This is what people should keep in mind when the statistic about US defense spending being higher than the next N nations combined or whatever it is now. If I buy a 30k Prius, and you spend 300k on a different car,
1) that doesn’t mean you can drive 10x as fast and
2) maybe you just bought an overpriced Prius, perhaps a gold plated one
This is a more general problem in politics, where the overall budget being allocated is reported rather than the practical result.
Yeah, you often read stories on the internet about how the SR-71 could easily outrun the MIG-25, proving US technological superiority, but those don't really take into account that there was like a dozen made of the former, with titanium hulls and exotic engineering. While there were more than a thousand made of the cheap, steel hulled MIG 25
Not sure about the comparison to the SR-71, but the more interesting comparison was with the US XB-70[1] which ended up cancelled but the MIG-25 was designed to intercept[2].
Ironically the XB-70 was also stainless steel - but it still was pretty exotic. It partly relied on compression-lift and highly corrosive fuel to cruise at Mach 3 (in 1961!).
Edit: Wikipedia diving after writing that led me to the Sukhoi T-4 which was the Russian response to the XB-70. Only a prototype, but this one was titanium and it is an amazing, drop-nose machine [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_XB-70_Valkyrie
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25#Backgr...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_T-4
I think while these kinds of projects are cool, but I think the point of my parent comment is that volume matters. If you can do something, its interesting and great for bragging rights, but making and operating thousands of airframes (especially considering the breakneck speed with which technology evolved, timeframes were very compressed!).
While the SR71 was more capable than the MIG, if the Air Force would've wanted to build a thousand of those in 5 years, it would've been impossible, not to mention the maintenance burden.
So while the planes you mentioned might've been more capable, in a real conflict they wouldn't have mattered much, as they could not have sustained a volume of strikes to be relevant.
Interesting how quality and quantity have changed over the years: in WW2, giant factories pumped out airplanes on endless production lines by the tens of thousands, yet those planes couldn't drop bombs accurately.
In contrast, 4th gen fighters were made in still significant volumes, and their smart bombs could hit a target accurately enough so that a hundred pound bomb can do the job you would need a WW2 B-29 to drop its entire payload for.
I think that was a peak in quality X quantity in aviation.
Yes, modern jets have even more tech, and stealth and stuff, but their complexity and and difficulty of manufacture doesn't offset the drop in volume.
So quality went up, but quantity went way down, and as a result their total effectiveness is less than the generation they're supposed to replace.
It's a false comparison.
How many MIG-25s flew over the borders of the United States mainland during the cold war?
Yes the MIG-25 was a cheaper and more practical plane, but that wasn't the MO of the sr71.
I am not the one making those. If you read an article about how a Lamborghini Aventador was faster than a Nissan GT-R, you would go 'well, duh, it costs 20x as much'.
A school bus costs 4-5x more than. GT-R, and I wouldn’t expect it to be faster.
The SR-71 wasn't trying to catch the MIG-25, it was trying to get away--and it worked. The U-2 proved vulnerable to filling the sky with cheap stuff--the missiles were ballistic by the time they got up there but when the sky was full of them the U-2 had no path to safety.
The SR-71 couldn't be defeated by the level of missile spam that Russia was capable of, the MIG-25 couldn't get close enough to catch it and they didn't have a missile that could actually work up there. (You need more control surface up there, but down lower more control surface costs you performance.)
(And the MIG-25 was a maintenance nightmare.)
I suggest you read the book Skunk Works by Ben Rich, to get reliable account about the SR-71 and its relation to Soviet air defenses from the horse's mouth. Besides, it's genuinely well-written and enjoyable book
These don’t seem comparable to me. The sr 71 was never meant to be mass produced or to head to head against a mig. The sr71 didn’t even have any guns it’s a spy plane. The sr 71 accomplished its goal with flying colors and spotted nuclear test sites and information on the Cuban missle crisis.
The star fighter, or f15 or f22 would be more apt.
TLDR special purpose tool vs general fighter cannot be compared
During the Cuban Missle Crisis it was the U2, not the sr-71
There were 32 SR-71s, 13 A-12s and 2 M-21s. That's 47 total I believe, making your figure off by about 300%, which incidentally is how much cooler the SR-71 is relative to the Mig, on account of it looking incredibly exotic and elegant instead of like a pointy sky tractor. Being faster is just icing on the cake.
Your figure of 300% is off by orders of magnitude for how much cooler the SR-71 is at 60 years of age than practically anything else that exists.
That's my point. The SR71 makes for a much cooler topic of discussion, but in a war, it matters how many planes you have. Even a thousand jets isn't really that much when fighting a country of millions.
Or they bought a lambo, which is amazing, and goes really fast... but when you are out of gas, the Prius will keep going. :)
Yes this is a great point. The great irony of the tech sector is that although tech creates efficiencies, the process by which tech is created is itself comically inefficient.
Almost nobody, especially those working for government actually looks at a complex, expensive solution and says "We should simplify this and make it cheaper." The government is paying for a LOT of unnecessary complexity. I would say that's most of the cost of essentially every tech project the government funds.
Reminds me of that 3-section meme about Starlink boosters showing how they simplified the design over time. This is the exception which proves the rule.
A lot of what you see was removed was just test sensors. The same happens in every engineering program, but no one else pretends that it's somehow innovation.
It's like removing test code when you ship a binary.
I don't agree that it's not innovation. It always looks stupidly simple with hindsight to just remove unnecessary complexity, and yet it's extremely rare to see a team which actually does it right on the first go.
I'm an experienced software engineer who worked on a range of big complex projects over almost 2 decades and my experience with every single project (for which I wasn't the team lead) was way, way, way over-engineered. At least 95% of the time was spent on fixing unnecessary intermediate technical issues which the team itself created for itself.
Even the sensor argument... Do you need so many sensors and fallback mechanisms if every part of the system was designed to work within the simplest necessary constraints to begin with? My experience is that the answer is almost always; no. Once you accept that your design is flawed, any patch you add on top to correct the flaws provides tiny diminishing returns if any. Often, the additional complexity actually makes it more likely that your core mechanisms will fail.