Crux of the "F35 not enough" issue...
The biggest headache is that the F-35 was late and that orphaned a number of F-16's that were expected to be replaced by it by now (but now won't).
The FY-21 request from the USAF was for 48 aircraft in the main budget, and 12 aircraft in the UPL. Congress gave them all 60. Add to that 12 F-15EX's. That gets them to 72 aircraft. Perhaps if they play around they can climb that up to 80 / year (combined) with flattish budgets. But that is the peak and likely best-case. Between these two aircraft families (F-35A and F-15EX) they won't get to 110 a year that they need (it is actually more than 110 a year if you factor in growth) to make a sizable and timely dent to the average age of the fleet.
So there is room to find something that is much cheaper and can come at a rate of 20-30 aircraft a year. It could be a new type of UCAV, or it could be a T-7 derivative or a combo of multiple 4+ gen, T-7 and UCAV. The T-7 program is being built for a peak production capacity of 60 aircraft a year. At that rate it would deliver all the current trainers to the USAF in under half a decade so by the end of the decade they could have options to leverage that established, paid for, production line for a derivative that should cost much less than an F-16V.
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The Air Force remains committed to the F-35, and it is the “cornerstone” of USAF’s force planning".
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The F-35 is the cornerstone of our … fighter capability,” and of USAF’s plans for the future, Brown asserted. The TacAir study he unveiled last week will simply look at what systems will be needed to complement it, he said.
“I’m not sure that’s fully appreciated,” Brown said of the long production run. If the service sticks to 1,763, the Air Force may “need to accelerate” the ramp rate, conditional on the funding that Congress will allow.
When the F-35 buy rates were forecast at the outset of production, the Air Force said it
expected to be buying upwards of 110 of the fighters a year by 2018.
Brown specifically ruled out raiding the F-35 accounts to buy the Next Generation Air Dominance fighter, now in development.
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We’re not going to take money from F-35” to fund NGAD, he said. The NGAD will be financed “from some of the other … parts of the fighter force,” he said, adding that he will continue trying to “bring down … some of the older aircraft”
