We’re sitting on the laurels of the old white guys who designed the classics, but there have been - until recently- high standards in aircraft design. The F35 is a fagbag or whatever but the front line kit will come from white minds and slide rules - the stuff of excellence.

The US fleet has always been a bit italian and sporty by design. It’s like having a sports car that can do its niche mission beautifully - but you have to change the oil every 1,500 miles and tear the engine out for a full rebuild every 5,000. For every hour on the road spent hammering through the gears, you’re spending 2 in the garage to maintain your resale.

When it works, helmed by american staff, it’s basically unbeatable. We simply have too many skilled airmen (retiring, dying off but still there), and too damn many aircraft. It’s hard to fathom the extent of how overwrought our air power is. If we had the numbers that the russkies did, then we’d be less intimidating, everything would see 60% uptime and they’d blow us away.

But instead, we probably have some insane ratio like 25 fighters for every one of theirs. Between the USAF and the assortment of Air Guard units, it’s just insane, laughable levels of decadence.

If we actually do go then we’ll probably lose some fighters here and there, but nothing like you’d wanna see where it’s collapsing before your eyes and destroying neolib egos every day. Russian fighter tech is…..not great for dogfighting, and we’ve been designing our systems to hit their weak points for years. Given how staid they seem to be, I wouldn’t give them great odds unless they REALLY go all-in on drone tech and figure out a way to burn through our funding with it. We’ll get some black eyes, but their only real hope for victory would lie in baiting out the conflict and letting us cripple ourselves economically so we can’t keep shipping parts across the world overnight.

nostr:note1crqd24rtxg7fwvet9azzng2da4tp7y255yk9ev0lnlk7mu82weesrczqqp