F-35’s combat radius is far short of USAF and USN desires.

An excellent reason not to spend a trillion dollars on the program.

Of course, this is my opinion written from a US long-term capability-centric needs perspective

Good. Let us have more of this long-term, big-picture thinking. And as you’ve already noted, one of the first things one notices from this perspective is how irrelevant F-35 is to it all.

(If you think F-35’s capabilities are too expensive for NATO members, then LRS is an order of magnitude worse).

And an order of magnitude more irrelevant. Denmark does not aspire to project power halfway across the globe.

You mean deliver more like:

• A single 4-ship of F-35s can enter the defended battlespace without a circus of CAP, SEAD, jammers and tankers which a Gen 4 strike package would require. It is easy to forget about the cost of the protective circus and complain about the cost of F-35.
• Use stealth to bypass IADS strongpoints? Where a Gen 4 would have to roll back SAMs via SEAD and jammer support. And how many additional Gen 4 sorties would it take to roll back the IADS? And how much do those sorties cost?
• Use ESM and stealth to either avoid or ambush DCA? While Gen 4 requires CAP to stay alive. And what is the cost of the additional CAP?
• Use on-board sensors networked within the F-35 four-ship to find, fix, track and target the enemy’s relocatable kit who is using sophisticated camouflage, concealment and deception techniques? Where Gen 4 would waste munitions on decoys, requiring more sorties to finally destroy the real targets (Bosnia Kosovo lesson). And how many additional sorties are needed to kill the decoys and real targets? And how much do those additional sorties cost?
• Guide network enabled weapons to moving targets while the ring of protecting SAMs are furiously trying to stop the attack.

If your expected use over the next 30 years is performing fly-bys on national holidays, or bombing AK-47 wielding insurgents riding in the back of a truck, then keep the Gen 4 jets.

In other words, if one is a vassal of the United States and intends to join it in its future misadventures against mid-level nations such as Iran, then by all means bleed the treasury dry to acquire F-35 in numbers so limited as to be ineffective as an independent air arm.

If, on the other hand, one is a sovereign nation interested primarily in defending one’s airspace and territory and retaining a independent air arm, buy something else.

Note that in the “pro-F35” corner it doesn’t actually matter how much the jet costs (so long as one can afford a token force) or how little it actually delivers or how late — it’s not meant to be used for anything anyway. All it has to do is show up at the next roll call of the ‘bullied and the bought’. The blithe indifference amongst the military and political elite throughout the program’s troubled history makes rather more sense in this context — the purchase is intended only as the material component of the submissiveness needed to maintain American commitment to one’s security.

I don’t see it as being that simple. The NH-90 and Tiger were both procured by the ADF after an open tender. In both cases, what has been delivered is not what was promised by the wining bidder in their tender.

The rule-of-thumb should be to procure off-the-shelf (or near enough) unless there’s a very good reason to do otherwise. Notice that this would’ve ruled out both NH90 and F-35.

Meanwhile, direct source contracts for the F-18F and C-17 have delivered capabilities that have worked as advertised, with no surprises.

Ordering a Powerpoint aircraft (F-35) is not at all the same thing as ordering an in-service, in-production platform. The equivalent analogy would be ordering F-35 in 2025, or F/A-18F back in 1995.

But then the same was said about the loss of the Blackbird in the early 90s and some people still think no secret projects were developed to fill the capability gap…

Totally different scale of investment required, no clear operational requirement, different geopolitcal and budgetary environment.

So is the LM Cuda HTK missile the answer to the F35’s relative shortage of AAM in LO configuration?

Profit by creating the problem, then profit some more by solving it. Brilliant. :p

LOL. Sometimes you sound like a political science major who went to one too many lectures given by some crusty old ex-hippie academic who is still living in his own personal glory days of the early 1970s…….. 😀

History and Philosophy major. 😉

Actually I don’t consider it that unlikely a possibility. The United States is already a militaristic and nationalistic state and over the next decades it will encounter both internal and external stressors pushing it further in that direction. Frankly, the signs are not encouraging. I expect the late 2020s through early 2030s — the tipping point, as it were — to be a very delicate time in world affairs.

This does require your politicians have the will to use the deterrent. That is why nukes are no longer a deterrent — nobody has the stones to use them.

Which nuclear power has faced and failed to deter an existential threat? True, Israel’s nukes didn’t dissuade Egypt, Syria, et. al in 1973 but that was a conflict with limited objectives and the Israelis knew it (and they won anyway) — they weren’t facing the prospect of being ‘pushed into the sea’. Nor was Britain in the Falklands.

Nuclear weapons are effective only within a very limited sphere, but within that sphere there is little indication that they are ineffective.

The USAF alone plans to buy 1,763 As http://news.yahoo.com/u-air-force-sticking-plans-buy-1-763-011218618–finance.html

Nonsense. F-35 production for US requirements will almost certainly cease around 2030, and planned and likely future build rates will simply not allow for anything like the ~2500 F-35s that were planned way back in the day. There’s no point in revising that figure with another, almost equally arbitrary figure — given that nobody has any idea what costs and budgets will look like post-2020 — but that in no way translates to that initial figure being at all plausible in 2012.