F-35 Cancelled, then what ?

[JFZ90]

Originally Posted by weemonkey

This may help.

https://wordhistories.net/2016/12/28...urse-sows-ear/

Is it really so simple to mock?

What would have been the alternative? If you ignore the vstol variant for a moment and focussed on what you needed to replace F16 and F18 etc. Would their replacements have been very different to F35?

Or would the requirements driving stealth, SA sensors and networking etc. have resulted in very similar - if not the same - technical risks and delays that F35 saw? But possibly duplicated in two very expensive programmes?

And if you argue to just upgrade F16 and F18 instead, you can’t bolt on stealth so you’re abandoning that as a requirement?

Is the cost of stealth a price worth paying?

I assume no one is pretending a stealthy pure F16 (and parallel programmes for F18 etc) would have been any cheaper than F35?