It might be just me… but I can’t imagine these planes being effective in large scale combat. Similar to the onset of WWII they quickly developed cheaper, more robust systems. This fighter has a lot of moving parts and would require a LOT of logistics to keep it running and build more. Practically speaking, they’d need a cheaper plane to actually fight any war. Particularly, with the ability to launch missiles and destroy factories. The less parts / reliance on large logistics the better. Might be good in the immediate combat, but anything over a few months I double many planes would be operational.
That said, baring a world war, this plane seems fine. As the US basically has a safe enough logistics train that they can deliver these planes around the world. IE fight in regional conflicts the plane works fine.
Not a surprising outcome given Europe's underspending on defense. The US has long been subsidizing EU defense via security guarantees and foreign bases and this is the natural outcome of falling behind in domestic R&D spending and relying on US defense.
The F35 might have been a colossal money blackhole but given two equally inefficient defense contractors the one with more money wins.
Do Czechia have the same agrement than Belguim, IE they have to be able to carry US tactical nukes?
If so this isn't checkmate at all, it is just than the only plane that can carry those nukes are the F16 and the F35.
Or it can just be a political move.
I still think the F22 have the best design for any stealth fighter, and the Rafale have a better design for multipurpose planes. The F35 tries to be a multipurpose stealth plane, and it suffers greatly. I get that it won't dogfight and will only engage F3 weapons against others gen3+, but i do think the inclusion of drone reconnaissance in the airspace will render stealth harder to obtain (well, not against Russia tbh, so i gess its fine). I do think the operating costs could cripple the airforce of small econ like the Su operating costs crippled the Russian army (less than 80 hours/year on average for their pilots? seriously?), and think the Grippen would be a better choice overall, but it is the cost-saving boring engineer who's talking.
>4th Gen Fighters
can it outrun a manpad? as recent events showed planes arent that great in the presence of AA. The dreams of dogfights are over. Cheap, reliable, plentiful seems to be the ticket. Poland just ordered x50 South Korean FA-50, good enough for 90% of actual needs in a real conflict.
Interesting that US used to have a policy of selling F-35s only to countries that already operate F16s.
OMG.
That site does Very Bad Things to my back button (Safari on iPad).
So we're theoretically not supposed to complain about back-button breakage, but you really need to know before you click on this that it comprehensively broke my back button. When I tried to go back in my history (mobile FF, holding down back button), it was just endless copies of the site. I had no choice but to close the tab. With abuse that flagrant I'm honestly tempted to flag the article, but at minimum you should open it in a new tab.