What Went Wrong with the F-35, Lockheed Martin's Joint Strike Fighter? (2017)

The same things were said about the F16 in it’s early days. And in fact it was the IAF that proved that it was suited for both long distance combat sorties and old school bomb sights bombing runs when they used it to take out the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq which proved many F16 critics at the time wrong.

The truth is that these days no replacement for a fighter jet would be that much superior to what it’s replacing not because it’s poorly designed but because what it’s replacing has had 40 years worth of improvements and refinements.

Block 70 F16s have nearly nothing in common with the original fighting falcon there likely isn’t a single part that is even interchangeable between them.

That said the F16 unlike the F35 doesn’t have another 40 years it’s air frame has already been stretched (literarily) beyond its limits so we do need a new platform regardless of its growing pains.

And for people criticizing the F35 over its low order numbers well they are low compared to the F16 but the F16 has been in service for 40 years and introduced during essentially the largest arms race the world has ever seen aka the Cold War.

When we talk about how defense dollars are spent I always am of two minds. Because I have no idea if we are comparing apples to apples. Everyone knows the flight characteristics of the F-16, but how many of us know what the -35 can actually do?

The test in question was not even an "F-16 vs F-35" exercise, it was a regression test of a new vehicle control law software with an F-16 being used as a visual reference for maneuvering against. Additionally, the F-35 being used for the test, AF-02, is a "Flight Sciences" aircraft that lacks all of the F-35's mission systems (Radar, Electro Optical Targeting System, communications suite, and electronic warfare suite).

The F-15, F-16, and F-18 are all multi-role aircraft, and are fairly unarguably the world's best in their categories. There's no reason to think the F-35 won't be in the same class.

As to the A-10, I believe the F-35's primary ground support approach will be from pretty high altitude, using smart weapons. That kind of approach will even work against first-tier opponents.

If you need "low and slow" close air support while shooting up the enemy with cannon, the Apache seems a better fit. The AC-130 is somewhere in between...note recent AC-130 variants have been getting longer and longer range weapons to decrease vulnerability to MANPADS.

Wikipedia says that 787s have a production cost of around $100 million per unit, and that the unit cost of purchasing one is somewhere between 200 and 300 million, and that Boeing expected breakeven at around 1000 units sold.

The unit cost of a F-35 is currently in the 100-150 million dollar range.

The 1.5 trillion dollar cost quoted is for the total program life - that's the cost purchasing, operating, maintaining, and upgrading a fleet of over 2000 aircraft over nearly 50 years. Of that, 1 trillion is in operating and sustainment costs. Total R&D and Test/Evaluation costs are estimated to finish up somewhere around 60 billion dollars, which compares favorably to the estimated 32 billion that Boeing spent before the first 787 order was completed.

It's like comparing the cost of a bus vs a tank.

If that were the case, why wouldn't the world's premier warfighting nation instead be creating such a project, graft and all, instead?

Perhaps the answer is that the F-35 still fulfills a very real, very important role and that all of the FUD around it is just that. FUD.