Non-stealth jet combat losses have also been minimal. It's due to comprehensive military superiority in many fields, not specific wunderwaffes.

Stealth planes are not able to fly freely through enemy airspace without having the way paved for them first. We have seen how the US and Israel use saboteurs and standoff weapons before sending in manned jets.

j35 save me

Yeah the F35 costs like ten times what it should but it is still unfortunately an effective weapons platform against all but thee most advanced of anti-air defenses (and honestly that remains to be tested, could be effective against them as well!).

Sure, but they also have not been used against any enemies with anything close to near-peer anti-air defense systems. They haven't even been used in Ukraine AFAIK.

the F35 program does seem to actually function

15-40% of the time, depending on the variant, and going down very fast with the age of the airframes, with 7-year old planes being down to 10-15% (https://hexbear.net/post/6018345/6468713) - and the lower figures are for the carrier and VTOL variants, which are the ones key to US power projection (especially since, as recent events have shown, the US can no longer rely on being able to actually fly from its bases in a given region).

Now, this doesn't necessarily mean the F-35 is uniquely bad, but rather represents the inherent challenges of such a complex aircraft - maybe the Chinese stealth fighters would end up having similar readiness issues down the line too (although I think they at least are not committing the same boondoggle of wanting the same base aircraft to be developed into both ground-based and carrier-based variants, which seems to be one of the sources of the F-35s troubles). It's like the Tiger II tank - its reliability issues don't necessarily reflect on the German engineers being incompetent fools, but rather that the concept of the 70t heavy tank was inherently flawed (at least with the engine/suspension tech of the time), and no amount of engineering genius could get you around plain physical limitations. The American M26 Pershing (a heavy-later-redesignated-to-medium tank), at a much lighter 42t, also faced reliability issues, and while the Soviet IS-2, at 46t, was generally reliable, it had to make a lot of ergonomic sacrifices in order to bring the tank down to that weight, which led to a dreadfully slow rate of fire of like 1-1.5 rounds per minute (later improved to 2-3 with upgrades).

While stealth capability is certainly useful and does clearly work to some extent, the evaluation of technology in a material realm of limited resources should always include not just effectiveness, but also efficiency, that is, "was this the best way to spend these resources?". To go back to WW2 - strategic bombing causes a lot of debates, for a similar reason. It's not that it was ineffective - there's plenty of bombed out factories (and homes) to attest to that, but the actual results can start seeming somewhat less impressive when considering the literally thousands of destroyed airframes and tens of thousands of dead pilots sacrificed to achieve them. Would the Allies have perhaps been served better making more tanks, or various other industrial outputs? Now, counterfactuals like this are never going to have clear answers, but they're still important to think about. In the F-35s case, would the US, perhaps, have been better served by going the Russian path, and pouring those billions of dollars into missile development?

For example, here's an article (from just a couple days before the war began), not specifically about the F-35 but tackling some such questions:

Some analysts will see this surge as proof the United States needs a larger Air Force. They misdiagnose the problem. Airpower is not the same as the Air Force, and the pursuit of ever more exquisite aircraft has left the service less relevant to the airpower mission it claims to own. Air denial increasingly falls to the Army, electronic warfare to the Navy, and persistent strike capacity to ships and submarines.

Exquisite platforms buy exquisite capability for a narrow target set. They do not buy persistence — and persistence is what strategically effective airpower requires. Punishment, as Thomas Schelling argued, depends on the credible threat of continuing pain. What compels an adversary is not a single devastating blow, but the belief that costs will keep coming. Denial aims to degrade capabilities and foreclose retaliation. Both require sustained presence over time, which in turn demands mass.

The gaps this buildup exposes are not in Air Force strike capabilities. They are in the Army’s ability to sustain air denial at scale, in the munition inventories required for persistence, and in the tanker fleet that keeps U.S. warplanes airborne. More B-21s and F-47s address none of these shortfalls. No procurement strategy centered on $700 million bombers or $300 million fighters can generate sustained presence at scale. The Air Force does need more airpower—but not the kind it is buying. Persistent presence requires large numbers of lower-cost drones that can absorb losses, deep stockpiles of low-cost munitions that can sustain fires over time, and uncrewed aerial refuelers that can keep fighters and bombers over target areas. These are the capabilities that generate sustained effects at affordable cost—and they are consistently deprioritized in favor of the next exquisite crewed platform.

The deeper problem runs beneath procurement. Washington has long treated “airpower” and “Air Force” as synonymous. They are not. Air control — the ability to deny an adversary the use of the domain while preserving one’s own — is increasingly accomplished by Army interceptors, Navy strike platforms, drones, and munitions fired from ships and submarines. The Air Force’s preferred model — manned fighters striving for air superiority so manned bombers can reach their targets — has yet to demonstrate the scale and stamina needed to bring a conflict to an end.

We'll see if the article's last guess will turn out to be right.

The thing is that the F-35 is not just stealth, it's a force multiplier across all fields. The F-117 was just stealth. This means that missions which would take dozens or even hundreds of aircraft in the past, depending on how far you go back, can be done today with a handful of F-35s. Long essay incoming.

It's AN/APG-81 AESA radar is no longer just a radar, it's an array that can both detect aircraft, ground targets, do recon with SAR imagery, and jam emitters/radars, all at the same time. The DAS can track ballistic missile launches from over 1300km away and geolocate the launch location, and provides a 360° passive warning/threat detection system for incoming missiles and aircraft. The EOTS is a very high quality electro optical sensor that can pick out individual windows on buildings and moving cars from over 40 miles away, and can be used as infrared search and track, for passive detection of fighter aircraft. With the SDB, an F-35 can carry 8 individual 250lb bombs with a hardened steel penetrator, for 8 individual hardened targets, from almost 70 miles away. There are laser guided, home in on jam/emitter, swarm capable and multimode seeker versions of this bomb all in the works. Not as capable at bunker busting as the 2000lb BLU-109, but for many targets, like a hardened aircraft shelter or runway, BLU-109 is overkill. And if needed, an F-35A and C can carry 2x BLU-109 internally. And with this air to ground loadout, it can still carry 2x AIM-120D AMRAAM air to air missiles internally, for self escort vs other fighters, these AIM-120D missiles have a range of over 125 miles in testing. The barracuda EW system can geolocate an emitter/radar 3x faster than the HTS system of the F-16CJ, then with "sensor fusion" the AN/APG-81 can jam it, and send a bunch of SDBs its way, all at the same time. While the F-35 can't fire anti radiation missiles yet (AARGM-ER is still in development), it will get that capability, a 180+ mile range anti radiation missile that flies at hypersonic speeds. And it can share all this information with other F-35s with the MADL datalink to work as a pack, significantly more capable than Link 16 and being integrated into other systems. For those without MADL, datalink translation gateways/layers like the E-11A BACN and U-2 can share some of this information with the rest, there's a reason 6/7 E-11As are currently in the Middle East.

There's a misconception that the F-22 is better than the F-35, that's only true for air to air combat and kinematic performance, super cruise, thrust vectoring, etc. For almost everything else, the F-35 is better. And it's not like the F-35 is some donkey which can't turn, it can do the fancy air show maneuvers which are not useful in combat like the cobra (search up F-35 high alpha testing on YouTube). While it's not a "dogfighter", it's still very capable at basic fighter maneuvers with its high alpha capabilities, high off boresight missiles and DAS providing a 360° view.

All this means that the F-35 can do self escort strikes, minimal to no EW or fighter support required. The US started the war against Iran with 12 F-22s and 12 EA-18s with NGJ pods, that's it. A dozen planes for fighter escort, another dozen for EW. That's all that was needed because the 90 F-35s that were present can escort themselves. In Iraq, the US sent over 70 F-15Cs for fighter escort! This comes back to what I said in the beginning, a mission in the Gulf war or Iraq war that would've required 4x F-117s to hit 8 targets, a whole fighter escort, and EW support, a SEAD package, over a dozen planes, can now be done by a single F-35. There were only 59 combat capable F-117s built. There are 102 F-35s in the Middle East currently.

For example this strike on Dezful airfield. In the past, 4x F-117s, fighter escort, EW support. Now, just 1 F-35 needed. The other strike on Hamedan would've required 6x F-117s and the whole support package. Now it's just 2x F-35s, with 4x SDB to spare.

That's not to say that shooting one down is impossible or anything like that, saying it's a some wonder weapon, it's not. But it's the most capable fighter aircraft currently flying. The program may have been a disaster and continue to be a disaster, but the aircraft itself is very good. It's why the US sells so many of them.

Turns out the guy who said back in the day "The F-35 would lose to a MiG-21" was actually full of shit.