Why the F-35B Should've Been Cancelled

The F-35 was supposed to be a single stealth fighter for the Air Force, Navy, and Marines, but the Marines needed a version that could take off from short decks and land vertically. That requirement led to the F-35B. To make vertical landing possible, engineers had to add a lift fan and redesign the middle of the aircraft, and this is where the program's original sin was committed. The core premise was that the needs of an Air Force pilot, a Navy pilot, and a Marine pilot were similar enough to be met with one platform. They were not. An Air Force F-35A needs to be agile for long-range missions from big, established airfields. A Navy F-35C needs a brawny structure to survive the brutal physics of carrier ops. And a Marine F-35B needs to operate from tiny, amphibious assault ships, which means it has to land without a runway. By trying to be everything to everyone, the Joint Strike Fighter Program created a situation where the most difficult requirement for any single variant would inevitably dictate the design for all of them. The program chained the fates of the Air Force and Navy to the incredible technical gamble the Marines were taking, and that gamble was the F-35B's vertical landing capability. Making a fighter jet land vertically isn't a new idea. The British did it with the Harrier jump jet decades earlier, but the Harrier was a relatively simple machine from a different era, and while some later versions could just break the sound barrier in a dive, it was fundamentally a subsonic aircraft in combat. The F-35B was supposed to be a supersonic, fifth-generation stealth fighter packed with more computers than any aircraft in history, and it had to hover. The engineering challenge was monumental. It's a mechanical nightmare, a symphony of moving parts, clutches, and actuators, all run by millions of lines of software code. It has to work perfectly, every single time. From the beginning, officials knew this was the highest risk part of the whole program. Early Pentagon reports called the Estovil design the highest risk of all variants, and the most difficult to get right. But the Marines were adamant. Being able to operate from anywhere, independent of long, vulnerable runways, was central to how they fight. They needed the F-35B, and because of how the program was structured, that meant everyone was getting a plane whose design was shaped by it. The first domino to fall was the F-35's very shape. The F-35B needed a massive hole in its airframe for that lift fan. This forced the fuselage to be wider and bulkier than it otherwise needed to be, and because of commonality, this wider, fatter fuselage was passed on to the Air Force's F-35A and the Navy's F-35C, even though they didn't have a lift fan. This might seem like a small compromise, but it had major consequences. A wider fuselage means more drag, which can hurt speed and fuel efficiency. It also meant the internal weapons bays of the A and C models were smaller than they could have been. But the bigger problem was weight. All that stovel machinery, the lift fan, the clutch, the driveshaft, the swiveling nozzle, was incredibly heavy. Adding thousands of pounds of gear to a stealth fighter, an aircraft that's supposed to be as light and sleek as possible, is a recipe for disaster. As development went on, the F-35B's weight began to balloon. It got so heavy that it threatened its own core mission, landing vertically with enough fuel and weapons to be useful. If you can't land with your unspent bombs or enough gas to get home, your multi-million dollar fighter is just a very expensive one-way trip. The situation got so bad that in 2004, the F-35B was put on probation by the Pentagon. Then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates publicly warned that the stovel variant was in deep trouble, with testing problems that might need major redesigns, adding yet more weight and more cost to a jet with no room to give. The crisis kicked off a frantic program-wide redesign. Lockheed Martin engineers went on an aggressive weight loss campaign, scouring every inch of the jet for ounces to They thinned the airframe's skin, redesigned structural parts, and rerouted wiring. In the end, they managed to slash more than 2,700 pounds from the F-35B's design. The F-35 story is a fascinating case study, and a journey we cover regularly on this channel, so if you're interested in the complex world of military technology and the stories behind the hardware, consider subscribing and hitting that notification bell. We'd love to have you part of the conversation. It was an incredible engineering feat, but it came at a staggering cost. The redesigns took years and burned through billions, and since all three variants shared a common design, fixes for the B model rippled outwards, forcing expensive adjustments and delays for the A and C models too. The promise of a cheap, common family of jets was unraveling. The program was now in constant crisis mode, just throwing money and people at problems that all traced back to the Stovall design. If the hardware was a nightmare, the software was a waking terror. The F-35 is basically a flying computer. Its original software had about 8 million lines of code, a number that has only grown. This software controls everything, the advanced sensors, electronic warfare, communications, weapons, and flight controls. And for the F-35B, it also had to manage the impossibly delicate ballet of the Stovall propulsion system. The transition from forward flight to a stable hover is a moment of extreme stress, and it's all handled by software. The sheer complexity of this unique system was a major factor in the now infamous delays of the F-35's computer upgrades, particularly Technology Refresh 3, or TR-3. TR-3 is a critical modernization of the jet's core processing power, the foundation for all future capabilities, known as Block 4. These upgrades are supposed to let the F-35 carry new weapons and improve its sensors and electronic warfare. But the program has been bogged down for years by hardware and software problems. TR-3 hardware and software issues were the main reason for late aircraft deliveries in 2024. The Pentagon even had to stop accepting new F-35s for a while because the TR-3 software wasn't ready. The consequences have been severe. The cost for Block 4 has jumped by over 6 billion dollars, and the schedule has slipped by several years. This brings us to the ultimate consequence, cost. The F-35 program is now projected to cost over 2 trillion dollars to purchase, operate, and sustain over its nearly 80 year lifespan. Sustainment costs alone, the price of just keeping the jets flying, have soared to an estimated 1.58 trillion dollars. That's a 44% jump from the 2018 estimate. The cost to operate a Air Force F-35A is now around 6.6 million dollars a year, way over the original target of 4.1 million dollars. These crippling costs are a direct result of the program's complexity. Production delays have become chronic, with contractors delivering aircraft and engines hundreds of days late while still, in some cases, receiving incentive fees. In 2024, for example, all 110 aircraft delivered were late by an average of 238 days. Now, it's not fair to say the F-35B was a complete failure that only caused problems. For the Marine Corps and allies like the UK and Italy, that STOVL capability isn't a bug. It's a revolutionary feature. The F-35B is the world's first and only operational supersonic stealth fighter with this ability. It gives them a level of flexibility that is simply unmatched. An F-35B can take off from a small amphibious ship, a damaged airfield, or even a reinforced road, bringing fifth-gen firepower to places high-performance jets could never go before. That's a real strategic advantage. And despite all its problems, the F-35 program was never cancelled. Today, with nearly 1,300 jets delivered to forces around the world, the F-35 is the backbone of NATO and allied air power. The pilots who fly it are almost universal in their praise of its one truly game-changing feature, its sensor fusion and situational awareness. The F-35's network of sensors gives its pilot a god's-eye view of the battlefield, letting them see and track threats long before they are ever detected themselves. In exercises, it has demonstrated a stunning level of lethality against older aircraft. The program did, eventually, deliver a formidable weapon. Supporters argue that the painful development, the delays, and the cost overruns were the necessary price for a generational leap in capability. They argue that the B variant, for all its trouble, didn't cripple the program, but merely exposed how hard it is to build something so far ahead of its time. That was me, the Mori Report. Now I want to hear from you. Do you agree with my analysis, or am I completely off on this one? Drop your thoughts in the comments. See you on the next one.