Experts from Russia: The MiG-31 is the fighter of the future!

The airships will replace the Su-57 and F-35.

On September 3, Russian media published an article by expert Alexander Khramchikhin.

Now, air defense systems must counter numerous missiles and almost endless drones.

One issue is that we need to clearly understand current trends to determine what should be produced specifically!

It is increasingly evident that the high cost of surface-to-air missiles, drones, and combat aircraft

is successfully suffocating manned aviation.

Today, only the "Big Three" (the United States, China, and Russia) have strategic bombers.

But we must realize that

those extremely expensive "stealth" strategic bombers are meaningless and uneconomical.

Their chances of survival when encountering an opponent's air defense system are too small,

and their prices make losing one or more aircraft almost a national disaster.

As for fighters, there was once a debate about whether stealth or maneuverability was more important.

Practice has shown that neither may be needed.

"Dogfights" between billion-dollar planes are not even fantasy, but delusion.

Evidently, the entire concept of expensive fifth-generation stealth fighters is a dead end.

In war, against equal opponents, they will be shot down quickly,

and for fighting weaker opponents, they are too expensive.

Even if the Su-57, Su-35S, and Su-30 are excellent, developing them may not be meaningful.

What is needed is to re-create a genius and greatly advanced MiG-31 of its time,

which actually has no foreign counterparts.

It refers to an aircraft equipped with a very powerful radar and long-range air-to-air missiles, without pursuing maneuverability or stealth capabilities.

Finally, airships are very promising.

After replacing hydrogen with helium, the catastrophic fire risk has become a thing of the past.

They can be piloted or unmanned.

They can stay in the air for weeks or even months.

They can fly to very high altitudes (30-40 kilometers),

where they are almost immune to air defense systems,

and even if a missile hits them, it may not be fatal to the airship.

Due to the high altitude, they can conduct optical reconnaissance of enemy territory from the air space.

They are also very suitable for long-range air-to-ground attacks.

Additionally, nothing can prevent balloons from performing real combat missions,

playing the role of carrying hundreds or thousands of missiles or various-purpose drones.

In fact, dozens of airships equipped with powerful radars and each carrying hundreds of "air-to-air" missiles,

combined with the hundreds of new MiG-31s mentioned above, could form an excellent air defense barrier.

Of course, now we will not seriously develop airships, nor will we have large numbers of surface-to-air missiles and updated MiG-31s.

But the overall trend still needs to be understood.

Because the storm will definitely come, and it will definitely be "baptized".

Original: www.toutiao.com/article/1842198953871370/

Statement: This article represents the views of the author.