Northrop Grumman recently released a video of the proposed F/A-XX naval fighter concept – the one that is supposedly going to replace the F-35 Joint Strike Flying Piano Morris Marina Turducken – and all one can say about it is that American military contractors sure do know how to hire good VFX artists:

The Ameribro crowd wants you to believe that THIS is the jet which will bring the glory days of Top Gun – the original, extremely gay one – back to the US Navy. I beg to differ. The list of problems with this aircraft is almost as long as the actual bugs list of the F-35C it is supposed to replace.

We have to start with the fact that the budget for the F/A-XX has been sharply cut, because Ornj Boi decided to crash-fund the development of the US Air Force’s latest toy, the Boeing F-47. Even in an institution as large, corrupt, and flat-out batshit insane as the Five-Sided Wind Tunnel, there are only so many (trillions of) dollars to go around and waste spend on useless pointless shiny expensive shit that doesn’t work vanity projects.

Then there is this “sixth-generation” malarkey that everyone keeps bringing up with this jet. The problem is that fighter jet “generations” are something of a marketing scam. I am not saying that there are NO qualitative differences between, say, an F-35 – assuming you can get the damn thing to fly – and an F-16, or an F-4. That would be stupid. Each class of jet is built for a very different set of requirements and parameters.

The F-35 is designed for a kind of modern, net-centric, sensor-driven, data-rich battle environment, with the idea being that it can “see” everything through its networked sensors and apertures long before it is ever tracked, and shoot everything down at far beyond visual range.

Never mind that the theory has rarely actually worked out like that, at least for the US Air Force and Navy, not least because they have not gone up against a near-peer adversary since at least the Vietnam War. That is at least the idea behind the Turducken, and its design principles reflect that fact.

The F/A-XX, by contrast, appears to be designed for… well, no one quite seems to know what, exactly, because no one can really define what a sixth-generation jet is supposed to do or be. The entire point of the thing seems to be to rival the Chinese, who are FAR ahead of the US (and the Russians) in a large and growing number of military technologies. The Chinese have been testing prototypes of what everyone is calling “sixth-generation” jets for a couple of years now. These are big, heavy aircraft – one of them, the J-36, appears to have three engines, and looks more like a heavy long-range bomber than a fighter jet.

The definition of “sixth-generation”, insofar as anyone has one, seems to involve being able to operate at hypersonic speeds – which is to say, exceeding Mach 5 – and at the edge of the atmosphere itself. Armaments are supposed to include laser-based weaponry, and the entire aircraft is supposed to be highly net-centric in design and purpose. But, again, as far as I can tell – I could be wrong – there appears to be no real consensus around what “sixth-generation” actually means.

Thus far, therefore, we have a severely underfunded prototype for an aircraft that is already well behind the times, which serves no discernible purpose, and has no clearly established design principles behind it.

All of that is before we get to the cost of the thing. Nobody knows how much the per-unit cost of the F/A-XX is going to be, but if the numbers being hyped around the F-47 are any indication, it could be in the range of US$300-400 MILLION, PER AIRFRAME.

That does not include maintenance and upgrades. Once you factor those in – who knows? The lifetime cost per aircraft might well exceed a billion dollars.

In other words, this is yet another gigantic boondoggle from a military-industrial complex that is rife with them.

America really does not seem to know how to produce cheap, effective weaponry anymore. It did once upon a time, but nowadays, its weapons are so absurdly expensive that one might as well not even bother manufacturing them.

Each new Ford-class aircraft carrier costs at least US$12-15 BILLION to build. A new Columbia-class strategic missile submarine costs something like US$9-10B. The new B-22 Raider costs somewhere in the region of US$700M – which makes it a positive bargain compared to its grandpappy, the B-2 Spirit, at US$2.2B or thereabouts.

The THAAD system, which has so miserably failed to achieve anything of note against Iranian drones and missiles, costs north of US$1B for a full battery – and there are something like 5 of them in the entire world. A fully kitted-out Patriot battery with a complete complement of missiles and radars costs about that, too – and the Patriots have proven utterly inadequate for intercepting even high subsonic Russian cruise missiles in the skies above Ukraine.

The new Trump-class battleships are another bonkers malinvestment – the US Navy apparently wants to spend US$700 BILLION on building 15 floating gin-palaces under the BBG(X) programme, with each individual warship costing an unbelievable US$46.6 BILLION over the course of its lifetime. This, in an era where submarine- and shore-based anti-ship missile launchers can target anything within a 1,500Km radius with hypersonic ship-killers that NO Western missile defence can target effectively, let alone stop.

Compared to those insane numbers, an F-35 Turducken, costing only around US$80-100M per unit (not including maintenance), is an outright steal.

Everything about the new F/A-XX tells the same story as always – of a military-industrial complex that has been completely hollowed-out, which cannot produce weaponry that works or is cost-effective, but which rewards military contractors with fat cost-plus payments for weapons that end up being nearly useless on the battlefield.

This is an unmitigated disaster for the FUSA. Not only is it being comprehensively outproduced – by several orders of magnitude – by the industrial colossus that is China, but it is being outproduced by Russia, several times over.

And, as the Banderastan War has proven so eloquently, Russian weapons actually work and are genuinely lethal. The Russians claim one of their Su-35S air superiority aircraft recently scored an extremely long-ranged kill against a “Ukrainian” F-16 – in reality, a Western pilot almost certainly was at the controls – using one of their enhanced R-77M air-to-air missiles. I see little reason to doubt this, given we know that the Russians have ploinked Ukrainian fighters at extreme ranges before with both hypersonic AAMs, and SAMs launched from their S-300, S-350, and S-400 systems.

All of this is before we get to the proven effectiveness of the Su-57, which is radically cheaper than the F-35, and probably costs around the same as a modern F-16 does to build for the Russians – but is a couple of orders of magnitude more capable and more dangerous. Western analysts laughed themselves silly when they saw the first prototypes of the “Felon”, claiming it was not a real stealth jet, and that it was easy to spot on radar, did not have true supercruise capabilities, and had limited utility on the battlefield. They are not laughing anymore. The Su-57 has repeatedly proven its ability to penetrate Ukrainian airspace, even under the noses of American-supplied Patriot systems, and carry out a wide range of air superiority, reconnaissance, strike, and SEAD missions.

The harsh reality that the Pentaloons refuse to face, is that the FUSA cannot win wars. It is not setup to do so either doctrinally or industrially. It lacks the ability to learn from its mistakes, internalise and absorb its failures, and reorient its core doctrines. Even after four years of watching the Russian and Ukrainian sides swap body blows with drone technology, the US remains far behind either in its ability to use and employ cheap, simple, dangerous drones for any good purpose – instead, it relies on hugely expensive large fixed-wing drones like the Reaper and Global Hawk, which the Iranians have been merrily ploinking out of their skies using simple MANPADs.

The F/A-XX is the sign of a military that no longer knows how to fight and to win. It is the sign of a country that does not understand what war really is. If the US Navy ever builds one of these stupid flying white elephants, it will not dare to risk losing it in an actual operation, because it will be so damned expensive – which negates the entire purpose of building the idiotic thing in the first place.