F-35: 5 Ways To Replace It

It could be done. Here’s how. 

byRobert Farley

If we could kill the F-35, the ideal solution would likely involve a combination of two, three, and four, with different recipes including different amounts of each.  Thus, a different way of phrasing the question that motivates this article is “how many UAVs and legacy aircraft would we need to make it to Generation Six?” If the United States does not envision air combat against a peer competitor within the next decade and a half, finding the right mix might well be possible.​

Editor’s Note: Please see previous works by Robert Farley includingWill the F-35 Dominate the Skies?,Five Best Bombers of All Time,Top Five Fighter Aircraft of All Time,Five Worst Fighter Aircraft of All Time,the Five Best Submarines of All Time, Five Revolutionary American Weapons of War that Never Happened and Five Revolutionary Soviet Weapons of War that Never Happened.

(This first appeared in 2014.)

With the recent engine fire that grounded the entire F-35 fleet (and mostly destroyed one of the few Lightnings in service), critics of the Joint Strike Fighter have renewed calls for a serious review of the program. And yet the F-35 appears unkillable.  The only winning move, it seems, was not to play, but we’ve been playing for a while, and we’re well beyond easy answers.  The F-35 program, with tentacles across America and in many of the United States’ closest allies, probably cannot be cancelled. The industrial and diplomatic challenges might well dwarf the problems with combat fleet shortfalls.

If it could, however, what would follow? The following five options are not mutually exclusive, and any strategy for replacing the F-35 would need to borrow liberally from several.

Build more F-22s