The Pentagon is doing it again. They are confusing "more" with "better."
The recent surge in F-35 Lightning II procurement—fueled by a record-shattering budget—is being hailed by the Air Force and Navy as a strategic masterstroke. They call it "achieving scale." I call it a desperate attempt to buy relevance in a theater that has already moved past manned air superiority. Don't forget to check out our recent post on this related article.
We are currently witnessing the most expensive mistake in the history of the Department of Defense. It isn't because the F-35 is a "bad" plane; it’s because the Pentagon is buying a gold-plated hammer to fight a swarm of mosquitoes.
The Scale Trap
The "lazy consensus" among defense analysts is that high production numbers lead to lower unit costs, which in turn leads to "air dominance." This logic is a relic of the 1940s. In 1944, the US produced nearly 100,000 aircraft. Today, we treat a couple of dozen extra airframes as a tectonic shift. If you want more about the background here, MIT Technology Review offers an in-depth summary.
Here is the truth: The F-35’s unit cost is a distraction. The real number that matters is the Cost Per Flying Hour (CPFH). Currently, the F-35 sits around $36,000 to $42,000 per hour depending on the variant. When you increase the fleet size, you aren't just buying hardware. You are signing a multi-decade death warrant for your maintenance budget.
By the time these new lots are delivered, the sustainment costs will have cannibalized the R&D budget for the next generation of attritable systems. We are essentially mortgaging our 2035 capability to pay for 2015 technology today.
Stealth is a Shrinking Asset
The entire premise of the F-35 is its low-observable (LO) technology. But stealth is not a binary state; it is a race against processing power.
Advancements in Multi-Static Radar and Quantum Sensing are rapidly eroding the "invisibility" of the F-35. When Lockheed Martin first designed this airframe, the computing power required to process low-frequency radar returns in real-time didn't exist in a mobile format. Now, it does.
Imagine a scenario where a $100 million stealth fighter is tracked and engaged by a distributed network of $50,000 sensors. That isn't a "what if"—it’s the current trajectory of integrated air defense systems (IADS) in the South China Sea. Buying more F-35s to solve this problem is like buying a faster typewriter to compete with a MacBook.
The Logistics of the Lost
The Navy and Air Force love to talk about "sortie generation rates." They rarely talk about the ALIS (Autonomic Logistics Information System)—or its successor, ODIN. These jets are tethered to a digital backbone that is notoriously fragile.
In a true peer-to-peer conflict, your logistics software will be the first thing targeted. If the cloud goes dark, the F-35 becomes an incredibly expensive paperweight. I’ve seen programs stall for months because of a single lines-of-code error in the maintenance interface. Now multiply that by a thousand additional airframes.
We are building a fleet that requires a "pristine" digital environment to function. In a real war, there is no such thing as pristine.
The Manned Aircraft Myth
The most glaring flaw in the "step up the buying" strategy is the refusal to admit that the pilot is the weakest link.
The F-35 is limited by the physical tolerances of the human body. It cannot pull the maneuvers required to evade modern, high-G hypersonic interceptors. While we are busy arguing over whether to buy 60 or 80 jets per year, our adversaries are investing in Massed Attritable Systems.
- The Math of Attrition:
1 F-35A = ~$80 Million.
For the price of one jet, you can build 1,600 drones costing $50,000 each.
One jet can track two, maybe four targets simultaneously.
1,600 drones can saturate an entire carrier strike group’s defenses until they run out of interceptors.
The Air Force knows this. That’s why they are whispering about "Collaborative Combat Aircraft" (CCA). But instead of pivoting hard toward the future, they are hedging their bets by over-buying the past. This isn't "risk mitigation." It’s cowardice disguised as procurement strategy.
The Industrial Base Lie
The common defense for these massive buys is "maintaining the industrial base." We are told that if we stop buying F-35s, the factories will close and we’ll lose the ability to build planes.
This is a hostage situation, not a strategy.
By funneling every available dollar into the F-35 pipeline, we are starving the startups and mid-tier innovators who are actually building the tech that will win the next war: autonomous swarming, directed energy, and low-cost orbital surveillance. We are protecting the assembly lines of the 20th century at the expense of the laboratories of the 21st.
Dismantling the "People Also Ask" Nonsense
"Is the F-35 the best fighter in the world?"
Wrong question. It’s the best manned, multi-role fighter. That’s like being the world’s best blacksmith in 1910. It doesn't matter how good you are at the craft if the world has moved on to the assembly line.
"Why is the US increasing the budget for F-35s?"
Because the Pentagon is addicted to the "Program of Record" cycle. Sunk cost fallacy is a powerful drug. They’ve already spent so much that admitting it’s no longer the primary solution would be a political suicide mission for top brass.
"Can the F-35 beat the J-20?"
In a 1v1 vacuum? Maybe. In a theater-wide conflict where the J-20 is supported by 5,000 cheap loitering munitions and long-range anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) batteries? The question is irrelevant.
The Actionable Truth
If we actually wanted to win a high-end fight in 2030, we would freeze F-35 procurement at current levels and divert the "record budget increase" into two specific buckets:
- Hardened Communications: Making sure our current assets can actually talk to each other when the GPS goes down.
- Autonomous Mass: Building the thousands of expendable systems required to overwhelm an adversary's sensor grid.
The current plan to "step up buying" is a victory for lobbyists, not for warfighters. We are buying a sense of security that will vanish the moment the first kinetic or cyber-electronic strike hits our centralized hubs.
Stop looking at the shiny wings. Look at the ledger. We are spending ourselves into a position of tactical irrelevance.
A fleet of 2,000 F-35s is not a deterrent. It is a target.
