> What am I getting wrong? 

That in combat, it's never that simple. It seems like that, seems like the enemy has 100% information, or is 100% capable. And it's not (nor are we).

Everything is muddy, nothing is guaranteed to work, the environment is unforgiving, people react differently under stress. We, they, everyone KNOW this and it still doesn't work.

So, you plan, you test contingencies, develop capability, even if they're never used.

In Germany, they had plans to use shopping centers as ad hoc aircraft bases. Knock large holes into the store front (they tend to not be load bearing), shove out all of the shelves and what not with a bulldozer, clear the parking lots of cars and lights (bulldozers work well for this as well). Boom, instant hangar and tarmac.

But that's just it, just warplans. Think tanks thinking through potential problems and ways to solve them. They also had warplans to blow up dams to wash over a teeming Soviet advance. Seems, in the large, to be a bad idea. But, on the other hand, consider the events and thinking going on when someone chimes in "Hey, maybe we should blow up the dams...".

Combat is very messy. No plan survives first contact. Just ask the Russians.

Maybe this video about how the Swedish Air Force uses the JAS-39 Gripen helps?

https://youtu.be/eEX8JJ0eXL4 (part of it at around 3m30s)

I was going to respond to this, only to have found myself at the end of an urban legend (no, there isn't a stipulation in the US to have 1 in every 5 miles straight in the US interstate highway system in order to allow for emergency landing of aircraft: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/landing-of-hope-and-glory/).

I do agree with the other sibling responses, though -- bombs cost money, and there's a lot of roadway that would need to be bombed in order to render entire highway systems unusable. So that's probably where the "win" comes in -- being nimble in takeoff / landing of aircraft locations makes life much more difficult for the enemy.

There are few air bases but many sections of highway which are long and straight enough to take off from. Targeting all of them with expensive precision munitions is totally impractical.

I thought this was a VTOL aircraft so runway length should not be such an issue.

The article references the F-35A which is a conventional take off and landing aircraft (CTOL). The F-35B is the short take off and vertical landing (STOVL) variant. The F-35B belongs to the marines is capable of using extremely short and improvised runways and this has been part of its operational concept for quite a while[1]. For an expeditionary force that kind of thing is important.

The F-35A is a bit different in that its a normal air force fighter. This is just proving that if push comes to shove it can be operated out of improvised bases.

[1]https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/f-35b-just-touched-dow...

The article references the F-35A which is the conventional take-off/landing variant whereas the VTOL variant is the F-35B.

VTOL takeoff usually reduces payload vs a more normal takeoff.

The F-35A variant doesn't do VTOL.

How clean does a runway have to be for an F-35 to take-off from it? I remember a lot of internet grief over the idea of shipping American fighters to Ukraine, on the grounds that the F-16 and other American fighters were designed only for pristine runways. Low air intakes of the sort Americans favor would ingest debris that would damage the engines, so runways have to be absolutely clear. The MiG-29, on the other hand, has auxiliary air intakes above the wing for taking off on a poorly maintained airstrip. So, does the F-35 need specially cleaned highways?

FOD is something to avoid when operating aircraft, everywhere. Meaning clean is clean enough, and if it isn't an emergency landing strips are prepared (basic maintenance, personal facilities, fuel...)

Regarding Ukraine, if it is internet grief, it is fair to assume it is wrong.

And besides, F-16s have operated from Ukrainian airbases before the war in joint exercises. It's not as if US aircraft are fragile snowflakes.

Well, Finland has been landing and taking off F-18s on these road bases for almost 30 years now.

This doesn’t look like a special part of a highway that’s prepared to be an airstrip, but just a stretch of road without any obstacles such as road lighting.

This being Norway, I expect they have quite a bit of that. The country is reasonably large (385,000km²), population density is fairly low (15 persons/km²), so in large parts of the country roads won’t be busy and don’t need much infrastructure.

This is Finland, not Norway, and the landing sites definitely are prepared and marked as such, they are not just random stretches of road.

edit: you can clearly see in satellite images the strip in question here, its significantly wider than the surrounding road and additionally has been recently repaved: https://maps.app.goo.gl/teYJ7wzbTzcfwngB6

This isn't to say they wouldn't use "regular width" roads during wartime if necessary. No point taking that risk during peacetime.

It's tricky to put airstrips out of service (for long), especially if the one looking to do the attacking doesn't have the ability to meaningfully contest the airspace there, as would be the case for most if not all adversaries an F35 might have.

There’s a lot of highway in the US

There's a lot more highway than airstrip length. According to Wikipedia[1], Finland has 78,141 kilometres (48,555 mi) of highways. That's a whole lot of runway to destroy.

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

> Can anyone explain how this makes a meaningful difference?

See how Ukraine is using roads to hide its warplanes and site decoys.

To add to other answers:

The enemy only has so many resources to target your resources. War has been, really for most of history, an economic struggle as much as a tactical one.

If they're planning an attack, they have to decide if the risk is worth the reward. They can't just magically hit all targets (or they can but that's because things go nuclear and hey, none of it really matters).

The more redundancies you have, the more likely you are to stop their attack, or to exhaust their ability to extend themselves. Given the absurd size of most road networks, that's a lot of potential targets to worry about, even if mostly undefended.

It does not mean it would be meaningful inside the US, but Sweden, now a NATO ally, has had this doctrine and design requirement for a long time. Evidently they think it is useful.

> In my lay-man‘s imagination, there will only be a few of these highway airstrips

Not in Finland, where this military exercise occurred. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bas_90 and the earlier https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bas_60 . I don’t have an exact count, but the number of Highway runways available in Finland is on the order of like 50.

And sure, these are well known and mapped. And yes, an enemy could target each and every one of them. But to do so they would need far more ordnance to destroy all these highways instead of just a few runways. But there’s some additional context. So, the most efficient way to disable an air base (or improvised air base using a highway) is to destroy the runway, preventing aircraft from taking off. But, it’s also the easiest thing to fix. Just takes some bulldozers and engineers and you can get it fixed relatively easily. So runway cratering is more about suppressing an Air Force instead of destroying it. Generally, you want to follow up those runway strikes with additional strikes to target the aircraft on the ground. And that is a lot harder when they are scattered all over the country.

Think about what it takes to put a military aircraft in the air.

You need: A fuel Truck A munitions truck People

And that's really it. That means you can put an airstrip anywhere that's long enough and relatively smooth. If you have alot of highways, you're good to go, and, in most places, you can land, then park the jet off the highway with a tug (read: ATV with a hitch adapter) and it's trivial to keep it out of sight because even with the best tech available, it's just not possible to have eyes everywhere, all the time.

Are you sure about that? I thought one of the drawbacks of the F35 was that it needs quite a bit of servicing in between flights, something like 7-10 man hours of servicing per flight hour and ~10 flight hours before failure.

Genuine question. Seems a bit much if it’s just resupplying fuel and munitions, not that I know much about this.

It should be serviced is much different than it has to be serviced.

If you're in a position where, your airfields are getting holes blown in them, getting forces back up in the air is more important than having a guy double check a bunch of things that are probably fine anyway.

Well that’s my question.

>Breaking down the engineering requirement for the three F-35 variants across the programme, the projected mean flight hour between failure was 10 hours for the conventional F-35A (from a requirement of six hours), seven hours for the STOVL F-35B (from a requirement of four hours), and 10.3 hours for the F-35C (from a requirement of four hours).

Failure suggests it has to be serviced, I’m not sure how that’s exactly defined or if that flight hour number is for airframes receiving regular scheduled maintenance (which is substantial) or not.

It certainly appears discordant with your statement of: “double check a bunch of things that are probably fine anyway.” Unless “failure” refers to non critical systems which may or may not be the case.

I’m wondering if you are speaking based on knowledge / experience or conjecture as I have not read much on the topic beyond random news/magazine articles over the years and don’t know the answers to these.

There is obviously still merit in being able to land outside of airbases but your description made it seem like this is a sustainable strategy rather than a backup landing and emergency take off situation 1-3 times to not lose the airframe.

https://www.key.aero/article/lockheed-martin-reveals-f-35-ma...

I wouldn't take it as any failure has to be immediately serviced in order for the jet to be effective. Make no mistake, it's a maintenance nightmare for alot of reasons, but if all you want to do is put ordinance on target, which is probably your situation if you're using improvised runways, it'll be just fine for at least awhile.

You'd be surprised at how many failures an aircraft is allowed to fly with, and, more than likely, unless you've flown on a brand new aircraft, you've flown exclusively on aircraft that had a dozen or more things that are wrong with them that need to be repaired. The military world is no different, and with lockheed's nepotic service contract on these jets, I'm sure they get grounded for all sorts of trivial stuff.

> there will only be a few of these highway airstrips

In Finland there is hundreds of them of various levels of preparedness while we only have 4 actual air force bases.