The 
Air Force simply can’t do without the F-35 strike fighter, and buying new fourth generation fighters to maintain inventories is a bad solution to F-35 delays, said Air Combat Command chief Gen. Mike Hostage Thursday. He told a luncheon of AFA’s D.W. Steele Chapter in Arlington, Va., that “beyond 2018, our fourth generation fleet can’t fight without fifth generation fighters” to back them up and becoming an ever-larger share of the force. “We have a woefully tiny F-22 fleet, and we won’t be getting any more,” he continued, and the F-35 is “meeting all its parameters” for performance. After the “painful-agony-of-concurrency” problems have been shaken out, Hostage said he has no doubt the F-35 will be a world-beater. “I have every reason to believe” the F-35 will be up to the job, and do it better than any other aircraft, “but I need all 1700-plus,” he said during his April 26 address. Without the F-35 in sufficient numbers, the F-15 and F-16 fleet “can’t survive” the murderous environment of anti-access, aerial-denial systems no matter how tricked-out with upgrades they are, he said. The F-35 concurrency issue is “getting smaller” as fewer bugs are discovered in testing and fewer changes need to be made to the early production jets, but “it’s a fact of life,” said Hostage, and the same kind of issues plagued all previous fighters. He thinks the F-35 is doing better at this stage of production and test than any previous airplane, however.
While U.S. defense officials have spent much of the past decade warning that China is the nation’s pacing threat and its People’s Liberation Army represents an urgent threat in the Indo-Pacific, several defense researchers are skeptical that the PLA has the human capital, the structural ability, or the political appetite…