Here's something not really being said in the US conversation on the future of their military when they go it alone like they appear to intend to.
They can't actually afford it. They didn't take a bunch of nation partners on to the F-35 program because they were really nice guys who wanted to make sure we all had the same kick ass planes as they do. It was as a way to guarantee that the cost per plane would get down to a reasonable and affordable enough number for them to be able to afford enough of them to replace the set of aging airframes they were looking to move on from that were still in service. Get enough countries in on it, and the economies of scale of ordering 2-3x in total as many of them as what the US by itself had the need of, and now a 1.5-2 Trillion dollar program becomes viable.
If you look at a lot of what the US has developed by itself over the last ~15 years
- The Gerald Ford class carriers are Nimitz class hulls with technology improvements and it was getting cheaper to just build new ships than it was to do another major retrofit of the carrier fleet again. Most of the development was parallel development in things like nuclear power, and incremental development of things like the catapult system, radars, etc.
- Similarly, they re-used the F-15 system to created the EX variant with a bunch of new toys because their last air superiority project produced an insanely good plane that cost a metric fuckton of money and they had to cut the fleet order in half but still needed new birds
- The new Abrahms is the old Abrahms with new systems, similar to
- They fucked up the Zumwalt program to replace the Arleigh Burke destroyers and burnt a lot of money along the way. The Navy is now just ordering new Arleigh Burke's, which are on par with the Type 45's the Brits developed, but not better. They're mid development into the DDG program and that program has turned into another goat fuck with the cost of each hull recently getting revised to 2.5B each. The Frigate being developed in parallel will now cost 1.4B per hull, up from 1B.
It's all updates to old systems that worked, and new development failures that didn't, even when it produced incredible equipment (F-22) it was so wildly expensive that they couldn't afford them.
I wouldn't be remotely surprised if their NGAD 6th gen project turned into another circus and one of the two competing western 6th gen programs beat them to market with a fighter more advanced than the F-35 is.
