Sexy URL, sucks for you if anyone actually clicks it and/or examines your profile as a "Defense industry consultant".
Just to be clear, your answer as someone invested in the defense industry to the question of "What military role does the F-35 fill in the modern world that unmanned drones can't?" is to say:
>A mission flown for the purpose of detecting targets and coordinating or performing attack or reconnaissance on those targets. Strike coordination and reconnaissance missions are flown in a specific geographic area and are an element of the command and control interface to coordinate multiple flights, detect and attack targets, neutralize enemy air defenses and provide battle damage assessment
Forgive my ignorance, but are you saying that we basically need a trillion-dollar endeavor to develop manned fighters which have just barely caught up to the existing technology to go pick fights abroad that we could have already been doing?
What new threat are we facing here, other than a slowing of contractual dollars?
You're conflating a lot of different things in your response.
The F-35, as a low-observable, sensor-linked, MANNED platform, has an important role to play for striking targets in a jammed, high-threat environment. That's all I was saying. I'm not defending the PRICETAG of this ridiculously-expensive and (IMO) poorly-managed boondoggle, just the unique capabilities of the platform. I think the US procurement system in the 21st century is badly broken and has probably contributed to an erosion of our overall military overmatch. I hate gold-plated profiteering junk and argue that hard, realistic training + rugged, simple tech will deliver an economically-viable force that punches above its weight. It's like the US learned all of the WRONG lessons from the WW2 German mil-industrial complex. But my solutions aren't sexy, and definitely aren't a license to print money. Probably why my personal interest is in teaching the militaries of developing economies how to "level up" their capabilities quickly without breaking the bank.
https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Strike_coordination_and_reconnais...