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Comment by scarier | Hacker News Reader

>Now, the US military is struggling with the "Fighter Mafia", which tends to run the USAF despite the ascendancy of drones and the usefulness of the A-10.

Duuuuude, the Fighter Mafia was active in like the '60s and '70s, and some of its members were involved in the design of the A-10 (in line with their strong advocacy against multirole aircraft). Do you have any evidence that current USAF strategic policy is dictated by the fighter community? Fighter pilots have lamented the loss of "l'audace" for decades, but despite their bravado I don't think any of them really believe that they deserve absolute strategic primacy.

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There was a recent story about the Air Force trying to kill off one of their most cost effective aircraft, whether that's evidence of a "fighter mafia" or not is debatable, but it does show the USAF's proclivity for expensive high-tech over cost effective platforms.

https://taskandpurpose.com/news/air-force-reaper-drone-retir...

The MQ-9 Reaper is cost effective for counter insurgency missions but it requires reliable high-bandwidth remote control data links to operate. In any conflict with a peer adversary they will shoot down the communications satellites and jam other links, making such drones mostly useless.

Which is why they will become autonomous…

Perhaps someday, but for now that's science fiction. Autonomous vehicles can only perform a very narrow range of missions.

Autonomous drones will be either useless, or equally dangerous to everyone. FoF is gonna be a crapshoot

They have enough rockets equipped with ASAT weapons to destroy the Starlink satellites ? All 40 000 of them (planned, about 2500 already in orbit)?

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/12/spacex-prepares-for-air-forc...

Shooting down just a few dozen satellites will produce kessler syndrome, there will be no satellites or spacecraft for anyone for decades.

Also, you don't even have to shoot them, there is jamming

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

some of its members were involved in the design of the A-10 (in line with their strong advocacy against multirole aircraft).

That was John Boyd, the fighter jock's fighter jock. He pushed for both the F-16, for air-to-air combat, and the A-10, for after the F-16 has cleared the sky.

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