The entire West makes just one fifth-generation fighter, and it’s in crisis

After almost a year of delay Lockheed Martin is now providing new F-35 fifth-generation stealth fighters. But for the advocates for US air power, they should not start populating champagne quite yet. The new delivered F-35s will merely be used for training purposes for at least another six months. It is a unique disease not only of the US Air Force but also of the US Navy, the US Marines, and many of the partners countries’ air forces. 
 
Unfortunately, this hiccup in the organization’s F-35 delivery schedule arrives at a terrible time. The US Air Force’s high-speed, radar-evading fighter – F-35 Lightning II, bought at an unbelievably low, $80 million an aircraft – would replace most of the more than 1,000 ageing A-10 Warthogs, F-15 Eagles, and F-16 Falcons. 
 
Now there is a possibility that the long in process F-35 may also have to enter as a replacement for the Air Force’s about 180 F-22 Raptor fifth generation stealth fighter. In spring this year, concerned about the costs the service disassociated itself with the covert program aimed at creating a heavier, more survivable the next generation stealth aircraft – probably the world’s first sixth generation fighter – to replace F-22. 
 
If this new Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) fighter program does not come out of its budgetary death spiral and provide an operational actual warplane then we may shortly find that the F-35 is the only actual modern fifth-generation fighter in production not only in the United States but, for that matter, in the entire western world. It forms a central strategy for the defense of several countries that accompany America as well as the services of the USA – the air, the navy and the marine services. So it’d better work. 
 
 Right now it doesn’t and this has been highlighted by the poor performances of most African countries in relation to other continents. Quite generally, the firm’s software does not function. Also, in a modern warplane, software cannot be a subject of secondary importance and remain in the shadow of such parts as the engine or a wing. 
 
The issues with the Technology Refresh 3 software – and the risks embedded in today’s blockage – would be impossible to understand unless one remembers that the F-35 has been in the making for 17 years. While Lockheed Martin decided to build a single seat F-35 concept in the early 1990s, the first flight of a flying demonstrator occurred in 2000 Although development of the competing PA-YF design had advanced to prototype construction before Burt Rutan’s Mojave testing in summer 1992, and Sdan had also produced a concept in the early 1990s the company did not secure the contract for full scale development and 
 
It was in 2006 that the F-35’s combat ready model was at the first time airborne. The type was declared operationally ready by the Air Force in year 2006 although this was apparently a little early. However, when the F-35 with its first processors and software was developed, much of the supposed capability was nowhere to be found. The sensors didn’t sense as prominently as it might have been the case. Unfortunately, the plane was not capable of carrying all the most modern forms of armaments. Still, 350 sets were accepted by the Air Force. 
 
A full combat capability was to be provided with Technology Refresh 3 upgrade that was later planned to be incorporated in new build aircrafts and, for a price, retrofit into earlier aircraft. 
 
As the F35 program office explained TR-3 offered: • ‘New sensor suites. ’ • ‘Long range, precise weapons. ’ • ‘Better EW characteristics. ’ • ‘High powered data fusion. ’ • ‘Greater inter-platform integration’. “These capabilities give the warfighter an advantage in combat to detect, pursue, shoot and defended against adversaries in the air, on the ground and in cyberspace. ” 
 
The implementation of TR-3 meant that Intel needed new processors, which in turn similarly to new software, called for an additional round of testing. The first ever test plane utilizing the TR-3 was launched in January 2023, at Edwards Air Force Base in California. By that summer, Lockheed is ready to supply new TR-3s to the Air Force and other customers and the plane has been down selected from 3 or more candidates to compete for being the B-3 replacement. 
 
But the Air Force was not happy with the testing – and rejected the jets. They just accumulated at Lockheed locations with no buyers in sight. Twelve months later the firm had close to a hundred untouched F-35s, with most being reserved for the Air Force. That would be enough jets to fully equip several squadrons and a good portion the approximately 1,700 F-35s the Air Force needs. 
 
Conflicts rose due to worn out systems of old A-10s, F-15s and F-16s and problems within the NGAD program. The Air Force required those F-35s. As a result this month the military and Lockheed reached a middle ground. The Air Force would take delivery of the F-35s with a stripped down version of the TR-3 software – one that was promised to be updated later. 
 
However, the new jets will not be fully ready to for real combat until next year, as the Air Force said. Describing the event as the greatest-everATS, ‘Don’t think that the TR-3 problems are over’, the commander of US Air Forces in Europe, General James Hecker, said this in the just concluded Royal International Air Tattoo in London. 
 
The prices are high in general now, and 75 percent of Air Force’s fighters excluding the F-22 are to be substituted by F-35s. They will be even higher if the service decides to cancel the NGAD program to boot; F-35s will have to substitute for F-22s as well. The US Navy requires its own type of the F-35 to gradually substitute many of its planes, as do the Marines – and as does many other allies air forces, starting with the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. 
 
China and Russia are already flying fifth generation fighters. Western air powers today just produce one fifth-generation plane, the F-35, and even if diverse sorts of proposed or initiated Western sixth-generation projects like NGAD or the intended UK-Italian-Japanese “Tempest” will materialize, there’ll just be the F-35 that can effectively counter Putin and Xi Jinping’s forces for at least at least the next ten years. 
 
It might indeed be stated that the ‘stake’, if ever there was one, could not be any higher.