It's tough to comment on it. From my perspective, in the world I live in, we have to sort through all the academic and published government and company reports and studies to try to get a feel for what capabilities are really embedded in it. These are so advanced and sophisticated we won't know until we see them actually come into operation what they can and can't do. Even then, we have difficulty trying to make judgments about them.
I think of it this way, and maybe this is the best way to answer. If we bought a fourth-generation fighter, or a four-and-a-half-generation fighter, whatever they want to call these things, instead of the F-35, how soon would you have to begin modernizing it and replacing key parts to make the platform interoperable and most effective? At least with the F-35, in this sense, you have a state-of-the-art, as we know it today, platform being deployed. That should give some assurances. And it should be structured better, given that engineers are thinking down the road about how we are going to pull parts out and put new technology in. If you go with something older that has older technologies, you start to get into a situation of potentially having to start replacing those technologies much earlier. The next thing you know, instead of looking at a mid-life update to an F-35 in 15 or 20 years, you're doing a mid-life update to the other platform in five years, after you've spent a lot of money on it.
There are no guarantees one way or the other, of course, because we just don't know how technology is going to advance. One of the key capabilities I think the F-35 will possess, which a lot of the others don't have, and you talked about one of them—think in terms of modern American thinking about net-centric warfare—is being able to integrate disparate platforms so that all the parts have common operating pictures. They can provide what they call a systems-to-systems approach. My understanding and my view of the F-35, because it integrates marine, air force, and navy capabilities.... They're on different platforms. But if these are going to be structured so that they can all be engaged in a common operating picture—receiving it, transmitting to it—it will be more effective for the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the delivery of force wherever you want to deliver it.
I think that's a thing people don't really want to talk about. Rather than looking at how this is going to fit into a much broader set of systems and military thinking about what we used to call our revolution in military affairs in the future, they get obsessed with sharpening things.