@val70 Yes the tech that goes into the modern fighter is incredibly expensive. Is it worth it? Never sure. If China can use a $2000 missile to take out your 1/4 billion dollar F 35......

@val70 three F-16s in the last year or so would be outstanding asset preservation especially in a combat zone.
Well done Ukraine! 👏🏻
Operation Spiderweb alone took out 40 of the barbarians' aircraft 😂😂

@hippyjoe1955 Yeah. A carrier born fighter that doesn’t perform in wet weather. I’ve seen more reliable paper planes.

@AdmiralPrune And if you bump the wheels on the ground it shuts off your flight controls? Did the designers ever hear of "touch and goes"?

@hippyjoe1955 Yes I read that too. You’d expect a VTOL aircraft to have robust undercarriage and control surfaces.

@ninalanyon True, Ukraine has proved that.

@ninalanyon The answer is somewhere between yes and no. It is really just in the last year that Russia has developed a jet powered version of a drone that can hunt a jet. This will make it much much more difficult for Close Air Support jets so the days of something like an A-10 warthog in contested airspace is probably going to go away. Partly because they would be more at risk and because you can swarm armour with $400 DJI drones with an artillery shell zip tied to it.

Although prop based CAS aircraft will likely still be useful, and cost effective. Ironically slower prop planes have proven to be pretty good at patrolling for drones. Ukraine has had some success with a WW2 trainer by mounting a machine gun in the back seat and patrolling around potential targets.

Russia has found success using flying boats to hunt naval drones in the Black Sea.

As for stealth that is becoming more and more irrelevant by the day and both Russia and China can already track F35s for sure and it is only a matter of time before they are as easy to shoot down as a Mig 21 or F4.

As radars are improved to find small plastic drones finding stealth jets will become easier. So spending 10 times the cost on one trick makes no sense.

Stealth bombers will likely become less relevant. The US developed them because alot of their nuclear deterrent are variations on 1950s gravity bombs that you have to basically sneak right over the target to drop. The US has not developed an ICBM since the 70s.

And as seen in Russia and even with the B52 strategic bombers are largely becoming large, long range missile platforms where stealth is irrelevant.

Strike Aircraft are changing to use glide bombs and now shooting at things 40 KM away they can't even see.

Jets are not going away but we will likely see another big shakeup of what various aircraft types are used for.


2 aircraft types that could be in trouble is large, slow cargo planes that are easy targets for drones. That is also why in Ukraine the only airborne part of their airborne units on both sides are now drone operators.

Jumping from a cargo plane is kind of suicidal these days.


The Chinese have created a proof of concept with the first drone cargo plane but that could cause potential issues is enemy EW figures out how to jam your entire heavy lift fleet.



The second is tankers. Slow, big and flying in predictable patterns will become a turkey shoot which will make refuelling a mess.

My guess is we might see a return to the old Soviet approach of machine guns mounted on their large slow planes again.

@Elessar Yes it’s a very interesting project.