It's 1914 all over again.
"Say, Geoffrey, what if, instead of just taking pictures of the mounted cavalry down there, I bring a few grenades to drop on them? Maybe a gun, too!"
$300 Million per plane
3 times the F35
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.
Right........that must be why every combatant in the world who can employ them, does.
Drones and missiles seem to have mostly taken on the role of WW2 carpet bombing. Although, drones are sometimes able to go tank plinking, when the ECM environment allows it.
Aircraft Carriers are used to get aircraft close enough to the combat zone to be useful.
You are not looking at this capability correctly. It’s not 300:1. Our 1 would have a swarm of drones with it, drones that can survive G-forces a pilot cannot and don’t require the weight and equipment to support a pilot. With AI, who knows what such a system could do? What we do know is that the drones would be a lot cheaper and more expendable.
Where this all goes I don’t think anybody knows.
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”
I’ve been watching Palmer Luckey interviews over the past few months, and am hopeful Anduril and others will be able to break the logjam that the bloated incumbents seem to have created of too-expensive weapons.
That’s estimated cost so multiply x 3 and you’ll get a good rough.
The F47 will standoff in the distance and direct unmanned CCA to perform the risky kinetic stuff.
Unless the enemy has superior AI (???)
Yes, tanks, bradleys and troop carriers proved useless against drones.
We shall see if the new Trump class battleship is part of this new AI and drone weapons future
It's 1914 all over again.
"Say, Geoffrey, what if, instead of just taking pictures of the mounted cavalry down there, I bring a few grenades to drop on them? Maybe a gun, too!"
Moreover, using advanced computer programs, the F-47 has already had extensive research and development to make it ready for actual production. This method is also now used successfully in the design and manufacture of civil aircraft.
The cost relationship between civilian and military aircraft is such that, in full production, an F-47 will cost several times what a civilian airliner will cost. This is not out of line with experience since WW II.
$40 trillion in debt.
If F-47 direct drone swarms to annihilate Iran’s missile and launcher production, then the numbers look much better.
However, your analysis is deeply flawed. The calculation using the cost of the Iranian missiles is almost irrelevant. The number to look at is the cost of the destruction and lives lost, and downstream effects the missiles can cause.
Another calculation is the cost of defensive missiles. Patriot batteries typically fire 2 or 3, and sometimes as many as 4 Patriot missiles at an incoming missile - this sometimes depending on the value of the incoming missile’s evident target. If a F-47 + drone swarm and / other munitions it directs from a relatively safe vantage can shellack some enemy missiles B4 deployment or launch, or, again, missile or launcher production, those enemy missiles will never require expensive Patriot launches.
Further, establishing air dominance reduces all sorts of other costs and losses.
Now, it is true, right at the moment, we DO urgently need Ukie quantity* cheap drones and command / control capability. But going forward, we will need ever more effective and advanced systems and platforms, and redundant / parallel systems and platforms at that, to manage / command them.
*The Ukies, with limited resources compared to the US, and under fire, are on track to produce 10 MILLION drones in 2026.