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I didn't interpret you as saying that the F-35B should be cancelled. I'm more bringing context that it's not solely a US Marines toy, and not solely a baby-carrier plane.

I don't think that adding catobar support for modern fighter platforms is viable for all of these small carriers that are incorporating the F-35B. Admittedly my understanding of the situation is very shaky, but by all accounts I've heard, the catapults and arrestor gear place very significant strain on even the US supercarriers. More countries used to operate catobar carriers in the past (such as my home country of Australia, up until the retirement of the Melbourne and a decision to discontinue fixed-wing carrier ops), which I suspect has to do with the operation of lighter aircraft from the carriers at the time. (~7t max takeoff weight for a Sea Venom, ~11t for a Skyhawk; compare to ~30t for a Super Hornet or an F-35C.) Maybe the situation has gotten better with EMALS cats, but we're yet to see this technology used to make baby catobar carriers a thing, so who knows?

The countries in question would likely need to upgrade from their ~25000t LHDs to something with at least the displacement of the 40000t Charles de Gaulle. (Not to mention that most such carriers use nuclear power for both propulsion and to power the cats and traps.) Such vessels would come at great expense, and likely also have significantly larger crewing requirements, which tends to be a pain point for middle-power navies. I also don't think a lot of these vessels would've been built bigger in anticipation of catobar requirements, as they were largely originally specced for helicopter deck and amphibious roles. The F-35B really seems like an opportunity which all of these countries have siezed upon after seeing it come to fruition.

Again, it seems like you have a case with the Queen Elizabeths, though it seems like the UK balked at the cost of fitting catobar, if that's any indication.

As to whether the costs would've been offset by savings in the development of the F-35B, I don't even think we're talking about costs on the same magnitude here. For reference, total R&D costs for the F-35 as of 2019 were $71.9billion in 2012 dollars. Building and sustaining big boy carriers for middle-power countries would've cost the JSF partners hundreds of billions of dollars, easily.

It's about a combination of stealth and the sensor/avionics package -- the ability to detect and identify SAM radar systems and launchers, and chart a path which minimizes likelihood of detection, aided by the aircraft's low radar signature, while enabling strike operations to take place. If you're arguing that the F-35 is not invisible, then you're attacking a strawman.

The F-117 was central to SEAD operations during Desert Storm, and the F-35 is regarded as the most credible SEAD platform in the USAF inventory today.

There are 12 catobar carriers in existence at the moment, 11 operated by the US Navy. (Soon to be 13 with the Chinese Fujian carrier entering the mix.) Maybe the UK would've gotten their act together and fitted catobar on the Queen Elizabeths if the F-35B didn't exist, but for the most part I think this is indicative of the challenge of putting together the hardware to launch/recover modern fighter aircraft at sea.

The F-35B may have started as a Marines ask, but it seems to have become an export success with countries that aren't really up to footing the costs for catobar-capable flat-tops for modern fighter aircraft during peacetime, e.g. the UK, Japan, Italy, Korea, potentially Spain.

The Marines have also been exploring the F-35B in austere basing, EABO conops, airborne amphibious ops, etc., so it's not just carrier ops.

It has been a lead weight on the JSF development project, for sure, but the F-35B does seem to provide an intriguing capability now that it's a thing. I'm also not convinced that a dedicated STOVL project would've given a more suitable plane -- it really seems like you would want the whole stealth + advanced sensor/avionics package on your jump jet to meet needs like naval LHD-borne fixed-wing AEW/air interceptor/task group anti-air range extender, airborne amphibious ops CAS, etc. Owing to the difficulties encountered by the JSF in supporting the F-35B, I doubt it's going to be succeeded by another platform for a very long time.

I don't think you understand the kinds (and volumes) of SAM firepower a Soviet hangover can leave you with. Ukrainian skies are the most dangerous skies in the world right now, for both sides.

Are you claiming that the Pentagon is secretly acquiring F-35 airframes for far higher prices than other JSF program partners or foreign sales customers, in order to cook the books?

These are some weird takes. Saying that the F-35 is built for ground strike roles doesn't mean that there's no need for ground forces or infantry, or that other capabilities won't ever be more suitable for certain strike operations, or that people have WWII-era strategic bombing campaigns in mind.

fwiw, if you're looking for a particular kind of strike target, the F-35 is widely regarded as the USAF's most credible SEAD/DEAD platform. It's suitable for a wide range of other roles, but SEAD really sets it apart.

> We keep saying missiles are great and dogfighting is over, and we keep being proven wrong.

My understanding is that the "dogfighting is over" rhetoric stopped being proven wrong during the Iran-Iraq war, when Iraqi fighters started mysteriously exploding in the sky during operations.

> Pretty much all buyers of the F-35 have been offered different sorts of kick-back deals, where they get to produce parts of the plane or handle maintenance, so the deal props up the national arms industry in some way or another.

What? This is pretty much standard practice across the board in military procurements. For example, as part of SAAB's Gripen bid for Canada, they would arrange for the aircraft to be produced, assembled, and maintained in Canada if the Gripen were selected. Countries do this for a variety of reasons -- yes, to bolster local industry, but also to give them a leg-up on sovereign sustainment of the platform, and so that they can ramp up manufacture to meet their own needs in the event of a war.

You might want to track down the information they release from multinational training exercises like Red Flag. Reportedly the F-35 has put in multiple dominant showings at Red Flag since its debut. I'm not sure how complete the information they release from these exercises is, though, and some of the aircraft involved (most notably the F-22) are notoriously restrained to keep the true capabilities of the platform secret.

Small, high-GDP countries like the nordics are also likely to rear a small amount of the high-quality pilots required for operating fighter jets. Maximizing those pilots by putting them in exquisite, high-end aircraft, with strong interoperability with aircraft operated by close allies (in this case most of the rest of NATO), makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, this. Smaller countries can easily wind up holding the bag with less-widely adopted defence procurements, and without a wider community of users investing in the platform and its parts ecosystem it can become a sustainment nightmare.

For example, Australia became the sole operator of the F-111 from when the USAF retired it in 1998, until the RAAF retired it in 2010. The Australian Army also found itself in the position of sole operator of the ARH variant of the Eurocopter Tiger, a situation which lead to severe sustainment issues and exorbitant per-hour flight costs (estimates of up to AU$34k), and eventually lead to the 2021 decision to replace them with Apache Guardians.

The four colour theorem does generalize to infinite planar graphs, in the sense that if an infinite graph can be embedded in the plane without overlaps, then a four-colouring is possible. It's a straightforward consequence of the compactness theorem for propositional logic, which I set as an exercise for my students when I teach the topic.

Don't worry, they probably just want to fill out requirements documents with "Agile" written on them.

Really the best usage of all the computation models we're discussing here is using them in mathematical reasoning. If you're looking to "create real working programs," then a better basis is probably going to be some combination of actual industry-grade programming languages and actual CPU architectures.

This response might come off as a little facetious, but seriously, I think the idea of "founding" industrial computing languages/platforms upon theoretical research models of computation misunderstands the relationship between theory and practice. There is a relationship for sure, the research on these models usually does want to translate into real-world implications somehow, but your functional programming language is not the literal lambda calculus.