While the topic is aircraft, it's worth pointing out the diminished and maybe questionable role of air combat in general. As usual, people think how to win the previous war.
It's all about cyber war, foreign agents supposedly manipulating (US) elections without repercussions, espionage and manipulation of networks and devices on all levels.
This reality requires a complete rebuild of relevant networks, software and hardware, a large "cyber force" of people who have skills that right now only a handful of experts have, and fundamental changes in how society communicates and deals with information.
While your post was entertaining, to me it is about as relevant as a discussion how to breed and train horses for cavalry.
Boots on the ground with logistics to back them beat any army of kids with keyboards. Wartime hacking can only be used to cripple enemy capabilities to some limited extent. It cannot replace taking physical action. In fact, civilian infrastructure is certainly easier to hack than the ad hoc field networks employed by militaries. But attacking civilian infrastructure and critical services like hospitals is a war crime of then worst kind. Doing something like that is unthinkable. The effects would be more like firebombing a city.
I get the sense that what really matters to winning the kind of counterinsurgency the US repeatedly finds itself in is being able to build and defend working infrastructure faster than the competition. Now there would be a strategic shift most people could get behind, especially given its own infrastructure woes.
You say that, but America's traditional villain, Russia, put boots on the ground to annex Crimea. Albeit not with Russian flags on the uniform. It's not all some futuristic fantasy cyber war, and it never will be.
Yet while I'm not advocating starting WW3 over Crimea, given Russia intervened militarily, there arguably should have been more military support for our friends in Ukraine.
I'm likewise not saying there isn't cyber warfare and psy-ops etc, but I'm absolutely saying there are still and will continue to be conflicts where are there are boots on the ground, tanks on the road, and planes in the sky.
It's all about cyber war, foreign agents supposedly manipulating (US) elections without repercussions, espionage and manipulation of networks and devices on all levels.
This reality requires a complete rebuild of relevant networks, software and hardware, a large "cyber force" of people who have skills that right now only a handful of experts have, and fundamental changes in how society communicates and deals with information.
While your post was entertaining, to me it is about as relevant as a discussion how to breed and train horses for cavalry.