Who cares? Air-to-air combat is exceedingly rare these days, and in the very near future no piloted aircraft will be able to keep up with a drone anyway (smaller, lighter, able to pull G-forces that would black out or kill a human pilot).
There is no "very near future" in military spending. It will take at least five and probably ten years to get a working high-G drone design with equivalent capability off the drawing board and into the air.
Meanwhile the F-35 is a fiasco for US and NATO force projection. The whole point of modern weapons - ugly and expensive as they are - is that they're supposed to be so intimidating you barely need to use them.
The F-35 fails to continue that tradition. The political consequences are going to be a lot more significant than the military ones.
> It will take at least five and probably ten years to get a working high-G drone design with equivalent capability off the drawing board and into the air.
Do you think we're going to have a shooting war with China or Russia before 2025? Because those are the only countries that can come close to challenging US air superiority.
The entire military-industrial complex is a boondoggle at taxpayer expense. The Iraq war cost, what, $1,000,000,000,000? And that didn't even involve any fancy next-gen fighters.
I just don't see why people harp on this one stupid-expensive plane when there's all kinds of other stupid-expensive junk we waste money on.
It's like somebody burned down your house, but what you're really mad about is that they burned down the brand-new tool shed out back.
