Lifetime Cost To Run F-35 Fighter: About $1 Trillion

[sofa king]

6. Yep.

The unfortunate fact of the matter is that a pilotless vehicle is already capable of carrying weapons, and the progress of miniaturization, autonomous programming, and secure communications means that war in the air is now inevitably trending toward the smaller, the cheaper, and the faster.

The robots are going to win, because they don't have to carry a life-support system and without a pilot they can accelerate and maneuver under stresses that would turn a human being into jelly. That makes them cheaper and faster, which collectively outweighs "better" every single time.

Worse still, we've cornered the market on piloted fighting, and nobody can or ever will be able to challenge us at the game we perfected long ago. That practically guarantees that everyone else will go the other way.

It's the exact same logical path that guerrillas take when their country is occupied by a superior on-the-ground military. Rather than challenge the enemy on the battlefield, they aim instead for what they can hit.

To me, that means the F-35 is worse than a Valkyrie-style political football, it's a national security policy position that is untenable and which needs to be reversed.

Edit: Perhaps the simplest way of defining the problem: a piloted aircraft is a platform for carrying weapons; when the weapons fly all by themselves, the pilot becomes a liability.