Summary
Lockheed Martin UK’s chief, Paul Livingston, defended the F-35 stealth jet program after Elon Musk called it obsolete due to advances in unmanned drones.
Livingston emphasized the F-35’s unmatched capabilities, including stealth, battlefield data-sharing, and cost-efficiency by replacing multiple aircraft types.
While Musk labeled the program overly expensive and poorly designed, Livingston argued drones alone can’t match the F-35’s capabilities or defend against threats like China’s J20 jets.
Despite criticism over cost and reliability, the F-35 remains integral to NATO defenses, with widespread adoption across 19 nations, including the UK.
One is an example of a team of people doing what elon’s dumb solution shouldn’t. The F-35 isn’t a solution to anything other than funneling tax dollars to Lockheed, and he’s dumb for thinking drones will replace everything, but not much more stupid than people seriously defending and advocating for the F-35 to replace everything, let alone anything
The bad stories about the F-35 are greatly exaggerated. The niche it fills is lugging 18,000 pounds of ordnance into contested air without getting shot down. Something the A-10 is less and less capable of every year. In the future, the development roadmap, they want the F-35 to use it’s electronics to guide arsenal drones in that bring even more ordnance. In an air to air fight one F-35 out in front can already launch all of the AIM-174s that a Super Hornet can carry, before the F/A-18 can even see the targets. Vastly improving survivability and deadliness.
There’s several very good reasons to use these things.
All those reasons have nothing to do with the reliability. It sounds nice (insofar as anything military can sound nice), but they still break down a lot more often than other fighter jets. Literally read this in a report from the pentagon iirc, though it was like 10 years ago and maybe they finally make it out of stuff other than tin and cardboard
Reliability is always being improved, they’re already on version 3 of the F-35. But no, “a lot more”, is a subjective term. There’s actually not much info on how often other jets break down. But they’re also on block 70, not block 4. And they’re still developing tools that fix them faster and better. For example the F-15 got an OBD scanner like device in 2007, after being in service for decades.
Here’s the thing; every bad thing you’ve ever heard about the F-35 comes either directly or indirectly from Pierre Sprey.
And Pierre Sprey also believed that modern aircraft shouldn’t have missiles or radar. He is not a man to be taken seriously, and neither are his criticisms of the F-35.
The criticism I’ve heard came from flag officers making statements like “It can’t run, can’t climb, and can’t fight”…
Yes. Indirectly or directly echoing ideas that have propogated through the military from Pierre Sprey and his allies in the “Fighter plane mafia.” Its genuinely hard to express what an undue influence these people have had on military thinking over the decades. These are the same people who convinced everyone that the Bradley (y’know, the one that has been fucking up tanks in Ukraine) is a bad vehicle.
“Can’t run, can’t climb, can’t fight” is the sort of thing you say when you’re under the impression that it’s still 1939 and we’re still using energy maneuver theory.
Dogfighting is as meaningful to modern combat as cavalry charges. The officers echoing this bullshit are no different than the ones who claimed that machine guns were overrated. Warfare has changed. Modern fighters operate like submarines; the goal is to detect and kill the enemy before they detect and kill you. Maneuverability has nothing to do with it.
No, most of the bad things I’ve heard about the F-35 come from stories and reports of how they break down and malfunction a lot more often than other fighter jets. Is that just made up by Sprey and the reports of it not working are just lies?
From what I can tell it’s not that the airplane is unreliable, but the logistics and training for maintenance and repair haven’t been ironed out.
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-105341
The gao cites issues with the contractor not sharing technical details, lack of availability of parts, lack of training, etc.
