>Its turn around time is ridiculous, it has to be maintained with specialized equipment/hangers, along with external contractor assistance.

>Compared to the Gripen, as an example, which can land on a freeway and be up in the air again in a few minutes.

I have no idea where people got the idea that the F-35 requires a major refit after each sortie or that it needs climate controlled hangars, but there's literally no truth to any of it.

The turnaround time for an F-35 after a mission in a wartime scenario isn't going to be much different from any other older fighter jet. Refuel, rearm, get back in the air.

One of the key requirements for the F-35 programs was to minimize extra care needed for the RAM (Radar Absorbent Material). Unlike older stealth aircraft the F-35's ram is "baked in" to the aircraft skin, rather than being a coating. The F-117 and B-2 require climate controlled hangars because their coatings are old and delicate, the F-22 doesn't, but needs regular touch-ups for its coating, the F-35 is just left sitting outside most of the time regardless of where it's operating, a desert, the arctic, a jungle, the deck of a ship, you just leave it out there. The only common maintenance done on the F-35's RAM is replacing a relatively small amount of special RAM tape which is usually used around the edges of the access panels which are opened for other types of maintenance.

The F-35 is designed to be able to break into and defeat modern air defense networks.

The gripen is a much less capable non expeditonary platform designed to maximize asymmetric losses if sweden is invaded. As a small country sweden has to follow a porcupine strategy to deter invasion.

Presently the actual comparable to the F-35 is attritable drones, which is why every mid-size and major power is developing them.

I think there's also some exaggerations about the differing highway landing capabilities of various aircraft. [1] is a video showing Eurofighter, F/A-18 and F-35 all landing on a highway in an exercise. Capability with stores and fuel load is another thing but I've read material that doesn't find the contemporary aircraft drastically different in that regard. Now, maintenance hours per flight hour and general operability certainly are interesting topics and there could be large differences.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKbgtixpfIc

The Gripen is a light multirole aircraft like the F-16. The F-35 is a stealth strike fighter. It requires another level of special care to maintain its stealth performance. If you want mass-produced stealth aircraft, that's what's required. Stealth aircraft up to this point have been in extremely limited numbers at astronomical costs.

Gripen will not be able to fly higher than tree lines in zones with active anti-air. Russia can't really use any of it's air power in Ukraine war, for example.

F35 can actually do something in such scenarios, as detecting them in the first place is hard.

Agreed and specifically in the case of the Gripen the “test condition” was “Needs to be serviceable by a few conscripts working under the direction of one person who knows what they are doing”.

It’s an extremely different design goal, the US doesn’t mind exotic weapons that require exquisite (and expensive) methods of servicing, they have the budget and the assumption that a well equipped air field will be immaculately maintained.

Meanwhile the Mig-29 designers assumed it’d operate from damaged/poorly maintained fields, so on the ground you can shut the primary air intakes and it uses ones on top of the plane to get air, drastically reducing the FOD risk on taxi/takeoff.

I do wonder how well the F-35 would fare in an actual shooting war against near peers when all the peacetime assumptions breakdown.