| ▲ | 9cb14c1ec0 11 hours ago |
| To be clear, that F35 was being incredibly careless, flying low in broad daylight. All the stealth features of an aircraft are useless if you can look at it with your own eyes. In any conflict with China, F35s would not be flown that way. |
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| ▲ | pjc50 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| In a direct conflict with China, the ICBM exchange would destroy the F35s on the ground. |
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| ▲ | elzbardico an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | There won't be a direct conflict with China, at least not in the last 10 years, because the US first needs to complete de-coupling his economy from China more, re-industralize in-shore or at least near-shore, and dramatically build up its military and logistic capabilities to fight an expeditionary campaign on China shores. China also is not stupid, and no matter how much they posture, they won't invade Taiwan. | |
| ▲ | mrguyorama 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | China doesn't seem to think so. China believes they need to fight those F35s in the air. Why would the opening salvo be ICBMs? | | |
| ▲ | don_esteban 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | To deny the US the use of any nearby airfields (Okinawa, several others in Japan an Philippines). This will limit US airpower to carriers, which are few and sinkable. Of course, China wants to be able to fight those F35s in the air - to mitigate the damage they can do to them (while the F35s still have airfield/carriers to land on) - also in order to make it easier to sink those carriers. Still, you can bet that all US nearby airfields would be peppered very early in the conflict. |
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| ▲ | iso1631 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You're holding it wrong? How many cheap-ass drones could you buy for the cost of one F35. 100k? A million? |
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| ▲ | breppp 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | None of these reached Israel from Iran this war, so maybe their superior quantity is not enough | | |
| ▲ | don_esteban 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Iran does not have a million of them, the numbers they have are better utilized on targets in Gulf states. If Iran launched 10000 Shaheds towards Isreal, you can be sure quite a few would get by. Maybe Ukrainian drone interceptors can be made cheap enough to be good enough against massed Shaheds. We are still early in the new paradigm, there will be significant developments. | | |
| ▲ | fpoling 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | APKWS interceptor is about 35K USD and works much better than drone-based interceptors. The problem is to scale the production, training and deployment. Another problem is detection. One needs wast multilayered system that US military missed to build as big stationary radars are very hard to defend. |
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| ▲ | nerfbatplz 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| To be clear, Trump announced that the US had destroyed Iran's air defenses, missiles and missile launch capabilities. Trump also said that the US enjoyed air supremacy over Iran and were flying when and where they wished. Maybe one of these days we'll see a B-52 take off with JDAMs and not JASSMs but probably not, kind of scary to try and drop gravity bombs on a country that your stealth fighters can't fly over. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tohttYlvFvU |
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