Think of a violin made by a master craftsman: beautiful, precise, capable of extraordinary performance, but impossible to produce quickly or cheaply. It takes time, rare expertise, and materials that cannot be sourced at scale. You would not equip an entire orchestra with instruments like that. Yet that is essentially what the United States has attempted with its tactical air fleet.

The F-35 program’s total lifetime cost is projected to exceed two trillion dollars, the most expensive Major Defense Acquisition Program in history. The United States plans to purchase thousands of them. Meanwhile, modern conflict, from Ukraine’s drone war to naval engagements in the Red Sea to Iran’s own mass missile and drone salvos, increasingly favors systems that can be produced at scale and replaced when lost. The F-35 is a masterpiece. But a force designed around a masterpiece is not designed for long, protracted wars, and U.S. adversaries know this.

The problems fall into two categories. The first is the physical problem of operating in the Pacific. The second is the sustainability problem of fighting there for more than a few nights. Both problems point to the same solution: a balanced force that has the unique capabilities of the F-35, while hedging against its limitations by shifting more procurement dollars to unmanned systems. That would result in a force with fewer F-35s than projected, but positioned for what the decades to come will demand.

The F-35 Lightning II has performed brilliantly in the Iran war. Stealth aircraft penetrated defended airspace, suppressed and destroyed air defenses, struck missile infrastructure, and enabled follow-on operations by legacy platforms such as heavy bombers. The jet’s sensor fusion gave commanders an integrated picture of the battlefield that proved as decisive as the weapons themselves. The F-35 demonstrated exactly what it was built to do: penetrate contested airspace, use its sensors to find and track targets inside an integrated air defense system, share that information across the force, and deliver precision strikes against high-value targets. None of that is in dispute.

But operational success in Iran does not validate a force built predominantly around a single platform, especially a platform with a low production ceiling and a high cost floor. This campaign has thus far been short, planned on American and Israeli timelines, and executed from secure bases against fixed targets whose defenses had been systematically degraded before the main strikes ever launched. It is a poor proxy for a high-end fight against a peer competitor. The question was never whether the F-35 could perform. It was whether a force built overwhelmingly around it will help win a protracted conflict against China. Iran does not answer that question.
 

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The Physical Problem

Wargame after wargame exploring a Taiwan scenario has reached the same conclusion: Most aircraft losses happen not in the air but on the ground. Airbases across the Western Pacific sit within range of PLA missiles. Active air and missile defenses at forward bases cannot reliably defeat salvos at the scales China can generate, and passive defenses — hardened shelters, dispersed parking, rapid runway repair, and decoys — remain inadequate across most of the theater. High-value aircraft parked on exposed ramps at predictable locations are among the easiest targets an adversary can service.

And the vulnerability is not limited to aircraft on the ground. On March 19th, an Air Force F-35A made an emergency landing after a combat mission over Iran, with the pilot reported in stable condition. Unconfirmed footage suggested the jet may have been engaged by a passive, road-mobile air defense system. Iran’s fixed air defense systems had already been heavily degraded by that point. If mobile systems in a diminished network can still put an F-35 on the ground, the threat from China’s intact, layered, and far denser air defenses is of a different order entirely.

This problem compounds because of the F-35’s heavy ground footprint. The jet depends on maintenance facilities, diagnostic systems, spare parts inventories, fuel and munitions stores, and the skilled maintainers who keep the fleet flyable. A runway crater can be filled. A destroyed parts depot or logistics server cannot be easily replaced in theater. Destroy any piece of that support infrastructure, and you degrade sortie generation as effectively as destroying the aircraft themselves. The concentration of high-value equipment and personnel at each operating location makes the F-35’s basing problem qualitatively different from that of simpler aircraft. The loss is not just one jet but the capacity to generate sorties from that site.

The natural response to base vulnerability is dispersal — spreading aircraft across more locations to complicate targeting. But dispersal pushes fighters in exactly the wrong direction. It stretches supply lines that are already thin, fragments maintenance capacity across more sites, and moves aircraft farther from their targets. Distance should then be compensated for, either with standoff weapons or with tankers, and both are brittle. Standoff munitions like the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile are expensive, produced in limited quantities, and have not been procured at scales intended to sustain a weeks-long campaign against a peer adversary. Every mile of additional standoff the operational geometry demands draws down a stockpile that cannot be replenished in wartime.

Tankers are the alternative, but they are large, slow, non-stealthy aircraft that, against China, would orbit within the engagement envelopes of fighters and sensors designed specifically to kill high-value airborne targets. China’s dense, layered, and mobile integrated air defense network pushes those tanker orbits ever farther from the fight. Against Iran, tanker tracks could be established in relatively permissive airspace with minimal risk. Against China, those tankers would be priority targets. Losing them does not just reduce range, but it also collapses the operational architecture, because the fighters cannot reach the fight without them. Every step backward to survive trades away the ability to fight, and every workaround for distance depends on something fragile.

The Sustainability Problem

The Iran strikes featuring F-35s were a planned strike package comprising a few nights of operations at times chosen by Washington and Jerusalem, against fixed targets, with the luxury of an operational pause between sorties. American forces chose the time, the targets, and the tempo. A conflict with China would offer none of those advantages. It would demand continuous, reactive operations at adversary-imposed tempo across thousands of miles, against a vast and mobile target set — transporter-erector-launchers, surface action groups, relocatable command nodes — with simultaneous amphibious movements, missile salvos, and air operations demanding sensor-to-shooter timelines measured in minutes, not days. The key variable is not what the force can do on a single surge night, but what it can sustain over weeks and months of unrelenting combat.

The cost-exchange math works against the F-35 in exactly this kind of war. Consider missile defense: Patriot and THAAD interceptors are among the most capable systems in the world, but each costs millions of dollars, and production rates remain limited. When adversaries launch large numbers of missiles or cheap drones, the defender burns through interceptors faster than they can be replaced. This dynamic is already visible across multiple theaters. The F-35 sits on the same side of this imbalance. At over eighty million dollars per airframe, with Lockheed Martin delivering fewer than two hundred aircraft per year across all variants and all customers worldwide, there is no surge capacity waiting to be activated and no precedent for accelerating a program of this complexity on wartime timelines. When one side can produce weapons by the hundreds and thousands — missiles, loitering munitions, and one-way attack drones — while the other relies on small numbers of exquisite platforms, the advantage shifts toward the side with scale. If losses outrun plans in a protracted peer war, the industrial base cannot replace F-35s quickly. What follows is not adaptation but improvisation under duress.

And even if the jets survive, they cannot generate enough sorties to matter. The F-35A’s fleet-wide mission capable rate has hovered in the mid-fifty percent range, reflecting not a temporary shortfall but a structural maintenance burden inherent to the platform. Each sortie generates substantial maintenance demand across airframe, engine, and the low-observable coatings that make stealth possible. In a sustained campaign, maintenance throughput becomes a hard ceiling on sortie generation. The backlog accumulates without operational pause, spare parts inventories draw down faster than they can be resupplied through contested logistics lines, and the fleet’s output degrades when operational need is greatest. A force sized to the Iran template — a short, sharp raid from secure bases — is not a force sized for the Pacific.

A Different Orchestra

Uncrewed systems offer a potential way out of both problems. Against the physical problem, drones can operate from more austere sites — short runways, highways, even expeditionary landing zones — with far less infrastructure than the F-35 demands. By design, they will not require the same concentration of maintenance and supply. They should be designed not to require tanker support to reach the fight, and can be forward-positioned at risk levels that would be unacceptable for manned aircraft and their pilots. When a missile hits a drone operating location, the loss is material, not catastrophic, and far easier to reconstitute. The operational effect is a force that is harder to find, harder to cripple, and harder to keep out of the fight — precisely the attributes that make the Iranian Shaheds a problem, and that the Pacific demands.

Against the sustainment problem, unmanned systems would offer lower unit costs, simpler supply chains, higher production rates that can more plausibly match wartime consumption, and no pilot lost with each airframe.

Naturally, those advantages come with real constraints. Current designs, such as the Collaborative Combat Aircraft and the XQ-58A Valkyrie, are built around small airframes with limited payload capacity. Increasing payload would mean decreasing fuel and range. Carrying weapons externally defeats the purpose of a stealthy platform. And the small motors that keep these aircraft cheap and simple cannot generate the electrical power or cooling required to operate the sensors and electronic warfare suites that make the F-35 so lethal. Scaling unmanned aircraft up to close those gaps pushes their cost and complexity toward the very problems they are meant to solve.

The case for a mixed force does not depend on unmanned systems becoming cheap F-35s. It depends on accepting what they are: limited but producible, expendable, and logistically light. They can be paired with a smaller fleet of F-35s reserved for the missions that genuinely require penetrating stealth, advanced sensor fusion, and full-spectrum electronic attack. Reductions in planned F-35 procurement would free up tens of billions of dollars over the next decade — resources that translate quickly into transformative quantities of cheaper, replaceable systems. Reduced sustainment costs from maintaining fewer jets compound those savings further. A marginal shift in investment buys enormous capacity in attritable and autonomous systems that restore the mass a peer conflict demands. The relevant comparison is not unmanned platforms against the F-35. It is a force that pairs both, against a force built predominantly around one.

This is not a risk-free bet. Autonomous and attritable systems are still maturing, and nowhere near perfect. Networking drones in contested electromagnetic environments remains an unsolved problem, and no country has yet employed these systems at the scale or against the defenses a Pacific war would demand. And many point out that legacy drones like the MQ-9 Reaper require a large footprint. But Ukraine and Russia have demonstrated that unmanned systems can reshape the battlefield faster than skeptics predicted. More to the point, the alternative to taking this bet is not safety. It is continuing to invest in a force that the preceding analysis suggests cannot survive, be sustained, or be replaced in the war the United States most needs to win.

None of this should suggest that the F-35 is a bad aircraft. Rather, the argument is that a force designed predominantly around the F-35 is a brittle force. The joint force should cover a wide spectrum of contingencies, from permissive raids against isolated adversaries to sustained, high-attrition campaigns against nuclear-armed peers fielding dense defenses across vast distances. No single platform covers all of that, and budgets are finite.

The problem is not unique to the F-35. The Pentagon’s requirements process is built to maximize desired performance, not to discipline design by what the industrial base can actually produce at scale. The acquisition system then attempts to execute against those unconstrained demands, turning production realities into a downstream problem rather than a governing input at the outset. The same issue plagues or threatens to doom other tactical aviation programs, shipbuilding, and much more. Just as it took the brutal reality of naval warfare in the Pacific to shift the Navy’s love from the battleship to the aircraft carrier, it may take the catastrophic failure for limitations of exquisite tactical aircraft to overwhelm the forces keeping them drinking up most of the trough.

The corrective is not to abandon the F-35 but to redefine its role. A smaller fleet should be reserved for the missions that truly require its unique capabilities — penetrating advanced air defenses, gathering intelligence in contested environments, and orchestrating distributed networks of unmanned systems. The marginal procurement dollar should shift toward platforms that are cheaper to build, easier to replace, less dependent on vulnerable forward infrastructure, and expendable in ways that manned fighters are not.

The lesson of the Iran campaign is that the F-35 performed superbly in exactly the kind of fight it was built for. The lesson for force designers is that the next war may not be that fight. The future of airpower belongs to a larger orchestra, many of its instruments unmanned, inexpensive, and replaceable. Prudence demands that the United States start building it now.

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Army Maj. Gen. (ret.) John G. Ferrari is a senior nonresident fellow at AEI. He previously served as the Army’s director of program analysis and evaluation.

Dillon Prochnicki is a research assistant at AEI.

Image: Airman 1st Class Iris Carpenter via DVIDS.