How about when funding was halted for the Bell-Boeing V-22 tiltrotor aircraft? (Dick Cheney did that under Bush 41) ....It was later restored and the aircraft is now lauded by the Marines and Air Force.
Yep. And all the while, the bloggers were reporting that the V-22 was horrid, the boots-on-the-ground were scared of it, and it could “never” accomplish the mission like the H-53. (I suspect a lot of the discourse was generated by a nostalgic H-53 community that didn’t want to see their copter retired.)
By the same standard that people are looking at the F-35, the F-15 and F-16 never should’ve been fielded. In the 1980s, they were falling out of the sky and the technical problems were daunting. On this report on the F-35, I counted about 20 technical problems. Only 20 discrepancies would’ve been an absolute dream for the F-16 in the 1980s, which killed 48 pilots and about a dozen people on the ground and millions upon millions were being spent on modification programs.
Same with the F-111, which turned out to be a great aircraft but ran into a meat-grinder in it’s debut in Vietnam, to the extent that it was pulled out of country until it was further modified.
How about the AV-8 Harrier, a.k.a. “Widowmaker”?
Every weapon system has these problems. If you wait until it’s perfect to field it, it will be in testing for 50 years and be long-obsolete before it sees its first deployment.