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Comment by kneebonian | Hacker News Reader

Drones. Sure you can buy a $22 mil next gen stealth fighter to secure air superiority but I can buy 200 drones that cost $2k for 1/100th of the price, launch them from much closer to the battlefield and good luck shooting all of them down to establish your air superiority. Or even better you send in your fancy fighter/bomber combo, I'm going to blanket the effected air with drones programed to move in an erratic and choatic manner and suddenly I just cost you $22 million for something that I paid $100 for.

Remember the Panzer was a better tank than the Sherman, but it didn't matter because the Sherman was cheaper to build and faster to make.

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You wildly underestimate costs. A F-35 costs 85m-125m. NGAD will likely cost similar and won't be affected by most forms of Jamming, unlike current drones which makes them useless. It's only sheer luck that drones work in ukraine due to the meme levels of shit that is the Russian forces. Drones cost around a quarter or less of fighters normally but can't be flown in contested airspace due to jamming with current technology.

> can't be flown in contested airspace due to jamming with current technology

Can't be flown or can't be remotely directed?

Who exactly is flying a drone?

Remote personnel with joysticks.

Alternatives would be self flying or pre-programmed flights.

Jamming seems to something to work around in the latter two use cases.

Both of those require signals to the drone, hard to do if the area is being jammed.

Self flying and preprogrammed do not need signals to the drone. Perhaps you read the comment strand too quickly.

You should check out the NGAD program. It's exactly what you're talking about.

The problem with drones is that they're easily jammed. Ukraine is lucky that Russia has been so incompetent, but I bet the next major conflict has large scale jamming on just about every frequency.

NGAD strikes a balance between drones and manned aircraft.

I don't really like the WWI cavalry analogy, either. The fighters being used in Ukraine are a far cry from what 5th/6th generation technology can achieve. The gulf war is a better example of what happens when you achieve air superiority. It turns out that's really important in modern warfare.

> The gulf war is a better example of what happens when you achieve air superiority. It turns out that's really important in modern warfare.

Not certain if true, as this has been claimed since LeMay but has not lead to victory since 1945. Iraq was not modern, not antique, maybe vintage is the word for them. Iraq and Afghanistan show that despite air and every other material superiority, the home team advantage is psychologically decisive against a non-genocidal alien force. You might even say that WWII proves the rule in that the US made a genocidal show of force.

Is air dominance helpful? Sure. Is it really important in getting to a victory condition? Jury is AWOL.

If one side has stealth fighters up, good luck to the other side in getting those 200 drones near the battlefield.

It's about a 1-2 ratio. F-35 costs around $80m and a single predator drone costs around $40m.

That's not even accounting for the fact that Predators aren't able to realistically be used with S-300/S-400 SAMs sitting everywhere. There's a reason you aren't seeing aircraft near the front unless you're talking about helicopters at or below treetop level. Neither side in this conflict has stealth fighters capable of fighting on the front lines.

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