Well, barely. Hey – it’s 2023. Did ya ever think? I never dared, or wanted, or thought beyond 2001, maybe 2010. Some science fiction date that would never really arrive.
Now it’s here and and everything’s all Escape From New York and The Manchurian Candidate and The Dead Zone. Without the happy endings.
Russia turned out to be a huge turd masquerading as a formidable military power. Why the world keeps taking them seriously is a mystery. Have they ever been half as competent in practice as they pretend to be in choreographed drills and fiery rhetoric? No. They were pathetic on a per capita basis under the Romanovs, including in Crimea. They were rubbish in the First World War, their Civil Wars were chaos of the lowest common denominator, everyone reduced to thugs at the end. The Second World War was a “victory” by mass attrition. And I do mean mass — to the tune of 25 million dead. The U.S. hasn’t had that many casualties in all of its conflicts in 247 years combined. We’ve lost 1,304,700 troops total, and and least 650,000 of those were from the American Civil War, which was obviously us killing ourselves. That tends to run up the total quickly.
My point is, Tsarist Russia, the USSR, and the Russian Federation have all suffered from the same problem: They are governed by corrupt oligarchs or dictators at the top, who care more for their own survival and lifestyle than they do for their people or their country. They are fine with ordering human waves against heavy defensive installations, for no rational reason. They will assassinate or exile generals who show too much initiative and become too popular amongst the troops. They are in many ways more afraid of their own advisers, military leaders, and spy chiefs than they are the actual enemy. They have always been a terrible fighting force. They have designed some good vehicles and equipment, though it tends to perform better at shows in peacetime than under the duress of combat. They exaggerated the capabilities of everything, where “Western” (NATO) countries generally do just the opposite. If a Rus fanboy online tells you the Su-57 can cruise at Mach 1.5 and surpass Mach 2 with afterburners (nearly 2.5!), you can assume with a fair degree of confidence that one in the wild will actually cruise around Mach 1 and boost close to Mach 2 while losing its stealth characteristics, such as they are. I’ve seen posts and even online “military analysis magazine” website articles that claim the Su-57 (or PAK-FA as the export to India is designated) is the new top dog of the skies and can best the American F-35, and even the mighty F-22 Raptor. This is obviously good for a deep belly laugh, and could possibly help one recover from some afternoon malaise or light depression. I’ll never be able to prove it with numbers the way these desk jockeys had Russia’s military 2nd best in the world, and Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and North Korea all in the top ten. People like that are people who have been using the entire suite of Microsoft products since the early 1990s and now use an ugly Android flip phone or a Pixel because “If you do an actual comparison of the specs vs the cost, you’d be surprised…”
Let’s just say I’d bet all the money I have that the following would make short work of an Su-57 or a Chinese J-20 in a dogfight, given pilots considered well trained by their respective services:
F-15, F-15 EX, F-18, F/A-18, F-35, F/A-35, F-22
I’d go so far as to put even money on an F-16 or an F-14 taken out of mothballs and cleaned up.
In a squad vs. squad scenario I’d go even further. Give me 5 F-35s with satlinks, or 3 F-22s with a Growler in the rear but with near-horizon coverage. You can send up to 50 of any Russian or Chinese made planes at me starting from 150 miles out, with any percentage of those planes being support aircraft. I will shoot down all 50 of your planes without taking a loss. Rest, reload, redo the experiment the next day, and the result will be the same. If the U.S. is able to network several of its modular, systems-aware craft and/or have over-the-horizon starting conditions, no combination of Rus/Chin aircraft are going to get anywhere near enough for a dogfight. The only constraint is going to be the number of missiles my planes are carrying, the rounds of ammo in their cannons, and the goodies I can call upon from my support craft (jamming, EM pulse, mini-drone strikes, etc). Soon that might even include directed energy weapons, in which case I might be up there awhile. Maybe til I get so hungry I need another aviator to come replace me for awhile.
Essentially, when the games stop and the fuh’rilla pops off, almost any U.S. fighter (air dominance or hybrid) is going to overwhelm any Sukhoi, Chengdu, or any other pile of scrap that an adversary has in the sky. The difference is tremendous. You’ll never see this online from keyboard jockeys crunching stats in between mining bitcoin, who are a whizz at uploading YouTube videos and have a presence in every major social platform, but have never served, fought, and generally never really lived. Lived outside, observed what happens in real life, and why you can’t model complex situations involving hundreds of variables, many of which involve human reactions, decisions, motivation, perseverance, training, and more. And the stats you have access to as a civilian are inaccurate. One “stealth” fighter is not necessarily nearly as invisible as another. A “5th Gen” fighter is only stated as being such. It may really be a 4.5 or a 4+. While another “5th Gen” might really be a solid 5.5, bordering on a 6 with a recent avionics upgrade. There’s just all sorts of nuances that aren’t made public, at least not readily, and YouTubers on average are not renowned for their deep investigative work. They need to pump out videos fairly quickly, so they consult sources like Wikipedia, or even worse, partisan fly-boy sites that always exaggerate the qualities of their favorite armed forces. Just go to any Indian military website… When they aren’t pimping their own rides, they’re relentlessly touting the science fiction-like abilities that new Russian or Chinese gear is going to bring to the table, which will have The Americans shocked and confused, scrambling for answers. Of course it’s always some model of aircraft or ship or tank that hasn’t actually been developed yet, but is heavily in development and expected at any time. Ever heard of vaporware? Or hype for something that exceeds what the engineers can actually deliver?
Apple, Inc faces this challenge every year, or every quarter. People expect something game changing from them in a way they don’t from other companies. Apple can deliver solid upgrades and evolutionarily improvement year after year, which would earn them plaudits from the pundits were they almost anyone else, but being Apple, they will inevitably start hearing those voices of discontent: “Apple has forgotten how to innovate! Tim Cook needs to go!” And when they do develop something radical like the Vision Pro, the same nabobs that rubbished the iPod, iPhone, and iPad take to their CNET columns and confidently tell their readers what a mistake this was from Apple, that it’s too expensive, there aren’t any killer apps, there’s not an audience for it, and all the same tired cliches they uttered after every innovative product Apple announced in the past. My god some (most) of these so-called experts are short sighted and wrong about so much. I could do their job much better. The same with many of the TV/free website level (think CNBC or Yahoo Finance) stock market “experts” that tell you what’s a hot buy and what’s fools gold. Their reasoning is so terrible! Some of their assessments are correct, but there’s always low hanging fruit, like buying NVIDIA as AI starts to become a thing (like, a year ago). I knew they would blow up because they dominate the GPU market and GPUs do all the crunchy math stuff in a massively parallel way, which is perfect for generative processing, which is what current AI like OpenAI’s ChatGPT do, once they are fed a crap load of real world data. Sifting data and doing comparisons and ranking them and all of those iterative, hierarchical algorithms are tailor made for a GPU. So NVIDIA, which designs the most advanced GPUs, and TSMC, which physically manufactures them, are probably going to be good investments if generative AI takes off (which it has). It’s not rocket science. It’s computer science, but more about being in the know than being able to code like Dennis Ritchie.
I think I’m way off topic…
