The F-35? At this stage, I'm just like; "Do it. I dare you. Bring it the heck ON."
Because if it can do 85%+ of what's claimed it'll be AWESOME.
Anything less than that, it will go down in history as either the M16 of aircraft or the biggest waste of money of all time. Because for the ammount of $$$ being put into it, at this stage, doctrinally and technically we need to be AT LEAST 85% right on this one.
And if it fails? Well...I do like to watch the world burn.
If it does 15% of what the claims were, it wouldn't be a non-functional testbed 20 years after adoption.
Perhaps meaning that the M16 initially had some teething problems that needed to be worked out, but after that has gone onto a 50 year service life.
difference being, the 'teething problems' of the M-16 were resolved in a matter of months, and the base design was a down-scale of another rifle that already worked, and had foreign sales (the AR-10), and the M-16 was not given a bottomless well of funding without a field-ready example over the course of now 4 administrations, covering 3 decades, (1990s to present), while the rest of the world continued to improve and refine methods for countering it's chief 'advantage' over other, better airframes (the Stealth concepts underlying the layout, build, even materials have been the target of every research establishment in the world-not to copy, but to counter, since the eighties.)
again, "Warload, range, and role". The F-35 can't perform any of it's stated roles, (Much like the F-111, only without competing programs that actually get results and cancel the damn thing after a decade) what it CAN do, is keep Lockheed in texas open, and keep thousands of engineers and PR people employed trying to make it 'work' (kinda like Fusion: it's gonna have the bugs worked out 'any day now' for the last 20 years in the case of the F-35, just like Fusion's been 'twenty years down the road' since the 1950's.)
it's what isn't being delivered that is the problem-I'm sure they're racking up all kinds of hours working out how to sell it, how to make it do 1/10th what the tender claimed it would do, how to get it to perform up to a sortie rate of, say, the F-117A (but with an even smaller bomb load, shorter fuel range, higher maintenance cost, and more restrictive flying environment...)
but the root of the design is already planned for a warfighting paradigm that it not only could not fill, but has already outpaced it. It's kinda like using a Million Dollar smart bomb to paste a thousand dollar pickup truck driven not by a drug lord or high-ranking terrorist, but Joe the frikking mailman. it isn't fit to fight other aircraft, it isn't fit for close air support, it isn't fit for medium, never mind long, range strike missions.
The litany of vulnerabilities we KNOW about from government documents, the hearings on the testing program, the results of those programs, the litany of 'fixes', it more and more resembles the Yak-38, and that's a very bad thing to resemble.
