We’ve spent the past 20 years fighting people who live in caves. Our toys are nicer than theirs. I suppose we’ve kicked their butts, but we haven’t exactly “won”.
We keep buying new toys. Not really because we need them. Not really because the old toys are bad. We buy toys because that’s what we do.
If China causes trouble, I do not think we will go toe to toe with them. The quality of our planes and our ships is likely to be inconsequential. A missile into the 3 Gorges Dam is likely to do all that we need.
I think this has become a very expensive, silly game.
Why does everyone think a missile into 3 Gorges Dam would win a war with China?
It provides less than 5% of their electricity at peak capacity (it does not operate peak other than in monsoons and drops off production greatly during their dry season - 6 months) and if the dam burst unleashing the reservoir it will kill a few million people in a nation with over a billion. Due to the dry season there, they more than have adequate power production to make up the difference.
It is certainly a big piece of infrastructure, the crown jewel even, but it would only inflame a nation of a billion people against us, piss off much of the world for such a casualty count, and invite similar attacks on our own infrastructure in an escalating tit for tat.
I worked a program called Combat Dragon... Did ery well so they brought it back for Combat Dragon II. Some good write ups available if you do a search. Point was you don’t need high dollar fighters to do basic jobs.
Why would we attack mainland China to defend Taiwan? That would open the door to them attacking mainland USA.
That should be one of the use cases of any new fighter design, to know that it eventually will be supplanted by some future new whizbang cheap fighter but we can flood the export market with these things and there will be spare parts for 2 generations, like Jeeps. So when we need to blow up bunch of camel jockeys but don’t wanna expend our shiny new expensive toys, we can always just go back to the old tooling. That’s where the A4 is now.