Beyond that, is there a viable competitor available for an US allied nation to purchase?
Plus every other party has far inferior fighters to "the West" anyway. And then you calculate ... you are not going to successfully defend against the F-35 in a war with the US. Not going to happen. Against Russia/China or anyone else ... every fighter jet will do fine, so take the cheapest.
The US got guaranteed this business because of international treaties ... which Trump has abandoned. But no worries, I'm sure he'll just make a "deal" and fix things again, right? Meanwhile I suggest you invest in EU weapons manufacturers, who are a lot cheaper than the US ones.
How many J-35s does China have?
Will it though? Underestimating your (potential) enemies might not be the smartest idea. Of course as the war in Ukraine has shown jet fighters might not even be that relevant anymore if you can't take our your opponents air defenses.
One of the design variants of the F-35 is designed to penetrate air support, no?
That means enough propellor powered cruise missiles to guarantee US air defense penetration is (a lot) cheaper than ONE F-35 (and they can still go ~500km/h), jet-powered ones cheaper than 2, maybe 3 and that's not counting equipping the F-35 with something to shoot, and of course there's the suspicions that F-35s have kill switches that Trump half-confirmed (yet another brilliant move there, Mr. Orange President).
How many of those interceptor rockets are available to be loaded into actual equipment in less than the 6 hours it takes jet powered cruise missiles to reach the US? I don't know, but let's go with 10%. In other words: the defense that Israel mounted against Iran is pretty much same effective defense the US would have if Russia started ... The US wouldn't be able to shoot down more of those, even if Russia had 100x more rockets than Iran.
Oh you want to shoot them down using bullets? Ok, halfway we have those cruise missiles switch to a ballistic trajectory. At that point it will be difficult to shoot them down, but that's not really the point. They're ballistic, and the problem with ballistic rockets is that they're like an (explosive) rock. You can shoot it ... but that only causes momentum exchange ... it doesn't actually give the rocket a different trajectory. In other words: it'll still hit it's target, just with less accuracy (and if the guidance remains intact, not even that). You have to hit it hard enough to get it to break up, which means rockets, which the US doesn't have enough of. Which nobody has enough of.
(this is a theme that will come up often once hamas or hezbollah start firing rockets at Israel again. The new laser interceptors have to hit the rockets BEFORE they're ballistic, in other words, what they do is make hamas fired rockets hit Gaza or South Lebanon ... Guess who will be blamed for intercepted rockets hitting houses, hospitals and kindergartens in Gaza and Lebanon?)
Guided munitions are a piece of the puzzle but I don’t think we’ve seen evidence that they can fully replace the ability to point to something on a map, fly planes over and make that thing not be on the map any more.
Wasn't it because the only optional they had if they wanted to do any damage was the GBU-57 (which probably wasn't close to being enough but still..)?
Cruise missiles are offer pretty decent precision for ground targets (supposedly around 5 meters).
The thing is, we can sit here on HN thinking we’re so clever but ACTUAL MILITARY LEADERS want to use F-35s so they clearly have insight and knowledge that we don’t.
Historically they are rarely very good at being able to tell how the next war is going to be fought.
Sure I suppose most generals these days are much smarter than the ones leading the French army back in 1940 (or pretty much anyone at the outbreak of WW1) but that's a very low standard..
Is the fact they aren't good at knowing how the next war will be fought because they're bad at it or because that's a hard problem?
Put more specifically: if you were to fight that next war, do you think you'd do a better job than Admiral Sir Tony Radakin or General Randy George?
Sometimes either, sometimes both. Historically it wasn't uncommon for mean who were exceptionally incompetent and ill suited to the position to end up leading the militaries of major powers (e.g. Gamelin, Cadorna, Fredendall and plenty of others)
Whether I would do a better job [obviously I wouldn't] seems entirely tangential and a pointless argument in general (especially considering I didn't even make any particularly strong claims. I certainly never claimed that the F35 is not the best fighter jet that's available currently).
Regardless decisions related to things like this are not made by individuals and are usually highly political, based on compromises and several decades in advance.
This was the precursor to the statement you objected to. It seems pretty central to my point: we only have access to public data and have no experience leading any military campaign. I’m willing to have a discussion to learn more but I’m ultimately going to trust that military people are looking at drone warfare in Ukraine and still trust the F-35 to be good value for money.
> based on compromises and several decades in advance.
Using drones in war has been a theoretical possibility since at least 2010, so I believe it’s definitely factored into their thinking.
Well.. I trust they wouldn't be telling us even if they didn't.
NATO doctrine is to start by controlling the skies. I can see a world where a lot of the strategies we see start to crumble when a jet or bomber can pick off key targets at will on and off the battlefield.
Rafale, Typhoon, Gripen. None are as good as the F35, but all are better alternatives to a bricked airplane.
Trump already demonstrated how even older models (F16 given by Europeans) can be bricked in Ukraine simply by not providing support.
Fictitious scenarios: let's say the US sells F35 to Taiwan. China tries to invade Taiwan. Taiwan wants to use the F35 to fight Chinese forces. China makes a deal with the US to limit the economic impact on the US of the invasion of Taiwan, and the US president of the time thinks maintaining a good trade relationship with China is more important than Taiwan remaining an independent democracy, and will therefore curb Taiwan's ability to use those F35. Not completely far fetched. Doesn't mean Taiwan has gone rogue.
The US tries to keep good relationship with Pakistan, while at the same time considering selling some weapons to India. You can imagine why India would prefer the older French Rafale (the French are much less demanding about what you do with their weapons, though there is the precedent of helping the UK with the Exocet it sold to Argentina during the Falklands war). The middle east is also full of those complex relationships.
Not available yet, but Korean KF-21 and Turkish Kaan/TF-X (which Spain is thinking about buying/co-producing IIRC), though they're both considered 4.5th gen fighter jets rather than 5th like the F-35.
US allied is a concept that is quickly losing its meaning. As the current administration no longer treats allies as allies, most European fighters are more viable
As I and others point out: the problem is if you do something Trump doesn’t like and he cuts off the extra features that make the F-35 better than anything else you can get. At that point you just paid millions for an expensive paperweight.
The F-35 is the only genuinely stealthy aircraft any country outside the USA has access to (other than China, and the efficacy of its stealth technology isn't known). F-35 stealth is a game changer, as seen in every exercise in which they're involved.
It’s hard to know for sure, though. The only true information we’ll get is when it’s used in a hot war and hints if or when countries reduce orders.
Second for the on-board radars to evade detection they need to be reprogrammed with the latest updates regularly. Not so much because the programming has a kill switch but because otherwise "adversaries" could still turn out to have rockets that can home in on an F-35.
And even in the case of the US, you don't have to shoot down that many F-35s to get them all.
Honestly, it's just absurd to think that any jet fighter is somehow low maintenance. The issue here isn't the f35, it's the host country becoming a unreliable/hostile partner.
And what if you look at the equivalent force it's competing with on the market? It's a bit pricey once you factor in CAS and supersonic interceptors to fill the gaps.
> The issue here isn't the f35, it's the host country becoming a unreliable/hostile partner.
Here? The issue is the F-35. What happened to Pakistan's F-16s when America became an unreliable/hostile partner to them? They kept flying them for decades, that's what happened. Same with Ukraine's Su-27s, Iran's F-14s, North Korea's MiG-29s... plenty of countries keep other nation's keepsakes in the air. The jet abides.
The F-35 has to be bought as a subscription package, you can't "own" features like sensor fusion without the US' consent. All but one nation has been denied the right to modify the airframe, everyone else is basically just renting the jet with permission to go eat an R-77T when the time comes.
Consider for example when one of the radar elements in the f35 burns out, among the thousands that are there. Where in Pakistan does on obtain custom GaN radar ASICs that integrate with the f35?
One strong reason why Germany got a batch of F-35 instead of the very capable and EU manufactured Typhoon is the fact that the F-35 is certified to carry nuclear bombs, and the Typhoon need certification for this particular mission capability. (The ordonance in this case is US tech).
Source: Luftwaffe
https://www.aviationtoday.com/2023/01/20/bae-systems-receive...
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/21/trump-boeing-stealt...
[2] https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2025-03-2...
The exact transcript is here:
[3] https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-...
All of these are in the top-10 first results when you search for this.
Of course it's also a quote from Trump, so who knows how much of it is from his random sentence generator. Although I'd guess he's quoting another official or someone from the defence industry.
It's surprising any were sold outside the US at all.