Hot garbage on the wing.
The pursuit of US and Western air dominance is a pipe dream but a fever dream for the military industrial complex. The existential failure of this fighter program has been stunning to behold.
The days of manned fighter aircraft are numbered in years and not decades.
It’s a startling development for advocates of American air power. For generations, the whole US military – not to mention the militaries of America’s closest allies – have depended on the US Air Force to achieve air superiority against even the most determined and sophisticated foe, affording freedom of action for troops on the ground and ships at sea.
For generations, the US Air Force has gained control of the air by fighting for it, jet to jet, with the world’s best air-to-air fighters – and highly-trained pilots. Late in the Cold War and into the 2000s, the Boeing F-15C Eagle fighter was the world’s top fighter. Later, the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor assumed this position.
The last few dozen F-15Cs are finally retiring after five decades of service. The 180 or so F-22s are pushing 20 years old – and won’t last forever. The US Air Force has already asked the US Congress for permission to retire the three dozen least-capable F-22s in order to free up a billion dollars for other priorities – a request lawmakers have denied, for now.
The disaster of the F35 is now harming and crowding out research and development efforts to develop and field the F35 successor, an aircraft that first flew in 2000.
The US Air Force developed the F-35 in the late 1990s and early 2000s as an affordable replacement for the service’s thousands of older F-16 fighters and A-10 attack jets. The plan, all along, has been the US Air Force to buy more than 1,700 F-35s. The F-35 is classified as fifth-generation like the Raptor: it should be more capable than all but a handful of today’s Chinese and Russian aircraft.
But deliveries of the $80-million F-35s to USAF squadrons stalled last year as the US Air Force and Lockheed Martin struggled to complete testing of the type’s latest software. Today there are scores of complete USAF F-35s sitting in storage, awaiting software. That’s billions of dollars worth of fighters that aren’t even available to front-line squadrons.
***
It’s not for no reason that aviation expert Bill Sweetman refers to the F-35 as a “trillion-dollar trainwreck.” The fighter is eating the US Air Force’s budget – and forcing the service to rethink its next fighter.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/29/us-air-force-f35-stealth-fighter-jet-5th-6th-generation/
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me
