Oh look, X is awash with a story about the F-35 again.
(media.scored.co)
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So your argument is 'muh multirole'.
Please refer to the comic.
This is the point of the comic. "Should" be? Really? According to who? You don't think it's super fucking weird that every single defense company on the planet, no matter the country, hasn't built dedicated single-role fighters in 30 years?
That doesn't clue you in that maybe this 'muh multirole' is clownish antiquated nonsense that spun out of the goofy days of air combat in the 1960s and the Century Fighters, when we had a new aircraft rolling off the production line every four years, that did only exactly one thing, and they all ended up in landfills?
We haven't formally built an "interceptor" aircraft in eons. How come nobody is complaining that that role is 'missing'? It's because technology moved on, and the 'interceptor' role became worthless.
And once its has that superiority, its worthless. It's not like the enemy will just have a new swarm of fighters appear out of nowhere. What are they going to do then? Fly around and look scary? Strafe targets with their 20mm?
You were literally just complaining about tax money being spent, and you're now advocating for multiple expensive aircraft, that all do something different, even though they could be combined into one. And every aircraft means a whole new supply chain, maintenance teams, and pilots.
You can cry about multirole or you can cry about expense, but you don't get to do both.
Because ground to air missiles are the only interceptors we need?
And that's when you tuck them away in their hangers and save on all the maintenance costs needed after flying missions. Once air superiority is achieved, why use an expensive to maintain jet to run missions a comparatively cheap attack helicopter can handle?
https://fighterjetsworld.com/air/maintenance-operating-costs-per-flight-hour-of-militarys-fighter-jets/11995/
And don't forget that we already have tons of advanced bombers flying, so why does the new fighter need to be able to drop bombs?
These flight hour things are pretty meaningless.
An E-4 doesn't actually cost that much money 'per hour' to fly. It doesn't land and you figuratively swipe a credit card to fix all the shit wrong with it that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Flight hour costs are a function of how new the airframe is, how ubiquitous, any upgrades its received, etc. There's only 4 E-4s. It's the same reason the B-2 is so expensive "to fly". It actually isn't, you just paid for more up-front.
These flying-hour cost graphs could literally just be interpreted to mean "we need to fly the shit out of these aircraft to get costs down". It doesn't actually save you money to do so, but if you flew the entire F-35 fleet on very gentle missions doing simple laps around the airfield for hours upon hours, it'd technically make it "cheaper" to operate.
That's not how it works. Aircraft hate being grounded, and pilots need to constantly fly. If they don't, you end up with something like Iraq's air force, which on paper was very good, but they never flew their planes so none of their pilots had any skill, and they all just got butchered.