Oh look, X is awash with a story about the F-35 again.
(media.scored.co)
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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.