> The US Air Force is spending ever more per airframe.

Except at the lower-end, where Super Tucanos, AH-64s and A-10s dominate. That environment is a numbers game, not a platform-capability game.

Notice how Comanche was cancelled in favour of continued Kiowa / Apache teams; stealth undermined by cost. The US Army saw the future ahead of most others and stealth wasn't it.

> Stealth isn't going anywhere.

For Tier 1 platforms I agree. For everything else, and everyone else outside the top 10 spenders, it's a nice-to-have afterthought.

After their dismal performance in the Iraq War (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_attack_on_Karbala), I dunno if I'd point to the Apache as an example of how stealth isn't necessary...

the blackhawk used in the raid on bin laden had stealth capabilities.

my guess is that stealth now includes keeping it out of public's knowledge, to minimize risk.

with helos sound comes into play as well, as detection comes down to human ears if used in rescue or raid situations.

But stealth, at least in its current form, isn't something that can simply be integrated without making substantial concessions elsewhere in the design. You lose the ability to mount stores on hardpoints on the wing, for example. That reduces the variety of munitions the aircraft is able to carry, which in turn makes it less flexible and adaptable to new missions.

Your argument that stealth is just the way things are now implies that stealth, as a feature, is more valuable than the features you have to give up to get it. The article is arguing the opposite -- that stealth is less and less valuable as radar technology improves to counter it, so maybe it's not worth giving up that other stuff to have it. You disagree, that's fine, but that in and of itself doesn't make their reasoning "flawed" and thus able to be ruled out with a wave of the hand and a jaunty "stealth isn't going anywhere."

The complexity of the weapon systems goes up, and so does the price. The F-35 design already accepted a decrease in stealth capability, over for example the F22, to reduce price. Networking, sensor integration and related tactics is another revolution in progress that the F-35 does have. It's hugely expensive to be the first one to develop this.

Are drones stealth? After all, they're now doing much of the day-to-day work that used to be done by piloted craft.

From my very casual outsider view, it looks like manned platforms are indeed becoming more expensive, but unmanned platforms are much cheaper and taking over much of the work.

So I can speak to this with a bit of authority seeing as how I accrued approximately 480 combat flight hours on the Shadow 200 UAV in Operation Iraqi Freedom II circa 2003-2004.

When we were doing our pre-war certification for desert combat, we had a chance to train right next to an anti-aircraft battery. We wanted to know the detectability of the Shadow at mission altitude so we could adjust things to keep from getting shot down. For those that don't know, the Shadow 200 (RQ-7A, now superseded by a bigger model), is built out of a carbon fiber composite with radar absorbing paint. The engine vents exhaust to the top backwards directly into the propellor, which does a wonderful job of breaking up the heat signature. It is approximately 11'x13'. Anyways the shadow is small and was meant to have a very low detectability factor. After the AV is a few thousand feet above the ground, you can either see nor hear it. Our own patriot anti aircraft battery was unable to detect it at mission altitude without setting their gear's sensitivity up night enough to detect large birds, which is totally impractical.

So was the Shadow built to be stealth like a B2 or F117? Nope. Is it effectively stealth when flying missions at several thousand feet above the ground? Yup! Go the the Wikipedia page for "Ground Control Station" which has a picture of me in the back of a Shadow GCS sometime around 2001.

Now the bigger stuff such as the predator / reaper / global hawk? They have much larger cross signatures, but they are more capable platforms. The shadow only had an approximately 6-7 hour in-air endurance.

From the article:

"In addition, a new generation of low cost, reusable, and ultimately disposable UNMANNED [emphasis added] systems can help invert the cost imposition of A2/AD networks by overwhelming an enemy’s ability to engage at favorable cost exchanges."

I'm curious as to whether you can conceivably build effective aerial platforms for cheaper than you can build missiles to knock them down, but I'd imagine you could do so with decoy drones.

I believe the unmanned part is key for enabling this -- hopefully no one would have ever suggested fielding survivability-inferior but numerically-superior manned force as a viable strategic aim...

"hopefully no one would have ever suggested fielding survivability-inferior but numerically-superior manned force as a viable strategic aim..."

Every wartime opponent of the USA for the last half century that we've lost to, has eventually won using that exact strategy. Its kind of expensive, but everyone who tries it, beats us eventually.

Not to mention that both we and the Russians used it to beat the Germans rather handily in World War 2. It was well known that the M4 Sherman tank was a less survivable fighting platform than the German Tiger or Panther, for instance, but the Tiger was so complex to build that American industry could turn out more than ten Shermans for each Tiger the Germans built. One on one a Sherman had no chance against a Tiger, but against five or seven or ten Shermans even the Tiger would eventually be overwhelmed.

Or, to phrase it another way, the Allied forces (and the Soviets) could afford to include this "extra" armor organically in lower-level formations. As opposed to the Germans who were forced to concentrate their relatively-scarce armor exclusively in mechanized formations.

Everyone always thinks about the consequences of the above as 5 Shermans (or T-34s) vs. 1 Tiger. But the more important distinction was likely 2 Shermans + infantry vs. 0 Panthers + infantry.