Lieutenant General of the US Air Force Clint Hinout doubted that the F-35 is ready for a big war.
Lieutenant General of the US Air Force Clint Hinout believes that the F-35 should not be included in the command and staff games. He made this statement to Defense News following the results of last year's large-scale game to repel the Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
And although the Air Force coped with the task, a high-ranking officer is sure that it was a "Pyrrhic victory". The US military was only able to prevent a complete takeover of Taiwan at the cost of a large number of casualties and equipment losses by limiting Chinese forces to one area.
And this is despite the fact that the game involved the F-35A, equipped with a full set of updates included in the Block 4 software package, that is, does not exist in nature. It is still in development. Also, the general had complaints about the survivability and limited range of the F-35A.
Therefore, Clint Hinout came to the conclusion that the fighter in its current state would not be appropriate to use for conducting combat operations with an almost equal opponent.
The Drive portal, which did not ignore this statement, believes that in this way the general adds even more fuel to the growing scandal over the F-35 program. Right now, it attracts the attention of the US Congress. The fact is that the initial operational cost of the F-35 to 2070 from 1.196 trillion dollars increased by another 22 billion. The costs are related to the upgrade of Block 4.
In addition, the developers of the F-35 are still working to eliminate the extensive list of shortcomings of the fighter. Most of them belong to category 1, the most serious type.
Oleg Koryakin
