Which is more reliable in combat? 100,000 $50 AK-47s with unlimited cheap ammo, or a $5,000,000 dollar whiz-bang net-centric, hyper-accurate electronic sighted, GPS enabled, tight toleranced, 3-D printed, precision machined, ultra light weight rifle with very expensive self tracking and guided ammo?
Who wins a air battle between 25 F-35s with 4 missiles each or an opponent who has 500 aircraft that can outrun the F-35s but only have machine guns with 1000 rounds each?
Put your money on the F-35s if you dare.
Using the reliability of the AK-47 as a benchmark for modern combat aircraft is an exercise in futility. Imagine if you had one decent belt-fed machine-gun at Gettysburg. Would it matter which side had the more reliable musket? Technology eventually drives tactics - not the other way around. This is true no matter how much resistance the old guys put up.
On today’s battlefield or airspace - technology wins. If they can’t see ours, but we can see and track theirs they will lose. Period. Dogfights are as antiquated as advancing in a line with muskets across open terrain. We went into WWII with a Navy totally committed to the battleship. We came out completely committed to aircraft carriers and submarines. The tactics were set, but technology changed everything. Today the aircraft with the best computers, radar, and missiles wins and few very planes would ever get close enough to ours to “switch to guns.”
The evolution of warfare never stops. As robotics and AI become more common the wealthiest nations will become even more powerful. That is my best guess.
“...Who wins a air battle between 25 F-35s with 4 missiles each or an opponent who has 500 aircraft that can outrun the F-35s but only have machine guns with 1000 rounds each?...”
Wrong comparison. But it illustrates a mindset Americans cannot shake free of, one that went out circa 1800: the militia mindset. The conceit that sufficient masses of citizens, armed with flintlocks and bursting with republican virtue (the small-r sort) but otherwise untrained and unorganized, can best any invader. A holdover from victory in AWI, and the no-clear-win rematch that was the War of 1812. Most of it was dumb luck, with a dash of strategic imagination.
When I wrote that quality beats quantity, I was not writing about one-one-one with same-type armaments.
F-35s (and a number of aircraft of slightly earlier generation) will eradicate any opposing fighter force because they will (if developed correctly) be equipped with capabilities no earlier combat aircraft possess. Doesn’t matter how many, how fast they can fly, nor the size of their ammunition load. It will be over before they are even aware the F-35s have arrived.
It’s the wrong comparison for other reasons: no fighter enters air combat one-on-one without ground control (though no fighter pilot can admit it); hasn’t been the case since before 1940. No matter how speedy, no matter how maneuverable, no matter how many guns it lifts of any caliber, a single fighter is helpless.
Who wins any air-to-air encounter? Whoever gets the drop on the other guy. Another truth fighter pilots are loathe to admit. Only about three percent of the average engagement is the visual-contact, hard-turning portion. It make no sense to design a fighter to exploit that segment, if it has no capability to fight during the other 97 percent (though you can watch the execrable Pierre Sprey claim the opposite, a couple times a week on American Heroes Channel and Smithsonian Channel. He also takes credit for designing the F-16, which he didn’t. Not really a standout in terms of the fighter mafia and their propensity to tell fibs).
If NATO had gone into battle with neutron warheads, it would not have mattered how many Red Army soldiers were swarming across the Oder-Neisse Line with their Kalashnikovs (decent ones cost more than $50.00, by the way).
In similar vein, no militia armed with flintlocks - nor Garands, nor even M14s - is going to meet with much success if ICBMs rain down on their heads.
That’s the edge quality enjoys, over quantity.