*When you wait until the US has already done the legwork, and then benefit from the R&D and lessons learned
Fixed that for you
Ok and
Latest their is the F/A-18E/F which is 1999 ( its a completely new airframe by the way) which is even worse in performance then the previous Hornet and is only a few years behind the Eurofighter
What leg work
You mean like how the F-35 lightning was developed with a huge amount of help from BAE systems and Roll Royce?
That’s blatantly not true. The US spends like 3% of its GDP on defense.
Gee. It’s almost like the whole point of the project was to get as much international buy in as possible they couldn’t afford to back out?
do you realize that a lot of the stuff in the F-35 were made by different companies between them BAE and martin baker
What are you on about
The VTOL system would be impossible without Rolls Royce
The point of the JSF was to replace the F16 AV8B and F/A-18 with one aircraft with many other nations being part of it
that’s most recent value, during the project they spend over 4.5% of their GDP
Oka,y, it was a tad exageration. But in 2023 US spent 3.4% of its GDP on its military for a total of $916 billion
UK spent 2.3% of its GDP at $74.9 billion
Germany 1.5% at $66.8 billion
France 2.1% at $61.3 billion.
It is a tad unfair to compare the rate at which the US develops stuff over europe considering they invest 10x more than everyone else
ah yeah during the developement of the F-35 they spend over 4.5% of their GDP, in fact their total spending on the military has been at its cheapest in 2022
Yep… Most nations are getting the F-35 at a steal. Why spend billions on R&R when you can let the americans spend the money and then buy the aircraft afterwards for a fraction of the cost :P
like the excuse to make some countries buy the F-35 just to carry a nuclear bomb in them lol, just look at germany they plan on making the tranche 5 typhoon and yet they still had to buy the F-35
not for Nukes though, I think to replace the Tornado. It is an aging platform.
Typhoon is great for air superiority, intercept, CAS and delivering stand-off weapons. But kinda useless for SEAD. F-35 does add that capability.
i remember something about using it on aircraft carriers to carry nuclear armament
I dont think the UK is planning that capability. Our subs carry our Nukes and I dont think Germany has any nukes other than those the US stores there. Maybe German F-35s will carry US nukes.
@x_Shini would probably know.
I would not be surprised if US F-35s had nukes though
yeah its to both replace the panavia tornado and for the NATO’s nuclear sharing concept in wich US will be sharing nukes or something to some countries so they can carry them in their F-35’s
Ok, so Europeans can outclass US air frames a decade or two later. I guess that’s a win.
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Yup german F-35 is supposed to take over the nuke carrier ability from the tornado.
The bombs we own are from the US sharing programm