The F-22, in particular, is more analogous to an exotic supercar or even a high-end race car than anything else. It requires dozens of hours of maintenance for every single flight hour and deep maintenance can take days or even many weeks to accomplish, depending on what is needed to be done and availability of spare parts, which can be scarce.
okay those are very sexy planes, but
:Last week I saw a few “How is the US actually going to build enough of our high-tech shit so we don’t run out in a week if there’s a war?” discussions. There’s this common claim that the US military is very reluctant to orient itself towards counterinsurgency for fear of not being able to fight a major war, but perhaps with the high-tech focus it’s the worst of both worlds, too expensive to blow up insurgents and too expensive to replace if there’s a major war.
youzicha said: I think there is a general expectation that big wars will be short. The other day I was reading about the war games at U.S. Naval War College in the 1980s. Apparently the first ones failed to reach a conclusion within 30 simulated days, so in 1985-88 they did a super-big continued game to investigate a “protracted” war—which in that case meant something like 60 days. If those are the timescales, you can probably do the whole thing just from existing stocks.
what would the “big war” even be, these days?
back in the ‘80s it was obviously a Soviet takeover of Western Europe, but now it’s what, China taking Taiwan? or establishing a new Asian Empire?
China taking the First Island Chain.
Russia desperately using up their existing army to try to anchor on the Carpathians. (They’re losing half either way)
Wierdly… Saudi Arabia vs. Iran.
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If I had to pick one, I’d bet on the Russians, if I had to pick two I wouldn’t because the Iran-Saudi thing will start the China thing.
only hope is that war gets so expensive that we revert back to symbolic football.
The other possibility I discussed is that the whole war becomes an omnishambles and both sides basically totally fail to deploy their forces to the battlefield.
The American experience of previous allies (USSR, China, Iran) turning against them, plus the fact that service/upgrade contracts are a big part of how they disguise their vassals’ imperial tribute, means that US weapons systems are basically designed to degrade or fail when removed from their US-sourced logistics trains
Like how the ground vehicles run on jet fuel turbine engines, how the Stingers we gave the mujahadeen didn’t come back to bite us cause they run off of battery/coolant packs that degrade in a few years
In contrast Soviet designs were made to be reproducible and user-serviceable in rough primitive conditions, which is why RPG-7s were part of all the ‘90s and ‘00s wars and how China was able to break away from the Soviet alliance and become self-sufficient so quickly