The bottom line is that while the F/A-18E/F will never be a stealth aircraft, it could offer a less costly 80 percent solution for the U.S. Navy’s requirements. Once developed to its full potential, the Advanced Super Hornet could perform most of the missions envisioned for the F-35C except penetrating strike—it would have to rely on stand-off weapons for that mission.
(This first appeared back in 2016.)
President-elect Donald Trump’stweet on Dec. 22—where he stated that he had asked Boeing to “price out a comparable F-18 Super Hornet” because of the sheer expense of the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter—was met with derision by journalists and Washington’s political elite.
While it is true that no version of the F/A-18E/F will ever be able to offer an exact analogue of the F-35’s capabilities, the reaction inside the Beltway was typically biased. Trump’s statement cannot be interpreted exactly literally. More likely, the President-elect was suggesting that a variant of the Super Hornet airframe could meet many of the capabilities that the F-35 offers at a more reasonable price.
For the U.S. Navy, there is a strong argument to be made that an Advanced Super Hornet derivative could offer an 80 percent solution for a lower price than the F-35C. And while such an F/A-18 derivative would not precisely meet all of the U.S. Air Force’s requirements as embodied in the F-35A, the Super Hornet is a perfectly capable shore-based strike fighter as the Royal Australian Air Force demonstrates on a daily basis. Only the U.S. Marine Corps—with its insistence on the short takeoff/vertical landing capability found on the F-35B—would have to completely revamp its air arm in the exceedingly unlikely event that Trump were to cancel the Joint Strike Fighter program. That being said, all three flying branches would have to give up on the notion of penetrating strike and rely on standoff weapons—the F/A-18E/F is not and will never be a stealth aircraft.
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