Harbyharb
Registered Member
I sincerely would like to discourage this dangerous line of thought, and I advise to view most equipments critically. Yes, stealth fighters are the king of the air superiority for the time being, but it, like all other fighters, are nothing more than the sum of its sub-systems and design decisions, which combined provide advantages, while great, are still entirely possible to deconstruct and mitigate.
Jets like F-22/F-35/J-20/J-35 are designed to be VLO (Very Low Observable), not Non-Observable, specifically that they able to absorb and redirect incoming radar waves of mainstream fire control bandwidth toward very very specific narrow aspects, which means for most aspects they would generate little to no return, and in very few and very narrow aspects they have immense returns which would most likely be filtered out as interference/ground noise.
There are ways to counteract this. Ground-based and AWACS radars have anti-stealth functions by operating in lower frequencies like L-band, where instead of reflecting away and behaving similar to observable light, they behave more similar to communication radio waves and generally ignore geometric details, while advanced AESA radar on both fighters and Active Radar Homing missiles have what we call Radar Staring mode, where AESA array sacrifices search azimuth to focus on a very small vector with intense refresh rate and acts similar to SAR to bypass and burn through the low observable bubble, and that's before we talk about counteracting Radiation and EO stealth.
As USAF and PLAAF's internal exercises against opfor stealth jets have learned, with proper AEW, EW, and ELINT support, non-stealth fighters would still play a significant role in defeating cutting edge VLO platforms, and objectively being faster and more agile is still an important advantage in energy-based BVR maneuver combat.
