I think I the balance is to use each platform for what it is amazing at and supplement the weaknesses with other platforms that are better in various areas. Combined forces hit the hardest, but the electronics / SIGINT packages in modern fighters truly does set them apart. After an F35 has expended all of its rockets it can still designate targets for other combatants to destroy. The sensor fusion going on (thanks to Moore’s law and smaller / faster compute) really is something.
Sorry, I'm not a military buff, but that article refers to beast mode being:
- either 16 Air-to-air missiles
- or 4 guided bombs and 2 air-to-air missiles.
That seems incredibly underwhelming. Isn't that less than the capacity of a single ground based vehicle?
And wouldn't a fixed position defensive system have hundreds of missiles?
I can't quite see when four bombs per mission is ever going to be "an unbelievable amount of firepower".
I'll try to respond to your statements here individually.
Let's compare that to one of the more recent Soviet air superiority fighters, the Su-57[1]. For air-to-air combat, it has 4 beyond visual range missiles and 2 short range missiles. The F35 in beast mode has 16 (14 long range and 2 short range) air to air missiles in addition to its machine gun. Pretty big difference even excluding the massively better AESA phased array radars in the F35 and additional jamming / spoofing hw in the F35.
It might seem underwhelming to you, but it is still an overwhelming amount of firepower. A ground based vehicle doesn't need to be stealth or deal with gravity. Ground based vehicles also don't need to go supersonic whereas the F35 can go mach 1.6. The US anti-aircraft patriot missile launcher, the M901, can be loaded with 4 PAC-2 patriots for anti-air, or 16 PAC-3 patriots for shooting down ballistic missiles. Do they keep some extra missiles with each unit to reload? Absolutely! Hundreds? Not even close. We worked with them when I was a UAV Pilot (Shadow 200 TUAV aka a "drone" that was about 11'x13'x2.5ft).
What I can tell you, from experience, is that when a single bomb can literally level a city block, four bombs per mission is an unbelievable amount of firepower. For serious missions, you'll also have entire wings of planes continuously dropping ordinance, flying back to base, rearming and doing it again. You end up with a lot of destruction, but this is real life and not a video game. I flew many missions in OIF II (482 combat flight hours) on the reconnaissance drone the Shadow 200. We did a lot of targeting and one of the more memorable missions involved a Kiowa scout helicopter being shot down. They made a military channel special about it[2] and what ended it was dropping a single GBU50 500lb bomb on a huge weapon cache the militants were using to rearm before trying to blow up the downed chopper and the pilots time and time again.
For a huge and daring operation to blow up a lot of Syria's chemical weapon production facilities look at the number of planes involved. Note that Syria has the S200 and newer Pantsir, supposedly some of the best anti-air in the world. The mission was a total success with all targeted facilities destroyed and not a single allied plane shot down.
Does this maybe answer your question? It might not seem like a lot, but these can be very big bombs and it isn't as though the enemy is spread evenly over a city the size of New York City.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/f-35-beast-mode-new-v...
I think I the balance is to use each platform for what it is amazing at and supplement the weaknesses with other platforms that are better in various areas. Combined forces hit the hardest, but the electronics / SIGINT packages in modern fighters truly does set them apart. After an F35 has expended all of its rockets it can still designate targets for other combatants to destroy. The sensor fusion going on (thanks to Moore’s law and smaller / faster compute) really is something.