I think the point of the F-35 is it's one jet that can do it all. Maybe it isn't as stealthy or fast as an SR-71, and maybe it's VTOL isn't as good as a Huey, and maybe it's sensors aren't as good as a high-latitude balloon or satellite, but that's the point. It's versatile, so you can use it as the bread and butter and deploy various more specialized equipment if needed. The bad press about the jet is stuck in a 1980s mindset - no, not even that, they're stuck in a 1960s futurist vision of the 1980s that never came to pass (you can count on one hand how many "dogfights" there were in the 1980s, and they were pretty meager examples of such).
> I think the point of the F-35 is it's one jet that can do it all.
That was the idea, but it is also why the program has performed so poorly on cost, timeliness, and capability.
The F-35 was supposed to achieve 80% parts commonality among the three variants. This would have delivered massive cost savings. Instead, the reality is less than 25% parts commonality. Also, the compromises made to accommodate all three requirement sets means the F-35 has worse aerodynamic performance and a worse radar cross section than it otherwise would've had if the Air Force and Navy could've had their own dedicated air frames from the start.
The much lower degree of parts-sharing wouldn't be so bad, except that the JSF program eschewed a lot of real world testing in lieu of computer simulation.
And to make matters worse they employed "concurrent development", which meant that production were getting made while the testing phase was still in progress. The result was that as problems were uncovered, expensive retrofits had to be applied to all the airframes that had already been produced.
In a more traditional development strategy, the vast majority of teething issues would've been found before series production began. But concurrent development was used to try to speed up the timeline, but also make it more difficult to cancel the program.
The F-35 has a lot of capabilities but it is fundamentally compromised because of the attempt to make it a jack of all trades. It has had an extremely long gestation period, very high development costs, very high operational costs, and compromised performance on several fronts. Had the DoD at least split off the USMC STOVL requirement it seems like this project would've gone a lot better.
That is how it was sold, for sure. Unfortunately now it has become 3 jets, that can't do it all (at this point). There was supposed to be > 70% commonality, but currently less than 25%. It can't do interdiction, doesn't have loiter time & is ordnance poor wrt. current platforms, is not a great interceptor (no supercruise launch). It is a significant advancement in sensor technology and integration, for sure. The reduction in type number, and the suggestion of the NGAD (both Air Force and Navy, which suggests that they think that joint acquisition is not the way to go next time) makes me think of the classic procurement death cycle. Very happy to be proven wrong on all of this.
The argument is that the result of that is a plane that isn't good enough for any of those roles, but is more expensive than dedicated alternatives. It will lose a fight against a true 5th generation air-superiority stealth fighter (an F-22 or equivalent). It can't support ground troops as well as an A-10. It is a more capable replacement for the Harrier (though many are sceptical that the USMC doctrine around that has ever made sense), and maybe it's good enough to replace the F-16, but it's supposed to replace all four of these (and will cost more to boot).
Well, the F-22 has been in service for over 15 years. The J-20 is probably not quite an equivalent, but I wouldn't want to count on that. Su-57 numbers might be too small to matter, but again do you want to count on that? The F-35 isn't equipped to fight against a peer adversary, so you're essentially relying on the geopolitical situation to continue to be that there isn't one.
