F-35 News. The hits keep coming. EOTS is obsolete before it even enters service.

Thanks for the link Charley!

via Huffington Post.

“EOTS is a big step backwards. The technology is 10-plus years old, hasn’t been able to take advantage of all the pod upgrades in the meantime, and there were some performance tradeoffs to accommodate space and stealth,” said another Air Force official familiar with the F-35 program. “I think it’s one area where the guys are going to be disappointed in the avionics.”
Ironically, older jets currently in service with the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps can carry the latest generation of sensor pods, which are far more advanced than the EOTS sensor carried by the F-35. The latest generation pods—the Lockheed Martin Sniper ATP-SE and Northrop Grumman LITENING-SE—display far clearer high-definition video imagery in both in the infrared and optical spectrum—and from greater distances. Further, both pods have the ability to beam those full-motion video feeds to ground troops, which provides those forces with burial intelligence information.

Read the entire article here.

So the SLDInfo interviews where senior leadership talks about this revolutionizing close air support for ground troops is exactly what I thought.

Bullshit.

So what will we be getting if everything works perfectly when the airplane enters USMC in 2015?

Less capability than the US Navy has on the Super Hornet when it comes to putting steel on target.

You thought I was over the top when I said in the future Marine Ground would be requesting Navy Air instead of Marine Air for support?  From what I gather from this article I wasn't expressing it strongly enough!

This program is a scandal/fraud of the highest order and people will go to jail over this.  

UPDATE:  Answer this one for me.  What mission will the F-35 be able to do better than legacy platforms now that we've found out that its EOTS is at least two generations behind?  It will plane suck donkey dick at Close Air Support.  The idea of it doing deep strike is now called into question.  Air Superiority missions have always been in doubt so what will this airplane do better than a F/A-18E/F or Growler or a fully upgraded AV-8B or F-16 or F-15????