planes don't dogfight, they lock-in targeting from miles away and fire missiles
If attacking, it could definitely circumvent older planes (but newer drones, maybe not so much). If defending against an attacking force, it doesn't seem all that effective.
My point is, at $3-4 million each (or $2-3 million as I saw in some sources, which I included in another comment here, that's still 20+ of these drones to to each F-35 in equivalent cost. So:
- Can the F-35 actually mount enough long-range weaponry to attack 22 separate targets?
- Do the drones even need to have an equivalent sensor suite in every instance? If defending, there may be ground stations with expensive sensor packages to help to coordinate. If attacking, the impetus is on the F-35 to destroy or render all units incapable of carrying our their mission. Destroying most of them and retreating without confrontation is useful only inasmuch as it prevents the attackers mission success, or lessens its impact.
That said, given the information you presented above about the F-35 being a drone coordinator, that makes it a much more useful and effective weapon in my eyes. If it can basically act as a force multiplier for the drones by providing a much more effective sensor suite, and coordinate them so it's like one large attack vehicle, then that's providing the benefits of both types while minimizing the downsides of each. For example, I would imagine an F-35 + 20 drones would be much more effective and deadly than either two F-35's or 40 drones.
In some ways, it's a lot like how Aircraft carriers worked in the beginning of or just before WWII. Having one in a battle group provided a much larger scouting range, and the ability to harass or incapacitate some types of enemy prior to the battle group arriving (they shifted more into an attack role as the war got under way, is my understanding. Prior to that there wasn't a lot of practical experience in using them in engagements).
Warning: Command is less of a game and more of a battlefield simulator and has a very steep learning curve if you're not used to the systems and tactics required to deploy modern combat power. I've been 'playing' it for years and without my background I'd have a very tough time. I can still only really play NATO scenarios as I'm not familiar enough with Chinese or Russian systems to use them effectively.
One or both adversaries can escape.. it can happen in seconds with two supersonic aircraft.
It's not like a video game where they exist in a modeled world where no one else is around and they both have unlimited fuel and radar works perfectly, etc..
If the two fighters "merge" at 600kts each and keep going they'll be 20 miles apart in 1 minute.
If one of them decides to light the afterburners and accelerates to 1000kts and go supersonic to escape the other one has to turn around and try to accelerate to catch up.
Not easy. The harder the chaser turns around the more speed they'll bleed off, and the more time it will take to reaccelerate. If they turn a wider circle they'll be further away and have more distance to make up.
Meanwhile the plane that has decided to "exit" might have flown into the cover of friend AAA/SAM sites or friendly fighters.
If you start talking about swarms of supersonic drones instead of an enemy fighter then suddenly the drones sound awfully expensive.
Which is mostly useless if the one escaping is in a defending role. Good job saving the aircraft and pilot. Unfortunately your adversary is now clear to proceed to the actual target.
In war, it doesn't just matter which soldier is better. It matters how quickly they can get to where they are going, how many of them you have to field, and whether they are defending or attacking, and whether they can be easily detected while moving. Different attributes have different values in different circumstances, but being able to field an order of magnitude or more covers up a lot of downsides.
What's more powerful, 1000 trained soldiers with combat gear and automatic rifles, or 10,000 conscripted citizens with hunting rifles? It depends on the specific circumstances.
Even in an attacking role, if you're still able to be denied actual air superiority over your target after you run out of missiles (i.e. because you're unwilling or unable to dogfight and clean up the rest of the enemy's air assets), then congrats, mission failed, we'll get 'em next time.
Which led to the huge, gun-less American fighters of the 1960s, the epitome of which was the F-4 Phantom II (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-4_Phantom_...).
Which led to embarrassingly bad kill/loss ratios over Vietnam (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-4_Phantom_...), when those big, porky fighters went up against smaller, more nimble, gun-still-included Russian planes like the MiG-17 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-17).
Which led to guns being hurriedly added back on to the F-4s, first in an external pod mounted on a hardpoint, and then internally on later production models.
Which led to the development of training programs to teach dogfighting skills like the Naval Fighter Weapons School at Miramar (the school immortalized in the 1986 film Top Gun), because it turned out that the conventional wisdom had sunk in so deeply that a whole generation of American fighter pilots didn't know how to fight with a gun, even when they had one.
Which led to the Lightweight Fighter Program (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_Fighter_program), an effort to use the lessons learned in Vietnam to design a maneuverable, gun-included dogfighter affordable enough to produce in volume.
Which led to the development of two new fighters, the F-16 Fighting Falcon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-16_Fighting...) and the F/A-18 Hornet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F/A-18_Horne...), both of which have been hugely successful in service and make up the bulk of the US Air Force and Navy's fighter forces to this day.
But the people who learned those hard lessons over Vietnam are all retired or dead now, so when people say "planes don't dogfight" nobody challenges it.
Which is how the conventional wisdom of the 1950s becomes conventional wisdom all over again.
The lessons of vietnam you cite really aren't as you claim. The gun was never the issue -- really poor missiles may have been. Better missiles fixed the problem, not the gun.
This does, of course, beg the question: how well would an F-35 do in a conflict with restrictive rules of engagement, such as might be found in future US-Iraq/Afghanistan-style conflicts.
The thing is though, if history is any indication, wars so total as to have completely permissive RoEs aren't the wars that we actually ever fight. Even if you imagine a war with a full-on peer competitor like Russia or China, it's not hard to imagine scenarios where RoEs are restricted in an effort to keep the scope of the conflict from widening -- an important consideration when both sides have nuclear weapons!
So I think the general point still stands. If the balloon ever goes up on World War III, we probably won't see a lot of dogfighting. But there's a whole spectrum of conflicts underneath that, and building an air force entirely around fighters that can't handle the rest of that spectrum at least competently is going to be a problem.
So the argument is that a small number of high performance fighters like the F-35 could very well not be a good match for a huge number of drones that individually are a fraction of the price.
the analogy sort of breaks down at this point.
It's not entirely analogous to the current discussion, because there's not really a commensurate difference in maneuverability of F-35 to the drones, but other similarities persist.