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Comment by nullterminated | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the purpose of the F-35 project is to con the Chinese into building shitty fighters, too?

We actually ended up doing something like this with the F-111; ruining a generation of Soviet fighter planes (though the Aardvark and Su-24 are pretty good low level bombers). The F-111, you may recall, was the last "do everything, all three service branch" jets we attempted to field.

You got us to cancel the lovely TSR-2 in favour of a modified F-111 version that was itself cancelled....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_TSR-2

Eventually we ended up with a classic Euro-compromise in the form of the MRCA/Tornado - a swing winged jack of all trades.

Not the first time we've fallen for that American scam, you'd think we'd have learnt http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Arrow#Cancellation

Prior to the cancellation of Black Arrow, NASA had offered to launch British payloads for free; however, this offer was withdrawn following the decision to cancel Black Arrow

So much for the "special relationship" eh?

Like Reagan's strategy of bankrupting the Soviets by forcing them to compete with SDI? Don't think that will work on China.

Read somewhere else that they learned from the "jack of all trades master of none" mess and copied a bit more selectively. Still think theirs will be worse though...

What if their's aren't shitty?

...US starts buying fighters from China?

With bonus spyware...

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