F-35C will be the last manned strike fighter for U.S. Navy

Secretary of the U.S. Navy Ray Mabus said the F-35C will “almost certainly will be, the last manned strike fighter aircraft the Department of the Navy will ever buy or fly.”

F-35C Lightning of VFA-101 takes off from Eglin AFB in August 2013
By U.S. Air Force photo by Samuel King [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

“Unmanned systems, particularly autonomous ones, have to be the new normal in ever-increasing areas,” Mabus said at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space 2015 Exposition.

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