I would think if they want to go post merge and get into guns only dogfight, they will get the advanced EM. It's interesting that it wasn't funded by the partners as a requirement.
IN FOCUS: Lockheed claims F-35 kinematics ?better than or equal to? Typhoon or Super Hornet - 2/7/2013 - Flight Global
as a refresher to the hub-bub from a few years ago: my opinion is it's what you cherry pick from the news conference and it's nice to read the full transcript which is conveniently forgotten most of the time. This includes this article.
"The F-35 is comparable or better in every one of those metrics, sometimes by a significant margin, in both air-to-air, and when we hog-up those fourth-generation fighters, for the air-to-ground mission," says Billy Flynn, "that the F-35 can go out on any given day, and we have, gone to the red line of the airplane" with a full internal weapons load. Going to the limits of the aircraft's envelope with a full load of weapons is "inconceivable in any of the other fourth-generation airplanes, including Typhoon
You maneuver the airplane much like an F-22 or a lot like I maneuvered the prototype F-16 20 years ago with thrust vectoring," Flynn says. "You maneuver the airplane back and forth with amazing controllability at the highest degree of angle-of-attack, and that is not the case with the only other Western airplane that can go to high AOA, the F/A-18." The one other exception is the Raptor, which Flynn does acknowledge as having better high AOA performance than the F-35 due to its thrust vectoring capability. The Typhoon, by comparison, has a 25° AOA limit. In the F-35, Lockheed made the decision to limit the AOA to 50°, but test pilots have flown the aircraft well past that.
The high AOA limit gives the F-35 "great" instantaneous turn performance. "We knew that 50°, from our years of research, is about as far as you need to go to take advantage of the aerodynamic performance" of the jet, Flynn says. "There is no reason to be there [at extreme AOA]; you're not going to get much more capability at 75° than you would at 50°." The limiter will allow an F-35 pilot to fly with "reckless abandon", which Flynn says is not possible in a Hornet because an F/A-18 can depart from controlled flight.
Even with the reduced transonic acceleration times mentioned in the Pentagon's director of operational test and evaluation 2012 report, the F-35, including the C-model which had its specifications reduced by 43 seconds, still out accelerates competing aircraft in a combat configuration, he says. ( LO's part quote) If one were to overlay the energy-maneuverability (E-M) diagrams for the F/A-18, F-16 or Typhoon over the F-35's, "It is better. Comparable or better than every Western fourth-generation fighter out there,"