So there's this new book with the aforementioned title that talks about how if China got into a war with USA they can just hack into F35s and shoot them all down easy with their hacker skills and people are now talking about how this means we should rethink about the F35 program. I think the book must have missed the part where the Japanese arrived to help out with the Gundams and raised the remains of the Yamato to rout the Chinese, since that's about as relevent to real life as this book too. I'm not going to pretend I know all there is about the future war fighting but it seems like a lot of these guys analyzing stuff can't even be called armchair analysts. For example you see reports about F35 not being the best at dogfighting. If you've paid attention to where aerial combat is going you'll know that they're closer to a video game than Top Gun or whatever people used to think about Fighters. It's really just you move this cursor on this guy and fire a missile before the other guy sees you (or not able to see you, because you're in Stealth Fighter). Although I don't think any Stealth fighter has been in real air combat it'd make sense to assume a Stealth Fighter isn't going to try to rely on out dogfighting an opponent without stealth. It's an open question whether stealth really works like advertised but as long as you believe stealth is supposed to work you don't have to worry about other performances, not to mention in today's environment I think virtually anything that can be seen by a ground radar is going to get shot down anyway. There's also a blurb in the book about how the LCS (Littoral Combat Ship) was unable to beat back the Chinese, probably because the LCS Is a very light class ship that is designed to fight pirated in Somalia as opposed to engaging a major power.
Perhaps the best example I can think of how people who utterly doesn't get these things is that we're told fighting the ISIS takes a long time and it's going to be an ongoing effort, so they interviewed this guy who was Saddam's henchman who is currently fighting against ISIS, and he's like, "America drove us out of Baghdad in 20 days on the Persian Gulf War. I don't see getting rid of the ISIS as harder than that. We don't need more training from Americans. Give us the tanks and we know how to use them too." I mean, of course America doesn't want to just hand over a bunch of advanced weapons to some guys who might immediately attack you after the ISIS is driven out, but this whole notion that it'd take a long time to destroy the ISIS as a function of their military strength is indeed quite absurd. The USA advanced weapon paradigm might be vulnerable to a case where your opponent just sends a ton of guys to die to eat up all the fancy precision ammunition though it's not like JDAMs or whatever uses some exotic material to construct, and at any rate I don't think most adversaries are going to start with a strategy hoping that they'll send in enough guys to die to run the USA out of ammo. As the Saddam henchman would said, the USA sure killed the Iraqis pretty well in 20 days and Iraq had a fairly large army. So if you're only counting on having enough targets to outlast the USA it's probably not going to work, and of course whether all the technology part works as intended is something you can't know ahead of time, but you don't design say stealth and then just assume it's not going to work despite seeing no proof that the enemy can easily detect stealth.
Perhaps the best example I can think of how people who utterly doesn't get these things is that we're told fighting the ISIS takes a long time and it's going to be an ongoing effort, so they interviewed this guy who was Saddam's henchman who is currently fighting against ISIS, and he's like, "America drove us out of Baghdad in 20 days on the Persian Gulf War. I don't see getting rid of the ISIS as harder than that. We don't need more training from Americans. Give us the tanks and we know how to use them too." I mean, of course America doesn't want to just hand over a bunch of advanced weapons to some guys who might immediately attack you after the ISIS is driven out, but this whole notion that it'd take a long time to destroy the ISIS as a function of their military strength is indeed quite absurd. The USA advanced weapon paradigm might be vulnerable to a case where your opponent just sends a ton of guys to die to eat up all the fancy precision ammunition though it's not like JDAMs or whatever uses some exotic material to construct, and at any rate I don't think most adversaries are going to start with a strategy hoping that they'll send in enough guys to die to run the USA out of ammo. As the Saddam henchman would said, the USA sure killed the Iraqis pretty well in 20 days and Iraq had a fairly large army. So if you're only counting on having enough targets to outlast the USA it's probably not going to work, and of course whether all the technology part works as intended is something you can't know ahead of time, but you don't design say stealth and then just assume it's not going to work despite seeing no proof that the enemy can easily detect stealth.
