The F-35 discourse is the single greatest gap between media narrative and battlefield reality in modern defense.
The program costs $2 trillion over 94 years. That number gets cited in every article, every congressional hearing, every Elon Musk tweet calling it an “obsolete jack of all trades.” And the criticisms of program management are real. Block 4 upgrades ballooned from $10.6B to $16.5B. Full mission capable rates sit at 36% for the A variant. Deliveries were halted for an entire year from July 2023 to July 2024 over software issues.
So on paper, it looks like a boondoggle.
Then you look at what happens when the thing actually flies in combat.
Israeli F-35Is have now conducted thousands of sorties across Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran. In October 2024, over 100 aircraft including F-35s flew a 2,000-kilometer round trip into Iranian airspace, destroyed S-300 air defense batteries and missile production facilities, and returned with zero losses. They flew through airspace covered by the exact Russian systems that were supposed to make this aircraft irrelevant.
The F-35I scored the first F-35 air-to-air kills against Iranian drones in 2021. First missile shootdown in 2023. First combat missions all the way back in 2018. By June 2025, Israeli F-35s were flying into Iran with conformal fuel tanks, no aerial refueling, hitting nuclear facilities. Iran claimed they shot several down. The IDF denied it. Every F-35 came home.
The $2T number covers 2,456 aircraft through the year 2088. That works out to roughly $82M per airframe at current flyaway cost. A single Gerald Ford-class carrier costs $150B. The math on the F-35 looks different when you price it per mission, per sortie, per year of capability delivered against peer-level air defenses.
This tells you everything about how defense procurement actually works versus how it gets covered. The program management is genuinely bad. The readiness rates are genuinely concerning. And the combat record is genuinely undefeated. All three of those things are true at the same time. The people who only read GAO reports think it’s a disaster. The pilots who fly it into contested airspace keep volunteering to go back up.
1,300 aircraft delivered across 19 countries. Zero combat losses. The boondoggle just keeps winning.
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Cynical Publius
@CynicalPublius
For years I have been reading about how the F-35 is a stupid, vulnerable boondoggle.
Yet it appears to me that the system is flying over airspace covered by the most advanced air defense systems Russia and China have to offer, yet it is completely invisible, untouched, and
