Not zero-indexing people’s attractiveness SMH. /s

Or reporting x dead in a terrorist attack, but not how many died in car accidents the same day. Or, topically, “F-35 downed in Iran” without any discussion of how many have bombed Iran and returned safely.

If the proportional news existed, I’d watch it, and all the coverage about old people slipping in the shower.

Sorry to respond when you’re banned, but I’d like to point out the US has way more sprawl than even we do (somehow).

I have to say, it is great that our politicians err on the side of depriving themselves. Good luck finding broken shit or no sitting space on airforce one, and the current US president straight up wants to switch to a gauche thing petrostate royalty invented.

I mean, don’t spend enough on it, and we won’t have a sovereign budget to worry about at all.

Nice. I’m guessing the F-16 would be closer to the F-35?

And then any other stealth aircraft is going to blow both out of the water.

Nope, you’re probably thinking of the F-22. The F-35 got it back down to reasonable hanger time and care, at the cost of a long, multi-trillion dollar development period.

Per the other commenter the Gripen is a bit cheaper yet, but that’s because it’s built like a car from the 70’s or something. All off-the-shelf parts combined in obvious ways with lots of allowances. The cost of that is it shows up to radar like a 70’s car. It’s basically just a very different aircraft for doing different things.

So then this would mean a 1 in binary is a decimal 5?

Yeah, sorry, that’s wasn’t very clear. I think I was in too many parallel discussions about this at once.

What I mean is just that the designers absolutely did know other sensors could and would be used for targeting. It’s jut a question of how much that lowers survivability, exactly. The amount of traffic over Iran indicates it’s still good, because radar is still the main game in town.

The neat thing about the Gripen is that it theoretically could run in a guerilla-type scenario. It takes an unskilled ground crew of IIRC five, and can take off and land on a dirt runway. If that’s enough, I have no idea.

The F-35 could be useful for hitting the US back in the very short term, but is very dependent on working airbase infrastructure and supply chains, which would be obliterated shortly.

We’ve already spent a quarter billion on the RBS-70s, which adds up to around 75 MANPADs occupiers would have to worry about when landing and taking off, maybe more if there’s more missiles in the order than launchers.

Yes, this is easily one of the more harmless things she’s asked for/done.

It’s a lot of paperwork and you have to pay for it.

No, the engineers knew it would be visible like anything else, because they’re not completely stupid. A lot of stuff still relies on radar, though, and other frequencies and tools can have limitations, like in range or “does-it-work-in-rain”. Consider how many F-35s made it over Iran safe and sound.

Presumably they’re as sneaky as possible in other ways as well, although at some point it’s still a jet plane.

This is known as “optronics” in military applications, FWIW. I don’t know if anyone is using it for target discovery yet, but optronic guidance to a known target is a thing.

Radar is nice in that it and works under all kinds of conditions (like through clouds) and can have very long range, but there definitely are other sensors that are making their way onto the battlefield. Passive audio sensors have been a huge success in Ukraine, for example. Sending out a radar pulse also draws all the wrong kind of attention.

6th gen fighters probably won’t bother with anything except hiding at this rate, and the battlefield might be so transparent by then nobody will make a 7th. The “blue skies” will just be where various unmanned projectiles pass through.

Yes, they more or less are are, to radar. The thumbnail is of an infrared image. If you’re close up enough to do this and prepared they can still be shot down.

The trick is just getting that to happen. Consider how many F-35s right above them the Iranians haven’t shot down.

I’m not even sure that’s a good deal, honestly. They wouldn’t be any good on missions abroad, and would they actually last long if the US invaded? Hopefully the military is thinking it through carefully, and the politicians are listening.

Maybe we buy 30 billion in RBS SAMs from Sweden instead.

They’re exceptionally reliable, and better than anything else at what they do. He went back on this word because he was actually put into rooms with airforce experts who made that clear, and he didn’t expect the US to turn evil at the time.

No, the Iranians haven’t discovered a kind of radio wave that the rest of us just missed. The “almost” in almost invisible means something, and there’s a variety of situations that can dramatically increase the radar signature, or that can make radar not the important consideration at all.

He needed budget room, and he didn’t want to raise taxes or cut any programs. Also, public service spending has grown faster than the economy, which apparently he took as a sign there must be fat to cut.

Pretty equal chance this guy wants us to be America’s upper penis, or genuinely thinks BC would join us. If it’s the former, he’s just as delusional about how that would go.