Sources:
https://www.19fortyfive.com/2025/03/the-f-47-fighter-cost-problem-no-one-wants-to-touch/
https://defencesecurityasia.com/en/iran-shahed-drones-gulf-patriot-air-defence-cost-crisis/ (assuming 2 missiles to each drone and the lowest estimate of drone costs)
War is literally a racket.
To some, it’s Cuck porn
What? War is more team sports than actual team sports
We are so close to inventing Arsenal Birds IRL.
You see, you’re approaching this from all the wrong angle. Big misconception.
You’re looking at this as if the US is trying to maximize its military capability, but that’s a mistaken assumption. Actually, the US is trying to maximize the amount of public funds funneled into defense contractors. And for that purpose, this is a very viable solution.
I think we’ve just found out you can’t beat poor countries using modern tactics and equipment with a military that was built to cannibalise your country’s wealth. You might do some damage, but you just end up another poor country.
TBH the US learned that over 50 years ago with the Vietnam war. I’m pretty sure herodotus wrote about it like 2500 years ago too.
I mean yeah, the Vietnam war could have been permanent Lunar base money. The money spent on the last few wars could have made America into a place nobody would ever leave willingly, but instead it’s looking like an empire’s last gasp.
The chuds watching 300 thinking their side is Sparta and not Persia…
I mean really, Sparta was xenophobic, massively right wing, and all talk - they were nowhere near as badass as their histories make them out to be. Compared to how tolerant and multicultural the Achaemenid Empire was at the time, chuds might be right.
But think of all the shareholder value created along the way
War mostly makes you poor nowadays unless you’re stealing oil
I’m assuming you don’t need to waste an F-47 for each drone, right?
If current F-47 can be retrofitted for dual porpoise… It might make a better value proposition?
Sorry, I’m not very knowledgeable, I don’t live on a war driven economy.
For $300 million, they better be quad dolphin
It looks like the F-47 would be able to manage up to 8 drones. Is that a lot? I don’t know.
At the same time? Or it’s to be scrapped afterwards?
My understanding is that the US drones are missile platforms. They launch their shit, then return to base; while the cheaper Iranian drones are kamikaze.
My reading is that the technology gives a crazy edge to quantity over quality, cheap over expensive, and the Pentagon’s asking, “How do we make these as expensive per unit as humanly possible?”
It’s fine. It makes us less effective militarily, drains the treasury faster, drives up bonds, accelerates an Argentina/Greece style debt crisis that will be the end of the empire… so it’s all good. Just wish I lived somewhere else is all.
My understanding is that the US drones are missile platforms. They launch their shit, then return to base; while the cheaper Iranian drones are kamikaze.
Yeah, that’s the idea here, particularly when it comes to the kind of drones being integrated with next generation fighters. The big notion most 6th gen fighter projects are moving towards is turning the plane into a mobile command and control centre, and using drones as the weapon delivery systems. So if you’re, for example, trying to shoot down an enemy fighter using a missile, instead of putting yourself in missile range to do it you send one of your drones forward and have it launch a missile. If your drone gets splashed in return, oh well. These aren’t cheap drones that we’re talking about, they’re basically fighter planes in their own right, but most militaries would much rather replace a plane than replace a pilot. That’s why ejector seats exist.
This actually does make a lot of sense as a concept. Basically every plane becomes a whole flight or even a small squadron. This drastically cuts down on the number of pilots you need to achieve the same effect in the air, and pilots are a really, really expensive and very limited resource.
The F-47 isn’t really a counter to Shaheds. There are ways to counter Shaheds, and the US desperately needs to invest in them, but that’s not really what their 6th Gen fighter program is about, any more than it’s the purpose of GCAP or whatever madness Saab is cooking up. 6th Gen fighters are built to take out the Russian and Chinese air forces. When one F-47 can basically counter a dozen Migs, that gives you a huge advantage.
Thanks for explaining the logic! It does make sense in an A2A context. Everything is about range.
But more broadly, I wonder what “air superiority” means in 2026. Even if you shot down every plane the enemy had, they can still deny you unchallenged access to their airspace. It looks like that’s what happening in Iran. We’re dropping standoff munitions at the border and sending missiles, not dropping gravity bombs directly overhead.
Seems ground defense can now match air offense at a fraction of the cost. “The assignment”, as I see it, is to build a cheap, robust military backed by an industrial base that can pump out munitions.
I think that’s a serious misreading of what’s happening in Iran.
Air superiority still matters a lot. But the way you establish air superiority is by systematically annihilating the enemy air defenses.
Remember all those Tomahawks, ATCMS, and other PrSMs the US absolutely dumped into Iran until their supplies started to run low? Yeah, you’re supposed to use those to kill the enemy’s air defence. That’s exactly what they’re good at. Instead the US just kind of threw them at whatever, including girls schools. Then they threw their aircraft at a still largely functional air defence network and were surprised when they got shot at.
The same thing is happening in Ukraine. Russia wasted their high end cruise missiles blowing up apartment buildings and then sent poorly trained pilots to fly so low and slow that they could be hit by MANPADS.
That’s not supposed to be possible. Shoulder mounted anti air is basically useless against a jet fighter flown by a competent pilot (they’re meant for killing helicopters). The only reason Ukraine is killing Migs with them is because the Russian pilots are so bad.
Nothing has changed about the importance of air superiority. We’re just watching two object lessons in how to completely fuck up getting air superiority.
My guess is the US didn’t take out Iranian air defenses because they can’t; maybe it’s memory or imagination, but I thought they’re underground until they’re in use, or they only turn on when there’s been a visual, or there are a ton of cheaper decoys, or a combination of the three.
Damn, that’s pretty embarassing for the Russians, though.
This is something a lot of people just don’t seem to grasp, and I’ve been saying it for a very long time.
If you spend a six or even seven figure sum to successfully intercept a five figure piece of ordinance, that’s actually a win for whoever fired it.
This is why we need to get rid of the $4,000+ bullet proof vests which protect against $0.40 bullets.
You can typically just shoot the person back, and deal with the problem that way.
Only if you ignore the cost of letting them bomb whatever they want.
Nope, you’ve missed the point even after I’ve explained it.
Yes, you need to intercept that missile or drone, because it’s headed towards something worth far more than the missile.
But, because the cost of a successful intercept is so high, your enemy can just keep spamming cheap ordinance at your until you run out.
I get your point, but that point is spoiling the ship to save a ha’penny of tar - the cost of the tar doesn’t matter, it’s about the cost of the ship. Period. Can you find less expensive tar? Great! If not, don’t lose the ship because the tar feels expensive.
That analogy doesn’t really make sense.
Of course ýou’d want to consider the value of the target.
So let’s consider a 10-story building costs $16 million to build. The enemy sends 3 20k drones out to destroy it. You counter with 6 missiles, for a total of $24 million. You’ve now, in a single afternoon, spent $8 million more than the building costs to rebuild.
The building obviously has utility, and might generate some income on its own, but the enemy has basically given you economic damage that is even greater than destroying the building. They spent 60k and you spent 24 million, a multiplier of 400!
Then the enemy sends 3 more drones, you’re out of interceptors, and you lose the building anyway. Total cost to them: 120k. Total cost to you: $40 million. The funny thing is that by sending in 3 extra drones to destroy the building, the multiplier DROPS to 333. If they wanted to purely drain your treasury, they’d try not to destroy your buildings to motivate you to keep intercepting drones!
Wars run on money. GRRM knew exactly what he was doing when he made the Iron Bank a major political player. You need money to win wars, and even if you win the war, you may have indebted your government so much it can’t recover.
One of the common themes of the fall of empires is that they own the fiat currency, therefore it is very easy for them to borrow money. So they keep borrowing money, and borrowing money, and borrowing money, until the day comes that they are spending most of their budget covering the interest.
Wars are the number one way empires run up their budgets.
The next step is the empire, losing its grip on the world, and becoming financially less stable, starts paying higher interest rates.
This is where on the map, we’d put a big arrow with the text: YOU ARE HERE (meaning the US). Bond yields are rising.
The next step is when even the interest become unaffordable, which triggers even higher rates, which cycles into higher taxes, lower services, which trigger less investment, and then it’s a vicious cycle to total economic meltdown.
It’s more likely they’re protecting an aircraft worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but yes, you’re very much right. You can just bleed someone dry with cheap ordinance.
In a longer war you’re only delaying that point a little bit until you run out of the deluxe turbo pro interceptors you make 100 of per year.
Hitting a drone is like winning a prize at the carnival.
username checks out
Call it a win win because trump keeps the media distracted from his global child sex trafficking ring
Well, unless your opponent can afford to outspend you by several orders of magnitude and still win the war.
True, but even for a country like the USA, that becomes pretty hard to justify to your voters unless you’re in a war of national survival.
Depends how much damage the drone would have caused if it was allowed to proceed to the target.
Nope, still missing the point, still not getting it.
What the drone might have hit is irrelevant. The problem is you’re spending an order of magnitude more to intercept this drone than the drone cost, meaning you will likely run out of interceptors before your enemy runs out of drones.
Okay, I’m assuming you’re being willfully ignorant to troll then. Goodbye.
Imagine thinking I’m trolling because you simply cannot comprehend the point I’m trying to make.
Frankly I’m not sure why this point seems difficult to grasp. “Smaller number better” is a pretty dead simple concept.
Just give up dude. The OP who posted this also posted a reply to me with some figures backing up the logic behind this.
Yes, I know a missile is cheaper than the asset it’s protecting, but your enemy can just keep sending cheap drones until you run out of interceptor missiles, and that’s a massive problem.
The assignment is to keep the media off of trumps global child sex trafficking ring
Logistics has been the king of wars for over a century. Only absolute FUCKING MORONS think a techno driven war machine is a good idea.
FUCKING MORONS with in-ground pools behind their houses in Maryland.
that’s odly specific
I imagine a lot of them live in the Maryland/Virginia area and live a typical comfortable middle class suburban life because that’s the sort of things morons who are morons for money would do.
Both.
Logistics determine the war since war exists.
These are class A morons
Why don’t they just make the drone swarms able to assemble into an F-47 like a Megazord?
Because then Lockheed Martin executives wouldn’t get their quarterly bonus.
It’s a Boeing plane.
Open to discussion because I frankly don’t know what I’m talking about, but I have a growing suspicion, given the US’s recent performance, that the true purpose of the military budget is congressional pork.
It’s true what you said about the interceptor which is why Ukraine uses interceptor drones against shahed types. Patriot was only used against ballistic missiles before they ran out.
Eisenhower described the problem in 1961. so for at least 65 years a significant factor of foreign policy has been rich executives of arms manufacturers and military contractors who profit from war making “donations” to politicians who decide when to go to war, and who and how much to award military contracts to. it’s called the military-industrial complex
It always has been. They understood the assignment very well. Funnel money from the public to defense contractors.
Everything the US government (or really any government) does is dual purpose. Pork + Function.
NASA launches are obscenely expensive (even as space programs go) because everything NASA does needs to create a job in the seats of 50 odd different senators.
Military procurement is super expensive, partially because modern military hardware is just an engineering marvel, but also because it needs to make the right jobs, hire the right contractors, meet ballooning requirements etc… Doesn’t mean they aren’t trying to get value for money, but if that’s all you focused on you’d buy all your military hardware from Temu.
While all of this is true, to an extent, the US military, specifically, is wildly inefficient in ways that almost no other military comes close to, perhaps with the exception of Russia.
Even putting aside any questions of corruption, pork, etc, just look at the basic structure and ask yourself “Does this make any fucking sense at all?”
You have:
- The Army, which handles ground combat.
- The Air Force, which handles air combat.
- The Space Force which does nothing.
- The Navy, which handles nautical combat… and also has an air force to handle air combat… The thing the Air Force does???
- The Marine Corps, which handles ground combat… Wait, don’t we have an army for that? Oh, also they have an air force, to handle air combat… The thing that the Navy does… Wait what?
Seriously, just at an overall structural level, what the actual fuck is going on here? Why does the United States have two armies and three air forces?
At least they all use the same equipment right?
FUCKING NOPE.
Different small arms, different vehicles, different aircraft, different fucking supply chains.
The F-47? Yeah, that’s for the Air Force. The Navy has their own entirely separate 6th gen program in the works. Because the Navy has a fucking air force and it’s not the same air force as the fucking Air Force.
I saw a video the other day where an American military blogger got to tour a Canadian ship, and he was absolutely bewildered by the fact that the guys who flew the helicopter were RCAF, not RCN. “I guess they’re, like, on loan or something”. No, they’re not, they’re just deployed to the ship because Canada has an integrated military.
The US doesn’t. That’s absolutely wild. Every branch of the military in the US is basically a separate organization with it’s own distinct top brass, all of whom pull high 6 figure salaries to basically replicate the same work over and over.
There’s a lot of discussion that goes into how high the US military budget is (over a trillion dollars now, and they’re asking for 1.5), but not nearly enough discussion of how little bang for their buck the US actually gets for that insanely bloated budget, because their military is so ridiculously inefficient. The average NATO military is, yes, kind of underfunded, and we’re only just now rectifying that, but at the same time decades of being underfunded has forced the average NATO military to get comparatively good at maximizing the impact of those dollars. There are still tonnes of inefficiencies (just speaking for Canada our procurement is a fucking mess, and our top brass are seriously overstuffed with guys who ride empty desks), but the effectiveness of something like the CAF per dollar spent is so much higher than the US military. There’s a reason NATO partners regularly stomp the yanks in exercises.
Every single military has bloat and inefficiency, but the scale of it in the US is orders of magnitude beyond almost anywhere else. They could probably halve their military budget and still retain every bit of their current effectiveness just by consolidating, reorganizing and integrating. And they’d still be able to keep throwing piles of money at Microsoft to make gamer glasses that no one wants.
So… basically a top-heavy jobs program?
When I was canvassing for a leftist candidate, I talked to a lot of people involved in the defense industry and they were all pretty much single issue voters–“keep giving me money.” I imagine they’re in every state.
People love money, what can I say?
Yeah, but if you proposed a jobs program to those people, they would be outraged. Because it’s military, it’s “good”, moral. I think that’s why the anti-war left is such a threat to the establishment, because the political system is built on military grift. If the military loses its sheen of holiness, the system collapses.
because a jobs program is for the poor, you know the people who actually need jobs, they dont want that. they want more money so they can buy their fourth rental property.
that the true purpose of the military budget is congressional pork
Some of it is just good old industry subsidies from an unrelated (and overblown) budget.
Why would they care? It’s free money to them. 🤢🤕
Just park the F-47 safely underground in the middle of your country.
