Well the good news is that Boeing is still cranking out F-18s with no end in sight. And for the price of a single F-35, you can get 10 F-18s. So hey, send out the platoon!
Negative. The F-35 model that the Navy uses costs $337 million. And the same use (carrier F-18 E/F) is $57 according to a Navy web page. So I was a little off... the A models were much less expensive, but that's still 5 F-18F models for one F-35. I think in a skirmish 5 F-18s will beat the pants off a single F-35, since there is no way an F-35 can carry sufficient munitions to compensate for the anti-missile capabilities of 5 F-18s.
The only possible way an F-35 could take out 5 F-18s is if its advanced electronics warfare package could remotely hack the avionics of the F-18s, or deploy some EMP weapon (then they all bail out!)
