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Make the mesh too thin, and it will be prone to electrical arcing if exposed to intense EM, which an aircraft in a war zone is liable to experience. Not to mention, friction with atmosphere can create static electricity which must be dampened. Thus, there is a limit to how thin one would WANT to make this mesh, even if they had the capacity to make a mesh even thinner.
With such a large number of sophisticated meshes (note that these meshes have a special sort of taper where the front edge of the mesh is “sharp” and it becomes slightly thicker toward the back in order to absorb a wider range of frequencies with each mesh,) it becomes possible to deliberately induce electrical arcing within the skin of a stealth aircraft such as an F-22 or F-35. This is the key to ascertaining the precise dimensions of each aperture in the a particular layer of mesh – the critical piece of information that led Lockheed Martin to destroy its machine tools. With knowledge of the aperture size of any two adjacent mesh layers, one could tune their radar to a frequency halfway in between the two frequencies that correspond with those layers in order to maximize efficiency.
However, this is a piece of information that is not available because remember, Lockheed Martin destroyed their machine tools. How, then, might an adversary deduce the information? An adversary may use a low-frequency over-the-horizon radar to ascertain the general vicinity of a stealth aircraft operating in a space near an adversary-controlled territory, the best example being the proximity of Syria to Israel. Russia operates a number of S-400 radar platforms in proximity to Israeli airspace, an airspace in which the F-35 often flies.
