[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.