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 Peregrine wrote:
by having a small number of human operators controlling a whole fleet of drones, and allows the vast majority of the first-six-hours losses to be taken by expendable munitions instead of experienced human pilots. Who cares if the drone fleet suffers 95% losses as long as it gets the job done.

When the human pilots are killed first because they're transmitting, making their stealth useless, you end up with 100% of the drone force dead, and not getting the job done.

 Peregrine wrote:

There is no such thing as replacing losses in a modern war between peer-level states.

Yes, they'll nuke each other into non-existence and not one human will survive to take up arms. Assuming they don't, however...

 Peregrine wrote:

Modern aircraft simply take way too long to build and modern weapons are too destructive to allow a war to continue that long. And cheap WWII-level expendable replacement garbage is worthless. It doesn't matter how many P-51 equivalents you can build with your low-tech factories, a single surviving F-35 (or drone figher) can kill an infinite number of them with zero chance of getting shot down, limited only by its need to return to base and rearm for another attack. Once the initial massacre happens the winner is the side that still has surviving reserves. And that's an argument for building reserves up front (including hordes of expendable drones), not for some bizarre attempt to build primitive weapons mid-war.

God Himself Could Not Shoot Down This Plane!

I'm not going to bother, the arrogance has gotten too great and breached the fantasy barrier. I'm Out.

LOL!

Hater.

 KTG17 wrote:
LOL!

Hater.

Not really. When we've reached the point that one plane will annihilate an infinite number of other planes, we've abandoned reality and there's no point in even trying to carry on a conversation.

HATER!


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I think you might feel differently about the F-35 after you have flown it. Why not take one out for a spin? Just tell them you are thinking of buying one and just want to test drive before signing the dotted line.

 Peregrine wrote:

 BaronIveagh wrote:
That's great, but according to the pentagon's own estimates for the sort of war everyone here is talking about, those experienced pilots will all be dead or otherwise incapacitated in the first six hours of the war. And that's the sunniest, most feel-good, numbers.

Which is another argument in favor of drones. Drone spam allows you to very quickly increase your effective manpower by having a small number of human operators controlling a whole fleet of drones, and allows the vast majority of the first-six-hours losses to be taken by expendable munitions instead of experienced human pilots. Who cares if the drone fleet suffers 95% losses as long as it gets the job done.

The side that wins is the side that can replace losses fastest.

There is no such thing as replacing losses in a modern war between peer-level states. Modern aircraft simply take way too long to build and modern weapons are too destructive to allow a war to continue that long. And cheap WWII-level expendable replacement garbage is worthless. It doesn't matter how many P-51 equivalents you can build with your low-tech factories, a single surviving F-35 (or drone figher) can kill an infinite number of them with zero chance of getting shot down, limited only by its need to return to base and rearm for another attack. Once the initial massacre happens the winner is the side that still has surviving reserves. And that's an argument for building reserves up front (including hordes of expendable drones), not for some bizarre attempt to build primitive weapons mid-war.

No, that single surviving F-35 or drone won't be killing anything because it has no base to take off from or return to, and a base that can support such advanced aircraft will take many years to set up, only for your precious surviving fighter to then be shot down by a surviving enemy SAM system, leaving you with nothing. And that is presuming the enemy doesn't decide your surviving high-tech weapon system isn't enough of a priority target to send in one of the missiles they kept back just for such an occasion. And even if your remaining drone fighter somehow survive all of that the P-51s will win the war because your drones will run out of munitions after a day.
The thing is that modern warfare is so destructive that you won't have any reserves that survive the initial days of the war. If you build up reserves the enemy is just going to destroy them as well. It takes just a single ICBM to take destroy an entire depot full of expensive drones. You can't outbuild or effectively defend against the destructive power of massed nuclear weapons. That is why you need to make sure you can get up quickly again after the hit inevitably knocks you down. The one who gets up the fastest again wins the fight. And that is before going into the fact that you simply can't build up reserves of F-35s or drone jets because they are too expensive for that.

Yeah, that thing about one modern plane killing an infinite number of other planes is possibly true if you start that mindgame with all planes armed and fueled at cruising altitude. However, as soon as logistics come into it...What was the number mentioned earlier in this thread, it costs 40,000 $ an hour to fly an F-35? That's most probably because it has replacement parts that are made from increasingly complex alloys in increasingly complex processes, meaning the supply chain to keep that one F-35 shooting down Zeros or 109s or P-51s is quite long.

During the Katanga conflict in the Congo, the separatists used a Fouga Magister training jet and literally rigged two machine guns to that thing on the spot. The unexpected aerial threat managed to take out a bunch of newer-era fighter jets and support planes by shooting them on their airfield, with nothing more than what I assume is .50cal bullets. And damn, THOSE are easy to make compared to F-35 replacement parts and all the sensory equipment and parts for AMRAAMs and Sidewinder missiles...

Plus the F-35 has to rearm every 4 shots. Which means it is landing somewhere and refueling and rearming. Which means the other 46 planes have ample opportunity to find it and shoot it on the tarmac, or as its taking off and use heat seeking missiles which don't care about yo stealth.

Even if you manage to survive a nuclear conflict with a single F-35, the chance of you having the infrastructure to support it even in the short term in nil. Lockheed Martan is almost certainly on the "Nuke this first" list.

One fighter against an Empire? That's just crazy enough to work.





That being said, isn't this thread getting a bit off track? I much preferred hearing about the various 4th gens and 5th gens being compared to the F-35 in terms of costs and combat capabilities.

All fighters are worthless if they don't have a base.

'Best fighter to operate after a nuclear war' seems deserving of its own thread.

 BaronIveagh wrote:

 KTG17 wrote:
LOL!

Hater.

Not really. When we've reached the point that one plane will annihilate an infinite number of other planes, we've abandoned reality and there's no point in even trying to carry on a conversation.

Agreed. The F-35 pops five older fighters (four with missiles, one with it's gun), returns to base to rearm... and gets strafed on the ground by fighters 6 to... well, however many there are.

So basically some of you are saying that one day an F-35 is going to be launched into combat and the enemy is going to launch 50 fighters in response, the F-35 will shoot down 4 enemy fighters, turn tail and run back to its base, where the remaining 46 fighters are going to follow it and blow it up while it’s re-arming and re-fueling?

Meanwhile the rest of the US military is going to be sitting this one out? Sounds reasonable.

Please, continue.

 KTG17 wrote:
So basically some of you are saying that one day an F-35 is going to be launched into combat and the enemy is going to launch 50 fighters in response, the F-35 will shoot down 4 enemy fighters, turn tail and run back to its base, where the remaining 46 fighters are going to follow it and blow it up while it’s re-arming and re-fueling?

Meanwhile the rest of the US military is going to be sitting this one out? Sounds reasonable.

Please, continue.

I think we are saying there ARE benefits to buying a bunch of last-gen fighters comparaed to one next-gen fighter apart from the obvious disadvantage in open combat. We are just using extreme examples to show those advantages.

 Witzkatz wrote:
During the Katanga conflict in the Congo, the separatists used a Fouga Magister training jet and literally rigged two machine guns to that thing on the spot. The unexpected aerial threat managed to take out a bunch of newer-era fighter jets and support planes by shooting them on their airfield, with nothing more than what I assume is .50cal bullets. And damn, THOSE are easy to make compared to F-35 replacement parts and all the sensory equipment and parts for AMRAAMs and Sidewinder missiles...

Or the Biafra rebels that Swedish Count von Rosen wanted to help - by flying in a few light prop trainers armed with bolted-on rocket pods. The government lost several of their shiny MiGs on the ground.

 KTG17 wrote:
So basically some of you are saying that one day an F-35 is going to be launched into combat and the enemy is going to launch 50 fighters in response, the F-35 will shoot down 4 enemy fighters, turn tail and run back to its base, where the remaining 46 fighters are going to follow it and blow it up while it’s re-arming and re-fueling?

Meanwhile the rest of the US military is going to be sitting this one out? Sounds reasonable.

Please, continue.

No. We were discussing the claim that in the event you survived a nuclear war with one F35 you would allegedly be able to take on an infinite number of inferior fighters

Where's the losing side on this global nuclear war getting its infinite number of inferior fighters?

Sorry, but the whole debate has been obfuscated to the point of complete iverisimilitude.

 KTG17 wrote:
So basically some of you are saying that one day an F-35 is going to be launched into combat and the enemy is going to launch 50 fighters in response, the F-35 will shoot down 4 enemy fighters, turn tail and run back to its base, where the remaining 46 fighters are going to follow it and blow it up while it’s re-arming and re-fueling?

Meanwhile the rest of the US military is going to be sitting this one out? Sounds reasonable.

Please, continue.

Probably going to be more like 50 F-35s in one place with AWACS and tanker support. To afford the 50 F-35s in all the trouble spots the rest of the Air Force is gutted. Around 500 or so Chinese or Russian (who else would be a peer-level fight?) will launch against them. Sure, the F-35s will decimate the ones they engage, and the other 200 will take down the AWACS and tankers. After which the F-35s never reach base, having ran out of fuel...

 Grey Templar wrote:

No. We were discussing the claim that in the event you survived a nuclear war with one F35 you would allegedly be able to take on an infinite number of inferior fighters

Whereas those of us who bother to learn about this gak know that the most advanced army in the world can be beaten to death with stones once they are outnumbered past a critical point.

 KTG17 wrote:

Meanwhile the rest of the US military is going to be sitting this one out?

Based on projections, dying messily.

The current projections for a war with China, Russia, and/or North Korea would make it the most costly in terms of casualties in the history of American arms. Numbers over 90% casualties get bandied about.

To be honest, the most effective use of the current military in this scenario is to serve as officers for draftees.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Where's the losing side on this global nuclear war getting its infinite number of inferior fighters?

Sorry, but the whole debate has been obfuscated to the point of complete iverisimilitude.

Well, first of all they aren't the losing side. Secondly, they get their fighters from factories. Light prop fighters like a P-51 are a million times more easy to produce than a highly advanced multi-million dollar 5th-gen F-35. After a nuclear exchance, which is what a total war would come down to, most of the vital military-industrial infrastructure of both warring sides would be in ruins. In such circumstances, restarting the production of F-35 fighters would be impossible. But the production of something as simple as P-51s on the other hand is something that could be set up quite quickly with limited means.

 Iron_Captain wrote:
But the production of something as simple as P-51s on the other hand is something that could be set up quite quickly with limited means.

Except for that tiny problem that, in the aftermath of a nuclear war that has annihilated modern infrastructure and industry, everyone is going to be far too busy trying to avoid starving to death to deal with irrelevant things like building fighters to go attack some other country (where everyone is also starving to death).

Also no, it isn't easy to set up factories to build something like a P-51. Easier than F-35 factories, sure, but still dependent on modern infrastructure and supporting industries. It still requires precision manufacturing, raw material supplies, skilled labor, etc. You aren't going to build that all from scratch, and if it exists pre-war it's at the bottom of a mushroom cloud.


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 Vulcan wrote:
Probably going to be more like 50 F-35s in one place with AWACS and tanker support. To afford the 50 F-35s in all the trouble spots the rest of the Air Force is gutted. Around 500 or so Chinese or Russian (who else would be a peer-level fight?) will launch against them. Sure, the F-35s will decimate the ones they engage, and the other 200 will take down the AWACS and tankers. After which the F-35s never reach base, having ran out of fuel...

The sort of "build your industry from scratch post-nuclear-war" fighter being proposed can't even reach the cruising speed/altitude of the tankers or AWACS planes. Nor can they out-run modern SAMs, have sufficient speed and endurance to chase the F-35s back to their bases, etc. To make any kind of realistic threat to even the easiest modern targets you need semi-modern jet fighters that aren't meaningfully easier to build or support compared to the F-35. If you can't build and support F-35s because your industry has all been nuked you sure as hell aren't going to be putting any MiG-21 clones in the air.


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 BaronIveagh wrote:
When the human pilots are killed first because they're transmitting, making their stealth useless, you end up with 100% of the drone force dead, and not getting the job done.

You do know that drones can be controlled remotely, right? If China is launching ICBMs at bases in the US to kill the drone operators, well, I think it's safe to say that WWIII has started and aircraft of any kind are irrelevant.

Yes, they'll nuke each other into non-existence and not one human will survive to take up arms. Assuming they don't, however...

Even conventional weapons are too deadly for new production to matter. We aren't carpet bombing the entire region around a factory and hoping to score lucky hits, factories are going to be a primary target and quickly destroyed. Meanwhile battlefield losses are going to be so absurdly high that the slaughter can't continue for months/years, there just won't be anything left by that point. In a modern war you have what you start the war with and you'd better hope it's enough.

God Himself Could Not Shoot Down This Plane!

I'm not going to bother, the arrogance has gotten too great and breached the fantasy barrier. I'm Out.

Sigh. The F-35 is literally invulnerable to attack in the air against your proposed P-51 swarm. It is significantly faster, can fly significantly higher, can detect the enemy at much longer range, and can engage from far beyond the range of any possible return fire. It can kill P-51s at will, and effortlessly disengage if anything miraculously gets into a position to threaten it. It's a sign of your concession of defeat that, rather than suggesting any believable way that it could possibly lose in the air, you insist on destroying the F-35 on the ground and assume that it won't have any ground-based defenses (all of which can also slaughter P-51s in obscene numbers) protecting the base.

(Too bad you dismissed the idea of a swarm of expendable drones, because your horde of suicide P-51s is far better done by drones.)

 Peregrine wrote:

Except for that tiny problem that, in the aftermath of a nuclear war that has annihilated modern infrastructure and industry, everyone is going to be far too busy trying to avoid starving to death to deal with irrelevant things like building fighters to go attack some other country (where everyone is also starving to death).

Also no, it isn't easy to set up factories to build something like a P-51. Easier than F-35 factories, sure, but still dependent on modern infrastructure and supporting industries. It still requires precision manufacturing, raw material supplies, skilled labor, etc. You aren't going to build that all from scratch, and if it exists pre-war it's at the bottom of a mushroom cloud.

Yep, yep, another nuke every fifteen feet. You do realize that to kill enough factories to prevent this, you'd have to ignore all military targets. Nukes aren't infinite either.

In reality quite a bit of infrastructure and even factories would survive. While I'm sure the worlds single Abrams factory would be primary target, and Lockheed would likely also be on the receiving end, raw materials would be the toughest part. Unless you're along the Great Lakes or mid Atlantic states. Then it's just a matter of patching some roads and getting lake trade moving again. Unless you think that Russia or China an launch enough nukes to boil the great lakes dry...

In the area outside the AOE for the nuking of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Buffalo, (assuming 10 Megaton hits, in reality they would likely be a larger number of smaller nukes) there are still 28 mines that produce the correct raw materials, three steel mills, four tube mills, two dozen factories capable of producing the required components (some already work for the US military) and at least two hydro plants. There's also untold acres of Amish farms in PA that give no feths about fuel and would be clear enough of radiation to produce viable crops. There's even oil and refining capability (Albeit in small amounts)

 Peregrine wrote:

The sort of "build your industry from scratch post-nuclear-war" fighter being proposed can't even reach the cruising speed/altitude of the tankers or AWACS planes.

Really? Because the KC-767 isn't faster, doesn't fly higher and most certainly not better armed than even a Mig-15. Which was produced under pretty close to the conditions you describe.

 Peregrine wrote:

You do know that drones can be controlled remotely, right? If China is launching ICBMs at bases in the US to kill the drone operators, well, I think it's safe to say that WWIII has started and aircraft of any kind are irrelevant.

You do realize that you don't have to do that to stop US drones,right? Let' say that the US is fighting China. China detonates a nuke over the Pacific at about 400km above the surface and that's it for the drones. The antennae that they require for remote operation fry their circuits like an electric chair. I'm aware that many systems are hardened against EMP, but 'hardened against EMP' is like the word 'bulletproof'. There are degrees, and the more cables and antennae, the less EMP proof it is.


Also, back to the F-35: How exactly do you intend it to shoot down infinite anything when for every hour of flight time, it takes 50 hours of maintenance?

If China detonates a nuke anywhere its going to be the end of civilization anyway. So who cares.

 KTG17 wrote:
If China detonates a nuke anywhere its going to be the end of civilization anyway. So who cares.

That is honestly the one weird thing about these times we live in - it is really questionable what amount of regular military force will be useful in what kind of situation, because everyone agrees there is a certain point - use of nuclear weapons - where Earth as we know it will just be done. And nobody can be a 100% sure where and when that point will be reached, and what military tools will be actually employed until that point.

I mean, for centuries - centuries! - people might've discussed the advantages of this way of smithing a sword over that way of smithing a sword, or using this wood for a bow instead of that wood for a bow, and it any advantage always made sense to pursue, because wars were fought in a certain way. With the advent of nukes, this has changed dramatically, with no one having the final answer in this. I feel the large militaries in the world are just going ahead developing non-nuclear weapons "just in case" and for use in these asymmetric low-intensity conflicts, but at some point the result might really just be "gg wp, nukes are being launched, no one cares how many billions you put into your last-gen's super-fighters ECCM module now"

Honestly makes me think about the general, strategic goals behind military development.

I think to have as many nukes as we do is a waste of money. The US can kill everything on the planet 17 times over. What is the point of the 16 additional times? I don't care how many China or Russia has, we have enough to kill everyone. So what is the point. There is never going to be a limited nuclear strike against someone who can retaliate. So you will have to go all in, and assume the same will happen to you.

So I just don't see it ever happening. Even in the instance where one captial is endanger of falling through conventional means, I highly doubt the trigger will be pulled. Its essentially committing suicide. I guess unless you are Hitler. But I imagine peeps will want to negotiate the end of the war before making the decision to kill everyone on the planet.

So I think pursuing conventional weapons is fine.

 Witzkatz wrote:
Honestly makes me think about the general, strategic goals behind military development.

One perspective might be that whilst you are engaging in an asymmetrical war, the opponent you are fighting against may be receiving support from another world power.

Hypothetically, let's say the US got involved in the war in Ukraine. It supplies planes and pilots to provide air support for Ukrainian government forces. The Ukrainian rebels have received material support from Russia, including anti-air missile systems. So the US planes need to be able to defeat that anti-air system.

In other words, whilst the great powers may not engage in official wars with each other, their equipment may end up pitted against each other and they are trying to ensure that in such an event they come out on top.

Exactly, equipment might be used in a proxy war. But many of these discussion points we had in the last pages were concerned with a "full-on" war, and I'd argue that a lot of the wars we've seen over the last years and decades were still comparably (!) low-intensity to wars like WW2, or even compared to Korea or Vietnam.
I feel that, if wars are staying as localized as they've been lately, many factors of war don't come into play, namely how a country deals with attrition of expensive equipment, how it deals with weapon/tank/plane factories being hit, resource logistics being hit and so forth.

I guess what I'm saying is - with the US, Russia, China and partially the EU being the big military producers, wars not directly involving those countries will never see the destruction of manufacturing capabilites or associated supply lines, things that mattered a LOT in previous wars. (For example the lack of oil for Germany in WW2, lack of aluminum for aircraft everywhere, etc.) So now we are having arguments around how complex and complicated a fighter jet might be, and how much of a disadvantage these complexities are, and I feel a little bit like it might never be relevant - stuff can be almost as complex as it wants to be if in case A the factories and supply lines are never directly involved in a war and there's never enough attrition to warrant a faster rate of producing weaponry - and in case B everything is going away in nuclear fire.

That's one of these big differences to previous wars. And it fits in with my earlier complaint about just having 20 Eurofighters active or somesuch - the question is really if you'll ever need more with the comparably-localized, semi-proxy, semi-low-intensity wars we are having, because any escalation affecting USA/EU/Russia/China directly will probably be game over.

 KTG17 wrote:
If China detonates a nuke anywhere its going to be the end of civilization anyway. So who cares.

Since civilization didn't end on June 17th, 1967, I chose to call this hyperbole.

As an attack during wartime? Wow I must have missed that one.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:
But the production of something as simple as P-51s on the other hand is something that could be set up quite quickly with limited means.

Except for that tiny problem that, in the aftermath of a nuclear war that has annihilated modern infrastructure and industry, everyone is going to be far too busy trying to avoid starving to death to deal with irrelevant things like building fighters to go attack some other country (where everyone is also starving to death).

Also no, it isn't easy to set up factories to build something like a P-51. Easier than F-35 factories, sure, but still dependent on modern infrastructure and supporting industries. It still requires precision manufacturing, raw material supplies, skilled labor, etc. You aren't going to build that all from scratch, and if it exists pre-war it's at the bottom of a mushroom cloud.

Starving to death? No sorry, but to destroy infrastructure to such a degree that an entire country the size of the US starves to death you'd need like a million more nukes than there are on the world right now. Apart from just nuking military and government targets, you'd need to nuke small towns, farms, roads, bridges, mines, railways etc. No country in the world has enough nukes to do that. Lots of infrastructure, including all military, would be destroyed in a nuclear war, but the majority of civilian infrastructure would survive.

 Peregrine wrote:
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 BaronIveagh wrote:
When the human pilots are killed first because they're transmitting, making their stealth useless, you end up with 100% of the drone force dead, and not getting the job done.

You do know that drones can be controlled remotely, right? If China is launching ICBMs at bases in the US to kill the drone operators, well, I think it's safe to say that WWIII has started and aircraft of any kind are irrelevant.

Yes, they'll nuke each other into non-existence and not one human will survive to take up arms. Assuming they don't, however...

Even conventional weapons are too deadly for new production to matter. We aren't carpet bombing the entire region around a factory and hoping to score lucky hits, factories are going to be a primary target and quickly destroyed. Meanwhile battlefield losses are going to be so absurdly high that the slaughter can't continue for months/years, there just won't be anything left by that point. In a modern war you have what you start the war with and you'd better hope it's enough.pp

Yeah, the factory will be destroyed. But since you did not carpet bomb the entire region, what is stopping the enemy from simply building a new factory in the ruins of the old, that you won't be able to destroy because you ran out of missiles?
Nothing. There will be nothing to stop a country from continuing the war effort after the initial exchange has exhausted the arsenals of both sides. The deadliness of modern weapons, combined with their small number, is exactly why new production would be more important than ever. It means that in a modern war, very little of a nation's standing military and military infrastructure is going to survive. However, it also means that all nations are going to be running out of weapon systems very quickly. And every factory and every tank and every aircraft you can build after the enemy has used up his weapons is something they will have lots of issues dealing with.

 Peregrine wrote:

God Himself Could Not Shoot Down This Plane!

I'm not going to bother, the arrogance has gotten too great and breached the fantasy barrier. I'm Out.

Sigh. The F-35 is literally invulnerable to attack in the air against your proposed P-51 swarm. It is significantly faster, can fly significantly higher, can detect the enemy at much longer range, and can engage from far beyond the range of any possible return fire. It can kill P-51s at will, and effortlessly disengage if anything miraculously gets into a position to threaten it. It's a sign of your concession of defeat that, rather than suggesting any believable way that it could possibly lose in the air, you insist on destroying the F-35 on the ground and assume that it won't have any ground-based defenses (all of which can also slaughter P-51s in obscene numbers) protecting the base.

(Too bad you dismissed the idea of a swarm of expendable drones, because your horde of suicide P-51s is far better done by drones.)

Dear Peregrine, sorry to disappoint, but that F-35 isn't going to have any ground defences protecting it (aside from heavy machine guns, AA cannons and whatever relatively low-tech weapons survived the nuclear exchange or could be produced afterwards), nor is it even going to have a base, because those have been destroyed by a nuclear ICBM. And that is why the P-51s win. Because the F-35 isn't even going to be able to leave the ground after a nuclear exchange. And even if it does, it's weapons load is minimal so it won't be able to do much damage to a formation of P-51s, which will then be able follow it back to its base. And even if they then fail to destroy the F-35, the F-35 is now useless anyway because it has run out of irreplaceable missiles.
At best, if you would have some surviving F-35s or other high-tech weapon systems left after a nuclear exchange, they will go out in an impressive last blaze of glory where they will destroy quite a few technologically inferior opponents before running out of irreplaceable weapons or spare parts. More likely however is that they are simply going to sit around being useless because you do not have the logistics to put them in the air at all.

 Witzkatz wrote:

 KTG17 wrote:
So basically some of you are saying that one day an F-35 is going to be launched into combat and the enemy is going to launch 50 fighters in response, the F-35 will shoot down 4 enemy fighters, turn tail and run back to its base, where the remaining 46 fighters are going to follow it and blow it up while it’s re-arming and re-fueling?

Meanwhile the rest of the US military is going to be sitting this one out? Sounds reasonable.

Please, continue.

I think we are saying there ARE benefits to buying a bunch of last-gen fighters comparaed to one next-gen fighter apart from the obvious disadvantage in open combat. We are just using extreme examples to show those advantages.

F-15E, F-22, the F-18(all varients), the EA-18g will see active service until a minimum of 2030 according to DOD with the EA-18G, F-35A and the F-18/A all being the next gen group that will remain beyond that date.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Vulcan wrote:
Probably going to be more like 50 F-35s in one place with AWACS and tanker support. To afford the 50 F-35s in all the trouble spots the rest of the Air Force is gutted. Around 500 or so Chinese or Russian (who else would be a peer-level fight?) will launch against them. Sure, the F-35s will decimate the ones they engage, and the other 200 will take down the AWACS and tankers. After which the F-35s never reach base, having ran out of fuel...

The sort of "build your industry from scratch post-nuclear-war" fighter being proposed can't even reach the cruising speed/altitude of the tankers or AWACS planes. Nor can they out-run modern SAMs, have sufficient speed and endurance to chase the F-35s back to their bases, etc. To make any kind of realistic threat to even the easiest modern targets you need semi-modern jet fighters that aren't meaningfully easier to build or support compared to the F-35. If you can't build and support F-35s because your industry has all been nuked you sure as hell aren't going to be putting any MiG-21 clones in the air.

Granted. Of course, my scenario is mainly applicable to pre-nuclear holocaust conflict, 50 F-35s vs. 500 Soviet-era MiG and Sukhoi fighters is not so unthinkable. And even a MiG-15 should be able to down a tanker or AWACs...

I agree with you on the odds of P-51s going into production anytime soon after a nuclear war. What few survivors make it won't be building anything much beyond the sixteenth century (unless they can kitbash it from whatever's lying around) for a good decade or so... minimum. But then, the F-35s will all be blown up, or out of ammo and fuel, very shortly after such a war as well, and every bit as irrelevant as the P-51 swarm that will never be built.

I recently learned that, in the last days of the war, the production of Bf 109 fighters was done to a significant portion by concentration camp labor. As jarring (and full-on cliché evil empire) as that is, it makes you wonder about how difficult it is to build reasonable airplanes if you have blueprints, an engineer who knows something about aviation, and a few primary tools and machines intact...