Mr. Chairman, through you to the general or the colonel, not being a pilot, obviously, I want to ask you some questions that I'm sure you can respond to.
I'm quoting from an article from an individual who has been around the U.S. Congress for 30 years, Winslow Wheeler, who is the director of the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information, with regard to the stealth capabilities. If you would, can you respond to these comments? He says:
...that new “high tech” feature and the long range radar have imposed design penalties that compromised the aircraft with not just high cost but also weight, drag, complexity, and vulnerabilities. The few times this technology has been tried in real air combat in the past decade, it has been successful less than half the time, and that has been against incompetent and/or primitively equipped pilots from Iraq and Serbia.
The other comment I'd like to put on the table, Mr. Chairman, is “The F-35 is, in fact, considerably less manoeuvrable than the appallingly vulnerable F-105”.
Remember the F-105s used to be called the “lead sleds”, which they used, of course, as a fighter, which proved rather defenceless against MiGs over North Vietnam.
Can you respond to those two comments? He makes some others, but I'm putting them on the table because I want to understand this apparent discrepancy between what I've been told and what I've read in this particular report.