Grand Danois
Entertainer
That's an enormous amount of hardware, infrastructure, personnel, just to slow down an inferior number of stealth fighters.To make a more relevant example, when examining an engagement between a 4th gen. and a 5th gen., you have to take into account all the other factors. So for example lets say we have a squadron of 4th gen. Flankers MKIs or the like, defending a target that a unit (lets say less then a full squadron) of F-35's is heading towards. The Flankers have extensive GCI, with redundant radar coverage of the immediate vicinity, a handful of theater/division level SAMs, and plenty of tac-SAMs, coupled with volumes of MANPADS and guided AAA (yes I know how little it can do in most cases), and an AWACS. All of a sudden, if the radar coverage manages to detect the inbound Lightnings, potentially even get targetting data, then all of a sudden we have a situation where the JSF could find itself outmatched on a system level, even though on a platform level they're quite clearly superior to the Flankers.
Attacking "4th gens" would suffer instantaneous disruption/obliteration.
Stealth = asymmetry.
And the F-35 is also part of a system - they don't come alone.
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