Flying high might make it invisible for human observers but the idea is that it’s not invisible in that wavelength, therefore it must be possible to create devices that can detect it.
Also, this is a brand new machine that is still not ready. Just write it off, liquidate any useful work that might have been done on it and go all in drones. What’s the point of insisting on a job not done when already looks obsolete?
> therefore it must be possible to create devices that can detect it.
What's the probability some over worked dude who tweet 20 times an hour came up with something the US military–industrial complex hasn't thought about in the last 50 years ?
Remember the early Ukraine invasion when a couple of bayraktars almost single handedly saved the country during the initial wave ? It was neither stealthy nor fast
https://defence-blog.com/bayraktar-tb2-drones-saved-the-coun...
btw his brand new idea is at least a hundred years old: https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-eyPsCUn0O68/V8jmQwIYR5I/AAAAAAAAK...
The Bayraktars are the budget-drone option. A big part of their success was less that they're good, and more that the Russians kept all of their EW and AA turned off to achieve tactical surprise. Which they sort of did, but not enough to anchor the fight, and the budget drones were effective at killing a lot of AA early on, increasing their window of lethality.
Once they got their EW & AA game together the Bayraktars stopped being dangerous very quickly.
And anyway, if you want CAS, to stop an army, A-10 will probably be a dozen time better suited than any multirole, and especially the f35 with its ridiculously low availability rate, or even better in that particular case, an AC-130 (that is probably able to direct a drone fleet in its latest revision, but that was speculation last time i checked)
(the A-10 is the best modern plane in my opinion, i really like the F15, f18 and Rafale (those curves!), because i really like the idea of aircraft carrier but that plane is the best.)
IIRC in 2000s there was talk by USAF that stealth is a 10-20 year advantage. Not something undefeatable. The actual degree to which stealth can be / is defeated, we wouldn't know until shooting starts. It's ancient technology at this point.
It’s not an indefinite ‘lead’, of course, but having decades of experience with LO shaping and materials means you can keep making effective incremental improvements.
When one is flying towards you, you hear it from few kilometres away for minutes as it has very loud petrol-powered engine.
In contrast, when you hear low passing cruise missile, you will have just few seconds until it passes over you.
I mean, yeah, if you control the ground in the battlespace and have microphone arrays all over the place, sure, maybe acoustic data could be... some part of... some kind of fused sensor network.
But even with perfectly smart software and shitloads of microphones over a huge radius that is going to be a very laggy and imprecise way of measuring (checks notes) objects that may be hundreds of miles away, moving nearly or above the speed of sound, using a spectrum (acoustic waves in air) that only propagates signals at the speed of sound.
AI might be able to do a dogfight which is great in terms of flight envelope, but completely unnecessary in modern stealth warfare. Despite everything you heard, stealth does work. It isn't perfect but it destroyed Russia's top of the line anti-aircraft missiles in Iran without a problem. The planes are ghosts, by the time you see them it's already too late.
Drones have the advantage of reduced risk to the pilot but since a human sitting at the base will have to deal with signal delay, transmission jamming and low resolution... The difference in having a pilot physically present is huge. AI is unpredictable and unreliable e.g. Iranians were able to fool a US army drone by sending it signals that made it land. Then they took it apart and reverse engineered it.
It seems to come down to this: for the same money you can buy 1 F35 or 10,000 long range drones. If you are an army with a few SAM's, what you scare you more: a single F35 coming over the hill, or a swarm of drones so large you had no hope of taking them all out?
Russia has some very advanced planes that are barely used.
For a long time they apparently only had two operational Su-57s. Apparently now they have 5-7? This is not a "production" aircraft as we would understand it in the west. Its actual stealth ability is also highly suspect. The official photos as well as photos from airshows have shown some sloppy physical construction that would compromise any stealth ability.
If you are an army with a few SAM's, what you scare you
more: a single F35 coming over the hill, or a swarm of
drones so large you had no hope of taking them all out?
For other kinds of targets, the F35.
While your comparison makes sense from a budget perspective, it's not necessarily realistic though. Nobody has the ability to launch that many drones at once and nobody is flying in a single F35.
Also, respectfully, a lot of the anti-manned-fighter arguments boil down to "drones are really good and useful!"
Which is true, but also not something that anybody disputes. Even the most diehard defender of manned aircraft is going to tell you that drones are a huge part of the future of war. And that manned fighters are niche.
The idea of a drone swarm is science fiction at this time. First, it's not 10,000 drones. Maybe the low quality stuff Iran builds is that cheap. A good western drone will be expensive but also of far higher quality.
If you try to send a drone cloud then they are easily detected and you can just shoot them down. If you send them one by one then they get detected one at a time. A few get through as we see with Israel who dealt with well over 30,000 drones/rockets over the past year... But it took them a year to launch 30,000 rockets/drones. They did very little damage.
You need logistics to send them out big logistics are a big target for an F35. If you do it from far away (like sending drones from Iran) then radars have a lot of time to pick them up and shoot them down. If you do it from close by (like Lebanon) then some might get through but the F35 in the sky will destroy you very fast.
Finally, they all need to fly autonomously which is flawed. You can take them down like ducks in a row. Any soldier with a smart scope can just bring down a drone. Not to mention their deep vulnerability to electronic jamming.
I used to think like you as an engineer. But having spoken to people who actually know this stuff I understood the difference. Yes, there is a price disparity which is why the Israeli army has both drones and F35. Different tools for different jobs. A drone can't carry the damage and logistics an F35 can. But sending an F35 to shoot down drones is a remarkable waste of resources. That's why Israel is working on energy/laser based defense systems which will make a swarm of 10,000 drones completely useless but won't even scratch an F35.
Indeed. A broken clock also tells the time correctly twice a day.