re: F35 - quite why anyone thinks a plane like this has a use in a future that will be dominated by drones, I don't know. ofc, I'd rather no death machines were built at all but hey.
If you think about it in the highest level terms, successful military aircraft projects have taken a very long time to reach maturity, and then remained in service for a very long time; so for instance Tornado had its roots in the mid to late 60s, and that's to say nothing of the B-52 which might eventually - and ironically - outlive pretty much every single person alive at its inception.
So, why should that pattern change dramatically just because you've potentially simplified some of the requirements, i.e. no need to lug a meat sack about the place any more? That is, bringing a drone-piloted JSF equivalent to properly useful operational service will take a very long time, and isn't automatically supplanted by anything else, like consumer kit is.
Hence you generally keep on plodding on with whatever you were previously doing, in this case something from the late 90s, in spite of it being apparently somewhat stupid, because the alternatives are bigger delays and a bigger waste of money.
All that said, I think JSF is crap.
Also, the real future would appear to be
autonomous drones, so why would you invest heavily in
piloted drones when etc etc?
)
