Thunder Bolt
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Don't be fooled by the sounds of champagne corks popping, there is nothing to celebrate about the newest F-35 stealth warplane whom defense analyst David Axe calls a "second-rate" fighter "seriously outclassed by even older Russian and Chinese jets" let alone cutting edge aircraft.
The Pentagon's darling has recently received some positive coverage. Defense contractor Lockheed Martin managed to reduce production and operation costs of the highly controversial and grossly overpriced project. The F-35 also performed better at tests.
Good new, right? Not really. Axe is convinced that this does not matter because the aircraft is flawed at its core.
"The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter – a do-it-all strike jet being designed by Lockheed Martin to evade enemy radars, bomb ground targets and shoot down rival fighters – is as troubled as ever. Any recent tidbits of apparent good news can't alter a fundamental flaw in the plane's design with roots going back decades," the expert asserted.
The main issue with this particular piece of military hardware is that it "is a second-rate fighter where it actually matters – in the air, in life-or-death combat against a determined foe."
The Pentagon is quite aware of this. A 2008 computer simulation conducted by two analysts at the RAND think tank unveiled the F-35's inferiority. It was one of the first wake-up calls the Defense Department should have listened to but preferred to ignore.
The RAND analysis showed that the F-35 is doomed when it comes to actual fighting when avoiding detection is no longer an option. Regardless of whether the simulation was 100-percent accurate or not, it exposed a serious flaw which had to be taken seriously.
After all, the F-35 is the future of the US military aircraft fleet. It is meant to replace an array of other planes, including the F-16 and the A-10. And this is where the F-35's main flaw lies: to do this the new fighter had to be extremely versatile which inevitably led to a series of painful design compromises.
As a result, "the jack-of-all-trades [F-35] has become the master of none," Axe pointed out, adding that the jet "is neither as quick as an F-16 nor as toughly constructed as an A-10."
The Pentagon's darling has recently received some positive coverage. Defense contractor Lockheed Martin managed to reduce production and operation costs of the highly controversial and grossly overpriced project. The F-35 also performed better at tests.
Good new, right? Not really. Axe is convinced that this does not matter because the aircraft is flawed at its core.
"The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter – a do-it-all strike jet being designed by Lockheed Martin to evade enemy radars, bomb ground targets and shoot down rival fighters – is as troubled as ever. Any recent tidbits of apparent good news can't alter a fundamental flaw in the plane's design with roots going back decades," the expert asserted.
The main issue with this particular piece of military hardware is that it "is a second-rate fighter where it actually matters – in the air, in life-or-death combat against a determined foe."
The Pentagon is quite aware of this. A 2008 computer simulation conducted by two analysts at the RAND think tank unveiled the F-35's inferiority. It was one of the first wake-up calls the Defense Department should have listened to but preferred to ignore.
The RAND analysis showed that the F-35 is doomed when it comes to actual fighting when avoiding detection is no longer an option. Regardless of whether the simulation was 100-percent accurate or not, it exposed a serious flaw which had to be taken seriously.
After all, the F-35 is the future of the US military aircraft fleet. It is meant to replace an array of other planes, including the F-16 and the A-10. And this is where the F-35's main flaw lies: to do this the new fighter had to be extremely versatile which inevitably led to a series of painful design compromises.
As a result, "the jack-of-all-trades [F-35] has become the master of none," Axe pointed out, adding that the jet "is neither as quick as an F-16 nor as toughly constructed as an A-10."
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