F-35, Air to Ground Attack or Air to Air Dog Fighter… Lets ask the USAF General in charge:
In the aftermath of the F-22's cancellation, the Air Force was forced to alter its plans and press-gang the F-35—originally meant as a ground-attack aircraft—into service as an air-to-air fighter. It was the only way for the flying branch to keep enough dogfighters in the air.
“Operationally, we have to have it,” says Air Force chief of staff Gen. Mark Welsh. “The decision to truncate the F-22 buy has left us in a position where even to provide air superiority [we need the F-35], which was not the original intent of the F-35 development.”
To be clear, the F-35 has always had some air-to-air capability. But that latent dogfighting ability was mostly meant for self-defense—not for aggressively challenging another country’s fighters in the air.
But now the Air Force has no choice but to put the F-35 on the aerial front lines. “You have to have the F-35 to augment the F-22 to do the air superiority fight at the beginning of a high-end conflict to survive against the fifth-generation threats we believe will be in the world at that point in time,” Welsh says.
By contrast, there are troubling questions as to how well the F-35 would fare against the new foreign fighters. While the F-35 has air-to-air sensors and can carry air-to-air missiles, it does not have the kinematic performance of the F-22. It’s simply sluggish in comparison. The F-35 does have integrated avionics—in some ways more advanced than even the Raptor’s—and it has stealth. But the F-35 lacks aerodynamic performance. U.S. military test pilots say the JSF is similar to the Boeing F/A-18C in speed and maneuverability.
So, the little skirmish between the F-35 and the F-16 was an early examination to see what might be necessary for the F-35 to fulfill the role the F-16 was capable of doing.
IMHO, it revealed that F-35 pilots need much training and time in the air to determine what the F-35 is capable of in terms of air to air tactics to defeat the enemy. But more importantly, the time to accomplish this training may be crimped by less available aircraft (limits on bankrolling procurements), flight cost per hour (most expensive of any recent aircraft) and cost of maintenance plus continued upgrades to equipment and software that requires retraining. It is what General Bogdan has hinted out as one of his top worries.