And yeah, the F-35 is an amazing aircraft in terms of what it can do, but to shoehorn it into every bloody role on the planet, is just hurting its' own cause.
The problem is that if you pick any one of those roles that the F35 can perform then existing specialised aircraft already performs them better. The F22 is better at long range stuff, as is the Eurofighter with a solid state radar upgrade and the new Meteor missile has twice the range. It gets destroyed in dogfighting by literally everything.
ground attack? eurofighter is better from a europeon pov (carries a heck of a lot more) and the A10 is better from a US perspective.
It's a rerun of the situation in the 1970's. If you read Colonel Burton's memiors from the Pentagon Wars (the book is better than the film, although the film is funny given it's a comedy) then there was a fighter program that was supposed to replace everything which ended up so expensive and loaded with hardware for every role that it was crap at all of them, and ended up being replaced by the existing set of aircraft.
The F35 is just a more modern example. The main difference of which is that it's actually made it to the production stage. The crap performance and insane price is about right though.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
