I cannot understand the usage of combat planes nowdays: unless in a unbalanced conflict, all combat planes are sitting ducks with modern air-ground missiles. No to mention cruise missiles should be able to do the same if it is the "delivery" some payload somewhere.

It is the same for tanks.

Maybe that's where AI could be "usefull", way more efficient autonomous guidance systems for all those missiles, actually scary efficient.

> It is the same for tanks.

And helicopters, and trucks, and humvees, and missiles themselves, and drones, and humans...

We have very good and usually very cheap (compared to the target's price) ways to destroy things.

Looks like planes and tanks are still useful, Ukraine wouldn't ask for them otherwise

That would means they are super omega sure that putin's regime invaders are very limited in their capacity to destroy combat aircrafts and tanks, basically have very low tech missiles and/or very little high tech missiles. It seems putin's regime is "making" room in it prisons sending political dissidents and "unwanted" people to be slaughtered by the ukrainian army.

Wild guess, the USA intelligence services know and have green-lighted the usage of combat aircrafts/tanks to friendly countries. Hope it is not the same type of intelligence used for the weapons of mass destruction in irak... ahem...

War is a game of cat an mouse. First, F-35 and the MQ-28 drone I mentioned are stealth aircraft. It does not mean they can't be found by ground-based radar, but it's not going to be very easy, plus, that radar exposes itself. Just like you can shoot a missile from the ground to try and kill the F-35, the F-35 can shoot a missile down at you. And while the F-35 can move around and try to evade the incoming missile, the land-based platform will be much more sluggish.

Why not cruise missiles? Cruise missiles will continue to have a role in combat, but they are too expensive to use them for everything. A stealth bomber like F-35 or B2 or the future B-21, can ferry a lot of relatively inexpensive munitions and drop them on target. A Tomahawk costs north of $1 million, while a JDAM can be procured for about $25k and a Hellfire for about $150k.

This is not what I "heard" from a much more reliable source than HN: once a missile of "proper tech" is shot at an aircraft, there is no evading it whatever the tech of the aircraft, unless luck modulo altitude. Maybe this is not true anymore, but that would probably be classified information. Classification of a boggey on a radar is usually a matter of seconds, if not less than 1 second, and once the missiles are in flight, it is very probably over for the combat aircraft. And I have not heard of any efficient "stealth" of combat aircraft on the whole range of existing radars, and I would not bet on this because.

And it seems there is often more than one missile shot at a combat aircraft.

That would mean, before any combat aircraft can fly, all ground base radars would have to be disabled... and how do you get rid of a dynamic mesh of mobile ground/sea based radars (or in a place you cannot really "reach")?

In the end, the tech of the opponent in a "standard" conflict should be assessed before anything can fly, and get ready for some very bad surprises (high altitude cruise missiles...).

drones with payloads may be able to do "more" for "cheaper" than a cruise missile: I guess a drone is "cheaper" than a combat aircraft but more "expansive" than a cruise missile.

"AI" may find its way in the autonomous guidance systems of a cruise missile, like drones which would only need to receive some sort of high level order to perform some "tasks" and that nearly completely autonomously, but I don't think you can "embed" such "big" AI in a drone though, you would need a near "realtime" link to some AI center, then it would be "space" war, war satellites destruction and jamming.

I think you will enjoy reading about Zoltan Dani [1]. He managed to take down a stealth F-117 during the war in Yugoslavia. But it was not easy. I would go as far as to say that Zoltan Dani was a military genius for figuring out how to achieve what he achieved.

A repeat is quite unlikely though, as the US military is very good of learning lessons in war.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zolt%C3%A1n_Dani

You are talking about low tech developing countries a long time ago (an eternity for tech), namely extremely uneven conflict.

That's why it is very important to assess the balance of a conflict on recent data in order to deploy the right equipment. Of course, there will be bluf, bad surprises, etc.

> an eternity for tech

Not really. As everyone could see, Russia is still using tanks made 50 years ago.

I may be talking about old tech, but you are talking hypothetical tech. "I don't understand why anyone would invest in combat aircraft when this hypothetical tech could be developed by a peer nation and render the aircraft obsolete". Does that sum up the argument?

Well, I know with better source than HN that combat aircrafts are mostly useless due to "proper" air defence missiles.

But combat aircrafts are still usefull in uneven conflicts, namely when one side has really weak air defence, or even none. It is a similar issues with tanks.