The F-35 is actually a great, albeit very expensive design that should serve the United States fleet very well. Its ace card is the avionics package and its ability to identify and collect intelligence data. Unfortunately I think what people don't realize is that most air combat these days is against ground targets. If there is the potential threat for enemy aircraft in an area, the United States will field air superiority fighters on combat patrols (F22 and F15's) alongside F-35s to address the targets.
Also, the F-35B is a necessary design because a vital component to US force projection isn't just our aircraft carriers, but the Amphibious Assault Ships that form the vanguard for getting US forces onto a beachhead. These ships, like the aircraft carriers, also launch fighter aircraft and are currently operating Harrier II's, which the F-35B is a massive upgrade to.
Most fighter aircraft are just bomb trucks.
Yep.
The arguments in this thread for dogfighting sound like rehashed arguments for keeping the mighty battleship. The nature of modern war is very different from what it was in the past.
The two arguments have their similarities, but they're not quite the same. The F-35 is supposed to be built in the thousands to replace an entire fleet of Air force, Marine Corp, and Navy aircraft. The battleship argument is about the US Navy's ability to provide Naval Surface Fire Support (NSFS), which is a much more specialized role. The 16" guns of the Iowa's are of their own class of firepower support that still cannot be matched by a cruiser or destroyer. Their destructive power is phenomenal, and their psychological effect on an enemy is simply unreal, and cannot be replicated by smaller caliber weaponry. You can't really describe it in words. Although their range is very short by today's warfare standards, advances in metallurgy, powder, and shell design could extend their 24 mile range to 50-100 miles or more with greater accuracy. On top of that, everyone talks about the 70 mile range of the AGS that'll be fitted onto the Zumwalts, but those guns can just as easily be outfitted to the Iowas too.
Arguments for keeping the battleships are as follows:
1. We spent $22.5 billion dollars designing and building three Zumwalt class destroyers. Although there was definitely some good R&D to come out of these, the Navy will be returning to purchasing additional Arleigh-Burke class destroyers because the Zulwalts are just too expensive. The bottom line, the Zumwalt is overall a failed project, and two battleships could have been upgraded and operated for many years for substantially less money.
2. The current Zumwalts we do have will basically be delegated to NSFS duties for now, which is exactly what the battleships did. And the exact same weaponry the Zumwalts will do it with can also be outfitted to an Iowa. See below.
3. A single battleship can provide more ordinance and destructive power at a fraction of the cost than an entire aircraft carrier's maximum sorty level, and four battleships can be operated for a fraction of the operating costs of a single carrier. The Navy claims that the battleships are prohibitively expensive to operate, and they definitely are more costly to operate than destroyers, but this statement is often misinterpreted. The operating costs of a battleship are very high if you consider that it only has one single role; NSFS. Otherwise they're just fear weapons (and believe me, the world fears the Iowa's). At least destroyers can be off doing other things while they're not doing that, but this idea that the Iowa's are massively costly to operate is overblown.
4. We have to be honest with ourselves, is rail gun technology actually going to make it to the battlefield? The idea is sound, but launching an object at Mach 10 is devastating to the barrel it's flying out of. This technology is still many years out imho before it'll be usable on a ship. Note, the battleships definitely CANNOT use rail guns, as they don't generate enough electrical power. The Zumwalts generate electricity in droves though.
Basically the bottom line is that we spent $22.5 billion dollars designing 3 ships that don't do the job as well as what they're replacing. Sound a lot like the F-35 project? It's similar, but not quite. We could have just spent $2-3 billion each on upgrading two battleships and had a much better platform for NSFS. I used to be very pro-Zumwalt, get rid of the dang ancients, but when it comes to the money and the very specialized role that the Iowa's do, it's hard to argue many billions in savings.