The U.S. Air Force’s chief of staff wants the service to develop an affordable, lightweight fighter to replace hundreds of aging F-16s and complement a small fleet of sophisticated F-35 stealth fighters. But an affordable, lightweight fighter is exactly what the F-35 was first conceived to be.
There’s a solution to this. You build three different aircraft. You build a plane for the Air Force, you build a plane for the marines, and you build a plane for the navy. When you make them all the same, you get an inherently bloated project with too much inter service conflict