alt Hacker News> They are at most used to lob gliding bombs from far behind the front lines.
You write that, and literally quote my point about F-35 making deep strikes against dense air defense possible in the very next sentence.
> They are at most used to lob gliding bombs from far behind the front lines.
You write that, and literally quote my point about F-35 making deep strikes against dense air defense possible in the very next sentence.
It remains to be seen how well F-35s actually perform in that role against an adversary with modern anti-air defense and with modern drone-based tactics.
Both Russia and Ukraine learned to avoid concentrating forces, so what are you going to strike? Use an F-35 to attack a single Jeep with a mounted machine gun? F-35 has limited range and carries very limited armament, so you can't just carpet-bomb everything. At some point, you'll need to use much less survivable heavy bombers.