He also calls it a supersonic fighter, which isn't true. The coatings cannot withstand sustained periods of supersonic flight.
True.
And also, the author is an operator, but not necessarily someone involved in the engineering or acquisition.
Nonetheless (and I say this as someone who was severely soured by my involvement with the program), people get tribal as to whether the JSF (provides an unmatched capability) XOR (is the zenith of acquisition malpractice). It's not either/or; both are simultaneously true.
No one in DoD R&D/acquisition fails to appreciate how expensive these things are and this realization is certainly driving long-term decision-making.
Actually, it does for me:
"Just imagine how the F-16 program would have been covered today when they were crashing an aircraft almost every two weeks during several years in the ’80s and ’90s (the F-35, by comparison, has only crashed 3 times in over a decade of flying)."
I had no idea that an F-16 crashed roughly every two weeks while being debugged. I imagine I'm not the only one.
From an engineering perspective local political optimization of a national project is what I would call ineptitude. But you can call it by another name.
Which is another area where F-35 is lacking: range. Without external fuel tanks it can't fight in the Pacific.
If only we had large floating aircraft bases and the plane also had versions that supported VTOL for even more expansive capabilities at sea.
If you're going to base your availability of air power, which is the main determinant of success given the American military doctrine, on having a secure and available carrier at all times, you may be putting yourself in a bind when anti-ship weapons start proliferating and you become forced to increase distance between those defenses and your carriers.
It also puts a hell of a single point of failure.
The best thing that could be done would be to have enough range to be able to fly out from a carrier that's relatively safe from antiship missiles. But that may well become impossible anyways as antiship missile evolve.
The difference between the F-18 and the F-35 is that while the F-18 might need extended maintenance after prolonged (read : more than a minute) supersonic flight, the F-35 may suffer catastrophic coating degradation that may be fatal in the same flight.
As for other operational fighters, the Dassault Rafale can supercruise indefinitely the Gripen indefinitely at Mach 1.3, the Eurofighter indefinitely at Mach 1.8, the Sukhoi-35 can if outfitted with the AL-41F-1S (meaning, some operational Su-35s can supercruise indefinitely, but not all). The F-22 is far from the only one.
Can’t the Eurofighter Typhoon supercruise?
If you need a fighter to fly 500 km and engage a target, why wait 25 minutes for a super-cruising mach-1 fighter when a Mach-2.3 craft without super cruise can get there in 10 minutes?