The U.S. Air Power has been confirmed to have acquired its five hundredth F-35A fifth technology fighter in July, marking the primary time a single service fields stealth plane in such numbers. The F-35 is one in every of simply 4 fifth technology fighters in manufacturing at the moment, alongside the Chinese language J-20 and J-35 and the Russian Su-57, making it the one NATO appropriate fighter of its technology out there for nations within the Western world and their strategic companions. The fighter’s manufacturing scale presently accounts for near half of all fighter manufacturing within the Western world, with orders having been positioned to equip over 20 providers together with the U.S. Air Power, Navy and Marine Corps. The U.S. Air Power has been by far the most important consumer for the F-35, and has made procurements at charges of roughly 48 per yr, though that is set to be lower to simply 24 in Fiscal 12 months 2026 because of price range shortages and the necessity to prioritise funding for the event of the F-47 sixth technology fighter.
Though the U.S. Air Power formally nonetheless plans to obtain 1,763 F-35A fighters, such giant acquisitions are more and more thought of removed from doubtless, with procurements doubtlessly not reaching even 1000 fighters, and probably not at the same time as many as 850. The chopping of deliberate annual orders from 110 to 80, 60 and at last simply 48 offered one early indicator of this. A big current growth anticipated to additional diminish the Air Power’s demand for the F-35 has been China’s unveiling of two new sixth technology fighters in December 2024 already at flight prototype levels, which raised the prospects of the F-35 fleet being left a technology behind. This immediately brought on a drop in Lockheed Martin’s inventory worth, and resulted within the Pentagon allocating a better precedence to the F-47 program. Different elements have included a pointy contraction of the Air Power, very low availability charges within the F-35 fleet, and main overruns in procurement and notably in operational prices which make the fielding of a fleet of over 1700 fighters seem successfully inconceivable.
One potential issue within the F-35’s favour is the probability of main delays to the event of the F-47, with Lockheed Martin having pitched new F-35 variants with ’5+ technology’ capabilities that might change into more and more engaging for the Air Power as a stopgap ought to growth of the service’s first sixth technology fighter take longer than anticipated. The far greater projected prices of those enhanced F-35s, nonetheless, and their limitations in comparison with sixth technology fighters, means manufacturing on a big scale seems removed from doubtless.
