Divide the F-35 into three different attack aircraft. Single engine CAS with STOVL capability. Big/fast/stealthy twin engine bomber. Carrier based attack drone. All three would likely fulfill their roles better for lower total cost and be operational on a shorter timeframe.

The F-35 reminds me of this short story by A. C. Clarke

http://www.mayofamily.com/RLM/txt_Clarke_Superiority.html

And this scene from pentagon wars:

https://youtu.be/aXQ2lO3ieBA

Or an example of how we don't learn from history, for the same exact thing happened with the '60s TFX, except the F-35 substitutes S/VTOL for air superiority. 5 models of it were planned, two for the Navy, all but what ended up as the F-111 were canceled, and we resumed building focused planes like the F-14 through F-16, and the A-10 I think. Read the relevant section in Possony, Pournelle, and Kane's classic The Strategy of Technology https://www.jerrypournelle.com/slowchange/Strat.html for lots more details.

ADDED: And I've now recalled that there was stiff criticism of the F-111 as it starting flying and was fielded in the hot war of Vietnam. By and large the bugs were worked out, and e.g. surviving pilots were convinced that they should not turn off the terrain following radar and auto pilot system so they wouldn't follow their predecessors in immediately flying it into a hill. Which didn't happen with the following similar in that way B-1, come to think of it.

That I remember mostly from contemporaneous reports, the frequently poor prosecution of the Vietnam war was a big issue in the heartland.

McNamara was the genius pushing the F-111. Also the genius behind the Ford Edsel. When he came to visit the base one time, one of the NCOs who was near retirement had an Edsel painted in the camo pattern specified for the F-111. It was parked within clear view so that McNamara could see it when he disembarked from his plane. He was pretty steamed.

That's about what airmen thought of the F-111 and McNamara at the time.

Ah, per Wikipedia the F-111 was employed, but I can see why it wasn't covered in book, it was ideally employed as a low level terrain following penetrator, so it would not be a part of the big daytime flocks of birds that the NVA were be able to follow and vector their Migs to for one pass attacks. So not relevant to a book focused on air combat per se.

Heh, love the anecdote about the Edsel. The Official Story, on Wikipedia at least, is that he saved Ford not by pushing it, but by killing it, but I have my doubts, everything he touched after that turned to shit, including his disastrous tenure at the World Bank where he destroyed untold agricultural systems in the Third World....

Adapted as a fighter bomber, the F-100 was supplanted by the Mach two class F-105 Thunderchief for strike missions over North Vietnam. The F-100 flew extensively over South Vietnam as the air force's primary close air support jet until being replaced by the more efficient subsonic LTV A-7 Corsair II.

And this was mentioned in passing in Clashes.

Of course we learn from history. The thing you have to understand is that everything is working as intended. F-35, and programs like it, are a way to use public money to create private sector jobs. They aren't meant to be efficient or even effective means to develop and manufacture military hardware.

You can see a direct analogy of this in the space sector, where SpaceX came along and severely disrupted the incumbents by doing things efficiently.

There are certainly cases where the government soaks up funding, gives it to a company, for absolutely no other reason that we can tell other than to just funnel money along into their little corner of the country (and thus their constituents).

But I have a really hard time believing that is the case here.

Source: https://books.google.com/books?id=kje_BAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA12&ots=...

After Apollo, that became many times more what it was for.

It /is/ a pretty good wealth distribution program, though. If you count dollars distributed, not number of recipients.

Yep. Just like the aircraft: tries to do too many things, ends up sucking at all of them.

Boeing was angry that Airbus got cheap credi backed by or from the government, Airbus was angry because Boeing got all the military money from the government.

Spoiler: they're a bad idea.

McDonnell-Douglas significantly upgraded the YF-17 mission systems and cockpit avionics for the F/A-18A/B and it was more advanced than the F-16A version at the time.

The F-117A basically used the same mission avionics and engines as the F/A-18 which was a few years ahead in development.

Having inter-service commonality in major systems and components sometimes a better option than a joint aircraft program. The USAF is upgrading the F-15C (& some export customers) with AN/APG-82 radar, which is basically a larger AESA "antenna" on a AN/APG-79 radar from a Super Hornet.

In particularly, they patched together their prototype in a way which all hackers will appreciate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQ5gmZ74YBY

Here's Jon Beesley, the pilot who did first flight in the F-35, along with quite a bit of the early air worthiness work. He is discussing the weight reduction efforts associated with what was called SWAT, STOVL Weight ATtack.

Originally the three F-35 variants were supposed to have about 75% of their structures as either common (identical) or "cousin" (largely the same but with some minor differences) parts. In other words, the F-35 was supposed to be modular. Unfortunately, this made all three variants overweight. This matters most for the F-35B, where extra airframe weight directly reduces bring-back weight and cuts into the performance margins of STOVL flight.

Starting at 2:15, he discusses the modularity issue directly (with a bonus discussion on scope creep!) "Holes are really heavy." For every hole, you must have a more robust structure around that hole to maintain overall structural integrity. A modular aircraft meant a heavier aircraft, so heavy that the F-35 was in great danger of being too heavy, missing a key performance parameter for the contract. Eliminating the modularity was the way to make the F-35 meet this performance parameter.

It's all about engineering tradeoffs.

I bet most of the avionics that get adapted for a new plane require some modification to get them working. This is, IMO, much easier if you start from a working version.

Consider the semi-disaster that is JTRS[1] (basically the f-35 of software defined radios). It was designed to be modular, and that was part of the failure. If they had picked a single form-factor that was useful in isolation, that would have allowed a single system to get up and running, and then it would make sense to grow it out from there, reusing where it made sense to.

Instead there was this byzantine connection of interdependencies and parallel development with few integration points that seemed likely to doom it.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Tactical_Radio_System#Pr...

Lots of standard interchangeable parts that can be individually replaced rather than one "do-it-all" pile of dependencies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9re9tJckTlk

The pilot in this video, LtCol Christine Mau is a F-15E combat veteran is now flying the F-35. The video description incorrectly states the director of the JSF is "General Michael Gilmore". LTG Chris Bogdan is the JSF Executive Officer and has seen the F-35 up close and flown chased flights from an F-16.

For the OT&E Office at the Pentagon, they do not actually fly the jet, or operate the jet, or even touch the jet.

There are a handful of DoD "civilian" pilots who evaluate the aircraft for the Office of Secretary of Defense. None of the DoD pilots have made public statements regarding the F-35 airframe having any major issues.

Then you get into the situation where the second aircraft is delayed by one FY because nobody wants to put two of these programs into one budget. Then there's pressure to diverge on engines, avionics, etc. which winds up adding to the cost of the second program.

Edit: to clarify: they're not exporting the good one which could change an actual war.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/design/the-hunt-for-...

It's not like an adversary could shoot down satellites, jam controller transmissions or hack a drones control plane.

We'd be better off buying aircraft from the French.

But for the obvious reasons they vastly prefer two engined planes, plus I've read the F-35's single engine is so big their current logistics system will have trouble getting new ones to a fleet at see, I assume this means it can't fit in a C-2 or maybe V-22.

This fits the Tiger Tank vs. T-33 in WWII. The T-33 had very good firepower and armor. The Tiger was superior in both those regards. However, the T-33 could be more easily produced, dealt better with Russia's muddy seasons and winters, and was far cheaper to maintain.

Drones were science fiction back in the early 90's when the F-35 program was started. Even today they can't even come close to outperforming a skilled human pilot in a combat scenario. (Although perhaps if it were Google working on the hardware and software it'd be doable).

The Navy's X-47B "Salty Dog" got pretty damn close (before the program was cancelled). It can take off, on-air refuel, and land back on a carrier with no human input.

http://dronecenter.bard.edu/chronicle-of-the-salty-dogs-x-47...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twdCdlo3BtA

AFAICT, the first armed drones deployed by the US military were ASW drone helicopters in the 1960s. Ground attack jet drones were successfully tested in the 1970s, and some preliminary and positive testing on air-to-air combat drones also happened in the 1970s. Drones certainly weren't science-fiction in the early 1990s, even if the military hadn't gotten around to actually fielding armed drones (despite the tests) beyond those old Navy ASW drones.

On the positive side for 'drones': they can be viewed as both expendable (with costs/limits) and capable of performing maneuvers that would kill a human.

I can see narrow beam transmissions on multiple carriers and extremely fault resistant communication protocols combining with remotely manned vehicles. The pilots might best be closer for speed of light delay reduction, but realistically you could have a relay in some kind of helicopter type vehicle a short distance from the actual fight, and the expert pilots stationed somewhere even more safe.

While you're at it, that helicopter/blimp/etc could also be your primary communication platform for a local region; it's already a high value target so there's little reason not to use it as an additional uplink.

1. CAS with STOVL capability (Marine)

2. Light attack fighter (Air Force)

3. Carrier attack plane with bigger wings (Navy)

Creating 3 separate programs isn't going to change that. And, if not that, then the software they want is going raise the prices of the 3 different aircraft anyways. The Marines are probably going to want to develop the expensive Augmented Reality helmet anyways, for example.

If you create 3 separate programs, where will you save money?

Max wants to replace his offroading jeep, Amy wants to replace her fast sports car, and Ned drives an amphicar because he lives on an island.

So Max Amy and Ned go to GM and say "Design us a floating, offroading, sports car please we are trying to save money."

By the end of the day GM has to convince them to take three variants of the same car, but the cost, time and design tradeoffs needed to reach that point were never worth it. When you could have designed three (possibly four) vehicles separately that each excel in their focus area.

Saying that 'well all three would need gauges and windshields anyway' isn't a compelling reason to combine them.

Not sure why you single out the USMC for developing the helmet mounted display, because the HMD is common to all variants and is already a working system.

Harrier design is also completely not low observable. An F-35 could splash any harrier derivative from afar, and could probably beat out an Harrier in anything but the lowest altitude, lowest speed confrontations.

F-35 is full of problems, but there's no sense in bringing up ridiculous arguments. Harriers might be able to perform some CAS roles better than a F-35, but it would get completely demolished in any 'stand-up fight'.

Any attempt to turn something based on a Harrier airframe into something as LO and as fast as the F-35 runs most of the same design risks and problems as the F-35.

...Ten years later...

"SimpleY is no longer Simple, it turns out that although we got 80% of what we wanted for 20% of the price, the last 20% of what we wanted were responsible for 80% of the overruns!"

And an X-wing could take out an F-35, I mean, if we're talking complete hypotheticals.

The Harrier is battle-proven everywhere from the Falklands to Afghanistan. Marry it up with modern radar and air-to-air missiles and you will have a very capable platform - one that the F-35 - if it ever flies in combat - which it won't because no-one will risk those mind-bogglingly expensive airframes in a shooting war - won't see coming because its radar has rebooted again.

However, the argument you're making is silly. A Harrier won't beat an F-35 in combat. The F-35 would shoot down the Harrier before the Harrier had even detected it.

The argument you SHOULD be making is one of cost, performance at roles (e.g. CAS, bombing missions, etc), proven for naval operations, extremely flexible, and would likely be delivered sooner (even if they started today, if only one manufacturer was involved, it will likely ship before the naval variant of the F-35 in 2022 or whatever they're guesstimating now).

The core problem with the F-35 and F-22 is that they're the most advanced air to air combat aircraft ever built, so advanced in fact that they have nothing to fight, and worse still will arrive right before swarms of drones take over from manned aircraft (e.g. 10x drones Vs. 1x F-35, the F-35 would literally run out of munitions).

* Greater STOVL performance, without the limitations imposed by needing to carry water for thrust augmentation

* Low observability (certainly lower than a Harrier, which has a big RCS)

* Greater sensor capabilities. Built-in electro-optical targeting so that radar can be used less, or not at all

* Reduce pilot workload by filtering information presented in an intelligent way

* Reduce STOVL cognitive errors created by differing control schemes between STOVL flight and conventional flight

This sounds an awful lot like an F-35B.

My point is, saying you want a "modern Harrier" isn't enough. Because in many important ways the F-35B is a "modern Harrier". You have to figure out how whatever it is you're going to build will be different, if you hope to avoid the same problems.

This doesn't translate into a tactical capability today: Falklands: Harriers fighting Mirage III, which were 20 years old, 34 years ago. Afghanistan: dropping dumb bombs on adversaries who didn't have a SAM capability

Given the situation, it would make more sense to invest in something cheaper that will do the job just as well.

The same criticism has been levied on the F-35, due to the S/VTOL airframe support requirement.

- Lots of system integration for the final product from multiple suppliers (usually nightmare).

- Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) is critical for the maintainability and it's millions of lines of code. Failure rate of large projects like this is typically 40-60% and ALIS looks like it's more advanced than most bean counting systems ever delivered.

- Underlying hardware is slowly changing underneath because the system is late.

- It has frigging augmented reality system with helmets that integrates everything together.

- It's safety critical code.

> no less than 27 power cycles were required to get all systems functioning between initial startup and takeoff. These power cycles varied in degree – from “cold iron” resets, where the aircraft had to be shut down and then restarted, to component or battery power recycling.

Holy shit!

> Holy shit!

Even more extraordinary that they found someone willing to takeoff after that...

Me: FYI, in scenario xyz, I updated the documentation to do abc. It seems like the best balance of complication and doing the right thing, especially considering it will almost never come up.

Boss: why does it even matter what it does? It will come up maybe once per year. Oh, and it should do <this other really specific and complicated thing> instead, so do that.

Me: sigh....

"Abort, retry or fail?"

Have you tried turning it off and back on again?

Have you tried turning it off and back on again?

Government: Why not build one plane that can do 3 things? it will be cheaper.

... it turns out it isn't.

Government/Army: We need 3 different planes for these 3 different requirements

Private corporations @ public trough: you could "save" money by building a single plane meeting all those requirements, and we'd also bring extra jobs to your geographical area. Oh, and plus there is this extra "lobbying" money you can have you if support this project.

Politician: Sounds like a good idea...

Your comment is nonsense.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Strike_Fighter_program

"Blackhawk Down" If you lose even one aircraft crew as we did in Somalia, you may be forced to retreat from the entire war. So it makes sense to spend 10x to go from 99.9% -> 99.99% safety.

"Battle of the Civs, Proxy war edition": Fighter planes are less relevant to hugely asymmetric warfare the U.S. is engaged in, and expects to engage in the near future. These fights consists of the most advanced military technology against insurgents with machine guns and RPG's. Clearly drones are better in this area, and Missiles of all classes bring more destruction and accuracy to the traditional fighter role of deterring the threats of advanced weapon systems against your ships/bases.

However in the smaller proxy wars of e.g. Syria, Ukraine a traditional fighter jet still makes sense, and in fact could be a crucial deciding factor. So what the F35 program is doing is building a machine that can give a strong advantage in a regional war. And by controlling the access to the machine, the U.S. gets a say in the conflict without entering it.

"Terrorist hideout or hospital?" - collateral damage has always been a part of aerial combat but bad PR seems to do be especially discouraging to today's democracies. So weapon systems have to be even smarter and more precise.

"Software is eating the world" - As others have mentioned this is at least an order of magnitude increase in software functionality over the F22. And yes, an autonomous vehicle will probably be the main aircraft in the fleet in 20-30 years. So the F35 is this kind of avant-guarde experiment in how to structure contracts, maintain and deploy weapons which are primarily based on software.

Software Development is going to be a competitive advantage in warfare as well. From what I have heard, DoD has some really interesting practices on building software (code review each line with physical printouts, etc), which in combination with scope creep might be the cause of this slowness.

My memory, faulty as it may be, seems to recall a two page ad in AW&ST touting the Night Hawk "supercomputer" that would be in each F-22.

In other words, my response to your statement that the avionics of a fighter jet are "computationally outclassed by a $100 smartphone today" is, "So what?" You buy and test the hardware that you believe is necessary to accomplish the given mission, not the latest-and-greatest for the sake of being the latest-and-greatest.

Which is fine because you're right: they don't need them. I'll add the older nodes were more reliable, too, as it was trivial to get chips to work vs deep sub-micron. I'll take old-school, fault-tolerant chip over modern ASIC any day if ny life is at stake.

This processing capacity could be replaced with a couple of high density MILSPEC FPGAs. Its likely they'd use a 64-bit PowerPC processor augmented by FPGAs. The combined solution would be flexible and probably offer 1000x what the F-22 (Block 5 airframe) went into service, at a fraction the cost of the CIP [1]

As for the reference to the $100 smartphone, the latest "$100" smartphones could probably handle MegaPixel cameras for Augmented Reality and with connected sensors, more commonly known as "Sensor Fusion" [2]

Note: A failure of a $100 smartphone doesn't usually result in a pilot pulling the ejection handles on a $185m (unit cost) fighter. Avionics has to meet higher standards. There are MILSPEC versions of some of these processors. FPGAs are available with MILSPEC qualification.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i960#i960_variants

[1] http://www.f22fighter.com/avionics.htm#2.1 Common Integrated Processor (CIP)

[2] http://www.f22fighter.com/avionics.htm#4.0 Software

Like you said, though, they can be emulated or replaced with PPC if necessary. I encourage someone to emulate i960 anyway given it was badass enough to deserve at least one FPGA clone. :)

I'm not sure that we do. We did when the JSF project that produced the F-23 was launched, but that was in 1993. More recently, the 6th gen fighter project that would be the follow-on seems to have been abandoned by the air force in favor of a strategy of disaggregating into independent component upgrade projects; for the attack role, it looks like the real replacement for existing manned airframes will be drones (the MQ-9 Reaper seems to be taking that role now, and the air force is training more drone pilots than anything else.)

> Why not make a generation of hyper-advanced missiles? It has got to be cheaper and easier (you don't need to visualize anything, because it is a computer) and you wouldn't even need active lifesupport.

Drones carrying the same type of missiles a manned attack plane would carry are cheaper over time and more flexible in use than "hyper-advanced missiles" that fly the whole mission themselves and are consumed each flight.

Let me fix that: if done well.

Oddly enough, Fairchild Aircraft was formed when Mr Fairchild decided to build a 'decent plane' to carry-around his aerial cameras...

Back to the F-35 it is interesting to contrast how Dassault in France has been slowly expanding the mission scope of its Rafale by adding additional software, without affecting the actual flight-control systems. After 12 years of gradual updates they're also starting to update hardware, such as converting to an SDR instead of traditional tuned radio.

Ya know, I think he may have been onto something there ...

> The A-10 was designed around the 30 mm GAU-8 Avenger rotary cannon that is its primary armament.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Republic_A-10_Thunde...

So, the upgrade actually made thing worse. I'm sure I'm colored by many of the negative articles about the F-35, but other than "we already spend a lot of money on this thing" and "there's no plan b", why aren't the F-35 scrapped?

For the US, it would maybe make sense to get the F-35 operational, but why would any other country, including my own, not pick a different plane?

For smaller air forces, which won't have enough plane fight of the Russians anyway, there's little reason for buying a plane like the F-35. Some of the competitors are actually planes like the F-18 Super Hornet or the SAAB Gripen, priced at around $60 million. Sure they are aren't as modern, but for the needs of many small countries they're actually fine.

Yes, a plane without engines is just a pretty mockup that sits on the ground. But, from Lockheed Martin's perspective, the engine is government furnished equipment. LM does not build engines. The government has a totally separate contract with Pratt & Whitney for the development and production of F-135 engines, and another separate contract with Rolls Royce for the development and production of the LiftSystem in the F-35B.

This is why the costs are given as "without engine". Because the engine is a separate contract.

At TOPGUN (& FWS) the F-5 "spanked" the Tomcats and Eagles on most dogfight missions. That same F-5 runs out of fuel pretty quick, limiting its frontline effectiveness.

There's also currently no missile for S-300/400 SAM capable to intercept F35, although there's a hectic R&D effort in that direction.

Maybe the F-35 is what you say it is, but when you look at the history of fighter development, I don't think the F-35 is significantly different, just a continuation and amplification of trends seen on previous programs. In other words, these kinds of problems aren't unique to the F-35. This is by no means an excuse, just a thinking point.

However, the F-35's woes are particularly bad because of some disastrous decisions made early on with the project.

First, the government decided not to start out with drafting detailed requirements for the JSF like they have for previous aircraft (and other weapon systems). The idea was that defense contractors know how to build planes so they could cut out some red tape. As it turned out, the result was a large number of oversights due to the contractors vision not lining up with the military's needs.

There was also a large reliance on computer simulation in lieu of real world testing. Predictably there were some sizable problems simulation did not catch, which resulted in major revamps and retrofits.

In the development of any weapons platform one would expect issues to be found in real-world testing with prototypes. But with the F-35 the government approved "concurrent production" which meant that production F-35's were getting built before all of the testing was complete. This resulted in extremely costly retrofits of existing aircraft everytime a major problem was identified (and fixed). Right now there are about 170 production F-35's out there, and operational testing is far from finished.

Put all of these facets together and it's a much worse situation than what we had with the F-22. Cost is tracking at around 200% more expensive than anticipated, and that's assuming we won't see a big drop in the number of aircraft partner nations order.

On requirements: as an engineer I know how disastrous it is to write bad requirements. But having a thorough set of bad requirements is better than not having requirements at all. Without requirements, just about anyone is free to make them up as they go along. As you said, the government did decide that it didn't know how to build planes and the defense contractors did.

But, also, the government has, by and large, shifted its engineering focus away from systems design and more towards systems engineering and integration. Also, in general, the government cannot pay the same kinds of salaries that contractors do. So, even if the government had wanted to take a more active role in systems design, it would have found itself lacking the right people to do so effectively.

This doesn't excuse the lack of requirements, but it does offer an explanation as to why the government didn't take a more active role in design.

> There was also a large reliance on computer simulation in lieu of real world testing. Predictably there were some sizable problems simulation did not catch, which resulted in major revamps and retrofits.

Most notably, the government provided an incorrect computer model of the dynamics of the arresting gear found on aircraft carriers. The initial F-35C arrestment hook was designed against this incorrect model. When testing revealed this deficiency, the hook had to be redesigned.

> But with the F-35 the government approved "concurrent production" which meant that production F-35's were getting built before all of the testing was complete.

Yes, in large part because the government believed that improved computer simulation would eliminate the need for a separate engineering and manufacturing development phase. We've seen how that worked out.

> Right now there are about 170 production F-35's out there

From different production lots, so not even all production aircraft are the same. Later production lots include fixes that must be retrofitted on earlier lots.

> and operational testing is far from finished.

What the government calls Operational Testing (OT, what is also known and talked about in the linked document as Initial Operational Test & Evaluation, or IOT&E) is different than a layman's interpretation of the term.

Traditionally, once the government completed a very detailed set of specifications and the contractor built a few prototypes, these prototypes were flight tested by the contractor (with government oversight, of course). Once the developmental testing was done, the completed aircraft and all its test results and paperwork were handed over to the government. "Here's your plane, it meets all your requirements." Then the government would conduct testing in environments representative of actual deployments and combat conditions. Operational Testing. The OT force for F-35 just stood up last year. OT has really barely even started.

> Put all of these facets together and it's a much worse situation than what we had with the F-22.

An amplification of previous trends, as I said earlier.

Unfortunately this is a trend that's happening all over government. There's this pervasive idea that contractors can do it better so over time the government has less and less full-time employees with the technical expertise they need. Glad you brought up this point because this is a prime example of how this philosophy can be very costly.

It does seem like the program has been running better under Bogdan but at the same time you still have many staunch defenders who refuse to acknowledge reality (like the USMC). Maybe it'll all work itself out but I feel like realistically we'll probably need to produce more legacy aircraft (Superhornets, F16E's) as a stopgap at the least. At worst they may have to short cycle the F-35 and bring the replacement(s) sooner than anticipated.

You compare fleet of 3k aircraft + operation costs for 80 years with fleet of 180 F-22 jets. Also F-22 can't fly from aircraft and amphibious assault ships, and do most of the ground attack missions.

Furthermore, the F-22A was already running into parts obsolescence issues when I was working on it (2002 - 2006). Those would have continued to get worse had production expanded or continued. The F-35A was (supposedly) designed to better handle those issues.

Allow me to point out the very practical reality that the figure you're quoting was the cost to build an F-22. We haven't built one since the last F-22 rolled out of Marietta in 2012, and all the tooling has been put away (and some of it has been lost). It would certainly be possible to resume F-22 production, but the cost of the first few new aircraft would be even higher than what you're quoting because we would have to teach ourselves how to build it again, and set up all the equipment and logistics necessary to do it. That won't come cheaply.

The next US fighter / attack program is going to be like that. It aims a lot lower and should be more predictable. I've lost track if it's called F-X or F/A-XX or what now, and what are the split parts etc...

http://www.seapowermagazine.org/stories/20160426-f35.html

1) F/A-18E Strike Fighter

2) F/A-18F FAC(A) CAS/Strike Fighter

3) EA-18G Growler

Commonality is ~80% between all 3 aircraft. They could probably make a F/A-XX based on F/A-18E/F with similar avionics, and engines based on the F135 in a larger airframe, but they could make it happen relatively economically if that was the priority.

Back in the sixties and seventies when the Hornet was designed, modern stealth shaping was not really known.

Modern airframes could be a lot more capable.

Generally, near the end of production the program makes a final buy of parts to warehouse for "spares and repairs". The typical threshold is twenty years of support. If the spares run out during the support lifetime, it is up to the customer how to handle it. Sometimes we can cannibalize other aircraft, sometimes we repeat the DMS process for the parts we ran out of, sometimes (if the customer wants to keep the aircraft flying for a while longer) we do a tech refresh and design new replacement modules with current components.

I think we should have cancelled both the F-22 and F-35 programs, demand that the Air Force just fly F/A-18F Super Hornets (they would totally hate this), and put all that money into UCAVs instead.

Edit: grammar.

Unwinding the F-35, with all the international commitments and arms deals, is gonna be very messy. Yet necessary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Elizabeth-class_aircraft...

"The bill would also require a study of the budgetary implications of restarting Lockheed Martin’s F-22 fighter jet line."

http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/2016/04/28/house-pa...

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2016/04/20/D-j-Vu-F-22-Why-Air...

http://www.businessinsider.com/f-22-wont-win-a-dogfight-thru...

5 years later will there be comments saying how awesome the f-35 is and that <gasp> we should build more?

The F22 is expensive but so good at its job that no other country had tried to counter it with its own design, and one of its primary problems is the health effects of extreme g forces on its pilots. The software is now modified to limit it's maneuverability just so that its pilots can remain concious.

Oops.

That said, would you consider a cruise missile a drone? One can imagine other types of weapons getting smarter. Additionally, its clear the roles that drones tackle will expand at the expense of manned aircraft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloster_Meteor_F8_"Prone_Pilot...

but we can't design a marginally improved fighter jet for less than a trillion or under 20 years?

ref: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Project_Azorian

That's just seems to be the nature of all public projects - the cost rises way faster than inflation.