Accessibility and penetrability into IADS is called cruise missile i.g tomahawk mate (with reaper over head for intelligence gathering).
Beside Israel has been making quite a few daring bombing into neighbouring countries with IADS without too much problems, and with so called “legacy” aircrafts…

@ bring_it_on : Buying more upgraded F15, F18, F16 while waiting for a more mature replacement is possible and is more that technicaly enough to face any actual threat.

Some interesting numbers about the F35’s cost (from a declassified US paper):

As of febuary 2011 cost per unit :
F35A : US$123M
F35B : US$150M
F35C : US$139.5M
(average cost excluding development cost)

Weapons system unit cost is US$183.5M (as of 2011)…

So I really hope it knows how to make coffe ;). More seriously I think I’m going to wait until they introduce it and start using it for my final opinion…

http://www.saffm.hq.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-110211-038.pdf
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story_channel.jsp?channel=defense&id=news/awx/2011/03/10/awx_03_10_2011_p0-295042.xml&headline=Canada%20Expects%20Much%20Higher%20JSF%20Unit%20Costs
http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2011/02/jsf-likely-far-more-expensive-than-aircraft-theyre-replacing.html

I agree with that but i must add that the people who decide all this arent the smartest in the world and ALL work towards an agenda. So if the Govt. decides in principal that the JSF is too much dead weight to carry on , or they dont need a 5th gen fighter then they will use all sorts of excuses and show all sort of glorified alternatives. Remember when the Congress capped the F/A-22 they said that the USAF can only spend 80 billion on it , once the USAF found ways to save money they didnt allow the USAF to buy more fighters (numerically) within the 80 billion budget and Capped the NUMBER of fighters that were to be procured…Then they put a stop to production (initiated efforts to end production) siting that the JSF was equally good for most US threats and the USAF didnt need more Raptors… The congress is fully capable with a straight face of Now canning even the F-35. It is highly unlikely however congress is known to do absurd things..

With the Indo-Russian T50, Chinese J-20, Indian FGFA (which by the way declined having any interest for the F35), I doubt the US will cancel the F35. They have to make it work no matter the cost or risk losing their pride in the face of the world. You will reither hear people speaking about threat coming from even under their bed, and the fact that the F35 is necessary in order to protect the american way of life, that it’s a matter of national security and blablabla….
A shame since only the threat of cancelling the program could motivate LM to actually do its job.
When the navy threatened to cancel production of new submarine because the sea wold were to expensive, the industrials went beyong themselve and proposed a very good product for half the price…

It’s the entire MoD procurement methods that are flawed.

Like the Rafale and Typhoon the F-35 will be produced in smaller numbers by that. Either the US-forces will half their inventory of such a fighter like the Europeans or for some missions other air-assets have to be used.

a total target reduced from 294 to 286 units (reduced target of 234 to 228 for Army and air target of 60, reduced to 58 for the navy).

For the rafale the reduction isnt that bad. (At least from data available in 2008)
The reduction been done in order to finance the AESA radar If I remember well.

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.senat.fr%2Frap%2Fa08-102-5%2Fa08-102-516.html%23toc236&sl=fr&tl=en&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

It obviously raises questions whether it would be more prudent to simply buy new fighters rather than upgrade older ones at such a huge cost. IAF, however, argues the “retrofitted” Mirages — with new avionics, radars, mission computers, glass cockpits, helmet-mounted displays, electronic warfare suites, weapon delivery and precision-targeting systems — would remain “top-notch fighters” for almost two decades more.

Gosh I like the IAF…

Instead of that, the expectations will be shifted accordingly.

It happened twice with the cost, it can/will also happen with tech specs.

http://ericpalmer.wordpress.com/2007/12/02/history-they-dont-want-you-to-know/

“The airplane meets all its key performance parameters.” This is true. In 1998 — as it became clear that the Super Hornet was slower, and less agile at transonic speeds than the C/D — the Navy issued an “administrative clarification” which declared that speed, acceleration and sustained turn rate were not, and had never been, Key Performance Parameters (KPP) for the Super Hornet. Apparently, some misguided people thought that those were important attributes for a fighter.-

From Bill Sweetman.

In electromagnetics and antenna theory, antenna aperture or effective area is a measure of how effective an antenna is at receiving the power of radio waves. The aperture is defined as the area, oriented perpendicular to the direction of an incoming radio wave, which intercepts the same amount of power from that wave as would be produced by the antenna receiving it.

So the power output of an antenna in watts is equal to the power density of the radio waves in watts per square metre, multiplied by its aperture in square metres. The larger an antenna’s aperture is, the more power it can collect from a given field of radio waves. To actually obtain the predicted power available Po using an antenna with an effective area Aeff the incoming wave must match the polarization of the antenna, and the load (receiver) must be impedance matched to the antenna’s feedpoint impedance.

In general, the aperture of an antenna is not directly related to its physical size.

i.e electronically steered antenna ESA

However some types of antennas, for example parabolic dishes and horns, have a physical aperture (opening) which collects the radio waves.

i.g mechanically steered antenna (MSA?)…

In these aperture antennas, the effective aperture Aeff is always less than the area of the physical aperture Aphys of the antenna.

Which mean in a mechanically steered antenna, the “physical” aperture (size) is critical since it’s going to affect the effective aperture (the real capability of the radar). I really don’t know how to put it any other way.

The directivity of an antenna, its ability to direct radio waves in one direction or receive from a single direction, is measured by a parameter called its gain,

So antennas with large effective apertures are high gain antennas, which have small angular beam widths. Most of their power is radiated in a narrow beam in one direction, and little in other directions. As receiving antennas, they are most sensitive to radio waves coming from one direction, and are much less sensitive to waves coming from other directions. Although these terms can be used as a function of direction, when no direction is specified, the gain and aperture are understood to refer to the antenna’s axis of maximum gain, or boresight.

Which is why ESA are better than “MSA”, and AESA are better than PESA because AESA have a better ability to manipulate beam widths than PESA, with each T/R modules been independant and more energy’s effective.

For antennas which are not defined by a physical area, such as monopoles and dipoles consisting of thin rod conductors(i.g AESA radar), the aperture bears no obvious relation to the size or area of the antenna. An alternate measure of antenna gain that has a greater relationship to the physical structure of such antennas is effective length leff measured in metres, which is defined for a receiving antenna as:

l_{eff} = V_0 / E_s ,

where

V0 is the open circuit voltage appearing across the antenna’s terminals
Es is the electric field strength of the radio signal, in volts per metre, at the antenna.

The longer the effective length the more voltage and therefore the more power the antenna will receive. Note, however, that an antenna’s gain or Aeff increases according to the square of leff, and that this proportionality also involves the antenna’s radiation resistance. Therefore this measure is of more theoretical than practical value and is not, by itself, a useful figure of merit relating to an antenna’s directivity.

So again, if you compare a land based AESA radar with a a/c AESA radar, of course the bigger will win, but when comparing the size of a/c noses, you can’t say that one has a better radar because that one has a bigger nose. Period.
And unless you are comparing fighters against AWACs platforms, you cannot say that one has a clear advantage above the other because even if it has a slightly bigger nose it wont be that much “bigger” to make such a difference.
Then because Gallium Arsenide Microwave Monolithic Integrated Circuit (GaAs MMIC) effectiveness tend to degrade with heat, too many modules working at full capacity (so the hugest possible amount of energy) without a robust (so bulky) cooling system is only going to degrade your radar making it more difficult to detect and track over long distances (losing sensibility).
So again, with AESA technology, energy (for distances) and angles is what matter the most along with sotfware of course not size.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_%28antenna%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directivity
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/systems/an-apg-aesa.htm
http://www.ausairpower.net/aesa-intro.html