How familiar aircraft names can ease new procurement

The F-15E provides an example of a substantially new aircraft presented as a continuation of an established type because familiar programmes can be easier to fund. The point becomes a deliberately exaggerated prediction that future fighter generations might keep accumulating F-35 variant letters even when they share little with the original aircraft. The joke exposes a serious procurement incentive: a designation can imply continuity to budgets and decision-makers while engineering changes underneath it. That logic also helps explain why militaries can prefer iterative upgrades to clean-sheet programmes. This is a claim about bureaucratic presentation and funding, not a literal forecast that every later fighter will be an F-35.