Isn't the F35 program considered a failure? Or am I confusing it with some other program?
replies(10):
I haven’t heard anything particularly bad about the software effort, other than the difficulties they had making the VR/AR helmet work (the component never made it to production afaik).
Definitely not a failure.
https://www.nwfdailynews.com/story/news/local/2021/08/02/f-3...
The electrical system performs poorly under short circuit conditions.
https://breakingdefense.com/2024/10/marine-corps-reveals-wha...
They haven't even finished delivering and now have to overhaul the entire fleet due to overheating.
https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/the-f-35-fighters-2-big-...
This program was a complete and total boondoggle. It was entirely the wrong thing to build in peace time. It was a moonshoot for no reason other than to mollify bored generals and greedy congresspeople.
From a european perspective, I can tell you that the mood has shifted 180 degrees from "buy American fighters to solidify our ties with the US" to "can't rely on the US for anything which we'll need when the war comes".
The evidence for this claim was found in testing for the F35 where it was dog fighting a older F16. The results of the test where that the F35 won almost every scenario except one where a lightweight fitted F16 was teleported directed behind a F35 weighed down by heavy missiles and won the fight. This one loss has spawned hundreds of articles about how the F35 is junk that can't dogfight.
In the end the F35 has a lot of fancy features that are not optional for modern operations. The jet has now found enough buyers across the west for economies of scale to kick in and the cost is about ~80 million each which is cheaper than retrofitting stealth and sensors onto other air frames like what you get with the F15-EX
Ok, joking aside: If it is considered a failure, what 100B+ military programme has not been considered a failure?
In my totally unqualified opinion, the best cost performance fighter jet in the world is the Saab JAS 39 Gripen. It is very cheap to buy and operate, and has pretty good capabilities. It's a good option for militaries that don't have the infinite money glitch.
Anyhow, a fair assessment is the program has gone massively over timeline and budget, so in that sense is a failure, however the resulting aircraft is very clearly the best in its class both in absolute capability and value.
Going forward there's broad awareness in the government that the program management mistakes of the F-35 program cannot be repeated. There's a general consensus that 3 decade long development projects just won't be relevant in a world where drone concepts and similar are evolving rapidly on a year by year basis. There's also awareness the government needs to act more as the integrator that owns the project to avoid lock in issues.
There have been over 1,200 F-35s built so far, with new ones being built at a rate of about 150 per year. For comparison, that’s nearly as many F-35s built per year as F-22s were built ever, and 1,200 is a large amount for a modern jet fighter. The extremely successful F-15 has seen about that many built since it first entered production over 50 years ago.
That doesn’t mean it must be good, but it’s a strong indicator. Especially since the US isn’t the only customer. Many other countries want it too. Some are shying away from it now, but only for political reasons because the US is no longer seen as a reliable supplier.
In terms of actual capabilities, it’s the best fighter jet out there save for the F-22, which was far more expensive and is no longer being made. It’s relatively cheap, comparable in cost to alternatives like the Gripen or Rafale while being much more capable.
There have been a lot of articles out there about how terrible it is. These fall into a few different categories:
* Reasonable critiques of its high development costs, overruns, and delays, baselessly extrapolated to “it’s bad.”
* Teething problems extrapolated to “it’s terrible” as if these things never get fixed.
* Analyses of outcomes from exercises that misunderstand the purpose and design of exercises. You might see that, say, an F-35 lost against an F-16 in some mock fights. But they’re not going to set up a lot of exercises where the F-35 and F-16 have a realistic engagement. The result of such an exercise would be that the F-16 gets shot out of the sky without ever knowing the F-35 was there. This is uninformative and a waste of time and money. So such a matchup will be done with restrictions that actually make it useful. This might end up in a dogfight, where the F-16 is legitimately superior. This then gets reported as “F-35 worse than F-16,” ignoring the fact that a real situation would have the F-35 victorious long before a dogfight could occur.
* Completely legitimate arguments that fighter jets are last century’s weapons, that drones and missiles are the future, and the F-35 is like the most advanced battleship in 1941: useful, powerful, but rapidly becoming obsolete. This may be true, but if it is, it only means the F-35 wasn’t the right thing to focus on, not that it’s a failure. The aircraft carrier was the decisive weapon of the Pacific war but that didn’t make the Iowa class battleships a failure.
The new 6th generation platforms being rolled out (B-21, F-47, et al) are all pure first-principles drone-warfare native platforms.
I’m from one of those countries, and I can assure you a lot of people would now have preferred that we went with an EU competitor instead.
Countries are buying it because it is the only game in town for certain high-value capabilities, not because they necessarily like the implications of there being a single seller of those capabilities. For better or worse, the US has been flying these for 30 years and has 6th generation aircraft in production. Everyone else is still figuring out their first 5th generation offering.
Closing that gap is a tall order. Either way, European countries need these modern capabilities to have a capable deterrent.
You know the answer, but I'll say it anyway. There is no comparable alternative today, and there will not be one in the near future.
Anyway we're all just crossing our fingers that the US is just temporarily insane and will eventually come to its senses. What else can you do.
Criticism is fair however: they did probably extend themselves too far with the helmet technology, and I do have concerns about touch screens in cockpits (a touch screen requires you to take your eyes off of a target to move your hand to the right location, rather than locating a button by touch).
Right now it is also the single most advance combat airplane, built in any number, which exists anywhere in the world and guarantees that the USA will be able to convincingly assert air dominance in any conflict.
Drones were not discussed much when the requirements for the F-35 were formed.
The F-22 was considered very open and upgradable for it's era. It's just that freakin' old where FireWire was the unproven new hotness.
Current AF efforts do focus on drone and loyal wingman concepts, but these don't have much material impact on avionics. There everything the AF is talking about is agility in deliverin capabilities through open systems architecture. That's why they're doing things like trying out k8s on military aircraft. It's not about drones specifically but things like delivering new EW capabilities in days or hours instead of decades.
For a dive on the latter stuff look into what Dr Will Roper was talking about during his tenure.
Operating in a drone threat environment, which is what I was talking about primarily, is mostly unrelated to loyal wingman and related technologies.