Future Peer Competitor?

[Granite_State]

...are we building a force which we will be too scared to use/commit as an instrument of policy, and which once used will be too expensive (or too difficult) to reconstitute either through loss, or over-usage?

I tend to think so, we lose just four F-22s (sorry to keep harping on this) at $1 billion, how many more are we going to be willing to commit? Are we going to end up being like the ancient Indian armies whose war elephants were their most devastating weapon, but also their most precious, so they'd surround them with cavalry, and then protect the cavalry by surrounding them with infantry? Kind of defeats the purpose.

My understanding is that the genius of the F-16 is that it was cheap, effective, and versatile, thus we could build tons of them and focus resources and attention on training plenty of top-notch pilots. I've read that John Boyd used to say "People, ideas, and hardware. In that order!"

[wm]

My understanding is that the genius of the F-16 is that it was cheap, effective, and versatile, thus we could build tons of them and focus resources and attention on training plenty of top-notch pilots. I've read that John Boyd used to say "People, ideas, and hardware. In that order!"

The more things change, the more they stay the same. I seem to remember the same argument being made about why we should have bought the F5 rather than the F16. And back then, we were looking at an adversary that had a huge superiority in numbers of systems. We relied on the technical superiority argument to make ourselves feel comfortable, but the hard fact is that we won the cold war by forcing a meltdown of our opponent's economy. The actual capabilities of what we bought didn't really matter as long as we spent very large amounts of dollars on things our opponents thought were technically superior.