Could all be smoke blowing bullshit to try and scare the Chinese. Make them think America has these super-advanced alien-derived beyond beyond next generation super wunder-craft that they’ll have no choice but to unleash in a direct conflict. The goal being to give more weight to US credibility to try and dissuade them from challenging the US in Taiwan or elsewhere when they act.
However it really doesn’t matter, unless these craft have energy barrier force fields around them or can move absolutely ridiculously, impossibly fast (doubt, they’d have applied it to interceptor tech or a next-gen missile program by now but they still lag behind Russia/China) they can still be hit and taken out by hyper-sonic missiles even if they could give them a theoretical advantage in dog-fighting with jets.
Come to think of it that seems as good a reason as any as the US is increasingly lacking credibility because of Ukraine, inventing this myth that we have these super secret alien-derived wunder-craft which we’ve been hiding and avoiding using would do wonders for the psyche of the western militarist which is going to get quite a rattling soon when Ukraine loses. They can just claim we didn’t dare unleash them there because we didn’t want Russia to have a chance to study them and are holding them in reserve for any kind of direct conflict.
I don’t think “We totes captured an alien spaceship and have super duper advanced fighters now, so don’t even try to resist us” is really going to work on China. Far more likely that this is aimed at the general US populace, to convince them of one thing or another, possibly even an attempt at trying to look “transparent” by “revealing the truth about UFOs.”
Does the US really lag behind Russia and China? I’m not up to date on military stuff.
In hypersonic capabilities? Absolutely. Greedy and ineffective defense contractors that have a perverse incentive to not deliver quickly so as to continue getting money for research programs are part of it. They paper over it with rosy rigged tests and language at times in like interceptor tests.
It’s becoming clearer and clearer that the US military and defense is not capable of what it once was even a decade ago. Privatization efforts have caught up and rotted it from the inside and it’s likely gonna be revealed soon that they don’t even have the capacity to sufficiently staff their 800 military bases. People simply aren’t signing up to be meat pawns for them anymore. Their Middle East adventures have lost them all credibility with Gen Z, and even if most of the US populace drinks the koolaid when it comes to Russia-Ukraine they’re still not gonna voluntarily enlist to die for the cause themselves. That’s another major reason why the US now gets the people of other countries to fight their battles for them.
The US would need a draft of their own populace and given the legacy of Vietnam and every one of their military failures since, a draft for the purposes of battling China would incite enormous unrest. I don’t think the people here would stand for it. And to crack down on such dissent they would have to majorly crack down on the populace using the military they’re trying to get people to join… an incredibly asinine thing to do while attempting to start a world war with a shrinking economy, lagging technology, and record unpopularity of their political system.
Like, I wouldn’t put it completely past the most violent politicians and string pullers of the US to do something that enormously stupid. But that’s what it would be: enormously stupid. It might be the one thing that would actually launch a united revolution against them.
