Okay, super high tech F-35 versus low tech A-10...
There's probably an envelope that the A-10 fills, where you just need the enemy meat bags to know that the sound of jet engines circling for more than 4 hours is absolutely backed by some really nasty heavy machine gun fire and some munitions dropped on your head.
Is that going to happen with the F-35? Is it going to show up and never go away, breaking a stalemate by testing the patience of pinned enemies that are hungry, tired and looking for a way to walk off the battlefield?
The idea seems to be that the only thing people need to do, in a fight anymore is call in for help on a radio, wait for some bombs to hit a spot on the ground, and expect that to perfectly solve everything troops encounter. One size fits all. Just use that same gambit over and over.
Got a problem? Call in the 50 million dollar plane. It flies in at mach 1.2 in under thirty seconds and drops a bomb from 25,000 feet. Then leaves just as fast. Wait. That didn't work. Okay just have another one supercruise into the killzone. One more bomb. Oh you missed. Uh... Third time's a charm?
I have a suspicion that supersonic flight in the stratosphere with a strategy of "just try more bombs until it seems to fix things" isn't going to really work.
Maybe in another ten years it simply won't be possible for a meat bag to survive on the ground and the idea of close air support will seem silly because robotic killer death machines create stretches of no man's land so huge that the only means to fight is from supersonic jets miles above their electro laser incendiary ballistic chainsaws...
There's probably an envelope that the A-10 fills, where you just need the enemy meat bags to know that the sound of jet engines circling for more than 4 hours is absolutely backed by some really nasty heavy machine gun fire and some munitions dropped on your head.
Is that going to happen with the F-35? Is it going to show up and never go away, breaking a stalemate by testing the patience of pinned enemies that are hungry, tired and looking for a way to walk off the battlefield?
The idea seems to be that the only thing people need to do, in a fight anymore is call in for help on a radio, wait for some bombs to hit a spot on the ground, and expect that to perfectly solve everything troops encounter. One size fits all. Just use that same gambit over and over.
Got a problem? Call in the 50 million dollar plane. It flies in at mach 1.2 in under thirty seconds and drops a bomb from 25,000 feet. Then leaves just as fast. Wait. That didn't work. Okay just have another one supercruise into the killzone. One more bomb. Oh you missed. Uh... Third time's a charm?
I have a suspicion that supersonic flight in the stratosphere with a strategy of "just try more bombs until it seems to fix things" isn't going to really work.
Maybe in another ten years it simply won't be possible for a meat bag to survive on the ground and the idea of close air support will seem silly because robotic killer death machines create stretches of no man's land so huge that the only means to fight is from supersonic jets miles above their electro laser incendiary ballistic chainsaws...