US hasn't realized this yet because we are currently using our military might to pick on folks who are decades if not a century or more behind us technologically but would likely be a different story against a more up to date competitor.
One of the real lesson of the JSF is the amount of institutional inertia surrounding it. We were effectively pot committed before they had demo planes to play war games with. They spent 10+ years selling the idea. How do you kill a project like that? There is a certain irony to how the US picks weapons platforms too, everybody wants a new toy so who says "no" when the toy isn't quite up to snuff? So politically, we kill all the things the JSF is going to replace, we build love for the new platform, promise the world when nobody has even seen it.
The whole "jump jet" fascination is an interesting one, why do you need to land or take off a fighter/bomber from a place where you can't fuel it, can't reload it, and it doesn't carry cargo and people? Now the concept is cool, I get that, I just don't see where it fits in to the war fighting plan in a general way, not until planes have like nuclear reactors for fuel or something like that. It just doesn't seem generally useful.
I was told by a Marine that the Harrier obsession stems from Guadalcanal in WW2. The waters in the Solomons were heavily contested and the Navy basically took off and left the Marines stranded. That institutional memory is hard to shake.
There actually very much like medium-deck carriers, which are the biggest carriers anyone not the US Navy operates anywhere. The Marines seaborne aviation capacity carried on its various amphibious ships outclasses, IIRC, all the non-US naval aviation in the world combined.
> Ward said any future warplane should have clear and narrow requirements, as opposed to the F-35's broad, incompatible guidelines. Development timelines should be fast, budgets should be inexpensive, the overall concept should be simple and hardware should be as tiny as possible.
The one way we have today to accomplish all those goals together is unmanned aircraft. Simple because no life safety systems. Tiny because no human factors (displays, radios, windscreens). Cheap because no need to get every plane home safe (mission success largely determined by delivery of sufficient quantity of planes to the theatre).
The political process drives the insanity of trying to serve multiple purposes with thousands of design engineers strategically located in as many Congressional districts as possible.
I think drones should be used for every application that they are appropriate for -- why put people on the line when computers can do the work? But just like the JSF project attempted to serve many masters, assuming drones are the optimal decision for all military aircraft requirements is dumb.
The Chinese and Russians are building high performance aircraft for less than $1 Trillion. There's a reason for that. We can too.
Drones will probably get good enough to do most air to ground, at 1/10 or 1/100th the cost or whatever figure is being thrown around. Maybe even air-air, although I don't really think anyone has seriously tried this yet.
Manned aircraft in the meanwhile will pad a a large number of Pentagon manager's retirements and kid's college educations...
