Posted on 02/03/2010 11:40:24 PM PST by RC one
An internal Navy briefing obtained by CongressDaily suggests, without saying it right out, that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter ballyhooed by Defense Secretary Gates will cost so much to buy and fly that the service might have to find a cheaper plane to fill up its carrier decks.
For those of us who watched the reputation of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara as a manager nose dive in the 1960s when he could not produce a carrier plane the Navy would accept, these newly expressed Navy doubts about the F-35 have a familiar ring that challenges Gates.
The F-35, the Pentagon’s biggest aircraft program, is supposed to be flown by the same three services. But F-35 critics contend its cost — pegged at $122 million a plane in the Pentagon’s latest Selected Acquisition Report — is out of control and its worth as a fighter is questionable.
Gates so far has been dismissive of such warnings, declaring last summer at the Lockheed plant in Fort Worth where the F-35 is being built that the United States “cannot afford not to have this airplane.” But neither he nor anyone else knows for sure what the F-35 will cost or be able to do in the sky because no complete prototypes have been fully tested.
Winslow Wheeler, former cost analyst at GAO and the Senate Budget Committee and now director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information, is among those who believe the fly-before-buy approach to procurement is the only way the Pentagon will ever be able to give the taxpayer a deserved bang for his buck. Wheeler would stop production of the F-35 right now and fully test prototypes of the plane to see what they can actually do.
(Excerpt) Read more at niemanwatchdog.org ...
Russian T50 PAK-FA Stealth
F-35 Lightning 2
As long as 0bama is in office we may be assured that the wrong decision will be made.
The F-35 was never meant for the air dominance role. That’s why the US has the F-22 and the Euros built the Eurofighter.
What F-22 do you speak of? The one we no longer make? Russia plans to build and export this thing. We aren’t even building anymore F-22s let alone exporting them. If the T-50 beats the F-35, there’s gonna be problems, especially if it does it for significantly less money than an F35 which seems reasonable to assume at this point. We bet the farm on the F-35.
Fill in the blanks.. F-22 __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ F-35 ???
for the same $$$ as one F35 bomber,
the AF could buy 200X as many B52Hs,
with a payload of 1564875628X that
of one F35
I agree with what you said. I think just the dihedryl alone on those tails prevents it from being as good as it can be.
The F4U—the most successful fighter-aircraft of WWII—was introduced a bit late in the war for maximum effect.
Pen-to-paper on that design began in the mid-1930s!
ping
>I agree. More importantly than assessing the F35 by itself, I want to see a comparison of the F35 against the Russian Suhkoi T50 before we commit to owning a plane that doesn’t guarantee air dominance.
At least, F-35 has weak manoeuvrability and perfomance (eg. speed) compared to T-50.
T-50 is also equipped with more powerful radars(X-band + L-band) and additional IRST capability. T-50 has twice as bigger payload compared to F-35 and air-air missiles with greater kill range.
So F-35 is far from being good choice against T-50.
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gee, maybe we shouldn’t have killed the raptor after all. thanks for that insight btw.
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