Which fighter is truly the best? From the F-35 and Rafale to the J-20, Su-57 and JF-17, this TSB Insight examines what the world’s leading combat aircraft actually do best—and why there is no single winner.

Leonidas matters less as a technological spectacle than as a possible answer to a harder military problem: how to defend against cheap aerial mass without exhausting expensive interceptors and shallow magazines. This insight examines the system not as a marketing claim, but as a strategic proposition — one that could affect force protection, procurement priorities and the economics of modern air defence if its promise survives the harder tests of integration, scale and operational reality.