That's a given. Even those who most likely would not join the fray, like vietnam or singapore are accounted for.
US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.
- Thread starter tphuang
- Start date
F-35 just turn to become even a worse deal when mature than it was when new...
And they manage to sell it to a lot of customer at incredible cost and maintenance handcuff. Lockeed got a nice greedy monopoly.
In a way, they've actually done world peace a huge favor by essentially disarming all their vassals. Forcing them to replace most of their military inventory for an arm and a leg, with equipment that will be worthless in less than a decade. Ultimately leaving their vassals financially exhausted and militarily impotent just in time for China to lead in literally everything (let's say 2030-2035 time frame).
Lethe
Captain
In Australia's case, it was because Super Hornet allowed us to compensate for our own short-sighted decision-making (re: F-35 project timelines and declining F-111 and F/A-18 readiness) by drawing directly from USN order slots on an active production line.
That's fair. To be honest, I was mostly thinking about warships. I guess the broader point is that it's worth paying attention to what is happening to the oldest and least capable elements of the inventory because, in concert with current production and programs of record, it's a clue to what is envisioned in the medium-term.
The difficulty with that idea is that a USAF divested of its older platforms is a dramatically smaller USAF, because few airframes were inducted in the post-Cold War era and both fifth-generation projects were delayed, over budget, and experienced significant ongoing challenges in terms of operations and maintenance costs and future development paths.
One can appreciate where the basic idea came from. The objective was to bridge between the dominant force structure of the then-present, to the equally dominant VLO force structure of the future. That transition was threatened by the lower budgets of the post-Cold War era but, conversely, the "unipolar moment" allowed USAF to divert resources from near-term procurement to longer-term R&D. The difficulty is that those longer term bets have not paid off to the extent that was envisioned.
2021 paper from the Mitchell Institute goes into the arguments against the acquisition of F-15EX, and those arguments are compelling enough on their own terms. Zooming out a little, though, it's more than a little odd that USAF advocates are at all troubled by services (PLAAF/PLANAF) that are implementing force structure strategies that are explicitly rejected for USAF, i.e. the ongoing production of advanced fourth-generation fighter jets.
One conclusion that may be drawn is that these dichotomies that are presented (investing in advanced fourth-generation aircraft vs. investing in fifth-generation aircraft vs. accelerating R&D for sixth-generation aircraft) only present as such because there is insufficient budgetary, institutional, even political space to pursue those paths simultaneously. Using the American nomenclature for the purposes of comparison, China currently has two advanced fourth-generation combat aircraft (counting J-15/16 as essentially one design and production lineage), two fifth-generation combat aircraft, and at least two developmental sixth-generation combat aircraft (that are clearly complementary, rather than one being an alternative to the other). Orders, budgets and personnel can be shifted around between these projects as required. The American system today simply has fewer moving pieces, and so the choices present with much harder-edged trade-offs between competing priorities.
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