@Lonewolf_50, any chance you can flick an email to russia, china and a dozen countries in the EU and abroad that are developing VLO 5th and 6th gen to not waste their time
A semi serious response to a silly jab follows.
Their production costs are a fraction of ours. That is an economic edge they'll have for another generation at least. Whether or not their designs, manufacturing, and maintenance standards are up to 5 and 6 gen fielding and operations is an unknown. But the effort is being put forth, and there are decent brains in those design houses as well.
On to more substantial matters.
Then there is the issue of IR detection which can be reduced in the mid-wave with materials as the detected energy is primarily reflected energy. However signature reduction is very difficult to do in the long wave where skin heating is the primary source of the energy detected.
One cannot outfox physics.
As a target, the only good news is the IRST systems do not track in range but only in azimuth. While there are ways of passive ranging a target they mostly rely on a non-maneuvering target.
There are ways of using passive detection to determine position, but can you do that with the granularity needed to match a weapon to a target? R & D continues.
The conclusion is that for every aircraft a decision must be made as to whether the cost of signature reduction and the advantage it creates in the combat arena are worth the cost in design and maintenance. RF signature reduction in air-to-air still reduces the range at which most fighters can detect and range on a target. For some manufactures, however, the advantage of stealth has been over stated.
This point, to me, is the key matter in the acquisition, production, and fielding problem. The Cold War "our quality will overcome their quantity" thinking was never put to the test. Quantity has a quality all its own. The down side was also that each one of your own losses was equivalent to four or five of their losses, depending upon how you modeled the "force multiplier" numbers. JSF attrition rates, and the number of sorties you can generate as you lose planes in a hot war, tell me two tales:
The war better be "short" and each loss hurts the operational commander a lot. As a defense planner, is that giving you the bang for your defense buck that you think you are paying for?
I think many [most?] are just balking at cost plain and simple.
Indeed. Even when a cost is reduced relatively by the economies of scale of a large production run, the delta between how much money is even available at all, no less for a portion of the combined arms package, gross numbers for smaller military establshments make for some real pigs in the purchase and ongoing maintenance budgets.
I don't think you'll be able to do simple sheet metal bending to repair or return to service the fancier and fancier geometries of composites used in these elegant aircraft designs.
Has that recurring cost been fairly assessed?
I suspect those costs, which we'd typically cover with "Operations and Maintenance" funds in annual appropriations, are going to surprise some folks. The smaller your military establishment, the bigger the sticker shock when those numbers skew out of conservative forecasts.
When will we know if JSF works? When will we know if we get a good bank for that buck? And if we don't, what is Plan B?
There isn't one, on this side of the pond, and there isn't the money to have one. The money has already been consumed by the 800 pound acquisition gorilla. Brer Rabbit has at least one foot in the tab baby, and my be about to kick it again.
The "High Low mix" myth isn't even a viable position to advocate. "Either or" has disappeared. By IOC, all eggs are in one basket, no turning back.
OBTW: that "rosy picture" is for the best funded military establishment on the planet.