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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

It truly baffles me just how many very effective and specialized planes are supposed to be replaced by the F-35, which, it seems, can't really do any of those tasks right.

There's a very good reason why there were so many specialized aircraft in the first place.

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The problem is that the F-35 costs a gazillion dollars, and (partly because it costs a gazillion dollars) the program is too politically wired-in to cancel. So they have to cut other planes to make room for it, and the only way to do that is to claim the F-35 can do the missions those other planes currently do.

Which it can't, of course, but since admitting that would require keeping the other planes, which would require canceling the F-35, which can't happen, everybody has sort of agreed to pretend it can.

Norman Augustine: Augustine's Laws

In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy 3-1/2 days per week, except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day.

(From Joseph Tainter)

Diminishing returns to complexity. Drones would, of course, be one way of addressing this phenomenon.

One of the reasons is that the last time we tried this, the TFX, we ended up with one useful airplane type and mission, the F-111, and after a long pause went back to specialized types like the F-14, F-15, F-16 and the A-10.

Hope we don't declare victory with the F-35, field it, and then suffer in our next serious war....

All this reminds me of when bozos start talking about "convergence" in the technology sphere. The US: doomed by middle management.

Not just the US. Netherland stupidly insists on following the US in this, despite it being abundantly clear that the F-35 (or JSF, as it's usually called here) is a fiasco. But it's American, therefore it must be superior to anything else.

Our airforce is usually a bit more than 100 fighters. Always has been. Now we're going to get about 30 F-35s, and they're going to be slower and less maneuverable than our old F-16s. But they have stealth, and some other fighters that we don't have can take off and land vertically, so it's all good I guess.

I seriously think this is going to be the end of western air supremacy.

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