At a time when top shelf Iranian missles cost only $1 million, can they even fight the enemy to a draw? Can we really knock out 300 of their best before one of these F-47’s takes a hit?
I figure this:
Our conventional weapons and tactics are obsolete. Fighter planes, aircraft carriers, tanks.
So why are we still making them?
To provide high paying defense contractor jobs in CA, VA and OH.
Your assessment is all wrong. First if all, the F-47 isn’t going to just fly lazy circles over Iran or somewhere else, just waiting for the enemy to take 300 missile shots at it. Tactics matter. And even our oldest stealth aircraft, the B-2 and F-22, are still pretty much immune to being targeted. It’s one thing to detect that a stealth aircraft is in the area, but it’s an entirely different matter to try to hold a radar lock on it long enough to fire at it, and that’s if you’re able to lock onto it at all.
And that’s for existing stealth aircraft. The F-47 will be a generational leap beyond that in minimizing radar cross section, as well as infrared emissions. Something else you miss in your analysis is that we only need stealth aircraft in the early days of a war, to penetrate heavily defended airspace and take out the air defenses. Once that is achieved, we are able to use much larger numbers of fourth generation non-stealth, or minimally stealth aircraft, such as F-16s, F-15s, and F/A-18s to pound the enemy once the stealth aircraft have ensured that they can no longer do anything about it. That’s why the Pentagon is now procuring large numbers of newly-built, heavily upgraded F-15s, in the form of the F-15EX.
The overall strategy is vastly more complex than just “build $300 million stealth airplanes and hope they don’t get shot down by cheap missiles”
True, todays stealth aircraft are mostly invisible, up until they open doors to drop a package of bombs and missiles.
That’s when enemy radar picks them up and opens fire.
Realistically, the F-47 is not a ‘fight Iran’ platform, although it could.
It was built to deter, and if needed, fight the CCP.