Stock of the United States’ largest defence contractor Lockheed Martin was downgraded to Hold from Buy at Deutsche Bank by 14.5 percent, with a price target of $523
Maybe if there are no competitors. Even as monopolistic as the military aircraft industry is in the U.S., drones open up a lot of space for competition by being vastly cheaper.
Then there's concern about long-term sales to foreign countries, plus the corresponding parts and maintenance revenues. The F-16 is flown by 25 other countries.
F22 is working just fine. The new planes from China seem like tech demonstrators, so a similar stage to X35 in 2000. So they could still have plenty of production problems ahead of them.
Sources alluding to what exactly?
That the F-35 had had problems? Every single jet platform has had problems.
While the F-35 has problems of its own, its no secret that China is yet to manage to develop anything that can rival or beat their RAM.
Prototypes are nothing short of speculations and wishful thinking until it starts to hit production.
And I'm not even a fan of US jets. As a Swede I will admit my bias for our own platforms. But the F-35 does fill a role that our fighters doesn't. And it does fill that specific role quite well. It's not an all purpose aircraft.
taking pause to look around when new things are revealed, which is sensible. doesn't mean what you think it means.
I remember the hype about Chinas new submarines. Oh they were gonna be so good and so stealthy. Turns out they didn't make it far out of the Harbour before sinking.
So what was that you said about China producing things that "actually work"? Or maybe you excluded their sinking sub in that statement. I must have missed the asterisk
Hard to think of another modern jet built outside Yankeestan that has problems that come even close to those that F35 flying cybertruck is having.
While the F-35 has problems of its own, its no secret that China is yet to manage to develop anything that can rival or beat their RAM.
[citation needed]
While the F-35 has problems of its own, its no secret that China is yet to manage to develop anything that can rival or beat their RAM.
The prototype China is making is for a jet a generation after F35, they already have an answer to F35 in production and it hasn't cost over a trillion dollars to make. In fact, Chinese military budget overall is only a fraction of what Yankeestan spends.
And it does fill that specific role quite well.
No it doesn't. As many experts have explained in great detail, F35 tries to do too many things and it doesn't do any of them well. It's incredibly expensive to maintain, it has constant breakdowns, and they can't even keep a sufficient number of them operational as a result.
I remember the hype about Chinas new submarines. Oh they were gonna be so good and so stealthy. Turns out they didn’t make it far out of the Harbour before sinking.
The fact that you'd latch onto a conspiracy theory really highlights the quality of your intellect.
So what was that you said about China producing things that “actually work”? Or maybe you excluded their sinking sub in that statement. I must have missed the asterisk
Nah, I'm just not dumb enough to fall for propaganda marketed to people who don't have fully developed brains.
And is your third source just saying that the biggest problem with the F22 is that they want more of them? That hardly seems like a criticism of the plane itself.
Jfs has been a cluster, they wanted a VTOL jet that do everything, which physics doesn’t like. But with 15 years extra development, they kinda did it.
In the same way the Cybertruck is kind of a truck.
80% readiness is higher than most jets, my sources are actually showing loser, but still in line with other military jets.
80% is not the readiness of F22, but a target they can't hit.
And is your third source just saying that the biggest problem with the F22 is that they want more of them? That hardly seems like a criticism of the plane itself.
It's a criticism of the abysmal production capability showing that these things are artisanally made.
Su57 is artisanally made, less than two dozen. ~200 is a short production run, they shut it down early because those 200 could defeat every other air force on the planet several times over. But tech has progressed since then, it's only a bit better than the J20. But like the U2, that's not it's fault.
If the US ever had use them to fight a peer competitor then these 200 would disappear very quickly. At that point the US would be unable to replace them because it lacks industrial capacity to do so.
It lacks the molds, fittings, and jigs to do so. They were destroyed after the production run shut down. Similar story to the F1 Saturn V engines, it'd be more work to recreate them than to make something better.
Cope how? I'm not a fan. The worst thing in the world for Lockheed would be if US's adversaries decided they weren't going to be designing any new weapons systems. Lockheed runs on fear of what's next.
Lockheed model of sucking up taxes without producing anything only works when the US feels they have superiority over the adversaries. Now that it's becoming clear this is not the case, there will be a push to actually have to produce things that work, and Lockheed isn't good at doing that.
The U-2 first flew in 1955. One was shot down over the USSR in 1960, and another was shot down over Cuba in 1962. They largely stopped flying over peer air defenses at that point.
That's about a 7-year span where it was useful for its primary task. Hanging around to fly over Libya in 2011 is not the same as fulfilling the role the plane was designed for decades later.