A great many of you have some very funny concepts of how these modern airplanes perform. Do us all a favor please and get a copy of a F-16 or F-15 -1 and read it through before posting any more one how these planes perform with stores on. You can get these rather easily on the internet.
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Sorry for the tone of this post. But (some) of you sound like you walked in here after reading 25 "war is boring" articles that you topped off with RAND's Pacific Defense review, and a AIDS inducing amount of Dr. Karlo Kopp.
Shift8 do you have any fighter time? If so, how many hours and in what aircraft?
I didn't have to find a copy of the F-15E dash-1, or the -34 or even 3-1, on the internet. They were issued to me or were required reading in the vault during my time as an F-15E pilot, and I have a bit of dissimilar and multi-ship air to air training in my logbook, so maybe that's good enough to skip the internet study part.
I may not quibble with all of your points one by one, but I'll drop a few generic observations and some specific arguments in here, if that's ok with you since you seem to be the expert.
First, the F-35 is in my deeply considered opinion a flawed compromise design, like most of our other "joint" tactical aircraft. It has the mission of an F-15E, A-10, F-16, and probably a navy battleship, shoehorned into a package compact enough to fit on a carrier and handicapped with a single engine in order to save money from not buying a second one. It has numerous outstanding critical flaws like not being able to keep the weapons bay cooled during ground ops, and even when "full up" it won't be able to do any of those purported missions it is intended for with anything like the competence of the planes it is intended to replace. It can't do all-weather night low altitude deep precision strike like an F-15E, can do hardly ANY of the air superiority of the F-15C or even air defense F-16 variants due to low endurance, low speed, poor maneuverability and low weapon loadout, it doesn't have any BRRRRT or even half the loadout, loiter time, or damage tolerance of an A-10, and to top it off even if they sell thousands of them they'll still cost more per aircraft than a one for one replacement of the legacy airframes I've mentioned.
BVR is the order of the day, except when your ROE requires positive ID against non-cooperative targets or bandits in a complicated air picture, then its ACM and BFM.
The F-35 is going to be slow and will run out of gas when sprinting (running away bravely, to quote monty python), so a real air defense fighter will be able to chase it down and shoot it in its fat non-stealthy butt on egress. Same with any SAMs that survive the initial strike, and there WILL BE surviving sams as our potential adversaries have been paying close attention to what works and what doesn't as we've taken apart (or attempted to take apart) numerous IADS over the last 25 years.
I know a number of ways to defeat radar missiles. Your statement pretty much implies that you do not actually know how radar missile employment or shot doctrine works, in part because you are incorrect, and in part because of your dismissive assumptions about their effectiveness. I'll have to leave it at that due to *reasons*.
Stealth is just one more feature of a weapon system, and anyone assuming it actually works in combat either doesn't know how it works or has been ignoring development of counter-stealth technology and systems. You can't find the requisite info to intelligently discuss it on the internet or in commercial circulation no matter how hard you look, unless you take a fairly specific set of courses at a limited number of universities, and even then you won't know anything about the tactical implications. If you possessed that info, you wouldn't be discussing it anyhow.
SA trumps kinetics unless you have a mission to accomplish and the only way through the door is to kick it down. Then the guy with the biggest stick (or most sticks) may not "win" but you're still gonna gonna suffer losses getting thru the door. Or keeping the other guy from coming in YOUR door. Guess what used to keep me up at night when I was responsible for a certain what-if scenario... 1000 cannon-equipped and obsolete fighters streaming south from North Korea. We'd run out of missiles and bullets before we got half of them, even if we could individually track and engage each one with optimum efficiency. Then you can have all the SA in the world, but the survivors are gonna strafe your O-Club and your chow hall when you run out of the kinetics you pass off as unnecessary. Buying a lot of new fighters with half the missile loadout of the ones we have isn't the way to win that fight.
A clean F-35 will be facing "heavy" 4th gen fighters that can still out-turn and out-stick them, may out-number them, and will likely have the speed to run them down when the clean F-35s run out of missiles and turn to run. Hopefully we'll still have enough F-15s to bail them out when that happens.
As for a merge being a randomized blender of death, that's possible however training, intuitive systems integration, raw aircraft performance, and weapons that are awesome in a knife-fight can and have made all the difference about who wins.
That said, the F-35 is a grand experiment taking a rather large step into a truly sensor and system fused approach to tactical situational awareness. While some nifty PR talking points like the stupid touch screen (you'd know why it is stupid if you've ever had to put your finger on a switch while pulling anywhere from -2 to +9 Gs or flying a night low level in moderate to severe turbulence) come across as retarded to many of those of us who flew what is STILL our newest and still worlds best strike fighter (F-15E), the *intent* of the data fusion is a laudable goal. I hope they achieve even 10% of what they set out to gain with the F-35. The problem is, and will remain, the fact that they chose a half-assed deeply compromised "joint" airframe design as the platform with which to experiment with on the path to this data fused tactical SA revolution. It won't meet any of the services actual needs, and the requirement to make this huge leap in technology and software while fighting "simple" problems we solved 30 years ago like bomb bay temperatures and avionics cooling, is crippling the program. It may never recover or achieve its goals. Even if it meets its technology targets, it will still remain a deeply compromised tactical platform due to the handcuffs imposed by the joint nature of the development and procurement program. We should have learned our lesson with the last several joint program disasters, but we didn't.
An F-15E replacement needs to be FAST, carry a LOT of weapons and fuel, maneuverable enough to hold its own, be able to do the hardest mission without compromise (low level night all-weather deep precision strike with or without nukes) and new technology be damned, it needs a seat for a WSO because that hardest mission is, well, HARD.
An F-16 replacement needs to carry a reasonable amount of weapons, be cheaply operated, and be able to turn up its own butt.
An A-10 replacement needs BRRRRRT, long loiter time, damage tolerance, and a huge CAS weapons loadout.
The F-35 has none of this. What it does have going for it is manufacturing presence in an awful lot of congressional districts, and a tentative buy order from a dozen or more nations who are horrified that we're putting all our eggs in this particular basket, but who also have few or no options.
