For the first sales (Australia and either Norway or sweden, i dont remember), the US and lockheed Martin hid away the issues and lied on operating cost and availability.

For sales to NATO: you have to buy a plane that can carry the US bomb if you don't have one yourself (despite the fact that nukes will probably never be launched from aircrafts if at all).

For sales against competition, i don't have a lot of data, but you can check the Swiss 2022 competition between the F16, F18, Rafale, Gripen and F35, public data is scarce but basically, the Rafale and F18 would have been better on most points except VTOL and stealth. The choice however was probably economic (as while VTOL is nice, Swiss short airports are still longer than carriers, and stealth isn't that much of a factor in defense, especially in the Alps): they bought planes for less than half the price NATO countries did, and 60% of the money will be spent locally: basically 20% of the cost Germany and other NATO countries paid.

> What could explain this sales pipeline, if the F-35 was the boondoggle this article implies it to be?

The overwhelming USA sphere of influence over its "allies". I don't really see a NATO member buying new fighter jets from China or Russia instead without that causing a big ruckus.

> What could explain this sales pipeline, if the F-35 was the boondoggle this article implies it to be?

Easy, desire to please American politicians to fetch political support from the USA and strengthen your position as military ally. Ideally, you will be looking so scary that you wouldn’t have to actually use the plane.

You buy F-35s to protect yourself from the mafia .

It's the most modern jet that can be acquired. The Gripen, Rafale, Typhoon are all very good jets, but they're around half a generation behind; they're still popular and acquired by various countries because they better fit their requirements (or because the US doesn't want to sell them F-35).

The article is sensational and deeply misleading.

Yes, the plane has a lot of bugs. It's got complicated software and hardware. You can't compare it to the relatively simple older designs that didn't deal with stealth.

Yes they don't need to test dogfights because war isn't a video game. When the enemy sees the f35 it is after it already sent the missile in your direction. You don't need to dogfight if you're an invisible ghost that can kill from a distance.

The f16 had a ton of bugs such as flipping over when south of the equator. It's a much better machine now and the f35 has all the makings to be a similar leap forward.

Microsoft enters the room....

Unfortunately we do not measure combat weapons in terms of commercial success.

We measure them in terms of lethality and reliability.

>What could explain this sales pipeline, if the F-35 was the boondoggle this article implies it to be?

A lack of actual proven fight-testing.

Is it? The 737 has been sold 12000 times, with thousands of orders in the pipeline. The A320 is not far behind, but only got introduced twenty years later

Even if you just consider military airframes, the MiG-21 has been built 11000 times, and is/was used by more than 50 operators world-wide, all of which have paid for the privilege.

Then there's the C-130, with 2500 units produced and operated by 70 countries.

The first American Fighter jet would be the F-4 Phantom II, with 5000 units built, and used extensively abroad.

The F-16 has 4600 units built up to now and is used by more than 25 countries.

(I'm ignoring the P-51 with its 15000 units here because they were mostly used by the US and rarely sold abroad).

tl;dr: The F-35 is not the most commercially successful airframe in the world, in fact, it does not even come close.

> the boondoggle this article implies it to be?

I highly recommend reading contemporary reporting on what are considered wildly successful aircraft (like the teen series F-14/15/16).

Hint: Just change one number and they're indistinguishable from reporting on the F-35.

> Why just not drop any manned vehicles and go for the remote control + AI? What is the logic?

When the F-35 program was started in late 1980s-early 1990s, neither reliable remote control nor AI existed (I'm not even sure supersonic-reliable remote control exists now). Now, if there exists research programs utilizing unmanned fighter jets, they're likely classified and we won't know about them for quite some time.

> it's not invisible despite calling it that. It's visible in the visible spectrum and hearable in the human hearing range, which means that you can build detection and tracking systems in those wavelengths instead of pretending that its invisible because its hard to detect at radar wavelengths.

That’s not a gotcha you seem to believe it is, it’s like the first thing you learn about stealth technology and has been apparent to anyone following military news to any extent in the past forty plus years. That you somehow think it’s something that went unnoticed and the thousands of people working on this every day has been “pretending” after reading some Twitter posts is absurd and funny.

> remote control + AI?

We might be getting close to advanced AI for a lot of domains, but are we ready to have one making independent decisions with bombs?

I’m not a military expert but I’d much prefer having a human making decisions rather than AI for at least the next decade. I’m not sure that remote connectivity is reliable and high bandwidth enough everywhere for a drone fighter jet

This is already the air force's tentative plan. They made several announcements (10+yr ago) when it was new about the F35 being the last manned fighter and then kinda walked that back because PR but kept pursuing it.

> Besides, it's not invisible despite calling it that. It's visible in the visible spectrum and hearable in the human hearing range

We didn't wait Musk to know planes weren't literally invisible or silent lmao, maybe don't take your military analysis from a man child with 0 experience in the domain.

They either fly high enough that you neither hear nor see them, or low/fast enough that you're dead long before you're even aware something is coming.

Also we already have unmanned aircrafts, a lot of them. Internet army experts will tell you f35 are useless because they're not invisible (duh) meanwhile in eastern Europe people are getting killed by 70+ years old tanks and other ww2 era surplus