This isn't a new weapon, this is a test platform for various ideas, none of which are new or secret. Also, there are not many groundbreaking advancements left in military aviation. Most are just fairly incremental engineering or manufacturing improvements. (Military space technology might be a different story, though.)

The only other nation with the potential to develop a high-tech military plane that could rival US technology would be China. But if we ever got into a war with China, they wouldn't need superior technology to win. They could win via superior manufacturing capacity and the sheer number of people they can draft into service at a moment's notice.

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logicchains 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>They could win via superior manufacturing capacity and the sheer number of people they can draft into service at a moment's notice.

Even with their manufacturing capacity they don't have remotely enough boats to get a nontrivial fraction of those people to the US mainland, and the majority of those people can't swim, so they wouldn't help in taking the US mainland, a requirement to "win" a serious war. Their entire armed forces is also almost completely lacking in combat experience, and in their last skirmish (against some unarmed Indian soldiers in the mountains) 30+ soldiers Chinese tragically drowned, due to the aforementioned lack of swimming ability.

	▲	wewtyflakes 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		How China frames victory and how the US frames victory needn't agree, and likely wouldn't. That being said, framing victory as only counting if there is a wholesale land invasion seems odd, as I suspect neither side would want to actually do that... so who 'wins'?

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foobarian 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They could just cease all shipping. The consequences would be legendary.

	▲	jiggawatts 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't know why you're being downvoted because clearly modern warfare is as much (or more) about the economic warfare aspect as the military one. There are some rather bizarre examples such as Gaza attacking Israel, despite getting something like 50% of their electricity and 10% of their fresh water from Israel! Attacking the supplier of critical civilian and industrial inputs would seem like a mistake nobody in their right mind would make, but... there you go. I wouldn't be surprised if a future conflict with China over Taiwan would be primarily economic. They threaten to stop shipping, we threaten to cut off the Internet and their banking, etc... Similarly, the most knowledgeable experts are predicting that China's strategy with Taiwan will be to simply blockade the island and wait for them to capitulate. Last but not least, this is also Iran's current strategy. By halting shipping through the Straight of Hormuz, they're waging war on the global economy much more effectively than bombing a few small military air strips in the region.