What if the F-35 Fighter Never Existed?
24 years after the program first began as the Joint Advanced Strike Technology (JAST) program, 21 years after the first Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) design contracts were awarded, and yet 16 years after Lockheed Martin won the development contract for the F-35 Lightning II, way back in October 2001. It’s notable that a war started the month prior to that award. Perhaps it’s intriguing to ask what might have happened if that contract had never been signed—if, perhaps, the Pentagon had gone all-in supporting the fighting in Afghanistan (and later Iraq), and found some other solution for backfilling its aging fighter fleets.
Extrapolating a little from the Selected Acquisition Report of December 2014, the U.S. Defense Department alone has so far spent or appropriated just under 100 USD billion on its F35. Over half of that has been for development and construction; only about $45 billion has gone into low-rate initial production of the first 300 or so aircraft. The production cost of a Lightning is thus not wickedly worse than that of a Typhoon, though Dassault’s Rafale is probably a bit less. Boeing’s Super Hornets and Saab’s Gripens cost much less—perhaps only half as much, depending on the basis of the estimate.
What else might the Pentagon done with that $100 billion? (Apart, of course, from the Treasury not borrowing it in the first place!) Forgoing new development, the whole sum would have bought about 740 Typhoons, or 900 Rafale or 1100 Super Hornets—and those aircraft would be in service already. As the F-35 is only now just available, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would have gone no worse. The Navy would have no carrier deck shortfall. No one would be anguishing over the decaying state of the fighter force. Chinese Intelligence would have had no new stealth fighter plans to steal. So the dreaded Chengdu J-20, like the much-ballyhooed Sukhoi PAK-FA, would still be just a prototype. And this would all be well-and-good, for now.
For by the threat estimates on their briefing slides, a grim mood would have already set in amongst the air admirals and generals. Enemy aircraft aren’t the stressing threat yet; it’s enemy missiles. Those “fourth-generation” fighters (as Lockheed’s marketing literature calls them) are expected to suffer high loss rates against Almaz-Antei’s S-300 and S-400 anti-aircraft batteries, now in service from Russia to China to Syria, and maybe soon in Iran. Squadrons of Super Hornets could attempt to fly through them, much like B-17s weathering flak over Schweinfurt. The other frightening missiles are China's legions of the anti-ship variety, on aircraft, ships, and trucks. China’s latest aircraft, too, aren’t to be trifled with. As I heard a retired air admiral put it recently, "with squadrons of J-20s coming eastbound, a supercarrier in the China Seas might need all 44 of those F-18s just to defend itself.” Either way, such a “grinding strategy of attrition,” as Max Boot pointed out back in 2003, no longer fits in what Russell Weigley once termed “the American War of War”.
Think about how much more could have been accomplished with just a part of that hundred billion dollars.
