The only important factor is how many defense contractors made billions of dollars?
The second rule of any bureaucracy is "He show spends the most money is the most important."
Better keep the old F-15’s, F-16’s, and F-18’s as healthy as possible - looks like we are going to be relying on them for a couple more decades.
Meanwhile the F 22, a comparable, very high tech fighter is flying and doing great. Remember it was Obama’s DoD that cancelled the F 22. Typical stupidity.
Some friends of some politicians have gotten really rich.
This is the type of crap that makes me roll my eyes when the DoD talks about “debilitating budget cuts”. Clearly they have no ability to manage the budget they have now.
A Global Force for Good™ doesn’t need killing machines, anyway.
I started working as an AF contractor in 1984 and retired in 2009. I started out as a Junior Programmer and it was common that we had 8 hour programming jobs. Yes eight hours... Start, code, test, document and approve for the production library.
These were usually one or two line code changes but could be bigger as necessary. Why? Because we were literally on the leading bleeding edge of technology at the time. And the Air Force at the time wanted results more than anything else.
Flash forward twenty-five years, A SINGLE line of code needs to be changed in a program over fifteen years old. That takes literally six month’s from approval to start to acceptance in the Program Library. One line of code and a Half a million dollars in cost. Month’s of meeting, Massive documentation, Project Management time lines to be met.
And so on... Actual real time to do the job? One half hour and that includes the two paragraph change to the documentation. All of the rest was for the Overhead of the Air Force Oversight people, the committees, the Company management and so forth.
Oh yes, I forgot the third party software testing company that analyzed what was done and insured their was no additional changes besides the line of code being changed.
And that my FRiends is how you can spend 400 Billion dollars on an Aircraft Program.
Little to nothing in the way of specific facts or problems...long on old information and speculation.
The SBDII allegation is horseshit and has been covered in another thread where all the resident FR “experts” are enlightening us all with their “expertise”.
Pretty typical low information tripe from YAHOO! to keep the yahoos giddy and fueled up in their quest to put their ignorance on display...
While there is much to dislike about the acquisition of fighters, I’d like to remind folks the same sort of things were written about the F-15 & F-16.
'Doesnt get paid their profit'... What the hell kind of business practice is that?? I mean it wasn't that long ago that when a vendor produced and sold something it was at some sort of an agreed price and he either made or lost money depending on how good a job he'd done.....
It does fly. Lots of them are flying. This article is a useless hit piece using metaphor to imply the aircraft has some severe flaw making it unable to fly.