Also unmatched in cost and rarity. It has been proven many time that quantity is a quality difficult to beat. The US military has been gearing and shifting toward expensive and hard to mass produce war machines. We will see how well a million dollar tank fare against 100k dollars worth of drones. Or what happen when a 10K rocket need a CWIS to take down that cost 50K to shoot.
Sorry, what? These factors balance against each other. If there is a single domain where quality dominates, it’s in the air. American reliance on air superiority is what’s driven this doctrine into places it less applies, like on the ground.
> what happen when a 10K rocket need a CWIS to take down that cost 50K to shoot
Neither is taking down an F-35.
By "proven", I meant this: a while ago, the doctrine was tanks and armored infantry were the deciding factors in wars, until it was no longer so. Yet Germany was still obsessed with overengineering their tanks to the point theirs were the terror of the battlefield and almost unbeatable 1:1 by any other rivals in WW2. It won them many battles, thanked to the superior engineering and untouchable thick armor. But you know how it ended.
Same with Japan. Their battleships were the pride of their nation. Those were impressive and leviathans of the Pacific. Until the US built ships faster than these beast could destroy and you know how it ended.
In a war against peers or near peers, overbuilt tech seemed to weigh down a military more than it helps. They become strategic weapons only used occasionally unless one has the manufacturing capability to mass produce them. But the US doesn't have the steel mills and engine factories it once did. China has them now. And in my opinion, if it comes down to it, China can do to the US what the US and Allies did to Japan and Germany.
The F-35 can win battles, easily, no argument from me there. But a war is different.
>Neither is taking down an F-35.
Maybe someone said that once upon a time about the B52 Stratofortresses until the Vietnamese shot down more than a dozen of them. Powerful war machines have been constantly brought low by hordes of weak and low tech enemies throughout history. I contend that is still the same now.
What we're bad at is asymmetric warfare of the 100:1 and 1000:1, as Iraq and Afghanistan have shown.