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quantgeniustoday at 3:52 PM0 repliesview on HN

Stealth is somewhat overrated, especially 5th gen. Sure you get a lower radar cross-section which means you are less visible to X-band radar but near-peer adversaries or even non-peer technologically advanced adversaries don't rely only on X-band radar, to say nothing of distributed array radar where the transmitter and receiver are not in the same location. More than one networked war plane in the air are essentially distributed array radar. There are other bands which admittedly as not as good as X-band in terms of how much energy you need and how accurately you can locate things. But you can send a missile in the general direction using say S-band and have the missile turn on it's seeker once it's closer. Once the missile is close enough, a stealth plan can no longer hide. This is what the Russian S-400 and S-500 do for example.

Even when Serbia was bombed during the Clinton years, American stealth bombers escaped not due to stealth but because they used decoys towed by fiber optics which transmitted what the missile seeker expected to receive from the plane while also aggressively jamming the missile seeker so the missile hit the decoy not the plane. One stealth bomber was hit anyway.

Safran and other European manufacturers arguably produce decoys that are as good as anything US planes have, arguably better because they decided not to go all in on stealth and focus on other measures instead. Stealth is certainly better to have than not but stealth also means somewhat worse aerodynamics and much less serviceability. You need to apply stealth paint and cure it any time you work on the plane. The plane needs more work and is harder to work on because of the tradeoffs made to achieve stealth. So instead of 75%+ of the planes being available at any one time, you only have about 50% of the planes available at any one time and total operational costs are much higher.

Given these disadvantages, it's not completely clear how much of a benefit 5th gen stealth is in a near-peer conflict. If the US is fighting Iraq fine. Now, if you can actually achieve what defense manufacturers say they will achieve with 6th gen stealth, where you have much lower RCS to all bands of radar from all directions, that could be a game changer but we don't actually know yet. The F-35 still doesn't do everything it was supposed to be able to do when the program started, so I would take these claims with a large grain of salt. And stealth countermeasures will continue to evolve.