[ldh]

> When the F-35 debuted, it was inferior to the F-16 and other 4th generation aircraft. However, its potential has been steadily unlocked by the engineers, and several years ago, it surpassed the F-16’s capability.

Sounds like the national defense equivalent of rewriting your website from scratch in $LATEST_WEBSHIT_FRAMEWORK. Sure, it's a worse product, but just imagine how great it _could_ be if we halt development of the working version and spend a trillion dollars making the new one work. See? It's better! And the customer is paying hand over fist, so everyone wins.

[CapricornNoble]

>>>Sounds like the national defense equivalent of rewriting your website from scratch in $LATEST_WEBSHIT_FRAMEWORK. Sure, it's a worse product, but just imagine how great it _could_ be if we halt development of the working version and spend a trillion dollars making the new one work.

And eventually the Air Force came to its senses, accepted the "pull request" for upgrades on its big workhorse F-15 "library"....and now we are getting the awesome F-15EX. Something we should have been working on before they even cancelled the F-22.

This is why I like the Russian approach to military R&D: they do a small number of cutting-edge products to keep their engineers employed and their tech as current as possible given their constraints, but the bulk of their actual inventory is continuous refinements of solid legacy systems, tweaked and rolled out at fairly low cost.

Su-27 -> Su-30 -> Su-34 and 35 (honestly even the Su-57 planform is clearly an extension of this airframe if you look at it closely)

T-72 -> T-90 -> latest upgrade packages for both (T-72B3M and T-90M Breakthrough-3)