>Putting things the other way around, USAF is about 40% of U.S. military by value, so we can assume it takes about 300 billion a year to operate. A plane's life is about 30 years. It makes up 9 trillion. And there are about 6000 aircraft it in. So each consumes about 1.5 billion over its lifetime, all accounted.
Now you're ready to compare our AF to someone else's.
>Why is the difference of 'per aircraft lifecycle cost' so important then? Only plane for which it is comparable (actually greater) than USAF total spent per airframe is B-2A,
Because you can compare each platform's "efficiency" at a given mission, as you state in the last part of your post. It relies on getting in lots of wars though to get enough data to make reliable comparisons, "fortunately" we've got that part covered.
>will make it a good buy anyway.
That remains to be seen / demonstrated. The way it shakes out so far is that there is a lot of doubt as to whether the AF will be able to keep enough of them in the air, or enough pilots trained for them to do anything other than make cameo appearances. The unit cost keeps rising, the performance keeps getting revised down. This thing is going to be like the Space Shuttle (IMO), too expensive for what it does and never able to to fulfill all of its intended roles.
You know, you might say most of our national defense establishment is operating at the (in)competence level of McNamara, with not-coincidentally similar results.
With his actions at the World Bank after being sacked from the DoD I'm not sure there's a single man who caused more suffering and death than him in the 2nd half of the 20th Century.
For mass production aircraft, efficiencies should be okay. F-35 is already a mass production aircraft, with about 150 of them flying or i various stages of production, so little doubt final production run will be at least, over a thousand given any further possible cuts.
Shuttle was killed by a lack of market: if it was actually flying 50 missions a year as planned it would provide decent costs and justify most missions - but there appeared to be no market for that. USAF had a second thought on manned military space station (Keyholes and Lacrosses did the job better and cheaper - Soviet Union came to same conclusion scrapping their Almaz project), and civilian satellites became so reliable there was no need to launch many of them, or to repair them on orbit. It was never a technical failure, just overestimation of potential market size (same will happen to SpaceX reusability plans i believe).
My main point was that overall USAF expenses are pretty high, whatever aircraft are in use. So we shouldn't be scared by high per-airframe costs, if F-35 is say 40% better than some 'average' aircraft of comparable role, say F-16, that will be already okay even if F-16 'direct' costs are only 10% of F-35'th. Because indirect costs are high anyway, over a billion bucks per airframe. There is little doubt it will be at least 40% better (because of lower vulnerability and situational awareness) IMO.
>My main point was that overall USAF expenses are pretty high, whatever aircraft are in use. So we shouldn't be scared by high per-airframe costs, if F-35 is say 40% better than some 'average' aircraft of comparable role,
I see that and agree. I just don't see how the F35 is ever going to do all of the thing that its supporters want us to believe it will do.
They want to kill the ~300 A10 fleet that costs ~18000/hr to operate in exchange for about a half-dozen F35's that cost who knows what /hr in that same role. That is not a good proposition. There is no way that a half-dozen F35's can replace 300 A10's at any operating cost.
Realistic estimates and actual history put airframe and total crew losses for the Shuttle fleet at ~25 flights per vehicle as I remember, definitely no more than 35. The SSMEs needed total rebuilds before reuse, there were the obvious expendables, etc. etc.
Spending more money upfront and wisely could have changed that, but once the turkey's design was set in stone its infrequent launches and insane operating costs (especially from all the staff who had to be retained no matter what the launch rate) were baked into the cake and turned it into a public works project. Certainly not something that demonstrated much about a market, given its insane costs/lb and severe restrictions on what it could loft due to safety reasons (e.g. no lithium batteries, Centaur booster canceled post-Challenger, etc. etc.).
Now you're ready to compare our AF to someone else's.
>Why is the difference of 'per aircraft lifecycle cost' so important then? Only plane for which it is comparable (actually greater) than USAF total spent per airframe is B-2A,
Because you can compare each platform's "efficiency" at a given mission, as you state in the last part of your post. It relies on getting in lots of wars though to get enough data to make reliable comparisons, "fortunately" we've got that part covered.
>will make it a good buy anyway.
That remains to be seen / demonstrated. The way it shakes out so far is that there is a lot of doubt as to whether the AF will be able to keep enough of them in the air, or enough pilots trained for them to do anything other than make cameo appearances. The unit cost keeps rising, the performance keeps getting revised down. This thing is going to be like the Space Shuttle (IMO), too expensive for what it does and never able to to fulfill all of its intended roles.
EDIT: removed annoying double-double-negative