| > My understanding is that if you take away the stealth aspect the F-35 is a sluggish fighter bomber that would be outperformed by most 4th gens. Considering an F-35 is nearly the price of 10 4th gen fighters the choice to "upgrade" becomes pretty suspect for a lot of Nato partners. First, "4th generation" can mean anything from an F-16A from 1978 to an F-16V of today. An F-16V is actually more expensive than an F-35A. Second, if you take away the stealth of the F-35 it still has: * A highly capable APG-81 radar with features like low-probability of intercept transmission modes, electronic attack (jamming) capability, multi-target track, ground moving target indication/track, synthetic aperture radar mapping, and passive (receive only) track capability * Integrated electro-optical targeting pod with laser designator and range finder. * Integrated software defined radio that can handle communications on UHF, VHF, Link-16, and inter-flight MADL * 4 pi steradian awareness Distributed Aperture System that's a mid-wave IRST and missile launch/missile warning system * Integrated Electronic Support Measures suite that provides Band 4/Band 5 detection and single ship rangefinding of incoming RF F-16V has most of this same stuff or functional equivalents, but you pay tens of millions more to get it. |