The insight here is, that in current warfare, quantity is the quality that matters. And with quantity, cost of replacement needs to be low, platforms expendable, cheap to maintain and resupply. It, and it's support infrastructure, need to not easily be detected and targeted by drones while on the ground. F35 is not these things. It's powerful but brittle, and like many US platforms, too much value packed into too few platforms. Not enough sustain in prolonged modern conflict. A one-punch military.
>The insight here is, that in current warfare, quantity is the quality that matters. And with quantity, cost of replacement needs to be low, platforms expendable, cheap to maintain and resupply. It, and it's support infrastructure
The irony, of course, is that the US military knew that back in WWII in how the Sherman tank was able to defeat the "better" German tanks for all the same reasons listed above.
Now the US has the same small set of defence contractors who are staffed by ex-government officials and no one asks any hard questions when every single project is 10yrs late and overbudget.
That's a stale insight from an old era of warfare. The purpose of quality is to remove quantity. Iran is the case study. A large stockpile of munitions counts for something, but once the factories are gone, you're on a 3 month clock. Factories being deleted can only be achieved with quality (expensive stand-off munitions + F-35s for SEAD, then missile trucks with cheap JDAMs to take out the factories).
30-50 years ago you just couldn't do this kind of warfare, the technology and intelligence didn't exist. Now you can. People haven't updated on this paradigm shift.
People are over-learning the wrong lessons from Ukraine. That is a unique war with air parity. That's why the Ukraine war is shaped the way it is. Not because this is how wars ought to be fought.
This is not to discount quantity. But you can't have only quantity unless you want to fight an attritional war for 10 years (or worse, lose your own industrial production to an enemy that achieves air superiority over your skies because they had the foresight to invest in quality).
The Iran war isn't over yet. Plenty of time for it to become attritional, especially if the people who want Big Gaza / "mowing the nuclear lawn" to become the status quo are in charge. After all, Afghanistan was a quick victory, 20 years of attrition, and eventual exit.
Without factories? I doubt it. I'm not saying the US is going to win (in the sense of achieving objectives), but it's not going to be an attrition war like in WW2 or Ukraine. Japan had factories. Ukraine has factories. You can't sustain a modern war without factories.
Afghanistan wasn't an attrition war (where the outcome is a collapse of one side). The CENTCOM commander explains best why the US lost, it's because of sanctuary:
> The core of the Taliban’s command and control was in the mountainous town of Quetta in southern Pakistan, and the most violent branch of the movement, the Haqqanis, were safely ensconced farther north, also in Pakistan. All were off limits to our forces. Occasionally, Pakistan would apply some pressure, but it was never enough to reduce their ability to operate. I came to see this as the absolutely critical failure of all our plans, and I grew to believe that there weren’t enough U.S. forces in all the world to establish order in Afghanistan, so long as Pakistan was open to the Taliban. It was a logical error in our approach to counterinsurgency that could not be papered over or compensated for.
> You can't sustain a modern war without factories
No, but somehow Iranian backed Hamas and Hizbollah forces manage it from factoryless regions of Palestine and Lebanon. That's what I meant by "big Gaza": a region that's substantially damaged but still capable of fighting, where US/Israeli forces have to keep bombing militants in civilian areas forever. Every few weeks a new pile of dead kids for social media. Is that the plan for Iran?
> US/Israeli forces have to keep bombing militants in civilian areas forever
It's not forever. A common misconception about insurgencies is that they're impossible to defeat because they're an "ideology". But it's more about sanctuary and state sponsorship. Afghanistan was a loss because of sanctuary, as per my quote above. This article provides quantitative analysis on that:
Hezbollah had sanctuary in Syria before Assad's collapse, and their state sponsorship is under strain because their supply route through Syria has been cut off and their state sponsor in Iran has degraded industrial production and finances.
> Is that the plan for Iran?
The plan for Iran is to prevent a fait accompli, defined as 10000 ballistic missiles (exceeding interceptor stockpiles) or a nuclear weapon. The best case scenario is regime change. The second best case scenario is coercing them into terms. The worst case scenario is to degrade their power projection capabilities without a negotiated agreement. But all three scenarios are considered better than the status quo trajectory by the belligerents. The status quo trajectory is seen as leading to a bigger war later (e.g. once they reach 9000 ballistic missiles instead of 5000), or worse.
I think the insight is that you need a high-low mix. Some threats call for top of the line capabilities (like early days of the Iran conflict with stand-off munitions and top-spec interceptors being used against Shahed drones and cheap cruise missiles). Some threats can be more economically serviced by a less capable, cheaper, and more available system.
It's always been about the biggest, fastest, longest range punch. That is extremely useful for deep strike (which has always been NATO doctrine), but when the range is short you need quantity and mobility far more than you need quantity.
Being able to cut off your enemy is an extremely effective weapon if your enemy needs massive supply. Drop the major bridges between Moscow and Ukraine and the war would soon be over.
But when you can't do that for whatever reason you need quantity and mobility far more than you need quality.
There's a very interesting fallacy at play here. It's true that Ukraine is doing absolutely amazing and ingenious things on a shoestring budget across all military domains. It's also true that the armed forces of other world powers have a lot to learn from them, especially when it comes to drone warfare.
The fallacy comes in when blindly transferring these lessons to other wars and other armies.
In a perfect world with unlimited production and budgets, Ukraine would love to use Patriot or SAMP/T to shoot down every slow moving drone. In the real world, they make do with what they have, because the alternative is defeat and annihilation.
Ukraine is using propeller trainer planes to shoot down Russian drones because they have them and they can be quickly modified for the mission. That doesn't mean that an air force starting with a clean slate would prefer to use a cheap propeller plane in an anti-drone role. Instead, given enough time and budget, they'd probably prefer to build a custom-designed, more expensive and more capable solution, which still lands in a better spot on the shot exchange curve than Patriot vs Shahed. Think interceptor drone (which are usually several times more expensive and capable than their targets, but that's air defense) or 21st century gun systems.
Ukraine is a post Soviet state with a huge stockpile, engaged in a drawn out attritional defensive conflict where neither side has claimed air superiority. They have no choice but to be efficient, and to make everything they have go as far as they can. From an economic point of view, the USA can afford to be less efficient when fighting into Iran.
For the USA, shot exchange as an economic problem is mostly theoretical. The real problem is supply exhaustion. It doesn't matter if the air defense interceptors cost $10,000 or $10,000,000 if the total stockpile and yearly production capacity of them is only enough to fight for 3 months.
It isn't reasonable to expect that propellor drones will be used long term - they are too easy to shoot down. you need just enough ability to force the enemy to not waste they energy making them when something more expensive is harder to shoot down and thus more likely to work.
The armed forces know this well but many of the internet commentators do not. Many have over-learned the lesson from Ukraine, going all the way from "drones are an important (and even potentially dominant) new tool of warfare" to "everything more expensive than a drone is a huge waste of money - just buy more drones". The real world is rarely so simple.
There are strategic winners and losers of a drone dominated world, just like there were when the machine gun or the airplane began to dominate combat. Calvary charges did not play a major role in WWII for a good reason. I would guess that the F-35 (and in general, fast stealthy attack jets) will continue to deliver a lot of value even in a world with drones. Think more like destroyer and less battleship or horse.
If you made me guess which systems would become obsolete as a result of this, my first guess would probably be attack helicopters. Much of their role can be filled by other less expensive and less vulnerable systems.
I heard it argued that Germany didn't have the raw resources and production capacity to go for quantity. Especially later in the war. So quality it was.
I suggest reading Len Deighton's Blitzkrieg (among other WW2 books by him) because it goes into unusual detail on the industrial design and resource allocation decisions that went into tank production leading up to WW2.
Except that the "quality" of their tanks was not exactly top notch, worse they used a lot of resources.
At that point it was just a desperate gamble: "if we can make an invincible tank, then it won't matter how few we have", we both know it did not pay off, not even close.
That's not true. They could have standardized on a few rugged platforms -- and in fact, some in Nazi Germany advocated for that -- but their industry and engineering were generally self-sabotaging and a mess.
They actually did standardize pretty quickly. Panzer III and Panzer IV were the workhorses in Russia, paired up with the StuG (which used the Pz III chassis). I think that it's arguable that no production strategy could have led to German success. Had they tried to produce T-34 or Sherman type tanks (and the Panther was kind of intended to be that tank), they still would have been overwhelmed by the sheer number of tanks built buy the Allies. The Soviets at their peak year produced over 29K tanks, with the US contributing around 21K. The Germans maxed out at around 8k.
IMHO, the Soviets alone could have eventually defeated Germany, thought at much greater cost (as if over 20m casualties wasn't already incredible).
Agreed that arguably no strategy could have helped them against the Soviet Union, it was a major blunder going to war with them.
But the Nazis self-sabotaged constantly. The Panzer IV and the Stug III (with the outdated Panzer III chassis) were arguably the closest standard for armor, but they were constantly diverting effort to alternative platforms that were too complex to mass produce and maintain. And the same for other weapons.
Not really, the tanks were both inefficient to operate and inefficient to build (lack of standardization, constantly changing plans, have to redesign every single part..)
When people say things like the GP, they are talking about German early war tanks, not the late ones.
The problem is that the early WWII arms race was so fast that I don't know how anybody can say with confidence that Germany lost to worse tanks than theirs. By the time the allies got any volume into battle, they also got better designs than their earlier ones.
Not necessarily worse, just different design philosophies. German design philosophies changed throughout the course of the war too.
And people don't really know much about the tanks the Germans were using in France and in Barbarossa. The Pz 2 was used extensively in Barbarossa and it was intended as a training tank! The Pz 3 was woefully underarmed compared to T-34 and god forbid come up against a KV1.
But at the end of the war, the Panther was one of the best tanks on the battlefield. Good crew ergonomics, a gun that was perfect, optics that allowed it to be used well. Comparing that to even a Firefly Sherman? Not a fair fight.
Depends what type of models you look at. There were many German designs that were much less prone to technical breakdowns due to pragmatic and mission focused design choices e.g. many of the Jagdpanzer ("tank destroyer") class like StuG II and Herzer were produced en masse and was very successful. Also, the Jagdpanther was a strong design.
The ideas that I as a civilian was sold over the past decades don't appear to hold up any longer.
As someone a while back put it, Russia lost several Bundeswehrs worth of equipment and keeps on grinding. Neither side is able to mass large forces, in a large part due to drones. And Iran can punish the US despite being comically outgunned.
Modern equivalents of Sherman and T-34 tanks over burdensome Tigers and a population willing to support heavy losses.
A Bundeswehr worth of equipment is so little nowadays that Bundeswehr itself lost several Bundeswehrs worth of equipment while being at peace for the last few decades.
Can't argue with that. The context of that quote was Europe defending itself and the reality that most European states are simply not ready for such a high level of attrition.
While Iran has faired better than I expected, it's a reach to say they've punished the US. The US losses are comically small. Of course wars aren't won solely based on battles...
One thing you and the OP are not addressing is that most of these modern tactics are also necessitated by the fact that building an air force, navy, or cavalry that can beat modern superpowers is just a complete non-starter.
I'm not so sure the F-35 is built for the wrong war as much as the war would probably call for the F-35 if it didn't already exist.
There are three stances that I can see in the debate at the moment.
* Quantity has a quality all of its own.
* Innovation and agility allows you to adapt and survive.
* Low capability platforms often can't be used to deliver useful effect & commanders will try every option not to use them in a fight. When they get committed it can be disastrous.
The first two clearly have merits, but every military professional I have ever worked with has cited them at me, so I don't think that they are underweighted in discussion. I believe that the last one is not treated with enough weight in the debate. The best example I have of it is the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Platforms with glaring problems, fielded and maintained at huge cost, completely unable to achieve their strategic purpose. Even when sulking in port these ships have proven to be deadly for their crews and maintainers. Another example is the TB3 drone. It had a staring role for about 10 days in the Ukraine, but those were 10 days where the Russians ran out of petrol to run their air defence systems on. It hasn't been in evidence since because it just can't be used in the current environment.
One that worries me is the upcoming T31 (uk arrowhead variant) frigate. The argument for it is that it is a relatively affordable platform that the RN will have enough of to actually be able to get out and about. However, it doesn't have a sonar, so... what actual use is it as a frigate (I know the story about the helicopter and some other bits and bobs... but... really?)
Sure, when the other side has run out of the good kit dragging crap out of storage might work, but until then you are going to be sending good men to their death in second rate equipment. Is that going to build war winning morale?
Second rate equipment is for playing lets pretend, or for fighting wars of national survival. We should avoid both.
Quantity has a quality *if* it can get to the battlefield.
The big stuff is for trying to keep the small stuff away from the battlefield. When you can't do that for whatever reason you need a bunch of small stuff of your own.
But a frigate without sonar isn't inherently horrible--lots of places don't have subs.
>But a frigate without sonar isn't inherently horrible--lots of places don't have subs.
True, but it's one less mission that it can do. My fear (which I think will be 100% confirmed) is that we will only get a handful even though they are unit cost cheap, because they still cost money to crew and maintain. I need to spend some time modelling the economics of it I guess.
The total cost of the entire program over its projected lifetime is $1.7 trillion. The F-35 is made by one company, Lockheed Martin (with some pieces made by a couple others). This entire program is a massive transfer of taxpayer money into one company.
Another data point is that it's estimated that all student debt in the US combined is $1.7 - 1.8 trillion.
Yeah, congress forces the military to contract out to companies in enough congressional districts to secure passage of the legislation. We basically force these companies into byzantine and inefficient supply chains because we treat it all as a jobs program.
You can just do both. The US does have some cheaper, more expendable drone platforms, and it's continuing to work on more. It should probably scale up production of them, though.
