"Which might never happen, since we don't fight real wars against similarly equipped opponents anymore"

*cough*russia*cough*


you seem to forget there are two very different version of the F-35 - and I'm not talking AF/Navy/Marines - I'm talking US only, and the export version.

Performance wise, the F-35 is a dud, no argument there. But the export tech was even given to Turkey, along a buttload of other countries. the Americans all but counted on those getting leaked, otherwise it wouldn't have been such a downgraded version - no actual stealth, none of the hardcore American systems. Avionic wise, the F-35 is way more advanced than even the F-22 - that's where it's real power lies, even if it can't do that much else in terms of payload and performance. You can outmaneuver them to hell and back, you can't kill what you can't see in time.

Besides, it's maneuverability is supposedly comparable to the F-16's. It's not terrible - even if it's behind the others of that generation, it'll hold up while completely dominating all the past generation ones, which includes the Chinese replications.


Nobody's getting ripped off. The DoD's initial call for the project was for a supersonic stealth platform that has variants capable of carrier and vertical take off/landing, all in a relatively affordable price nad variants for the export market. They get what they pay for, and they didn't pay for a specialized craft - they have the F-22 for that. This is the 'fill the gaps in numbers' bird, and it does that just fine.


Being a brown man myself, I don't use 'west' as code for white people. Israel's got some kickass tech too, while France will always kinda suck in my eyes.



No one's underestimating the adversaries - no one with any wit in them, anyway. It's a simple recognition that certain things take a lot of time, effort, and capital to attain. In the example of the Drone in Iran - they didn't bring it down, it crashed. If they had the ability to bring it down, you'd hear a a much, much higher number of them going down, as opposed to the one. Use your brains.

What they later did with reverse engineering I've no doubt, because once you have the tech there is can serve an one hell of a shortcut. Even if there's a limit to how much you get by reverse engineering, it'll still take you pretty far forward - especially if you're a Middle Eastern / Chinese country.

The problem is, when you rely on copied tech, you're kinda stuck there - you didn't take a part in the creative process that brough the developers there, so your ability to grow that tech independently is very restricted.

No one's talking about supercomputer benchmarking, either - that tech's all but public domain. No big secrets.