs.

Serious question: at what point in the entire F-35 development process was that _not_ true?

Right at the start the F35 programme looked like the sensible choice and the F22 was perceived as a ludicrous expensive pointless prestige project.

Then the F35 got Christmas treed to death.

Well, the F22 is still fairly pointless, isn't it? The JSF/F35 is a joke, obviously as well.

The F-22 is the best high altitude air superiority fighter in existence. It's ludicrously expensive and it is ludicrously over capable for the actual missions it flies but it did completely achieve it's role specification.

Not it you need to replace F-16s and you're only able to afford to operate one type of fighter plane.

Missiles and drones are a lot cheaper than piloted planes, and easier to replace.

And can be launched from much smaller sites which are harder to detect before conflict and destroy in the first minutes.

Airfields are the F-35A's biggest weakness.

Indeed, they are now so expensive that they'll have to be really good. Is one F-35 better than five Su-27 which cost about the same.

To quote Stalin, “Quantity has a Quality All Its Own"

Problem currently (Iraq and Syria) is the Air Force is being only able to run limited sorties against a large number of small targets like pickup trucks with 20mm cannons on the back.

The way to hit an unsophisticated target like that is come at them out of the sun. They won't see or hear you coming.

The problems is that the F-35's ground attack capacity is better suited to destory large hardened targets such as latest MBTs fielded by Russia and China, rather than the small, numerous and arguably unsophisticated technicals or the proverbial dude running with an RPG. It will cost several times more and does not work as well.

Frankly the 1963 B-52Hs are extremely effective at that mission. They can drop enough munitions to level a medium sized city WITHOUT nukes.

For sure. The "flying bomb truck" has looped back around to being extremely powerful for current engagements against insurgents. The F35 is indeed one of those... it just costs 100x more than it should.

While you're doing that, everyone else (who aren't, incidentally, in line with you and the sun) should be firing full auto at a point in front of your aircraft so you fly through a cloud of bullets.

It's pretty hard to do a deflection shot against a target moving 500 mph that you have maybe a second or two to line up on.

Sure, but how many trucks can you field for the cost of one F-35? It only has to work one time out of a hundred, or even one in a thousand.

The main trouble with the F-35 is it is so expensive it can't be risked in actual combat.

They'd be going slower than that for a ground attack. Also, "In the Korean War, our Air Force lost 259 jet aircraft and 285 other aircraft to combined small arms and air defense fire, which is nearly five times as many aircraft that were lost in air-to-air combat. In South Vietnam, we lost 410 fixed-wing aircraft and 2,100 helicopters. In the Mideast War, 36 coalition aircraft were shot down by ground fire." [1].

[1] http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/army/f...

Sure, but the NK and NV armies did have good anti-aircraft setups, likely much more effective than relatively untrained fighters with a weapon designed to shoot at other people with.

Richthofen in WW1 was brought down by a single shot from a rifle, but that is widely considered to be a freak shot.

Nevertheless, you're right that it is never safe to get in range of small arms fire, hence the genesis of the A-10.

F-35 has 180-220 rounds, that's it.

Right, but the better planes are needed for deterrent.

If the money was used instead in financial vehicles for the adversarial countries in question, the created economic codependence would very likely be more effective than this plane

Or on better education... In both sides of the conflicts...

Peace is nice but I wouldn't count on a large amount of trade to end all wars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion

> The Great Illusion is a book by Norman Angell, first published in the United Kingdom in 1909

> Angell argued that war between industrial countries was futile because conquest did not pay. J.D.B. Miller writes: "The 'Great Illusion' was that nations gained by armed confrontation, militarism, war, or conquest."[3] The economic interdependence between industrial countries meant that war would be economically harmful to all the countries involved. Moreover, if a conquering power confiscated property in the territory it seized, "the incentive to produce [of the local population] would be sapped and the conquered area be rendered worthless. Thus, the conquering power had to leave property in the hands of the local population while incurring the costs of conquest and occupation."[3]

...

He was partially right though

> Angell said that arms build-up, for example the naval race that was happening as he wrote the book in the early 1910s, was not going to secure peace. Instead, it would lead to increased insecurity and thus increase the likelihood of war.

That's a pretty old framework. The idea of peace through codependency is AFAIK a bit newer. The biggest problem is that it looks like it could lead to sovereign insolvency which can backfire if it leads to economic calamity and the rise of a political group with an eye on conquest (see Europe 1930s)

As an interesting aside, I'm no fan of wealth inequality. However, if it looks like it's the primary mechanism that is prolonging relative global peace (as in no biological or nuclear weapons being used), I may accept the tradeoff.

There's a balance, to be a bit vulgar, between "alright we need to pay this" and "fuck this debt, we're storming the castle"

Money didn't stop WWI. Britain could not afford the completely batshit insane 3.251.000.000 (thats more than 3 billion) Pound Sterling it paid for the war (in 1900s money)[0]! and there are still bondholders who haven't been paid back, 100 years later.

[0]:http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/zqhxvcw#zy4gjxs

From what the Germans? I thought nuclear weapons were for deterrent.

No, they are for government pork.

A cheap plane would not nearly be as effective.

That's what the F22 is for, no?

The F-22 is, even now, still projected to cost more per aircraft than the F-35. Plus the F-22 cannot be sold internationally for reasons that aren't entirely clear (something about secret technology), whereas the F-35 can.

Isn't it entirely based around the stealth functions of the F-22, and more specifically, their unique application of such? I am pretty sure they fear reverse engineering of the metallic skin; hence why the Senate has pushed for an exportable version.

It's barely more expensive, and it's a way better plane.

If we are going to settle for less than the F-22, then we should just buy the stealth-upgraded F-15. It's cheaper than the F-35.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_F-15SE_Silent_Eagle

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