Sure, but in any case the nations buying the F-35 are so tied at the hip to the United States it would be fantasy to expect them to break off in any meaningful timeframe relative to the lifespan of the plane.
Beyond that, is there a viable competitor available for an US allied nation to purchase?
I don't think the concern is that they would turn hostile to the US, but rather that they would need to strike a country that for one reason or another, the US doesn't want them to strike (though of course you also have to weight the risk of a coup and of a hostile regime coming to power into a formerly friendly country).
Fictitious scenarios: let's say the US sells F35 to Taiwan. China tries to invade Taiwan. Taiwan wants to use the F35 to fight Chinese forces. China makes a deal with the US to limit the economic impact on the US of the invasion of Taiwan, and the US president of the time thinks maintaining a good trade relationship with China is more important than Taiwan remaining an independent democracy, and will therefore curb Taiwan's ability to use those F35. Not completely far fetched. Doesn't mean Taiwan has gone rogue.
The US tries to keep good relationship with Pakistan, while at the same time considering selling some weapons to India. You can imagine why India would prefer the older French Rafale (the French are much less demanding about what you do with their weapons, though there is the precedent of helping the UK with the Exocet it sold to Argentina during the Falklands war). The middle east is also full of those complex relationships.
> Beyond that, is there a viable competitor available for an US allied nation to purchase?
US allied is a concept that is quickly losing its meaning. As the current administration no longer treats allies as allies, most European fighters are more viable
> Beyond that, is there a viable competitor available for an US allied nation to purchase?
Not available yet, but Korean KF-21 and Turkish Kaan/TF-X (which Spain is thinking about buying/co-producing IIRC), though they're both considered 4.5th gen fighter jets rather than 5th like the F-35.
There is also the metric "sorties per day", which is severly underlooked and very useful in any prolonged conflict. The F35 is not a clear winner there and might not be the best fit if you are a smaller nation.
Military procurement is not about what is the best system, it is about who gets the money.
Plus every other party has far inferior fighters to "the West" anyway. And then you calculate ... you are not going to successfully defend against the F-35 in a war with the US. Not going to happen. Against Russia/China or anyone else ... every fighter jet will do fine, so take the cheapest.
The US got guaranteed this business because of international treaties ... which Trump has abandoned. But no worries, I'm sure he'll just make a "deal" and fix things again, right? Meanwhile I suggest you invest in EU weapons manufacturers, who are a lot cheaper than the US ones.
> Against Russia/China or anyone else ... every fighter jet will do fine
Will it though? Underestimating your (potential) enemies might not be the smartest idea. Of course as the war in Ukraine has shown jet fighters might not even be that relevant anymore if you can't take our your opponents air defenses.
That’s because Russia and Ukraine don’t have the capabilities of NATO. Russia is completely incompetent. Ukraine was incompetent and has spent most of the war trying to remedy that.
NATO doctrine is to start by controlling the skies. I can see a world where a lot of the strategies we see start to crumble when a jet or bomber can pick off key targets at will on and off the battlefield.
One thing I've been wondering about: a jet powered cruise missile is less than $50000. A propeller powered cruise missile can be built for under $10000. Both have ranges over 1000km. The US has, grand total, about something like 40000 interceptors.
That means enough propellor powered cruise missiles to guarantee US air defense penetration is (a lot) cheaper than ONE F-35 (and they can still go ~500km/h), jet-powered ones cheaper than 2, maybe 3 and that's not counting equipping the F-35 with something to shoot, and of course there's the suspicions that F-35s have kill switches that Trump half-confirmed (yet another brilliant move there, Mr. Orange President).
How many of those interceptor rockets are available to be loaded into actual equipment in less than the 6 hours it takes jet powered cruise missiles to reach the US? I don't know, but let's go with 10%. In other words: the defense that Israel mounted against Iran is pretty much same effective defense the US would have if Russia started ... The US wouldn't be able to shoot down more of those, even if Russia had 100x more rockets than Iran.
Oh you want to shoot them down using bullets? Ok, halfway we have those cruise missiles switch to a ballistic trajectory. At that point it will be difficult to shoot them down, but that's not really the point. They're ballistic, and the problem with ballistic rockets is that they're like an (explosive) rock. You can shoot it ... but that only causes momentum exchange ... it doesn't actually give the rocket a different trajectory. In other words: it'll still hit it's target, just with less accuracy (and if the guidance remains intact, not even that). You have to hit it hard enough to get it to break up, which means rockets, which the US doesn't have enough of. Which nobody has enough of.
(this is a theme that will come up often once hamas or hezbollah start firing rockets at Israel again. The new laser interceptors have to hit the rockets BEFORE they're ballistic, in other words, what they do is make hamas fired rockets hit Gaza or South Lebanon ... Guess who will be blamed for intercepted rockets hitting houses, hospitals and kindergartens in Gaza and Lebanon?)
You’re overstating how good guided munitions are. They’re not magic. The further out from the target, the harder it is to hit that target. There’s a reason the USA flew a B2 stealth bomber into Iran instead of lobbing munitions over. And they could only do that because Israel had wiped out their AA capabilities.
Guided munitions are a piece of the puzzle but I don’t think we’ve seen evidence that they can fully replace the ability to point to something on a map, fly planes over and make that thing not be on the map any more.
But even with that you need to find targets, for which only piloted stealth jets work. Then at that point, you may as well drop some ordnance on it while you’re there.
The thing is, we can sit here on HN thinking we’re so clever but ACTUAL MILITARY LEADERS want to use F-35s so they clearly have insight and knowledge that we don’t.
Historically they are rarely very good at being able to tell how the next war is going to be fought.
Sure I suppose most generals these days are much smarter than the ones leading the French army back in 1940 (or pretty much anyone at the outbreak of WW1) but that's a very low standard..
> they're bad at it or because that's a hard problem?
Sometimes either, sometimes both. Historically it wasn't uncommon for mean who were exceptionally incompetent and ill suited to the position to end up leading the militaries of major powers (e.g. Gamelin, Cadorna, Fredendall and plenty of others)
Whether I would do a better job [obviously I wouldn't] seems entirely tangential and a pointless argument in general (especially considering I didn't even make any particularly strong claims. I certainly never claimed that the F35 is not the best fighter jet that's available currently).
Regardless decisions related to things like this are not made by individuals and are usually highly political, based on compromises and several decades in advance.
> The thing is, we can sit here on HN thinking we’re so clever
This was the precursor to the statement you objected to. It seems pretty central to my point: we only have access to public data and have no experience leading any military campaign. I’m willing to have a discussion to learn more but I’m ultimately going to trust that military people are looking at drone warfare in Ukraine and still trust the F-35 to be good value for money.
> based on compromises and several decades in advance.
Using drones in war has been a theoretical possibility since at least 2010, so I believe it’s definitely factored into their thinking.
Well, technically Pakistan shot a Indian Rafale with a Chinese made missile a few months ago, which created some consternation in France. I heard the French explaining it away, as India trying to bomb some Pakistani territory without hitting the Pakistani military, hence putting their jet fighters in unecessary harm's way. I am not qualified to draw my own conclusions on the quality of Chinese weapons but it seems to imply they can certainly do significant damage.
Rafale was shot down by J-10 plane using PL-15 missile.
Rafale, Eurofighter and J-10 are old 20+ years designs.
Europe has nothing equivalent to Chinese J-35 or even previous generation J-20.
> Beyond that, is there a viable competitor available for an US allied nation to purchase?
As I and others point out: the problem is if you do something Trump doesn’t like and he cuts off the extra features that make the F-35 better than anything else you can get. At that point you just paid millions for an expensive paperweight.
Beyond that, is there a viable competitor available for an US allied nation to purchase?