Say what you want. The 35 is slower, can’t out accelerate, out turn, or out range, or outgun anything it is likely to encounter. Russian designs exceed it in all those. It can’t stay in the sky with a 16 either. Yeah, it’s dogmeat for a 70s design.
The 35 supposedly will prevail because of stealth and software. But those only work in BVR encounters which we nearly always refuse to allow. If it does anything nutty like get within visual range, (fighters never do that, huh?) it simply cannot refuse a fight. It cannot escape.
The 35 is a national embarrassment, a monument to a corrupt procurement system. Grunts know about warthog magic. You need to get your mouth away from the government nipple and get your head straight on the 35.
The fact is, if an F-35 is slowing down and getting into a turning dogfight with an F-16, he’s fighting the opponent’s fight instead of his and the pilot is probably screwing up badly. You don’t hear about the fights where it goes up and takes out an entire flight of F-16s before they even know they’re dead. But one training flight when it was flight-restricted for an engine inspection and suddenly, oh my god, it’s total garbage and can’t even take out piper cub.
It amazes me how many people are pulled into a barrage of MSM garbage. I expected more from a bunch of Freepers. But when it suits you, you act just like a bunch of democrats at Salon.com.
So it hasn’t occurred to you that it’s a media smokescreen? If we listened to the media on everything, we wouldn’t have fielded a new weapon system since the Korean War. I’m not some great advocate for the F-35 but the news media coverage of this is ludicrous. Honesty, I had expected a bunch of FR people to be a little smarter about this.
The fact is, the F-35 is taking all kinds of criticism for not doing things well that it was never designed for. Take the CAS mission. The powers-that-be put the AF in a nightmarish can’t-win position: do the media/communists’ bidding and walk away from a brand new 5th generation weapon system or walk away from the 45 year old A-10, you CAN’T have both. It’s like putting a gun to your head and telling you to choose between losing an arm and losing a leg. USAF knows that the F-35 going down in the weeds to gun tanks is a joke. The only reason they even entertained it is because the alternative is to completely walk away from the CAS mission. In the late 1980s, they put a 30mm gun pod on an F-16 to see how it would do in the A-10’s mission. It was, predictably, a complete disaster. The F-16 and A-10 are as different as a Caribbean Island and the moon, as are their missions.
As for the F-35 going against other jets, the same thing was said about the F-14 Tomcat. It has a crappy TF30 engine that fails and kills crews on a regular basis, it can only pull 6.5g, how the hell is it going to take anybody out? But then it did. It went out and killed the best front-line Russian jets, it wasn’t even close, IN A DOGFIGHT. The F-14s mission is to come in high and fast and hit the enemy with a 100-mile Phoenix missile shot or AMRAAM like the high-speed interceptor that it is. The last thing you ever want to do in an F-14 is to slow down, turn corners, and get into any kind of turning fight with an F-16. You’ve gotta fight YOUR fight, not get sucked into the other guy’s. The whole “F-35 lost to an F-16” is a lame-ass MSM smokescreen. The F-35 at the time was on flight-restriction due to an engine inspection. It was flying on waivers to even be up there, and we don’t know what kind of training environment it was in. This reminds me of the time that an SR-71 crew gave an F-15 crew the exact time, direction, and speed that it would overly their base. Because the F-15 got within missile range of the Blackbird (an actual missile launch had no hope of hitting him), Air Combat Command puts out a press release, “F-15 successfully intercepts an SR-71 blackbird” with all the requisite chest-thumping that you’d expect. Of course, the next time an SR-71 flew overhead and the F-15 unit was only given which 4-hour period it would fly over in, the F-15 was never in the same area code as the SR-71.
You gotta be careful which stories you decide to hang your hat on. You’re going to trust the Huffer Post and NBC, who lie every minute of the day and tell us that global warming will make the earth unlivable in the next 20 years? Really? If you’re going to get your military opinions from them, you’re beyond help.