Dangit, missed two of them, not one.

"Need to fulfill a role" is heavily dependent on the role. With F-35 as ground attack craft you can send the ground attack craft in before the B-2s and F-22s are quite finished turning the local air defense system into mincemeat. OTOH, it probably can't take A-10-style low-level missions even after the local air defense is gone because it's more vulnerable to gunfire and it goes too fast.

So the Air Force probably will simply redefine the roles so that A-10s are obsolete and F-35 is the only possible answer.

And who in DC have the taxpayers elected who actually wants to keep government efficient?

The Republicans (and their allies in the Conservative movement) talk a good game, but when it comes to military spending literally the only time they've willingly cut it is that time they realized a useless artillery system was being designed in a black guy's district.

The Democrats hate military spending in theory because it crowds out their social spending priorities, but love it in practice because Boeing/Lockheed/etc. are smart enough to throw a certain amount of the work the union's way.

Which means if I'm a USAF Two-Star, and I want to make Lieutenant General, my proposed budget includes $0 for older aircraft that cost very little money, and as much as I can get away with in a brand-new type.

That's one potential strategy. But lots of pilots means lots of potential casualties, and this is no longer the country that lost 26k at the Muese River in WWI. The whole US Military has been going towards relatively few, very well-trained, very low-casualty operations since 'Nam. And even 'Nam (for all the Baby Boomers bitching about it) was extremely low casualty compared to the Bulge, Okinawa or the Overland Campaign. Call the modern model the warrior-monk model.

Congress loves spending lots of money per warrior-monk, but really really really hates it when any of them dies because the American people do not fucking know how to deal with the death of anyone under 65.

Thus we'll get thousands of warrior-monks piloting ridiculously expensive F-35s, rather then 10-15k piloting much cheaper (and in some ways, that do not cost lots of money, superior) older airframes.

Which is technically true, if your military has the base level of competence of a Western military, and the equipment of the super-expensive warrior-monks in US Service.

In practice it took 15 years of F-117 flying before anybody we actually fought managed to take one of the damn things down. It's the only combat loss of the type, and it was remarkable enough that the Serb Colonel who pulled off the kill has his own wikipedia page.

So I suspect that F-35 will get used in lots of situations where the local air defense system isn't quite dead yet without losing dozens of aircraft. There will be a lot of them, beating their stealth requires some very specialized knowledge that isn;lt common, and advanced equipment which is also not common, all from an Air Defense system that is under attack by B-2s and F-22s.

I guess those sanctions are more effective then we'd hoped.

I didn't say you couldn't do 3.0 Gs. I said that your credibility is destroyed when you bring that into a discussion of mass transportation. Mass transportation is not supposed to be that jerky because mass transportation is supposed to be used by all the people you specifically agreed you weren't when you signed that contract before the pilot took you up.

As for your comparison to current modes of transport, you're not comparing a current hi-spoed transport system with other current hi-speed systems. You're comparing a theoretical system designed by people whose job is to Fail Fast by cutting corners, and no education in transit, with those systems. The current systems you're talking about have been carefully calibrated to have 0.2 Gs lateral max, because when you cut that corner your customers put "Vomit Comet" on all your Yelp Reviews. The theoretical system is designed at 0.5 lateral Gs, which is roughly equivalent to what you get on a roller coaster.

That's always a risk in military service. If you miss out on one of those revolutions you lose the Battle of France to a force with fewer troops and shittier tanks (albeit much better aircraft). So you have to at least try.

On the other hand, we will have 2,400 of the damn things. So even if they suck individually the quantity will "have a quality of it's very own". Especially when combined with our more experienced pilots and better missiles.

Don't be silly. It's not VTOL so the Marines could be stuck on a beach without air support like that one time in WW2.

Moreover it's old, so the budget request would be tiny, and no Marine Major General who made it would ever earn his Third Star.

One of those features is actually the Second engine. Grippen (not intended for Naval use), has one engine. Russia's Su-27-based and Mig-29 designs, and Dassualt Rafelle are twin-engine partly because they're carrier-capable. Eurofighter Typhoon is not, but before the French pulled out carrier capability was on the spec-sheet, so it's also twin-engine.

Fo an aircraft that's supposed to command the entire fucking Pacific you want a second engine because it can't just land on a handy highway if the one engine dies. It has to fly home (or close enough to home that a chopper can save the pilot).

And who has a decent military RADAR Early warning system besides the Russians and Chinese? Hint: they're all our allies.

Moreover who is going to retain said system after the B-2s are done with it? Hint: the answer is nobody.

Iraq had a pretty good air defense system in 1990. It died because nobody bothers buying enough air defense stuff to beat off US Air Force levels of modern, well-piloted, well-armed aircraft. They just don't have the money to buy enough air defense stuff to make a dent in the number of good (and well-piloted and well-armed) airframes $500-$700 Billion a year can throw at them.

As for it's ability to do ground support and light attack missions (B-1, B-52, and B-2 are all going to serve until the 2030s in the Heavy Bomber role, which most air forces no longer have because they can't afford them); the sheer quantity of missions 2400 of the damn things can perform has a quality all it's own.

Damnit, you mentioned the B-2, which is stealth.

So a) only applies to three of the four.

a) None of those are stealth.

b) None of those can fulfill the roles of any of the others.

c) They're all old designs that don't look good on a budget request.

d) Particularly a $1 Trillion request.

So we'll have a very expensive plane that does nothing particularly well, but we'll have a lot of them, and against almost any opponent we're likely to face it will be literally invincible because getting through stealth (even the Gen 1 Stealth of the F-117) is a lot harder then it looks in a Navy white paper.

Against the Russians it wouldn't be one theater. Same with the Chinese. Against almost anyone else we'd have a 10-1 advantage in airframes using only half our F-35s.

I suspect that F-35s could easily keep up the operational tempo of earlier aircraft, but for a lot more money. The USAF has no interest in reducing the number of missions it can fly, but it has plenty of interest in ensuring it's budget for those missions is maximized.

This is the nature of military plans.

You have a plan that you think could work. The enemy also has a plane he thinks could work. Neither side is guaranteed victory in the absence of overwhelming numbers.

I doubt the Chinese plan will work for more then a day, because you can always deconnect the aircraft from it's network and reinstall the software. Which is the reason they are trying to develop some interesting hardware of their own.

The F-16 itself could be out-dog-fought by almost any plane built in the 30s, including many not intended for air-to-air missions, because Biplanes are much more maneuverable then jets. In actual combat it would be much better because it would be fast enough that none of the Biplanes could start a dogfight with an F-16. The Italian Air Force did not realize the major advantage speed gave a plane, so they emphasized maneuverability (and consequent superiority in dogfights) for years after everyone else had decided 350 M,PH was the minimum acceptable speed.

Vulnerability to RADAR is a matter of debate. The side that says they're vulnerable doesn't say they're worthless and we shouldn't buy them, it says that we need to also buy these very nice Growlers that their employer just happens to have ready for production if the money's right.

No money? Are you insane? This is America. If that particular nightmare scenario happened and it risked our boys lives Congress would order the President to buy the damn Growlers tomorow with a special appropriation.

Past due years and massively inflated costs are par for the course in government contracting. As is military conservatism pooh-pooing anything that isn't exactly like the last version with 10% more speed and/or boom. The Abrams Tank, for example, was widely derided as a ridiculous waste of money, easily detectable by the enemy due to the extremely hot exhaust plumes from it's brand new Gas Turbine (instead of Diesel) engine, and unreliable ceramic armor. The Marines refused to upgrade their M60s until the last possible minute. Then the Gulf War happened. Now the biggest reason anybody buys a non-Abrams tank is that they don't have the technology to replace said ceramic armor.

In this case the pilot's testimony should not change your opinion. Everybody knew it sucked at dogfighting already.

Keep in mind that doctrine calls for F-22s to handle dogfights, and we've got 187 of those. That's more F-22s then combat aircraft all but 27 other air-forces, 10 of those are Allies, and the Vietnamese and Ukrainians beat the F-22 by 2 and one plane respectively. So it's not quite as extreme as it was before 'Nam.