Europe has the Eurofighter Typhoon and is working collectively on its successor. France has the Rafale. Even if the F-35 is superior, Europe has plenty of fighter tech to continue developing as a comparable platform. This is true for virtually all American military tech: Patriot/SAMPT, Abrams/Leopard, etc.
What Europe doesn't currently have is the production capacity to match American capacity, but that's exactly what they're changing now.
The other big thing I’m wondering about is how much the invasion of Ukraine has people reconsidering super-expensive fighters versus drones and missiles. It feels like the cost-benefit ratio has fundamentally shifted in a way everyone is still fully updating their tactics for.
I can't imagine the scale of doctrine rewriting that will be done over the next 10 years, constantly argued by companies like Lockheed Martin who are so heavily invested in large scale expensive platforms (while simultaneously drooling over new contracts for drones).
It's not just planes, either. WW3 was going to be a huge tank battle fought in Europe. I don't think we've seen the end of tanks, but I suspect we'll see them no longer being the central weapon around which combat formations are built.
It depends where those people are expecting to fight. Small drones have proven effective for defensive, attritional warfare on geographically constrained battlefields. But the US military is pivoting to fight China in an island hopping campaign in the western Pacific Ocean, where ranges are orders of magnitude longer and a little battery powered drone can't get anywhere. There it looks like super-expensive fighters will be the only way to accomplish the mission.
Yes - I’m just not sure _Europe_ is thinking that way. If your goal is deterring Russia and being able to handle other territorial defense roles, you aren't giving that the same weight.
The pacific theater is also complicated by the high support requirements and limited airfields, which China must have plans to attack early in any war. Again, if you’re primarily focused on defending Europe you have a much easier version of that problem because it’s your territory and most of it is land, not ocean.
> where ranges are orders of magnitude longer and a little battery powered drone can't get anywhere.
Why would that be? For one, they could be launched in swarms from shipping containers aboard many dispersed vessels.
If those vessels would be too suspicious and/or vulnerable at the time, they could still be launched from submarines, maybe themselves robotic, cheaper to manufacture. Or from something like a cruise missile, like a swarm of dandelions, from a swarm of cruise missiles, or whatever larger (disposable) drone-launching platform may emerge.
What Europe doesn't currently have is the production capacity to match American capacity, but that's exactly what they're changing now.