[cloudie78]

What’s the point of this useless exercise?

Once you optimise for G forces, speed, cost, lethality - you end up with a missile. We have those already. And we know this already.

Give it more fuel and maybe loitering capability. Something with a jet engine for cruising and a small rocket engine for terminal phase kill.

I’ll have my 100mil now please and thank you.

[trencedamp]

I'm reminded of Henry Ford and his famous "people would have asked for a faster horse" quote.

This feels like those people all over again.

We know AI can fly things, but why make AI fly an airframe designed in the 1970s around a human cockpit? Ukraine can probably 3d print ten drones that would win in a fight against one of these, for peanuts

[short_sells_poo]

I was always wondering about this as well. How much more manoeuvrable can an unmanned drone be given that it doesn't need to lug around life support systems and avoid any G forces that would kill the expensive squishy mammal inside? To your point, it can be indistinguishable from a missile.

Or maybe have a slower but still very nimble carrier drone platform with loitering capabilities that launches very fast and nimble drones/missiles?

Going even further, do these even need to be as nimble and fast as fighter jets? Once you completely remove humans from the equation and replace super expensive and nimble fighter jets with swarms of cheap drones, the loss of a drone or even a carrier becomes much less costly and they won't need to overemphasize survival to the degree that expensive human piloted jets do.

[tim333]

>Ukraine’s F-16s have shot down 2,200 of roughly 3,000 Russian drones and missiles it has intercepted, https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2026/07/23/incredi...

So chalk one up for the F-16s in the F-16 vs drone battle. It'd be hard to catch one when your drone does 200 kmh and the F-16 2000 kmh.

That said this AI thing sounds more like a research platform than finished product.

[trencedamp]

Ok, but those drones were one way ground attack drones and had no self defence capability. An AI piloted f16 has immediate cost and maneuverability disadvantages against a built for purpose dogfighting drone

[cloudie78]

1 drone: 10-20k

1h of flight time for an F-16: 25k, not counting the missiles used and ammo.

Doesn’t scale. Ergo, useless.

[tim333]

They get quite a lot of use in Ukraine shooting down incoming cruise missiles and drones which Russia launches by the hundred. You'd need a lot of expensive missiles to do the same.

[energy123]

F-16s are reusable missile trucks. F-35s are reusable missile trucks with a smaller capacity but with stealth and better telemetry.

Reusability is just common sense economics. A JDAM costs only $30k USD.

[cloudie78]

Once you consider the full picture it doesn’t make sense.

There’s a reason why Russia and Ukraine are lobbing ballistic missiles and cheap drones at each other.

There’s a reason why Iran conflict looks the way it does.

[energy123]

I can provide explanations for these observations.

Russia and Ukraine is like this because they lack F-35s. This is what an air parity war looks like. Air parity wars are qualitatively different phenomena, and should not be conceptually clustered alongside air superiority wars during analysis.

Iran: Strategic outcomes are irrelevant to the question of unit economics in airpower. The amount of JDAMs they've dropped and the amount of money they've saved by using JDAMs instead of ballistic missiles is actually insane. Israel, for example, used over 20 Sparrow ballistic missiles to assassinate Khamenei, but they did this for an explicit tactical purpose and generally prefer to use reusable aircraft (as does any modern airforce who are fighting an air superiority war). If you would advocate for using ballistic missiles instead of JDAMs, why would this cause a different outcome, and why would this cost less money than using JDAMs? Regarding Shahed one-way attack drones, they aren't much cheaper than JDAMs and they're significantly less effective. They also do not provide a platform for forward telemetry like F-35s and ISR drones do.

[cloudie78]

> Strategic outcomes are irrelevant to the question of unit economics in airpower.

lol

> look at how much cheaper expensive bombs are than expensive ballistic missiles are

Right, to drop a JDAM you need to be within 30km of a target. Any 70s era SAM can prevent that since they usually cover an area of 150ish km if Serbia could shoot down an F-117, then it can shoot down an F-16. I’m using Serbia as an example here because they operated 60s era Soviet SAM systems, and that’s the floor for Iranian capabilities.

F-35 is a joke too, evidenced by checks notes 0 sorties over Iran in the last two months.

So, with that out of the way, since a plane costs 30mil for F-16 and 80-100mil for an F-35, both equally useless against near-peer much less peer level adversary, a ballistic missile is suddenly much MUCH cheaper option.

The way to defeat air defences is saturation, you want 30-100 of 10k/unit one-way drones to exhaust the air defences, just aim them at the launcher sites or the radars. That’s 300k-1mil for a saturation, and then let’s say another 6 million for 6 JASSM cruise missiles for total of 6000lbs of ordinance delivery to hit whatever it is you’re actually trying to hit.

Alternate is you fly 3 F-16s each loaded with 4 500lbs JDAMs, so that’s 90mil lost when they get shot down by a MANPADs along the way to the target which will probably be somewhere in the middle of the country and another 1mil lost in one-way drones. Plus the political cost of losing pilots.

[energy123]

There's been zero sorties over Iran in the last two months because the war aims in the current round of fighting are narrowly scoped to Hormuz. That's not a commentary on the capability of the F-35.

You mention MANPADs as if it is a significant vulnerability, but there's been only one or two shootdowns of jets by Iran during the previous two rounds of fighting. I encourage you to look at the number of jets shot down in the Vietnam War and the First Gulf War to understand how insane this is.

One way attack drones are not a solution in any conflict with significant strategic depth and against an opponent with air superiority. You cannot protect your industrial base if you sacrifice air superiority due to the opponent possessing F-35s. Which means you cannot pump the volumes required to achieve the kind of attentional effects we see in Russia-Ukraine. This is the reason why it's analytically flawed to bundle air parity wars with air superiority wars in analysis.

[cloudie78]

“Narrowly scoped to Hormuz” yeah because anything more than that apparently is too great of a scope for the US military. Check the latest reports on stocks in Washington Post.

What air superiority? In the Middle East? With what, let me guess F-35? With 25% operational readiness and 13h of maintenance for every 1h of flight? With gym plates in the nose instead of actual radars?

And don’t quote Vietnam as some sort of a success story, especially when the US lost that one fighting against farmers in flip flops armed with AK-47, so of course nothing got shot down.

[ACCount37]

First, missiles are not reusable. "JDAM trucks" are. Jet engines are expensive, you know.

Second, US already has a lot of F-16s, and not a lot of dedicated high end drones. US has more F-16s than it has trained F-16 pilots.

Things like this enable turning "manned" airframes into "optionally manned" airframes. Which enables using those F-16s for cheaper for routine "JDAM truck" runs, and also for the kinds of missions that would be too risky for a human pilot. No pilot rescue operations for a downed Nvidia GPU rack.

You could think of an AI F-16 as of a "higher end variant of Reaper", and you wouldn't be wrong exactly.

Third, the best thing? This AI approach transfers. If you can have an AI fly F-16 through reasonably complex missions, you can also adapt it to an F-35, or a dedicated high end drone platform.

[cloudie78]

F-16s are reusable until they get shot down and you need to be within 30km of the target to drop a JDAM. Any SAM from 60s onwards can deny entry to F-16/F-35. As soon as F-35 opens hatches to drop a bomb it’s on the radar.

Small jet engines are 20-25k/unit

One F-16 gets you 20-30 ballistic missiles, or cruise missiles.

Math doesn’t math in your case, volume and saturation over high tech gadgets that barely work.

So much so even the US military is waking up to this reality.

[ACCount37]

Have you actually seen what happened in Iran? Were you paying attention? Any attention at all?

US rolled in, convinced Iran's AA to stop doing its thing, and proceeded to bomb targets with impunity. And I mean "impunity" when I say it. When you see B-52s take off with JDAMs under their wings, you know someone's AA is not picking up the phone.

If a B-52 with JDAMs is somehow survivable, an F-16 is not even a question.

The bulk of US losses in Iran in the air were: MQ-9 Reapers, with 10-20 airframes lost reportedly. That's an aging low/slow turboprop platform that's highly vulnerable even to MANPADS.

No F-16s or B-52s were lost to Iran in the air. Zero. One F-15 was shot down by Iran. One F-35 was damaged - and that specific airframe has crawled back to the nearest airbase under its own power and landed gracefully. Clearly, the jets involved were having a good time overall.

(Except over Kuwait. No airspace is more hostile than an incompetent friendly airspace, it seems.)

Now: a (manned) F-16 flight hour is 20-30k, and a single F-16 can truck 2 to 4 GBUs or JDAMs. An unmanned F-16 can shave a few thousands off that. Trucking cheap bombs with an expensive aircraft is quite a lucrative gig if you can reliably get that aircraft back. And the possibility of using those aircraft in SEAD/DEAD missions that are a bit too spicy for meatbag pilots, but can keep airspace open for other platforms? There's considerable value in that too.

Going "full missile" makes sense at extreme standoff distances, or in extremely low survivability scenarios. That, as Iran shows, isn't at all a given when US levels of SEAD/DEAD are in play. Missiles and OWA drones had a place there, but so did high end SEAD jets and jet-powered missile carriers.

MQ-9 might have underperformed, but that seems to be as much of an argument for more cheap missile/OWA hybrids as it is for cheaper strike/loiter drones, and more expensive, more survivable drones. An "F-16D" and even "F-35D" unmanned conversions might make economic sense, given the prices of MQ-9, F-16, F-35, and what we've seen happen in Iran.