F 111 redux. Trying to make 1 platform all things to all services.
We never learn.
The F-111 actually turned out to be a pretty good aircraft...for the RAAF. The company I retired from made parts for the F-22. We lost that work when it was cancelled. We made parts for the Boeing JSF entry (the Monica). It lost the competition. We made a bunch of stuff for the Comanche stealth helicopter. Twenty years of R&D and billions of dollars and the whole project was scrapped. And then there was the V-22...
If you broke all this waste down to dollars per taxpayer, what do you suppose it would come to?
The F-111 program was not a total loss since they did quite well as a strike aircraft for the Air Force for many decades, and for the Navy the lessons learned from the F-111 as well as many of the subsystems and design innovations such as the AWG-9 radar, the AIM-54 Pheonix missles, and variable geometry wings were rolled into the F-14 which served the Navy well for 30 years.