Originally Posted by
Lonewolf_50
It could never have been anything more than a compromise, given the political requirements behind the "Joint" Strike Fighter concept. F-22 is ample evidence of that. But it is well to remember that the original F-22 buy was much larger, but for reasons that still get my blood pressure up, the F-22 buy was curtailed. That was the air superiority fighter to replace the F-15.
Given the thrashing about that was the roles and missions fight after Desert Storm, F-35 was the politically acceptable way to move forward while achieving alleged "savings" by using a "common design."
Another way of looking at this is that what could be expected, and what we got, was well foreshadowed by the F-111 clusterfkuc.
It was such a foolish waste of billions of R&D to limit the F-22 acquisition for the sake of the "cheaper" F-35. We should have amortized that investment with several hundreds of F-22.