F-35 is built for the wrong war

The problem is that the F-35 was intended to be the low cost, mass produce-able workhorse for long protracted wars against technologically inferior adversaries where extremely high performance would be unnecessary. Yes it incorporates advanced stealth and electronics that make it a very capable aircraft, especially when it's going up against F-4s, but these weren't driving the cost. The US had already developed these technologies, and once you have them putting them on another aircraft isn't too expensive. And in particular the main focus was on lifetime cost - keeping flight hours reasonable and maintenance down compared to a higher performance aircraft like the F-22. This plane was designed around exactly this sort of conflict.

The problem was horrific project mismanagement. Building factories before the design was complete, delays due to development operations being done in parallel, making essentially 3 different aircraft with radically different requirements use a common design - the initial program cost skyrocketed and the only way out was to keep upping the order quantity to keep unit costs low. Cost per flight hour was supposed to be $25k, it's now $50k. Engine maintenance time was supposed to be 2 hours, it wound up being 50. And the issues didn't stop after initial development - with each successive iteration there have been new issues resulting in further delays, with airframe delivery on average still being 8 months behind schedule. None of that had anything to do with the F-35's core capabilities. For comparison, the F-35 has lower production costs than the non-stealth F-15EX which is based on a 50 year old airframe, but it has a 30% higher flight hour cost, and the program cost is 100X for 20X airframes.

This sort of botched procurement has caused terrible issues for multiple military projects, such as the Navy's failed Constellation-class frigate program, or the Army's immediate cancellation of the M10 Booker. These aren't masterpieces built for the wrong war, these are failures at producing what was intended. One has to wonder how you can mess up Epiphone guitar production so bad you accidentally wind up with a Stradivarius. It does not bode well for the orchestra.

And naturally F-35s on that theatre would have been a game changer making mass strikes on Moscow possible. For all the dysfunctions of American military industrial complex it remains a fighter without peers (unless you count F-22) or serious AD threat.

No US ship was to my knowledge even hit by a drone/missle.

Iran has been prepping forever for this with Russian/Chinese equipment.

This sounds identical to previous arguments I saw of how hard it would be for US to beat Iran in open conflict. China is different but comparing theoretical ability with reality is different also.

The only reality we have as of now is that f35 completely dominated the enemy on every single front. It's insane to see discussions like these when we just witnessed one of histories greatest showcases of technological dominance.

There is no technology or method in this conflict that would have changed the current state. If a nation wants to toss cheap drones at you there's basically nothing that can be done. Another example is US blockade, without something that can take an F35 down there is actively nothing Iran or China could do to prevent a complete crippling of their country.

The issue the US has is that they really do not want to lose US soldiers in this war and because of that they are unwilling to fully occupy or destroy Iran. And the reason they don't want to do that beyond all the normal reasons is that this is a phenomenally unpopular war and every lost life is considered unacceptable by the American people. Similarly, causalities of innocent Iranians is not going to play well domestically or internationally, since one of the ever shifting reasons for war that was given was that the Iranian government was killing it's people. Helping the current Iranian regime kill innocent civilians seems counter productive to that point.

The US nor any country will ever be good at fighting a war where there is no clear objective and they are not fully committed. Winning for Iran is not losing and the US isn't playing to win, so Iran wins by default. This entire campaign is a textbook example of how not to go to war. No military equipment or capability is going to change that.

Of course I understand wanting to be prepared even for grim scenarios such as these. Military strategists should of course continually be refining such plans. But casual discussions like this, without even so much as a disclaimer about it being a hypothetical and extremely undesirable outcome, may pave the way towards it through normalization.

> Meanwhile, modern conflict, from Ukraine’s drone war to naval engagements in the Red Sea to Iran’s own mass missile and drone salvos, increasingly favors systems that can be produced at scale and replaced when lost.

In the conclusion:

> The lesson of the Iran campaign is that the F-35 performed superbly in exactly the kind of fight it was built for. The lesson for force designers is that the next war may not be that fight.

What a weird article. It starts out by saying f-35 is not fit for modern war. Concludes by saying it works perfectly in modern war.

The middle part talks about combining f-35 with drones to get the best of both worlds, but isn't that what people already are doing? Iran war allegedly had lots of drones on both sides.

And of course blowing up iran is going to be totally different from some hypothetical war with china. Will the f-35 work well in a conflict with china? I have no idea but the article didn't really make any convincing arguments about it.

It is to investigate new technologies (i.e. how do we control a thousand drones) and preserve domain knowledge in a large number of engineers spanning multiple generations. If all these engineers go work at $BIG_TECH optimizing ad revenue for watching short videos, we'll have to rediscover basics the next time.

When we have to fight the next serious war, we are not going to primarily use F-35 jets built twenty years ago, it's going to be something built on a similar platform in larger numbers to specifically address challenges of that era. If it can not be made cheap enough, whatever contractors involved are going to be nationalized. All major wars between comparable powers were fought with technology hot off the assembly lines, not billion dollar prototype models developed twenty years ago to bomb caves in deserts.

If you look at it from this angle, all the idiosyncrasies make sense. There's of course the inefficiency of defense contractors skimming off profits at multiple layers, but if you find a solution to that while preserving productivity, you'd win the economics nobel tomorrow.

The author's main argument against the F-35 is that it can be easily destroyed on runways now, as drones and missile developments have outpaced missile defense, leaving the US and US allies vulnerable to a preemptive strike by China.

That might be true, but it's also strategically valuable to diminish the military capabilities of allies of China (e.g. the Iranian theocracy), which may make up for the tactical weaknesses of the F-35 against China in a direct confrontation. It's also possible that drone/missile defense will catch up (e.g. lasers), but that's hard to say at this point.

Kinda lost me at the first sentence with this metaphor; you can and do equip an orchestra with instruments of similar caliber to the violins. Woodwinds are expensive. Bigger strings are expensive. Percussion is expensive. Maybe brass is cheap idk but there aren't many of them in an orchestra. In fact the plurality of instruments in most orchestras is violins.

If you put the f-35 along all the rest of the us military, the war can be won and the f-35 plays a critical role in that win.

Also, the collaborative combat aircraft is being developed with the F22 and F35. Arguably though the collaborative combat aircraft is a bigger challenge than the F35 program as a whole and it is still in development whether it can be completed. We could downsize the F35 fleet or provide it in military aid but, I don't we can truly say wrong war it will still be available when a different war occurs and Aircraft have a long shelf life.

And the military is corrupt. They misplace hundreds of millions of dollars (cash) when they go overseas. The IRS is responsible for finding massive fraud schemes that the military never noticed. Why didn't they notice? Because there's no consequence. The military isn't a business; they can practically write blank checks with taxpayer dollars, and if they lose the money, what're we gonna do, fire them? Same for contractors. They can overcharge us or build faulty weapon systems/vehicles/etc, and it's not like we have 10 alternatives around the corner.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxJLUZWPEb8

(Re-Upload: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8__8--YAm4)

Over the past few years we have seen it operate with impunity over multiple countries. It astounding to me that in the 12 day war and the iran conflict there hasn't been issues from maintance alone.

We dont know how well the F35 holds up against patriots or s400's, but what we do know for certain is that against virtually everything else it unstopable.

More so when you realize the us has 600 and is making another 200 a year, and in a real war, you would lose some but theres rough parity between the number of s400 systems that exist, and the number of f35s that exist, and all those s400's will never be in teh same war or same place.

Low tempo is irrelevant. What matters is whether you can deliver those munitions to the factories early in the fight to prevent it from becoming an attritional war.

In Ukraine, they both have air parity so they can't do that.

This being said, should the "invisibility" fail, it becomes a plane that can't dog fight, cant fly very high, can't fly very fast, can't carry a lot of load, needs an insane amount of maintenance (10h per 1h flight) and is expensive. Big bet!

Superiority comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_(short_story)

Fun fact: German stealth figthers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horten_Ho_229

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MBB_Lampyridae

The modern background of stealth figthers comes from the soviet union: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_technology

Again, this was 10-15 years ago. Now with the Ukraine war everyone acts like it is obvious...and I agree, it has been for awhile. We just never had a theater to test this stuff in. I suspect US defense contractors were on-board for Ukraine and Iran to advance development efforts significantly.

Arthur c Clarke's short story, "Superiority," describes this dynamic perfectly.

The corrective is not to abandon the F-35 but to redefine its role. A smaller fleet should be reserved for the missions that truly require its unique capabilities — penetrating advanced air defenses, gathering intelligence in contested environments, and orchestrating distributed networks of unmanned systems. The marginal procurement dollar should shift toward platforms that are cheaper to build, easier to replace, less dependent on vulnerable forward infrastructure, and expendable in ways that manned fighters are not.

The lesson of the Iran campaign is that the F-35 performed superbly in exactly the kind of fight it was built for. The lesson for force designers is that the next war may not be that fight. The future of airpower belongs to a larger orchestra, many of its instruments unmanned, inexpensive, and replaceable. Prudence demands that the United States start building it now."

And then send millions of them, with specific single targets. Each AI controlled to target single weakpoints in buildings, bridges, or even specific people. You can't stop a million of them even with EMPs because you can just end a million more. You can destroy entire cities with a technology like this. If each drone costs $10,000 and you send a million of them that's only $10 billion for a war and complete destruction of your enemy.

Oh, do they? How many F-35s have been lost in combat? As far as I know we had one that was damaged by an IR guided missile and subsequently landed in friendly territory. You don't have to replace what you don't lose.

Drones aren't magic. Sure, you can build swarms of easy to jam, short range, small payload drones that are easy to track back to the base station on a budget. Will they work against a tech-savvy enemy? Maybe. Hope all your targets are really close to the launch site.

And yes, you can upgrade your drones. You can give them longer range, larger payload, higher speed, and more sophisticated electronics. But then they're not cheap anymore and building a swarm will break the bank.

Every F-35 is capable of carrying multiple nuclear bunker busters each of which is far more powerful than the GBU-57A/B MOP.

Instead of saying outright that war has evolved and the plane is not really fit for purpose, he ends indecisively.

"It’s not Mildred sitting at a switchboard saying ‘Joe, you go to the corner of 42nd and Broadway,’ no it’s the AI. It’s not that hard given the state of current computing to imagine a system where the targeting grid is quote commanding and control itself.”

Of course it was built for a different war... the use of drones didn't proliferate until after the 2010s and really more since the 2020s with Russia/Ukraine.

So, thanks Captain Obvious and arm-chair quarterback, for the insightful article.

On paper it looks cool.

In practice it was /never/ the right plane. The contractors knew and didn't care.

The F-35 at least has been produced in quantity and the unit cost has come down and they're finally rolling out some decent upgrades. Yes it's a messed up program in so many ways as its literal decades of history shows but:

The bigger issues is our industrial base cannot replace our many missile systems quickly enough, including surface to air, antiship, and surface to surface. We can't build ships or planes very quickly, either.

We are woefully low on stocks and can't meet commitments in NATO, mideast, and against China and N Korea. Taiwan is and has been waiting years on billions in backorders.

The other issues is everything is as expensive as f-ck. We're shooting down dirt cheap drones costing in the thousands with missiles costing in the millions. The article at least mentions this.

And what is the proposed solution to this? A giant, expensive, long range fighter that will coordinate expensive drone buddies (google NGAD). Because we think it's realistic to try and defeat Chinese forces when we're thousands of miles from base and they're at home.

First off we need to replenish systems we already know how to make and that are effective. We need to learn to build sh-t quickly, at home and with allies, and it's bizarre no politician has taken the lead on this because it involves popular stuff like spending government money, creating blue collar manufacturing jobs, growing small businesses with more reliable gov contracts, and so forth.

Then we need to develop cheaper systems including lots of drones, anti drone stuff, and low cost interceptors and antisurface missiles.

Then we need to reform contracting infrastructure and rules to move much much faster and with less cost to experiment and iterate more rapidly going forward like the Ukrainians (and even the Iranians) are doing.

We need to do all of this and quickly and no one from either party is providing leadership. This is the biggest reason the US and west are at risk of becoming paper tigers - we have cut our infrastructure and defense spending and microoptimized inventory to the point where we can't restock quickly enough to be a credible deterrent force.

The question is, what should be the alternative? Large numbers of "cheap" F-15/16/18 planes? They're not exactly cheap. Military kit prices are notoriously hard to reason with, but some googling tells me a new F-15 costs about the same as a new F-35. Adjusting for total lifetime costs and availability, according to Claude (lazy I know), Gripen is the cheapest western plane to fly at around 28k/hr, Rafale/F-15..18 sit around 50-60k/hr, F-35 around 100k. Eurofighter allegedly even higher at 120k.

I'm not saying these are good numbers! But if they aren't total nonsense, you could have, allegedly, twice the number of gen-4 fighters (4x with Gripen). That's a lot, but not an order of magnitude. It's not like you could swarm the sky over China with gen-4 fighters Vs homeopathic amounts of F-35. And I can well believe in a real big war, preserving a smaller number of more capable planes and pilots is better than starting with a lot of still-expensive planes and lose them more quickly.

At the same time, Israel is reported to have lost over a dozen of pricey, advanced, but more expendable non-stealth drones over Iran. They were probably used in riskier fashion, but I'm not sure what would happen if you replaced them with gen-4 fighters.

It's also possibly one of the most mass produced fighters at the moment. Production numbers exceed 1000 iirc. So hard to argue it cannot be produced in volume.

Finally, the comparison to cheap lawnmower drones is also IMO a bit out of place. They're so cheap because their capabilities are near 0. It just so happens that they have a niche they are perfect for. For sure there's going to be more and more autonomous planes in the sky, but not sure about the general usefulness of the Shahid-style drones. They are perfect for terrorising Ukrainian civilians and disrupting woefully under defended Russian industry.

I'm not saying I know better than the expert article, it just misses to me the alternative, and it's not obvious what it should be. And if youre making a bad choice, when the other choices are actually worse then your choice might be, in fact, good.

One can dream

U.S. weapons supremacy is increasingly exposed as a marketing facade. Despite a $1T annual budget, the industrial base is so brittle that strategic missile stocks were nearly depleted within a month of engagement with Iran. To keep the gears turning, Washington is now cannibalizing the stockpiles of its own allies.

You could make the case that the F-35 isn't a weapon; it’s a sophisticated wealth-extraction tool designed to fleece the American taxpayer. While it excels at deleting defenseless targets in lopsided conflicts, its primary mission is maintaining the flow of capital into a bloated military-industrial complex that prioritizes contractor profits over combat endurance.

Yes, the U.S. possesses the most lethal tactical hardware in history, but its industrial backbone is currently ill-equipped for a prolonged, peer-to-peer war of attrition.

  - Korean War (North Korea/China)
  - Rating: Competent
  - Note: North Korea began with a well-equipped, Soviet-backed armor force; China followed with massive, highly disciplined infantry waves that effectively fought the UN coalition to a stalemate.



  - Vietnam War (North Vietnam/Viet Cong)
  - Rating: Technologically Incompetent
  - Note: While technologically outmatched, they demonstrated elite level unconventional warfare, logistical persistence (Ho Chi Minh Trail), and sophisticated anti-aircraft defenses.



  - Invasion of Grenada (Grenadian Military)
  - Rating: Poor
  - Note: A very small force with limited heavy weaponry and minimal organizational depth.



  - Invasion of Panama (Panamanian Defense Forces)
  - Rating: Poor
  - Note: Though professionalized to an extent, they lacked the hardware and air defense to resist a modern concentrated assault.


  - Gulf War (Iraq)
  - Rating: Competent (on paper) / Incompetent (in execution)
  - Note: Iraq held the world's fourth-largest army at the time with modern Soviet equipment, but failed significantly in command, control, and air superiority.


  - Intervention in Somalia (Local Militias/Warlords)
  - Rating: Poor
  - Note: Characterized by decentralized "technical" vehicles and light arms; effective only in urban ambush scenarios rather than conventional warfare.




  - War in Afghanistan (Taliban/Al-Qaeda)
  - Rating: Incompetent (conventionally) / Competent (insurgency)
  - Note: Zero conventional capability (no air force/armor), but highly capable at sustained, low-tech asymmetric warfare.



  - Iraq War (Ba'athist Iraq)
  - Rating: Poor
  - Note: By 2003, the military was severely degraded by a decade of sanctions and previous losses; it collapsed within weeks of the conventional invasion.


  - Military Intervention in Libya (Gaddafi Loyalists)
  - Rating: Poor
  - Note: Largely reliant on aging Soviet hardware and mercenary units; unable to project power against NATO-backed air cover.



  - War against ISIS (Insurgent State)
  - Rating: Poor (conventionally) / Competent (tactically)
  - Note: They lacked a traditional air force or navy but utilized captured heavy equipment and "shock" tactics with high psychological impact.

Another fun fact in all this is the F-14. Did you the Navy has a policy of shredding all F-14s? Why? Because they were sold to Iran in the 1970s (pre-Islamic Revolution obviously) and the US wanted to make sure they could never get spare parts.

Anyway, as a result of that the US didn't want a repeat of selling the F-35 to a country that became an enemy so the US effectively has the ability to turn off the F-35 for every buyer... except one: Israel. Technically I think the avionics require daily activation and the US is the only supplier of those codes.

So, one nit I have about this article is the operational record of the F-35 in this current war. I don't think that's entirely correct. Iran's fairly primitive air defense has managed to damage the F-35 in at least one incident [1]. Also, you can assess the risk by how a fighter is used. As in, does the military use them with stand-off weapons [2] or not? This means using precision-guided munitions from a distance, possibly over-the-horizon. This wastes more payload on fuel. Those munitions are more expensive. The only reason you do it is because you fear the air defenses or otherwise can't guarantee air superiority. There have been a lot of reports the US military still primarily relies on standoff weapons in Iran. This is of course unconfirmed.

The bigger issue here is that post-Vietnam, and particularly since the 1990s, the US military has adopted a Strategic Air Doctrine. Rather than putting boots on the ground, the US projects military power by the ability to bombard. Unfortunately, that has limited utility. No regime has ever been overthrown by air power alone. And we're seeing that now. The entire Iranian military is built to resist strategic bombardment.

So yes, in this sense, the F-35 is built for Strategic Air Power and that's just not that relevant anymore.

So how do you put boots on the ground? Well, in Iran's case, it's like the country was specifically designed in a map editor to make this near-impossible. Iran is 5 times the size of Texas and has a population of ~93M people. It's surrounded on 3 sides by mountains and on the other by the Persian Gulf, which itself is bottlenecked by the Strait of Hormuz, which no US military ship has even approached in this conflict.

People just don't understand how complicated the logistics of this are and how many soldiers are required. You need, for example, tanks. You can't air lift multiple tank battalions. A plane can carry one, maybe two, tanks. They need fuel, munitions and maintenance. You need air defense and to establish bases. You need people to do all those things. Those people need to be fed.

Logistically, it's as complicated and large as D-Day.

It's also why I find the Taiwan question (also in this article) so frustrating, for two reasons:

1. China doesn't have the amphibious capability to cross 100 miles of ocean to land on Taiwan, establish a beach head and suppress a military of hundreds of thousands (as well as an insurgency) and to occupy the island. If you think they do, you have no idea what this takes;

2. More importantly, China has absolutely no reason to invade Taiwan and has shown no inclination to do so. this is the part that gets people mad for some reason. All but 10 countries on Earth have what's called the One China policy. This includes the US and Europe. That policy is that Taiwan is part of China and the question can simply remain unresolved. China belives the situation will be resolved eventually and there's absolutely no rush to do anything. The US agrees, policy-wise.

So any talk of a Taiwan invasion is just scaremongering to sell weapons. Like the F-35.

Maybe, just maybe, you should take with a grain of salt when the guy who sells you weapons tells you there's an imminent threat that requires you to buy the weapons they sell.

[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/19/politics/f-35-damage-iran-war

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standoff_weapon

The primary goal of this program is not to make a plane, it's to spend $2 trillion in military contracts. As a side effect, it runs as a jobs program for engineers and its US based supply chain. Technology gets developed but with a super low ROI.