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The F-111 is the right comparison class. It was supposed to do everything; got relegated to the role every failed airframe does: attack aircraft. Basically a shitty expensive bomber. Just as the F35 is. Dipshit Generals who are bribed with Lockheed jobs afterwords will try to convince you that's really what they wanted; it ain't. It is an egregiously failed weapons system, though an excellent piece of modern political corruption. Yay we have a plane that costs $300 a troy ounce which can be used to blow up cavemen in Afghanistan.

Something a cloth winged Sopwith Camel biplane from WW-1 would probably actually be better at; certainly more cost effective.

Nerds who are touting this turkey because "woo woo cool half million dollar vidya game helmet" ... y'awl make me want to renounce my citizenship. This turd can be defeated by a Russian tractor mechanic detuning his radar slightly.

Exactly, every ground attack air plane from WW2 with added flares would work fine.

Some in the Airforce recognized this and it lead to the light-attack aircraft competition.

But currently it's stopped, I guess there was not enough money in it and was killed by a competing faction in the Pentagon.

See also the disastrous development process of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Fighting_Vehicle#Histo...

I'm baffled that the largest airforce in the world is so desperate for a jack-of-all-trades aircraft. It makes a lot of sense for a small airforce. The F-16 was incredibly popular with smaller airforces because it could do everything. Never the best at anything, but good enough for a small airforce.

But the US can afford specialised aircraft. Betting the house on a jack-of-all-trades means you end up with a master of none. The US should be master of everything, and that means more specialised fighters, bombers, CAS, etc.

If the A-10 isn't good enough anymore, by all means design a replacement. But don't expect it to also take of vertically and perform air superiority. Everything comes at a trade-off. Having an airframe designed for VTOL and then use it for planes that don't VTOL is just wasteful.

> I'm baffled that the largest airforce in the world is so desperate for a jack-of-all-trades aircraft.

A big motivation was that developing combat aircraft is stupidly expensive and extremely prone to cost overruns, which then make programs vulnerable to cancellation. So the defense industry and DoD got together to make this project very difficult to cancel. They sold the virtues of cost savings by sharing components, then they staked the future of US and allied air power on this one platform. On top of that they spread the production of the aircraft across FORTY-FIVE states. It is not only the most expensive weapons program in history, it is the most politically engineered.

> But the US can afford specialised aircraft. Betting the house on a jack-of-all-trades means you end up with a master of none. The US should be master of everything, and that means more specialised fighters, bombers, CAS, etc.

Yes, but one of the critical weaknesses of the US military's philosophy is that if it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing. The DoD frequently capitulates to the desire to gold plate weapons systems and change requirements to the point that projects get cancelled. So, the JSF is in a way, a response to that tendency, just the totally wrong one.

> If the A-10 isn't good enough anymore, by all means design a replacement. But don't expect it to also take of vertically and perform air superiority. Everything comes at a trade-off. Having an airframe designed for VTOL and then use it for planes that don't VTOL is just wasteful.

I think the STOVL requirement is key factor that really effed up the JSF program. And that entire requirement is born out of an irrational institutional fear the Marine Corps has about being left without air support that they harbor from WWII.

I can totally understand the Marines wanting a VTOL/STOVL aircraft. Just don't make it the same aircraft that the airforce and navy use for non-VTOL missions. That's just putting totally irrelevant restrictions on fighters that have nothing to do with VTOL.

The F111 was designed as an Air Force aircraft. period.

They later built two prototypes to test for the Navy, decided a common airframe wasn't going to work, and built the F14 using the lessons learned from that development effort instead.

The three variant JSFs are essentially three separate aircraft run by one program office.

The USAF and USN used a common aircraft in Vietnam to great effect -- the F4.

The JSF per aircraft cost is going to be less than the F18 by the time the program is finished.

> The three variant JSFs are essentially three separate aircraft run by one program office.

They're actually shutting down the joint program office because it is now in fact, three separate aircraft. Which again, puts lie to the whole rationale of the program in the first place.

> The USAF and USN used a common aircraft in Vietnam to great effect -- the F4.

The F4 did decently, and if we use it as a guide, the Air Force and Navy variants should have been their own program, and the USMC should've had a separate airframe to accommodate their STOVL requirement. But that's not what we got, and that STOVL requirement is a large reason the platform has some big fundamental compromises.

> The JSF per aircraft cost is going to be less than the F18 by the time the program is finished.

People keep promising that, but the DoD and Lockheed keep laying games with how they quote costs in order to make it seem like cost parity is closer than it really is. Flyaway costs for the F-35 keep getting quoted against procurement costs for 4.5 gen aircraft to make the F-35 look better than it is on cost.

The cost actually is. It's not a thought about something in the future, it's a fact.

The USMC used the F4 alongside the USN as they always have. USMC aviators are trained as Naval aviators, deploy with USN ships, and support USN missions as part of the CVW. The ARG concept is different, and USMC STOVL fixed wing wasn't a thing in Vietnam. It's a more modern concept. You're projecting things that didn't exist into the past.

There are no compromises between the platforms for STOVL -- the JSF-B is a separate aircraft as it has been since the beginning and as you say in the sentence above. JSF-A and JSF-C are different airframes with different requirements and different capabilities.

The airframe designs of the F-35A and F-35C were heavily-compromised by the F-35B's wide lift fan. That single requirement makes ALL F-35's wider, heavier, and with worse drag than they would be otherwise.

They're separate airframes. There are literally only a very small number of components (mostly the engine) that are the same across all three variants, and all three variants have different dimensions and flight characteristics.

The fuselage across all three variants is the same, as the other poster stated, the result has been that the F-35 has worse aerodynamic performance, is heavier, and has a wider radar cross section than it would have had if it didn't have to accommodate the STOVL requirement.

So while the different variants have different wing surfaces there is no denying that the Air Force and Navy versions would've been designed differently if the airframe didn't have to fit a lift fan in it.

So then you're back to the fundamental question of why even bother. Parts commonality is 1/4th of what it was supposed to be. Costs are nowhere near what they were originally billed as, even with the most optimistic estimates.

Really the only virtue of the JSF approach was that it made the program too big to fail.

The fuselage between the three is not the same. The A and C model fuselage is not the same as the B.

The size of the aircraft is driven by the need to carry large amounts of internal fuel and all internal stores, not the need for a lift fan for the B model. This allows all three models to operate with a reduced cross section for an expanded set of missions, which is the purpose of the aircraft.

Parts commonality is essentially non existent except for the engine and parts of the avionics -- that does make a difference and is a cost savings, but it's not the issue you make it out to be.

Costs are better than they were sold as, and their availability rates are better than they were sold as, and their accident rate is so low as to be non existent. It's a phenomenal aircraft and a capability that's going to completely change the balance of power in some regions of the world.