The F-35's gun doesn't really matter.
"Meh... We'll come back to that later." For those of you keeping up with current events, you may have noticed the fury and uproar regarding the latest bit of JSF news. Specifically, the fact that the F-35 will not have the capability to fire its cannon until at least 2019 . How could a $400 billion (possibly $1.5 trillion ) fighter program leave out something as simple and basic as a gun? What good is a fighter without a cannon? Why will it take another four years just to get one to work? I am here to tell you it does not really matter, anyway. Even if Canada did decide to order the F-35 today, it likely would not receive its first airframes until 2017-2019 at the earliest. Even then, a CF-35 would not enter service until for a few years after that. Full operational tempo would not occur until the early 2020s. In the meantime, the RCAF will still have its life-extended CF-18s armed with the tried-and-true M61 Vulcan...