re: #86 Dread Pirate Ron

That story has been pushed all week on many sites. Usually these stories are pushed by Boeing employees. I’d take a F-35 over a F-16 in any fight. The first sign a F-16 would have that a F-35 is around is when his aircraft explodes. If you look at the price of the F-15X, the F-35A is cheaper. The US is not going to build a stealth jet cheaply, even their non-stealth jets are getting up there in price as they add better electronics integration and sensors. If you follow the Red Flag war games you’ll see how superior the F-35 is in combat. I have faith in them working the bugs out.

I don’t. It’s the Gutlass Cutlass or, worse, the F-111 of the modern era. Trying to make a single airframe do multiple missions has never been a good idea. The F-4 came, perhaps, the closest and even it was a mess of compromises - remember the gun pod on the middle era AF jets because missiles were the “stealth” super wonder tech of the day. We would have been far better off building more F-16’s & F-22’s for the Air Farce and more F-18’s for the Navy. The Russians and the Chinese only have prototypes because they don’t offer enough in the real world to be worth the price tags.

The bigger boondoggle coming down the road is the B-21. The B-2 should have been the last manned bomber. Build much smaller, cheaper, faster drones that carry a small number of bombs each and if we lose some, so what? Consider them as an expendable item like a round of ammo and send that many more at the target.