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I am certain no one here has ever actually used a fucking FCR or even a operated a boat with a commercial nav radar. All this 'stealth doesn't work' smugposting to portend the sheer stupidity of NATO in developing a white elephant fails to consider the corpus of historical evidence for low observable UCAVs in penetrating contested environments, not to mention literally every Red Flag exercise seeing F35s curbstomp 4.5G unless things are stacked specifically against the F35. Stealth aircraft are incredibly difficult to detect much less differentiate from atmospheric pickup, and not even 2010s tech is able to do variable gain adjustment and track reacquisition. Every nation is either looking to buy or indigenously develop 5G+ stealth planes because right off the bat stealth strangles your opponents aerial inventory and capability. No CAP, CAS or ISR if you can never confirm if even your own airspace is clear and if you lose automatically lose any contest. Ground Based Air Defense spam is cope when GBAD all requires a first track to be established by a radar station and thus is itself subject to the 'contested' matrix outlined above.
This doesnt change (much) the points raised about drones and artillery spam, but that might require a seperate effortpost. Suffice to say, artillery now has to include a wider variety of counter battery threat vectors and drones... well let me just say I am really excited for sci fi lasers to finally manifest in reality.
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Point to how good multilateration is vs stealth please. At that sensitivity you're making your radar pick up every passing sparrow. Good luck differentiating one gain, much less three. IRST still has a very wide performance band, always better for confirmation than for acquisition. IR has an issue where it is rear-facing optimized against jets since the heat of an engine comes from the rear (engine motors on helos are all hot which is why SHORAD will never go out of style) and is constant, unlike forward facing thermal profiles which continually deform based on angle and scatter. Stealth is also not just radar signature reduction, it is also thermal emissivity absorbing, which is why all stealth planes have that darker shade - absorbs more thermal energy and thus reflects less thermal energy. Also, thermal has notably stupid performance when things like cloud reflected scatter (same as radar), so a web (can't be a ring, you can just punch a hole) of IR sensors must still be complemented by multiple stations to increase gain probability. Nevertheless, once a decision is made to launch GBAD in a not so vague direction where a hostile aircraft is incoming, IR does render stealth null. Modern IRH is stupid hard to soft counter inside the kill envelope, so if the adversary is ok with just wasting dozens of missiles in the vague air then yeah stealth totally is a meme - but so is basically any type of air mission if the enemy just throws dozens of missiles at every passing (literal) bird.
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Of course not. This is a nerd forum, not warthunder. If you have secret info so damning to stealth, then so be it, rest easy that when the balloon floats you'll be vindicated, unlike literally every nation scrambling over themselves to buy F35s or develop the Su57 or J31 or Qahar. I prefer to err on the side of the wisdom of crowds and see 'past winners' continuing to buy 'winning' tech. Lazy and reductive, but its not like the history disfavors it. There is one exception to this historical trend though, and its super fun!
Of course this cuts both ways: S400 and Pantsir sellers also have every incentive to tout their stealth killing capability, which kind of is odd if stealth is so useless that 'multilateral' stations and a ring of IRST can easily counter this non-threat. Do note that the multirole/air superiority sales sector does not advertise their offerings as 'better than F35' but instead 'we can fulfill your order books faster and meanie LockMart doesn't want to sell F35 to you' for expensive multiroles (F15EX, Gripen, Typhoon, Rafale) or 'you are poor and we are cheap' (TA-50, Tejas, JF17). Whether this thesis is rooted in smart purchasing decisions avoiding a politically loaded white elephant or a reflection of limited political/financial bargaining power is an exercise in relative value assignment.
Finally, re Turkey... I respect your hypothesis that S400 tested against F35 would show the folly of stealth against superior GBAD and the USA is being spiteful bitches for Turkey going behind NATOs back, but do consider that Turkey has always been an ally of last resort in the geopolitical chessboard which is the Near East. Erdogan has made no secret of his disdain for the West, and with that comes an adjusted calculus on whether that asset owner will respect the interests of the manufacturer - a very different and significantly more interesting discussion could be had on whether F35 unified maintenance system and capabilities are the REAL octopus of the US DoD ensnaring lesser states in its wake, but again that may require a seperate effortpost.
In any case S400 has been directly used by Russia in Syria already, which is right next to Israel which has had F35s in the air since 201?, so the live data aspect should already be known to them (and, for our sake as internet shitposters, not us).
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I don't mean what people used to win, I mean look at what past winners are doing now. I would trust the Iranians over the Iraqis over what sort of capability is the right trend to go for winning in the region, just as I would trust the Taliban over the ANA. Similarly, I would trust NATO over Warsaw Pact, or Israel over Egypt, on who is likely to have a clearer head on what is more likely to work. I would also point out that this calculus changes rapidly, and we do see that with NATO suddenly trying - and failing - to rediscover the love of 155mm artillery.
With regards to aerial operations, this statement simply is not true. Since Vietnam, we have not seen a single instance of air supremacy being countered by GBAD, with Mole Cricket 19 and Gulf War 1 showing how a full spectrum multi layer GBAD network can be curbstomped by the threat they are supposed to be the hard counter towards, and thats against Phantoms and F15s that have the RCS of a bus. Meritorious arguments about whether those were 'anomalies', such as what Kenneth Pollack does in 'Armies of sand' when he cites specific cultural into organizational into C&C failures of Arabs as specific reasons why those systems failed have been made, so it is up to us to decide whether 'near peers' like the Chinese or Russians are necessarily up to scratch - current Ukraine would point to that not being the case, with most casualties for the UAF being the caused by the excellent Mig-31 mounted R37 air launched missile. I would also point out that many countries in the NATO sphere have their own Air Defense Artillery - specifically Patriot and their own ADA testing, even in adverse conditions, has lead them to conclude that buying into the F35 is still a good decision. I would like to imagine comically large sacks of money changing hands as a smug lockmart exec combs his hair to the WSB dicaprio slickback, but that still means their internal papers have concluded it is better to purchase F35 even though other companies are knocking at the door with their own comically large kickbacks - the last major western aerial purchase scandal was Dassault in the 90s to my recollection, but there has been plenty of investigations launched with no firm conclusion since then.
So your thesis is both 'S400 is so good that it can detect the Israelis without them noticing' and 'Russia is polite so they won't try to acquire the S400 because otherwise its a shooting match'. This literally is the opposite of how routine flight operations are conducted - terrestrial radar - even normal airport tower - stations ALWAYS paint aircraft in neighbouring countries without issue so long as the airspace integrity isn't violated (see Turkey shooting down Russian jets the moment they crossed the border back in 2015 - the Russians were tracked long before they actually physically crossed). My point is that the Russians own presence in Syria allow the capabilities of the S400 in establishing a track on the F35 can be done without needing Turkey to act as the backdoor to upend the Secrets Of Stealth. There are plenty of other reasons for the S400 vs F35 spat that don't hinge on LockMart being nervous that F35 will be exposed for the failure it is.
Ultimately, I feel it is instructive to see the direction of where countries are focusing their efforts on in countering a modern aerial threat environment. More SHORAD solutions against drones, more natively integrated AESA inside stealthy aerial platforms, less dedicated ADA ground stations. Even India has demurred against exercising the option for purchasing the last remaining S400 units, and the Indians are the only major air force with a positive operational history that have not bet big on stealth as their air dominance capability. S400 certainly has its advantages, but it has not been assessed to be the stealth killer by the people actually making the decision to buy the damn things.
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