I'm pretty sure at some point we will have a cheap, sub-100k drone that would be able to take out this fighter. Okay fine maybe it'd take 30 of those sub-100k drones. But for every take down, the US loses 1 BILLION DOLLARS while probably 20 of the drones survived, so the cost was ~ 1 million.
#1 rule of war. Never take to war what you can't afford to lose.
It was noted the navy has the same issue. If we lose an aircraft carrier we lost the war economically. At that point its cheaper to just give up.
Also, we certainly haven't lost the war economically from a loss of just one carrier -- we have a few. Our opponents (whoever they might be) would though.
It's not a bad example actually -- US economy and military spending are so far ahead of competition, that if we can keep $$ losses under ~1 to 5 (their 1 to our 5, that is), and probably much more than that if you account for production capabilities and strength of the economy, that any opponent would be economically devastated. WW2 and the cold war demonstrated that quite well: Soviet costs were technically lower in absolute terms, but in relation to the size of the economy they were absolutely destructive.
A loss of a carrier doesn't incur by itself any economic cost, however building it does.
Your Soviet analogy makes sense, even though their mistake was building it (and not losing it - I don't know about great losses of the Soviets after 45)
Also, IANA expert but I think carriers today only make sense against pre-missile and pre-jet militaries. IMO a carrier can only operate under air superiority and effective missile defense one of which probably even small countries can contest these days.
I think opinions also vary on that one, and effectiveness of anti-ship missiles vs carriers has obviously not been combat tested -- a carrier group has a lot of means to defend against cruise missile attacks though, the aircraft themselves being a pretty major one. There have been developments on both sides of that equation, but I doubt anyone who actually knows much about the current state of affairs is going to tell us :)
One problem with the missile strategy (which is the one Soviets tried) is that even if you might be able to cost-effectively attack a carrier group with missile cruisers, they are pretty much useless for anything else.
>> If we lose an aircraft carrier we lost the war economically. At that point its cheaper to just give up.
That's not the Navy's approach. The general thinking is that carriers are so valuable, their crews so difficult to rescue, not to mention their nuclear payload, that the loss of a carrier in heated combat will likely precipitate a full nuclear exchange. See TheSumOfAllFears for some of that scenario. The economics are beside the point.
F-35 has lots of problems, but it does not cost a billion a piece to build. And I'm not sure that drones vulnerability to ECM will ever be solved, so quite likely there is always going to be a role for a manned fighter.
Whether F-35 should be that fighter is another question, there is a lot of disagreement on that one among people far more qualified than me, so I have no opinion there.
#1 rule of war. Never take to war what you can't afford to lose.
It was noted the navy has the same issue. If we lose an aircraft carrier we lost the war economically. At that point its cheaper to just give up.