It seems to be expensive, but what would have been the alternative to JSF or to the F-35?
The trillion dollar budget was postulated by some already long beforehand. Bill Sweetman wrote that into his book ten years ago already: http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Fighter-Lockheed-Martin-Strik...
Unfortunately, with this being what it is, nobody believes the companies' presented combat aircraft prices.
Just a while ago, the French Dassault Rafale doubled in price, some time after winning a huge fighter order competition in India, and it's a plane that's been operational already for fourteen years!:
http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-dna-exclusive-100-price...
Maybe two or three different aircraft could have been developed, and it would have been faster and cheaper in total - since each design could have been more straightforward, more specialized for its mission. Who knows? This is far from obvious to me. Pierre Sprey advocated this line. But even his favorite optimized light weight fighters were adapted to multiple roles and replaced many more specialized aircraft.
Another alternative would have been to develop nothing really new, just keep operating old airframes, maybe manufacture some minor updates (F-15, F-16 and Super Hornet are being manufactured). They don't have stealth, though some versions have some minor stealthiness. Russia and China are developing at least reasonably stealthy aircraft (PAK-FA, J-20, J-31). The F-22 is not manufactured but AFAIK the tooling is preserved. But it's a more specialized aircraft anyway. I think doing nothing would not have been a politically possible path.
Everybody complains but there aren't that many better directions. Some countries could at least buy European or Russian generation 4.5 fighters if they want to avoid JSF, but that's mostly it.
The problem isn't just that the F-35 is multirole but is trying to cater to the various quirks of multiple services. I mentioned it upthread, but an example of this is the very shape of the aircraft was determined in large part due to the Marines' vertical take off requirement. This necessitated a huge lifting fan in the fuselage, which had major ramifications on the maneuverability of the aircraft and the pilot's visibility out of the cockpit. Then there are all the modifications made to the C variant to accommodate carrier landings for the Navy.
The end result is that you have an airframe that was meant to save money by being common between all three services which has ended up with a parts commonality of only 25-30%[1] and whose performance has suffered because of the requisite compromises made to chase that goal.
I think one of the other big things that gets lost in these conversations is that the F-35 was meant to be cheap and widely fielded. The problem is that the program's bloating to the point that they're getting too expensive to field in numbers that would replace the existing force.
The response is usually that the high tech gadgetry in these planes will save the day. That's problematic. This is going back to the F-22, but RAND ran a widely-circulated simulated
conflict in the Straight of Taiwan a few years back[2]. The result was that the F-22s held their own... until they ran out of missiles and were overwhelmed by the sheer number of opposition planes that were being thrown at them.
So, basically, my answer to your question would be forget the super planes and focus on cheaper, more, and good enough. Accept that fighter, bomb truck, and stealth is a pick two proposition. Design something light, cheap, and modernized to fill the multirole capability of the F-16 today; it's very difficult to replace a $40M jet in the same kind of numbers with a $150M one. Supplement the F-22 with new production F-15SEs. Look into things like the Textron AirLand Scorpion to fill the permissive environment CAS role that the A-10C fills today.
I don't dispute your points: it is very expensive and there are problems.
So, at the risk of oversimplifying, your preferred approach would be to stop the F-35 program (or programs) and start a few new different aircraft programs, and trying to depend on existing or mild developments as well?
It would not be cheap either, and it would take time.
The trillion dollar budget was postulated by some already long beforehand. Bill Sweetman wrote that into his book ten years ago already: http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Fighter-Lockheed-Martin-Strik... Unfortunately, with this being what it is, nobody believes the companies' presented combat aircraft prices. Just a while ago, the French Dassault Rafale doubled in price, some time after winning a huge fighter order competition in India, and it's a plane that's been operational already for fourteen years!: http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-dna-exclusive-100-price...
Maybe two or three different aircraft could have been developed, and it would have been faster and cheaper in total - since each design could have been more straightforward, more specialized for its mission. Who knows? This is far from obvious to me. Pierre Sprey advocated this line. But even his favorite optimized light weight fighters were adapted to multiple roles and replaced many more specialized aircraft.
Another alternative would have been to develop nothing really new, just keep operating old airframes, maybe manufacture some minor updates (F-15, F-16 and Super Hornet are being manufactured). They don't have stealth, though some versions have some minor stealthiness. Russia and China are developing at least reasonably stealthy aircraft (PAK-FA, J-20, J-31). The F-22 is not manufactured but AFAIK the tooling is preserved. But it's a more specialized aircraft anyway. I think doing nothing would not have been a politically possible path.
Everybody complains but there aren't that many better directions. Some countries could at least buy European or Russian generation 4.5 fighters if they want to avoid JSF, but that's mostly it.