Yes, 40 years ago, a submarine sunk a WWII cruiser. ASW is a thing, and subs are a legitimate threat. But this is also why we have submarines, because the best tool for hunting a submarine is another submarine. But claiming this magically makes aircraft carriers obsolete is largely internet fanboy noise.

The US military trains and fights as a team, and the entire point is to use the strengths of one platform to protect the weaknesses of another and vice versa.

Once you stop being targets, you mean.

> It will still need all or most of the advanced avionics that make F-35s expensive.

Those jets are catch-all do-everything machines, almost entirely because it's so crazy expensive to build jets + the political/contracting games played, that they are forced to jam everything into them. There's lots of efficiency and tactical gains in small niche applications where each platform is specialized for the job.

> Ukraine is ingeniously working to defeat Russian drones at ever lower costs, as Russia tries to send ever more and more of them at lower and lower prices. It's not enough to make something cheaply - it comes down to "value" for money. If these super-simple super-cheap Chinese drones can likewise be defeated by cheap weaponry, the impact is limited.

Even in Ukraine we really haven't seen 'cheap' defenses properly scale up to deal with the drone problem. Ukraine was getting 90% shoot downs in the early days but that's changed in the past year where Russia's tactics adapted. They've have been getting hammered weekly, even deep into their air defences along the polish border.

With Chinese SAMs and extreme range air-to-air missiles all of the fancy F-35 avionics will mostly be just them doing everything trying to survive those encounters far away from the frontline in Taiwan... where they mostly become very expensive missile launch platforms (bombers) and some radar networking. If you remove maximum survivability + narrow into niches those get a lot cheaper.

In the case of submarines that is necessarily the case though.

The people that go into a submarine aren't normal people, or they weren't back in the day anyway. They are people you would be really unhappy to throw away.

You can think completely differently about these platforms if those people aren't inside them.

It's substantially cheaper after skipping personel + operational costs of training and associated maintenance etc. Keeping the human bits trained involves flight hours, platform wear and tear etc. Unmanned = do more with less, i.e. same airframes can focus on useful missions. Or sustain more with much less upkeep. Wasting hours wearing down platforms to maintain crew proficiency is SUBSTANTIAL over lifetime of highend platforms. XXLUUV fleet - skipping out on 1,000s of crew, and can be built to lower standards etc. The AI proliferates experience across all hulls simultaneously. For same acquistion you can acquire 2/3x size fleet, have most in storage while a few do day to day operations with significantly cheaper OPEX while maintaining readiness.

XXLUUVs aren't cheap or lowend, they are highend but PRC shipbuilding advantage over US simply monumental, i.e. they can match capabilities and win attrition game on budget. Like UUVs following surface fleet is basically DARPA ACTUV proposal... TLDR is instead of spending 500k-1M per day (US costs) on fleet size ASW you can use a few 10k per day drones that keep tabs on marked targets. PRC has ship building capabilities to execute this at fraction of cost. Once you remove manning, attrition based strategies become even more potent for PRC industrial base.

UKR demonsrates how shitty deindustrialized powers are at generating fires. PRC is has industrial base to make 30m cars and 20m motorcycles annually. This translates to industrial base that can output 5 digit shaheed tier munitions daily. This basically enough satuate any layered defense US+co can prepsition. That's just lowend. Medium end like cruise missiles PRC can probably do ~1000 a day, see their cruise missile gigafactory. The key difference between RU, is PRC (like US) has C4ISR to make efficiently use munitions. RU is closer to Iran level.

ATACMS and Storm Shadow range are functionally toys in IndoPac, i.e. we're talking about different scale of of highend warfare over much greater distances and magazine exchanges. UKR is frankly schoolyard fight and has no worthwhile lessons for Indopac except it's important to have strong industrial base for attrition game, i.e. RU able to sustain very incompetent exchanges vs entire US+NATO support. Incompetent as in wildly inefficient and constrained because they have shit C4ISR that can't dismantal UKR IADs or logistics insulated on NATO soil. There's no "sancturary" in IndoPac.

The useful lesson we learned in last few years relevant to highend peer to peer fight is basically shit tier missiles can penetrate the most sophisticated ABM in the world (Iran vs Israel), more than carrier groups has magazine depth. XXLUVs basically another layer of massing fires in quantities current surface fleet composition can't survive, but strips out ambiguity around long distance / standoff kill chains by parking satuation sized salvos always in terminal range. Again these are not cheap low end solutions, these are HIGH END solutions that PRC simply can build cheaply at scale.

Track as in find carriers (then cue other assets to fix), not eyes on deck / line of sight / provide weapons grade track at all times. Movement as in we know carrier can only be in this small geographic area.

Nothing that states it as fact, but there's write ups about PRC yaogan IMINT constellations many years ago, that basically said when constellation size reach X, they'll have Y revisitation rates. We're at X & Y, and people in PLA watching, doing napkin math, using PRC commercial sat specs (jilin/gaofen) like swath size to determine that more or less on paper has functionally persistence in at least pacific theatre, i.e. the gaps were insubstantial that predictive algos can find carriers basically at all times, unless carriers can teleport. Combine this this PRC rolling out a lot of SAR in last few years (i.e. like 200-300 more satellites into have launched since initial articles) + wake detection algos, and on paper they should be able to persistently track carriers through cloud coverage. Of course cannot say definitely, it's just mathmematically possible now unlike a few years ago when constellation too small.

Again, none of this will be publically disclosed as "fact", it's more (as customary with analysis is PRC), the supporting evidence is so overwhelming that it cannot be denied. Extrapolate to PRC and US spaceforce rolls out megaconstellations sized IMINT, it's more or less over for carriers. Maybe stealth bombers or submarines.

I’m sorry, but you clearly don’t know anything about the F 35 development program. It is held up as an exemplar case of preventing congressional pork, as every single development and integration contract was competitively won on a best-value basis.

Well in Ukraine both sides are generally too afraid to get their jets anywhere near the frontline and just use them to launch long range cruise missiles and such from a safe distance.

Air defences are just too effective and modern jets are so expensive that nobody can really afford to risk losing them.

Maybe F-35 could change that, it seemed very efficient in Iran. But AFAIK Iran didn't have anything better than the S-300 so it wasn't exactly a fair fight...

Rules of engagement and the fact that nobody was properly trained on tactics that worked with the missiles. IIRC only the air force added a gun to the F4, the Navy just improved their training regime, and ended the war with better kill ratios than the air force.

Plus the early missiles just had some problems that were fixed over time.

> Isn’t that like how the F4 didn’t need to be good at dogfighting because it would shoot enemies down from BVR (first versions didn’t even have a gun, only missiles) and then rules of engagement over Vietnam nullified that advantage?

Not only ROE limitations, but unreliable missile technology (see the "Red Baron" reports for example) and bad tactics as well. The Navy was better than the USAF in both respects.

But how many can they knock out? Patriot air defenses are extremely effective. But on some level they’re not very useful if the interceptor missiles are materially more expensive than the things they’re intercepting against a foe of equalish economic means.

Yes but how many people do you know that are willing to live in a claustrophobic space to partake in a billionaires fever dream.

Why not both?

Geez, you non-supervillain-aspiring types are so ... mid.

All yachts can be optionally submerged. Once. Surfacing afterwards is the tricky bit.