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Comment by elabajaba | Hacker News Reader

The bugs have mostly been fixed, and it's cheaper than most 4.5 gen fighters (they're building a lot of them so the unit cost drops significantly) while being significantly more capable (see the ridiculous numbers it puts up at Red flag).

People have also learned that a lot of the "experts" that criticized it were extremely noncredible (eg. Pierre Sprey) and are spouting nonsense that hasn't been true since before the Vietnam war (eg. Relevance of dogfighting and guns in air combat).

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“Mostly been fixed.” Please elaborate, cite.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/03/23/the-new-york-ti...

https://mises.org/power-market/f-35-15-trillion-boondoggle

There's definitely a distortion field around the F-35 both from the positive perspective and the negative. As most of us are laymen who've never flown the plane, it's hard to know which viewpoint is definitive.

Sentiment has definitely shifted towards the positive viewpoint though.

However, the negative viewpoint is not unrealistic. The US can strong arm other countries into buying their crap with bribes and other under the cover dealings. Heck why do you think TSMC is opening a fab in Arizona? Because it's a profitable move? No way.

I guy I grew up with is a flight instructor for the F-35. He claims (publicly) it's a total game changer compared to the F-16's he used to fly before.

In exercises such as Red Flag, it dominates anything 4th gen.

"Stealth" is not only about being hard to detect. It's just as much about making it difficult for enemy missiles to get a lock and keep it until they score a hit.

Also, the softer (or software) elements of the F-35 is a huge part of it. Sensor Fusion makes it a lot easier to know what to do next.

As I see it, the budget and schedule overruns are not functional faults in the airplane itself, but in the program that produces and maintains it. As such, it is not in the scope of a tender process for procuring such planes outside the US.

Are you kidding with these sources? Perhaps next you will go to Greenpeace for their opinion on the F-35?

Both of these are groups which exist to oppose any kind of military spending, neither of them have any relevant expertise.

Responsible statecraft is a well known foreign actor site that's paid to produce anti-American propaganda.

F-35 is quite cheap now.

LMAO.That's quite the claim. Since it's so "well known", I suggest you provide a shred of evidence.

"Quite cheap now." After we already wasted trillions on it.

Still waiting...

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/about/

The thing about dogfighting and guns / mawr dakka seems to be an American thing, I did not hear it, but David 'Warisboring' Axe seemed like a serious reporter, and Marcus Ranum was a serious IT guy

Mirage 2000, Rafale, and Typhoon were/are all arguably designed with a huge emphasis on energy maneuverability, which is also only meant for dogfights according to postings on internet forums. And there are plenty of other isolated ways you could argue the reverse of the US showing restraint in ways others don't, such as Europe's love for delta wings (rejected most recently when the F-35 was first considered), or the Russkies' obsession with supermaneuverability, which the US has barely even considered sane enough for demonstrators. In terms of "mawr dakka", too, assuming you're referring to the A-10, that honor also belongs not to the US, per popular opinion, but to the Soviets in the MiG-27. You've just never heard of it because they wanted to fire essentially the same projectile in a slightly bigger casing at 2000 more rounds per minute, which the airframe simply couldn't handle reliably, and were also limited in the battles they did see due to an unusual weakness to ground fire as opposed to the A-10's unusual resiliency. And besides that, the US also built the F-111 and F-117 as an explicit alternative to light air attack craft.

The only "American thing" that really exists in modern military history is a tendency to do more things than everyone else. The US has NIH-ed their way into pretty much every military technology that's been hypothesized by someone not wearing a tinfoil hat and raving about Nikola Tesla or Leonardo Da Vinci. The public hears about questions like dogfighting and firepower in US aircraft because the US is one of the only countries in the world whose military actively seeks out (or at least sought out, there's some argument that the F-35 is the beginning of the end) multiple home-grown variants of military equipment, especially aircraft, that are expected to compete both on economic and doctrinal value as actual service craft for continuing contracts, rather then just proving ground test beds. More chances to change preference, more chances for contracts, more argument, more buzz filtering into newspapers. In contrast, we're probably not going to talk much about if stealth is a Finnish thing or whatever else for quite some time after this. Perhaps the American thing is spending lots of money, but a full assessment doesn't really allow for more specifics than that.

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