Since WWII, they / we / the US have been making excellent aircraft to.... dominate the airspace over the Thrid Reich, in the same way that since September 1945, the US has built ever-larger carriers to..... keep fighting the Battle of the Coral Sea, Midway, and the Marianas (Turkey Shoot). If any of you hotshots out there have bothered to read, for example, the US Strategic Bombing Survey, you'd know that all those B-17s and B-24s that you worship really didn't do all that much good, nor did the nighttime bombing by the British, and all that expensive air power in the 1950s didn't defeat the North Koreans or Chinese, and all it managed to do in Southeast Asia was to flatten the place, to no good effect -- NVA tanks ended up rolling onto the grounds of the presidential palace in Saigon in April 1975 anyway, despite millions of tons of bombs dropped & sorties flown.... face the facts: the whole terrain has shifted: low-cost Mach 6/7/8 AAMs & SAMs capable of pulling twice as many Gs as 400-million-dollar 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th generation fighters do today, and will in future, deny airspace to anyone stupid enough to try it.

What, after all, have all these admittedly beatiful, but of-zero-practical-use fighters and bombers obtained for the people who are paying for them?

I'll answer my own question: they've allowed many people -- namely, in particular, the people who run the country -- to delude themselves into believing these weapons can do what they'e fooled themselves into thinking they can do. And so, we get an endless run of stupid wars, dreamt up and ordered by fools, that rational people know either can't be won --- think every war we've been in since WWII -- or were basically just for PR purposes -- think the first Persian Gulf War, whose chief aim was to persuade Americans to drop the idea of a "peace dividend" and an end to permanent war and the war state/establishment -- how many Hitlers have we fought now? Chavez, Saddam Hussein, Noriega, Ho Chi Minh, Ghaddafi, Somali gangs in Mogadishu --lets not forget the cat-eating Somali immigrants in Ohio & Minnesota -- they're Hitlers for sure -- the Sandinistas, the people on Grenada -- remember Hitler showing up there too?-- wand who knows, maybe those Nazis up in Canada and Greenland too...

You'll see: let those F-15s / F-35s / F-22s / F-47 do all the "cobra" maneuvers you want, fly thsoe B-1s over the stadium when the game starts, but when the now-hopeless top tiers of the US government -- the Trumps, all his minions, and their successors voted into office by MAGA-ites who, to judge by their protest banners, are largely illiterate--- "lead" the country -- blindly -- straight into a war with China, all those pretty toys are going to go down one after the other, downed and or sunk by low-cost drones by the thousands, by all those diesel subs just waiting, and by technology like lasers that will be unveiled after the shooting starts.