In article ,
"Tarver Engineering" wrote:

Except that USN does not wish to participate in the F-35 procurement, in
favor of replacing the F/A-18As with robots. The USAF, however needs the
F-35 to hedge their bet that the F-22 will ever be produced in any numbers.

Oddly enough, the only person who seems to believe that the Navy wants
to give up on piloted planes in the near future is... well, Tarver.

Sure, you can find one or two odd folks who think robots are the way to
go in the short term (in the long run it's not so chancy, but the tech
is nowhere *near* what we need right now), but most folks agree that we
need a near-future manned Navy attack plane to replace the ones we have
right now.

The new carriers in the pipeline - the CVN-21 series - are planned to be
primarily F-35 equipped (with F-18 and E-2 for the near term), with UCAV
to supplement on high-risk missions - once they figure out how to use
UCAVs on a crowded flight deck with manned planes (not a trivial feat).

As far as the F-22, we're buying them, they're working fine, and we all
know Tarver's delusions on that particular airframe...

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