Ultimately, this article has one point but makes it about ten times. The point is that the F-35 led to the U.S. losing the 2008 war game. All of the quotes (particularly from Australian military officials) are about the failed 2008 war game.
It might seem like a valid point except that the war game deliberately crippled all the F-22s (the U.S. air superiority fighters) and instead pitched the F-35s (the U.S. jack-of-all trades jets) against Chinese air superiority fighters. It shouldn't be a surprise that a computer doesn't like that fight but it's a contrived and fairly silly situation since it's not really the F-35s job.
It's less academic for those of us in Australia, and that's why Australians are mentioned in the article. Australia is replacing its entire air superiority and assault capability with F35s and is contributing billions to the development program. We've already given up our bombers -- we were the last operators of F-111s.
We can't buy F22s. I'm pretty sure we would (and so would the UK, Japan, Saudi Arabia and a number of other close allies), but the US Congress has banned their export.
There is a constant undercurrent pushing for Australia to buy Russian fighters. They're cheap, they don't make design compromises we don't care about and you can actually get some, rather than seeing the delivery date receding like a desert horizon.
And more to the point: our neighbours are buying them. In a confrontation, they'd win. Which rather defeats the point of buying billions of dollars of air superiority hardware, don't you think?
Edit: Funnily enough, Lockheed has advertising spread throughout Canberra, our national capital. I mean everywhere. Especially in the airport, it's like a giant Lockheed showroom. I get the sense that they are feeling spooked.
This is stupid because you don't even know why the engagement was lost. It wasn't because the f-35 was outmatched but because they ran out of missiles in the fight which meant they could not defend their tankers and so they ran out of fuel. Numbers matter, you can't expect to send up an f-35 with a limited amount of missiles against a force much larger than yours because thats exactly what is going to happen. You will eventually run out of missiles.
On the other hand, you can buy cheaper fighters and more of them, but are your cheaper fighters better than the other teams cheaper fighters. I don't know, one thing I do know is Australia is not going to ever have an air force comparable to China in the future.
It might seem like a valid point except that the war game deliberately crippled all the F-22s (the U.S. air superiority fighters) and instead pitched the F-35s (the U.S. jack-of-all trades jets) against Chinese air superiority fighters. It shouldn't be a surprise that a computer doesn't like that fight but it's a contrived and fairly silly situation since it's not really the F-35s job.