> I provided my sources. Yeah...very conspiratorial...

As I said, you are approaching that with this idea that the F-35 is this big cover-up. It can't "fight", etc. etc. and I just do not have any interest in treading water near that discussion. It's not at all interesting or valuable in any way.

Anyway:

> Yes. Complete zero air superiority combat missions as with the exception of bombing a few ISIS tunnels. But as this article from 2021 mentions, its not combat if the enemy can't shoot back.

> "...The United States has been at war continuously since Sept. 11, 2001, yet the F-35 has flown zero combat missions. Zero. When I was a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne, we would say: “That dog don’t hunt.” Perhaps sensitive to the F-35’s disgraceful war record, in 2018 the Pentagon sent a few on missions in Afghanistan and Iraq to notch up combat cred. Never mind that their help comes 15 years too late; the super-expensive F-35 was not designed to take out a weapons cache or a terrorist on a moped. Also, as any grunt will tell you, it’s not “combat” if the enemy can’t shoot back. If engine failure is the biggest threat to survival, then the F-35 might as well be flying over Kansas..."

Just because the F-35 hasn't flown an air-to-air combat mission doesn't mean that it hasn't been involved in combat. You're misunderstanding the role of the aircraft here and defining combat in such a way that unless there's an exact engagement that fits your criteria it can't possible be combat. That's not how anyone in the military actually understands combat. It's not binary, but a matter of degrees.

So not only has the F-35 flown combat missions, the missions it has flown which haven't been dogfights are exactly the kind of missions it was designed for. It's a multi-role fighter, there are different variants for different purposes, including battlefield C&C and target identification where the F-35 isn't even expected to engage but instead use sensors and identify enemy aircraft.

> My source are US F35 pilots...Note how somebody tried to undermine the F16 ( And airplane from the 80's) in the test

That doesn't make anyone an expert. I'm a military veteran - I just have an opinion on the systems I use. It's still an anecdote. Anyway here's another anecdote which contradicts your anecdotes.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/remember-f-16-killed-...

"“I was at Edwards Air Force Base when the test pilots were there and they were writing that original report. It’s been the narrative ever since and I want to say a few things about that. . . . First of all, it should be noted the aircraft (F-35) was in its infancy stages and we were still just trying to learn how to fly the airplane,” Chris “Worm” Spinelli, an F-35 test pilot for Lockheed Martin, told the National Interest. “The entire CLAW [Flight Control Laws] hadn’t been delivered yet so the guys hadn’t really developed tactics, techniques, and procedures, etc. So to say that the F-35 can’t Basic Flight Maneuver [a term for dogfight], I think, is a gross overstatement. Honestly, you know I think it would be quite eye-opening to see an F-35 and an F-16 in a BFM engagement, depending on how it was managed. Certainly, the F-35 has some advantages that the F-16 does not, particularly in its helmet integration, along with its advanced weapons, which are a lot more beneficial in platforms like the F-22 or F-35.”"

The problem here is that you are thinking about aircraft in conventional terms. To the author and this pilot's point, the F-35's goal is to not even engage in a dogfight. It's like arguing that an Army Ranger is a crappy soldier because they can't beat a samurai 1-1. Can a dogfight happen? Sure. But you shoot from far away and the samurai doesn't even know what hit them.

> Did they re-stage the fight? No

Do you know of every single thing that the US military does? Do they publish all reports 100% accurately? Maybe they're publishing info like this so that rival forces feel secure in not upgrading their aircraft? There's no value in re-staging this exact scenario.

tl;dr you are implying that these is this big cover-up and the F-35 can't "beat" a 40+ year old platform and all of this stuff and basing it off of, frankly, no real evidence. You don't know what you're talking about. I don't really know either, but I'm not making strong claims here.