"Is this the end of the fighter jet? Drones don’t have" Topic

… mothers

"If the Iran war, as President Trump promises, is soon to be over, the inquests will begin even before a treaty is signed. Was the US right to take up arms? Who, if anyone, was the winner? And what does this asymmetric conflict, with costly American hardware failing to prevent Iranian missiles from menacing a geopolitical chokepoint, tell us about warfighting to come?

An instructive moment came on 3 April, when Iranian defence forces managed to shoot down an American F15E fighter over the Zagros Mountains, deep inside Iran. There followed an anxious couple of days as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard and American combat search and rescue personnel raced to locate the two surviving aviators. The pilot was picked up within seven hours. The injured weapons system officer meanwhile hid out in the mountains with little more than a pistol for protection. After what one senior military office described as "one of the most challenging and complex in the history of US special operations", involving four bombers, 64 fighters, 48 refuelling tankers, 13 rescue aircraft and hundreds of ground personnel, the stricken officer was eventually picked up by a couple of second-hand Airbus propellor planes, executing a low-tech Plan B. The raiding force had got stuck on a soft runway.

President Trump could claim "WE GOT HIM!" — but like the war itself, the rescue came at an extraordinary cost. Numerous expensively tricked-out special-ops airplanes and helicopters were destroyed in the process and America seriously hindered its own ability to make any such rescues in future. The escapade compounded what had already been an expensive few weeks for the US Air Force. Days earlier, the service had suffered its heaviest loss since the Vietnam War, when cheap plastic unmanned airplanes powered by commercial electronics raided Price Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, damaging a number of KC-135 tanker planes and blowing a E-3G Sentry airborne radar plane in half. Another lesson from Iran is that the best fighters can be ambushed: hit by infrared-homing missiles at close range, launched from 4×4 vehicles that can quickly blend into civilian traffic…"

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Armand

No … nor is it the end of AFVs. Tech and tactics evolve …

No— IMO this isn't the end of the jet fighter but it is the end of the assumption that it dominates the battlespace cheaply or independently.

The key shift is economic as much as tactical. A modern fighter represents a very high-cost asset but its effectiveness depends on a whole supporting system—tankers, ISR, electronic warfare and munitions—all of which are also expensive and finite. By contrast, drones and many missile systems are comparatively cheap and increasingly "good enough" to impose real risk and force expensive responses.

That creates a persistent asymmetry: even if drones are individually less capable, they can be used in large numbers to saturate defences, probe for weaknesses, or force fighters into defensive postures where their cost-effectiveness drops sharply.

But it's not replacement. It's pressure. Jets still provide speed, range, payload, and flexibility that drones can't match at scale. Yet.

The result is a more contested, cost-pressured air environment where airpower still matters but is no longer economically or operationally "easy."