Of course, it's not easy to balance the commentary when Lockheed Martin declines to publicly defend the F-35's dogfighting skills, presumably out of concern that a good word for the F-35 could undermine the case to save the F-22.
But here's a new analysis by Heritage Foundation analyst Ariel Cohen, which ranks the F-35 as a clear winner against even the MiG-35 and Su-35.
Stealth is a major discriminator between a 5G fighter like the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning Joint Strike Fighter and "Gen 4 plus plus" competitors like the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-35 Fulcrum and the Sukhoi Su-35 Flanker that are essentially modernizations of their respective progenitors, the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-29 and the Sukhoi Su-27. No operational Soviet or Russian stealth aircraft has ever been reported to have entered service.
A U.S. analyst who requested anonymity said that while the Russians have some good specific system technologies, their ability to effectively integrate them often lags behind that of the West, and the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning Joint Strike Fighter takes integration of off-board intelligence to a step well beyond proven Russian capabilities.
Recent Comments