I know its going to be a bit departed from the actual conflict but I think its a worthwhile "periphery issue" in modern warfare and I think its connected, IN THEORY
View attachment 7331032
3rd f-18 crashes in 8 days under dubious circumstances.
Source
Call me crazy, plenty will, but I think the avionics of the f-18 have been compromised and whoever did said compromising is now "nudging" them at just the right moment with just enough deniability to make the platform look fine and its just "circumstance" but we are seeing test runs of full autonomous takeover.
Imagine it like this, I have a snooper on your computer that is untraceable but if I remote in and open a broswer while your using it, you will KNOW something is wrong even without proof of an outside hack immediately, but if I wait until you are about to hit compile on a critical program your coding and copy in a bunch of prewritten code right before you do that, it its codebase says to delete all record off the adding of such code and the payload could be anything, but let keep it simple and say it just bricks your OS. When you or any other investigator tries to determine how this happened you will only be able to speculate as on paper it will all seem like a "random error".
I think China has already penetrated the f-35 program and thats why they dont use those for flight ops anymore and its possible they penetrated the Indian avionics system as well as gave this ability to Pakistan resulting in so many jets being downed, this is pure speculation on my part but it seems a reasonable conjecture given the power disparity of the 2 airforces.