You can make things at home. However some parts will need $100 worth of your time when you can buy it - at slightly the wrong size - for $0.50. You could make the part for $0.25 instead - but it would cost several years to design the molds.
It isn't reasonable to expect that propellor drones will be used long term - they are too easy to shoot down. you need just enough ability to force the enemy to not waste they energy making them when something more expensive is harder to shoot down and thus more likely to work.
The days of China manufacturing cheap junk is long past. These same arguments were made against Japan. Look at a BYD EV and it will have a fit and finish comparable to any US manufacturer. In aviation, they're catching up quickly to the US, and are arguably ahead of Europe and Russia.
I suppose visible is subjective. But they are also key component and raw material suppliers for essentially everything high value as well. The west simply does not have the heavy industrial or resource extraction base to account for anything else to be the case. Every time I’ve looked into literally any product China is at the start of the supply chain if lot much further into it.
And yes, I am alleging outright fraud and misrepresentation when it comes to stuff supposedly required to be entirely domestically sourced due to national security. If China froze all exports to the US and its allies, the US manufacturing base would simply cease to exist in rather short order. The China link might be 35 steps down the supply chain and buried 4 countries deep - but it’s almost always there.
The military is concerned about that and developing alternatives where there is real risk. The supply chain is global and china too has areas where they are missing something critical.
We’re a fading manufacturing power and corporate profit-maximization since the 80s has made things very brittle. The most obvious example for HN is semiconductors but there are many other things which we either don’t make in sufficient quantity at all or which have significant dependencies on countries like China. In a war, it doesn’t help, if, say your factory is in Utah when it depends on Chinese rare earth until someone spends 5-10 years getting a new mining & refining supply chain online.
The iran war - for all it was a bad idea eliminated a lot of iran's war capacity which seems to be the real goal - near as anyone can tell what they were. Regime change would be nice, but needs more than the us was ever gave indication they would do.
the followon effects like the closing of the straight were obvious which is why few Iran hatehs thought it was a good idea
The estimates I’ve seen say they lost/used 33% of their conventional capacity, 33% was rendered inoperable but recoverable.
I’d guess with the ceasefire, they’re probably back to 40-50% online.
The nuclear capability story is even worse: they were mostly mothballed prewar, suffered partial refinement damage and minimal stockpile loss. Refinement will be back online sometime in the next few years (unless this is a forever war), with weapons following shortly after that.
More than any other non wartime fighter in recient history. and if war breaks out we can produce a lot more once we gear up factories - as every other war needed-
That's a non-answer. You're comparing it within its category when the point of contention is specifically and explicitly that its production can't match that of drones etc. In a broader sense the entire category of manned fighter jets can't scale to keep up with drone production.
Ukraine produces thousands of drones a day, including interceptor drones.
A valid question is how the investment in drone warfare is best balanced with that in traditional warfare, but that is besides the point of the difference in scaling production.
The pacific theater is a way different combat environment then Ukraine. The ranges involved and china's IADS is just a whole different beast. The cheap drones that we have been seeing in Ukraine and Iran are just not as useful in a war against china. Cheap drones don't have the range or survivability to penetrate china's airspace or hit moving targets(most go to fixed gps coordinates), this is a job for stand off munitions and manned stealth aircraft. There's no current UAV or CCA that exists that has the capabilities needed to replace manned aircraft for the majority of missions that would need to be flown. Wargaming shows that the b21 and f47 as well as stand off munitions are the workhorses. Although something like a Barracuda-500 seems very interesting but again its like 10x the cost of the drones being used in the Ukraine theater and its production lines are just now being set up.
If the headline of the article was that fighter jets are bad in general instead of just F-35, i suspect the convo would be very different.
But still, even if you assume that was what the author meant, its still a confusing article. The status quo already is that we dont just use fighter jets.
Rubber gaskets wear out. Best practice is to replace them every time you open the cover. We can put them in, but the replacement battery better come with the gasket because you can't safely replace the battery without a new gasket.
In general I find noise the unimportant part. I'm not listening to my keyboards (except my midi keyboards, and even then it isn't the physical keyboard it is what the sound engine it connects to does). Keyboard reviews focus on that because sound is something that can be objectively measured in a video. I tell by watching a video if I will like how a keyboard feels in my fingers.
I have to disagree. It isn't nonsense that a good keyboard feels good, and something that feels good makes someone more productive by inspiring them.
What is nonsense is that everyone cares. For some people it won't make any difference. It also won't make any difference in the quality of work (except in the case the keyboard is broken) when you force yourself to work.
If a good keyboard gets your over the hump and working then it isn't procrastination.
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