Which plane, exactly, is superior to the F-35?
Realistically for Switzerland these aircraft are basically 9/11 prevention and national penis-enlargers, so any modern jet would do the trick (subject to politics i.e. no Sukhois).
If by "unmanned combat aerial vehicle" you mean a missile, maybe. Up to a point fighter planes get faster as they get larger. Any "drone" that could go toe-to-toe with the F-35 is going to be around the same size and look roughly the same. But more significantly, the F-35 is a stealth fighter that serves primarily as a sensor platform for long-range weaponry. The premise that it would find itself in a dogfight is not realistic.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kratos_XQ-58_Valkyrie
I agree that dogfighting is irrelevant and unrealistic.
That said, it's kinematically and aerodynamically superior, but that's not very important nowadays.
The B-52's are still in service after 60+ years, with pretty much everything upgraded several times over.
For close air support the A-10 is vastly superior.
The F-35 is an employment program like the TSA.
The F-35's k/d ratio since that dogfight in 2015, when pilots were just figuring the plane out:
15-1
https://www.businessinsider.com/f-35-once-beaten-by-f-16s-sh...
> Since then, the F-35 has mopped up in simulated dogfights with a 15-1 kill ratio. According to retired Lt. Col. David Berke, who commanded a squadron of F-35s and flew an F-22 — the US's most agile, best dogfighter — the jet has undergone somewhat of a revolution.
It could easily be something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002#Exer... where the contest was tweaked until the correct outcome happened.
Examples: the wiki article mentions small boats. As in about the size of your average fishing boat. No, not your commercial fishing boat, your weekend fisherman fishing boat (Boston Whaler). And it would be carrying a conventional Soviet era anti-ship missile, weighing some 3 tons. This is not only enough to swamp the boat, but launching the missile would result in the boat turning into shrapnel. Or it mentions motorcycle couriers. But the sim wasn't setup to include the latency they involved, so he got effectively instant, unjammable comms.
There were simulation issues, like the Blue Force navy showed up teleported into being next to the coast, due to model limitations. Due to the fact that the real life location of this was in fact a very busy set of air and sea lanes, Blue Force navy also started with no defensive capabilities.
And of course, the whole point isn't for the red team to sink the blue force, but to see how the blue force can adapt to the red team during an amphibious/airborne invasion. It doesn't do much good to have tens of thousands of guys sitting around doing nothing because their ship got "blown up" or their landing zone got covered in "chemical weapons". MC2002 wasn't just a couple guys in a room doing a war game. It involved real ships, real people, real aircraft, and real money.
https://www.navalgazing.net/Millennium-Challenge-2002 https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/4qfoiw/mil...
Vastly superior for providing CAS in uncontested airspace against enemies that struggle to acquire MANPADS, let alone a modern air defense network or their own air force, perhaps.
But the argument is that the US military should be designed for fighting the biggest plausible enemy, and that's Russia or China, not goat herders in Afghanistan. A major inefficiency in counterinsurgent air support is expensive and survivable, using A-10s against a major threat isn't.
Other factors also reduce vulnerability. MANPADS are essentially never radar-seeking for reasons of physics; they do not have a large enough diameter to carry a proper forward-looking antenna at radio frequencies. The A-10 has some redundancy and armor, and the MANPADS have very small payloads, so hitting a single engine isn't going to doom the aircraft. The A-10 is normally flown in a way that avoids dangerous exposure, with complicated undulating movement that would break an IR seeker lock. (now you see the engines... and now you don't) The A-10 doesn't have to fly alone against an enemy. Pairing it with the EA-18G Growler would be a decent idea.
Once you consider the enemy to be an advanced country, the standards for acceptable losses change. You're speaking of World War III. Look back to the bomber pilots of World War II to see what is accepted. At times, typical survival for a pilot was a month. In war with an advanced country, 1:1 loss ratios are to be expected.
It does not do anything approaching "fine" against modern air-defense emplacements. Or against air-to-air missiles, whether radar guided or infrared. (those engine-hiding undulations won't do much against an all-aspect missile from the front)
And while accepting 1:1 losses against a peer state in a war might be the reality, I'm pretty sure the A-10 wouldn't manage such a record in hostile airspace. (That's if you count "tanks" or "infantry" on the opposite side of the ledger, of course - purely air to air the A-10 would lose to the average 3rd gen fighter as far as I'm aware)
In hostile airspace, the EA-18G Growler brings the AGM-88 HARM, assuming those modern air-defense emplacements haven't already been hit by cruise missiles.
Plans for war get ruined upon contact with the enemy. Pessimists will assume that friendly plans get ruined, while optimists will assume that enemy plans get ruined. Asset diversity helps everything except logistics. Success or failure of a reasonable weapon system (the A-10, not knights on horseback) is far from certain. All sorts of unexpected factors come into play.
Not to mention "this plane works fine if we get the Navy to do the hard part first" is going to go over well with a rather limited subset of Air Force personel. (The Air Force has wild weasels too - generally F-16s though I believe the F-35 is planned for that role in the future)
What kind of combat?
If an F-35 actually makes it to a merge somethings gone wrong, and reports vary wildly https://www.businessinsider.com/f-35-vs-f-16-15-18-lost-beat...
Ultimately a lot of F-35 hysteria seems to derive from it being the first US aircraft developed entirely post-internet where news travels quickly - i.e. If your projects early tests and teething problems were being reported on publicly by everyone you'd probably look fairly bad too.
That's not to say the F-35 is flawless in any way, but these conversations usually end up in a reductive cycle of arguments we can't know the answer too without security clearance.