When we'll reach this inflection point with jet fighters?
I remain skeptical that the F-35 will prove to be a prudent expenditure of resources both financial and in terms of R&D.
I remain skeptical that the F-35 will prove to be a prudent expenditure of resources both financial and in terms of R&D.
They are in effect the specced-down mass production version of the F-22 and are comparable in terms of cost relative to similar fifth generation fighters (and even comparable to many fourth generation fights) but go toe to toe with or outperform the competition.
This stacks the deck such that the F-35 will be a peer to or superior to any "opposition" aircraft or anti-air weapon system while the US keeps the F-22 around to serve as a dogfighter that is reserved for fighting the rare circumstance of something that's legitimately a threat to an F-35.
Drones that can do that are called “anti-aircraft missiles”.
Are you absolutely certain that there's no other way to take down modern fighter aircraft?
Like isn't that the lesson from the Ukraine war w.r.t. tanks? That there are cheaper, more effective tools out there to take out state of the art equipment.
We have many drones much cheaper than an f35 that can do this already. They're called AIM-9, AIM-120, Meteor. Or if you're Russian they're called R77, or R73.
These are, of course, anti-aircraft missiles.
Why or why not?
For another, R&D: we've been working on fast autonomous flying vehicles to take down aircraft for decades: as the poster above keeps explaining, they're called AA missiles, and are extremely expensive, and even still have a hard time actually hitting a plain. Drones are an innovation in fighting tanks because they are much more maneuverable than traditional AT weapons and thus can more easily find chinks in the tank's armor. You could have always used the extreme maneuverability of AA rockets to hit those same chinks in the armor, but the cost was too high; drones were cheaper. AA rockets are extremely cost effective against plains though, as those jets are monumentally more expensive than a tank.
So essentially you can't see an F-35 until it is already lined up to kill you. That tends to make it pretty difficult to hit it.
An air-to-air missile is essentially a single-use drone
And barring some big advance, an air-to-air missile can't be any smaller than it is currently. It needs to carry enough explosive to damage the target aircraft, and it needs enough fuel to travel at supersonic speeds for a long enough distance to actually intercept the target.
That's the lesson from drones vs tanks.
Not sure what this has to do with my claims about not being able to use cheap drones for taking down fighter jets. Military ships, like tanks, are also somewhat slower and somewhat less maneuverable than fighter jets, I believe.
They will absolutely replace modern fighters to a degree and already have to an extent, like we've seen in Ukraine with drones serving as close infantry support etc. instead of manned aircraft.
There are still some things "cheap" drones won't be able to do.
Specifically, if you want to carry big bombs and missiles, you need a large aircraft even if it's unmanned. The drone is also presumably going to need to be able to survive enemy air defenses to some extent. So you wind up with a big expensive drone like the MQ-9 Reaper ($30mil plus, lol) that is approaching the size and complexity of a manned fighter.
Also, and I'm not sure if this is what you meant, but "small, cheap drones" are not likely to be shooting down modern fighters in the way that small cheap drones are currently killing tanks directly.
If you want an aircraft that can fly at mach 1.6+ and shoot missiles at other things (some of them stealthy) traveling at mach 1.6+, you are going to wind up with something fairly close to the size/cost/complexity of an F-35 even if you don't have a human being sitting inside.
A starship already costs around 90 million USD at cost (estimated based on parts cost currently) and is intended to cost around 10 million USD per launch commercially if it's able to be reused regularly.
And a single launch could carry a lot of bombs (like 50-400 based on the size). So on the high end after factoring in the cost of the bombs, amortising the cost of the initial orbital platform, and assuming a higher cost of like 120 million USD for a single launch, that would still almost certainly come out cheaper than sacrificing an MQ-9 or a much more expensive missile. And of course if you can get that cost down to 10 million USD per launch then other than artillery, that's going to be the cheapest way to deliver ordinance to any location in the world by far (after factoring in the cost of flight time for jets, etc).
However it’s interesting to compare the F35 program to the alternative of producing several hundred F22s, or some other stealth solution.
And importantly, the US wants to export the F-35 but keep the F-22 close to chest so that should push come to shove, the US can always maintain air superiority.
However, it's unrealistic for them to establish anything like air superiority over the Taiwan Straits. Each carrier has fewer than 100 aircraft, and only a couple can be deployed to the region at a time. The opposing PLAAF has over 2000 combat aircraft including hundreds of stealth planes.
For the US to be competitive such a contest they need planes that are qualitatively better than the Chinese ones by a huge margin. American advantages in stealth, missile range and avionics are essential just to stay in the game.
Instead, the retrospective will likely be: "I guess we should now build drones in addition to our jet fighter." Double the effort, half the efficiency, half the result.
If we use the Ukraine war as a template for the next major war that the US faces (possibly against China) -- does the United States have the industrial capability to produce the tens to hundreds of millions of drones necessary to win?
Like can it produce the propellers, the frames, the motors, the batteries, the ICs to make a FPV drone that blows up in an enemy soldiers face?
Can that supply chain be made in the US and how long can will it take to make?
Is this a priority for the United States? Why or why not?
Yes
> Can that supply chain be made in the US and how long can will it take to make?
In a limited capacity yes but also in like 5 or so years the answer will be an unequivocal yes.
How independent would TSMC's American foundries be if cut off and forced to operate autonomously if US/China war breaks out?
I am sure that the goal is full independence but I have no idea what the current state of that is, what the state of it will be in 5-10 years etc.
Most are much smaller and more specialised/less automated so they don't have the same kind of production but there are a lot of fabs in the US and a lot of fab knowledge. Of all the countries, the US is one of the few that could probably survive a semiconductor industry collapse outside.
And many of those semiconductors in cheap FPV drones likely are actually fabbed in the US or could easily be fabbed in the US by Intel, Infineon, Texas Instruments, pSemi, NXP, Bosch, Renesas, Micron, onsemi, Analog Devices, Honeywell, Polar, GlobalFoundaries, Microchip, or Samsung, just to name a few non-military facing companies with significant fab operations in the US.