What’s the purpose of the F35?

We have pilots today flying B52s their grandfathers flew. In 50 years, we’ll have programmers debugging F35 code their grandparents wrote.

Hmmm … now I’m not a mathematician, but it seems to me that if the cost of a single F35 is $110,000,000, and only 30% are fully mission (combat) capable, then the actual cost of this single-engine flying brick is about $367,000,000 per working / combat-available copy. Plus $44,000 per flight hour. “Our” (LOL) government can’t find something better to do with $1.7T of borrowed money than to light it on fire for this piece of junk?

Perhaps the biggest problem with the F35 is the same as the problem with the F4 back in the 1960s: pretending that one platform can meet the needs of every service flying a fighter. It can’t. The F15, the best fighter aircraft the world has ever seen, was the result of that recognition. Every rationale for the F15 was shunted aside to design & build the F35 brick.

What is it good for? Not CAS (Close Air Support). The A10 is the best CAS aircraft in the world, but the fighter jocks running USAF don’t care; all the glory is in air-to-air combat so they keep trying to retire that jet. (It’s really time to revisit the 1948 Key West agreement.) Of course, “There has not been a strategic dogfight since the Korean War,” so the point of this “hanger queen” is…. ???

Not long-range bombing, the F15E, B52, B1, and B2 carry larger bomb loads over greater distances. And actually work.

Not air-to-air. Can the brick beat the F15 or F15EX or F16 or F22 in air combat? Depends on whom you ask. But if those are 85% mission capable and 70% of the 35s are not, it really doesn’t matter how capable a plane on the ground is, does it?

It seems much of the brick failure may stem from code. The plane has 8M lines of code plus 24M lines of code running logistics & maintenance on the ground. I’ve managed code development most of my career. Debugging tens of millions of lines of code is not possible. And when all that code is upgraded? More bugs. CTL-ALT-DLT in the middle of a bomb run or dogfight seems sub-optimal, no? Kinda gives the old Windows’ ‘Blue Screen Of Death’ a new perspective, doesn’t it? And when that code is running on microprocessors produced in China…? Can you spell “back door” or “hack?” And that’s if the code even works, which it doesn’t today. Hmm…

That doesn’t seem like “progress” to me. But it does sound like full-employment for the Complex. And, seeing as how the last thing we need to defeat illiterate, untrained, sandal-wearing opponents with only small arms, wearing black (Vietnam) or white (Afghanistan) pajamas are a few squadrons of $100,000,000 airplanes that can’t fly and fight, the entire point of the F35 escapes me.

https://www.zerohedge.com/military/70-or-more-f-35s-may-not-be-combat-capable