The U.S. Air Force Just Admitted the F-35 Stealth Fighter Has Failed

But it’s an open question whether the Air Force will ever succeed in developing a light, cheap fighter. The new low-end jet could suffer the same fate as the last low-end jet—the F-35—and steadily gain weight, complexity and cost until it becomes, well, a high-end jet.

If that happens, as it’s happened before, then some future Air Force chief of staff might tell reporters—in, say, the year 2041—that the new F-36 is a Ferrari and you don’t drive your Ferrari to work every day.

To finally replace its 60-year-old F-16s, this future general might say, the Air Force should develop an affordable, lightweight fighter.

Why would the USAF be the last to know/admit the F35 has failed? It's been open knowledge for the rest of us for the last 10 years or so. I'm on record on the Webs for calling it today's 'Brewster Buffalo' Pilots' Graveyard for years.

JM Greer called it the 'lard bucket' in his book "Twilight's Last Gleaming", also years ago.

I'm really worried that cheap, abundant and reliable is not something our defense industry is capable of.

- As a result of deindustrialization, we can't ramp up production of critical components. We make up for that by prepositioning supply depots around the world, and these depots allow a brigade or so to fight for a few weeks. But once that runs out, things get hairy. See this article: https://www.csis.org/analysis/united-states-running-out-weap... which talks about "surge" capability after a four year ramp up time and also here: https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/us-not-ready-peer-peer...

- We have little sea lift capacity to move gear around to the hot spot even if we were able to produce it in large quantities. https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2019/12/31/the-us-military... see also https://gcaptain.com/new-report-says-us-navy-capacity-is-ver...

A nice summary of US military logistics is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIpPuJ_r8Xg

- US gear has a reputation of being expensive to maintain and breaking down easily, even though it is generally best in class.

- We critically rely on air dominance

Basically we've optimized our military for global police actions by pre-positioning small amounts of troops and supplies around the world, rather than maintaining an industrial base with a large amount of slack and the ability to quickly ramp up production to support a sustained conflict. At some point an adversary is going to call our bluff with a major sustained conflict - and sufficient AA defenses to deny us air dominance. Then people will realize how hollowed out our defense industry has become, and they'll look at the huge amount we spend on defense and how little we are getting in return for that investment.