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April 19th, 2024 | 9:00 PM ET

The F35: A 21st Century Coalition Asset

Posted: October 14th, 2016

After years of delays and cost overruns, the F-35 is finally in the hands of military services across the globe. As of June of this year, Lockheed Martin has rolled out 174 F-35s and altogether these aircraft have racked up 68,000 flight hours. Now that the aircraft is reaching operational benchmarks and is in the hands of a growing number of foreign aviators, we can begin to see if the F-35 will deliver on its promise of becoming an asset to coalition warfare.

The F-35 was designed with coalition warfare in mind from the very beginning. The suite of processing and sensor technologies are meant to be interoperable, not only across service branches, but also among allied militaries. In practice, this would mean one pilot can view on his display in real-time, not only the information gathered by his plane, but that of every other F-35 or ground based system linked to the same network.

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