F-35 Cancelled, then what ?

[LowObservable]

Orac, What you are suggesting is that the umpteen air forces and governments with the classified data, are wrong. While the guessers on the internet are right. That's a big leap of faith.

We know for certain that most of those governments don't know some of the answers and made a "big leap of faith" themselves, when they signed on to the program on the basis of JSF cost and schedule estimates that were moonshine, and with few mature programs to compare JSF against.

In most cases, today, they have access to JSF data (but on a restricted basis - I doubt, for example, that any foreign lawmaker has access equivalent to the US Congress' classified sessions) but they don't have access to the same data on alternatives, since nobody is going to hand over the crown jewels or brief at any high level of access unless there's a real competition under way.

And with the exceptions of Denmark, Japan and Korea, any such real competition has been studiously avoided (see the desperate measures of the Harper government in Canada and the mock-evaluations in Norway and the Netherlands). Denmark is undecided - although I suspect Nordic peer pressure may carry the day. The F-35 lost fair and square in Korea, until the upper levels of government (who of course were not the ones who had reviewed all the classified data) changed the rules retrospectively. And Japanese procurement of anything is a mystery wrapped in an enigma, locked in a filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying BEWARE OF THE LEOPARD.

LO, aren't most planes dearer than the ones built 30 years ago. Although dearer is subjective, as the F-35 is cheaper than some 4.5gen, isn't it?

According to real-money, head-to-head bids in Korea, it costs substantially more than the Typhoon and F-15SE.

And as I have sometimes had to remind people, if all the military experts were always right, we'd have seen the Queen, the Kaiser and the Tsar getting together a few months back to commemorate the end of the European War of 1914.