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Comment by garbthetill | Hacker News Reader

I still think US military tech is king, especially their fighter jets. eu countries cancelling or regrets is just geopolitics pandering

fighter jets are unicorns on the same level as chips you cant just procure 3nm chips tomorrow because you want too. I'm not super knowledgeable on them, but its interesting to see how difficult maintaining and making new gens are for example gripens still rely on US engine, china relies on Russian engines etc and the US seems to be always ahead

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Perhaps. But the US is less and less capable of producing them. Especially since the tariffs back-and-forth with China that lead to an exports control on rare earth minerals. Even before that, US manufacturers were consistently under-delivering and behind schedule on orders

Not to mention there are key areas that the US is widely considered to be behind on (e.g. hypersonic glide vehicles and drones) compared to the "Second World" powers. And there's been lots of talk—even from within the US—that drones have become more important to modern warfare than manned jets.

When you procure a 3nm chip you expect to keep it working as well as when you bought it, even if you block the management engine for privacy.

When you buy a fighter plane you should expect to not be able to fly for the full duration of a single conflict the manufacturing country disagrees about.

Right: A powerful jet that can not be flown for lack of replacement-parts is worse than a mediocre jet that actually operates.

We've made great strides in reliability over the years, but planes are anything but solid-state like integrated CPUs are.

Forget parts. Mission's can't be flown. Look up Mission Data Files and F35 Partner Support Complexes.

Lack of MDFs does not mean that you can't fly missions. It's an intelligence product that assists with mission planning. That's like saying your car is completely unusable if the builtin maps are a few years out of date.

Ukranian hackers know how to hack John Deere tractors.. hah, downloading files from a Ukranian web forum to install on your F-35 would be very dystopian cyberpunk.

> When you procure a 3nm chip you expect to keep it working as well as when you bought it

This seems like it’s being revisited.

https://www.theverge.com/news/719697/nvidia-ai-gpu-chips-den...

People think jets are things that should work even if they aren't supported by the manufacturer. Javelin and patriot don't work that way? How exactly does someone beside the us manage the hydrazine supplychain without usa logistics?

F-35s parked on the runway because the tangerine clown told LM to withhold this week's software update is a lot less useful than a squadron of 4th gen fighters in the air chock a block full of state-of-the-art missiles.

US military tech is best but European stuff is pretty functional.

“Best” but you’re going to spend millions per missile system to have “the best”.

Israel quickly found out when trying to shoot down “cheap” $30k Iranian drones.

> US military tech is best

Do we know this to be true still? There's a lot of new modern equipment that other countries have that have not gone head-to-head against to really know that any more.

I'd say it's not true, not in all aspects. Ukraine for example is better at drone production and defence

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