i’m thinking F-35
Did Defense contractors design it to work? Or design it to have lots of very expensive upgrades and repairs?
I worked for a major defense contractor for many years as a quality engineer. From my experience the effort to solely blame the contractors is misdirected. Sure there have been bad design over time but...
I would like to state categorically that the BS government bureaucracy did a hell of a lot more to inflate costs, delay production and inhibit innovation and necessary engineering changes than we ever did as a manufacturer.
Every thing we did had to go through multiple review boards (PDR, CDR, PRR, ERB boards) before we could even begin production or try anything new. Every government entity there had to justify their existence by adding bells, horns and whistles and new hoops to jump through. That alone added many hundreds of man hours and costs to accommodate the change process and of course, delayed deployment.
They never let us use off the shelf avionics. Everything had to be mil-spec even though the items were not mission critical and on the shelf for commercial aerospace manufacturers.
I am a child of the 50's where new and innovative designs were coming out almost monthly. The government, at that time just said "Build it and send it to Edwards for testing". Some worked, some didn't but we experienced the biggest and most productive learning curve in aviation history, from P-51s to SR-71s in a decade.