A nice position to take, but totally untenable. All three missions needed a follow on replacement for current weapons systems, but the individual services couldn’t afford the costs by themselves. Involving foreign countries having requirements inputs (but not veto authority) was a reasonable approach to sharing development costs. You cited the B-52 (never exported) and C-130/F-16 (both exported), but C-130/F-16 customers ONLY paid for those delta development costs related to unique configurations meeting their requirements, not for any of the initial development costs. Lockheed footed the bill for C-130J configuration development, but the gubmint balked at amortizing those costs for pricing production -J aircraft.
If you really need to whine about something, why not complain about all the interest money, aerospace technology and industrial secrets given to, and stolen by, the communist chinese?? Those trillions pale in comparison by far to F-35 development overruns, and they have already been caught hacking F-35 technology secrets with no penalty whatsoever from the Obama regime!
JC
If you’ve paid any attention, you’d know already that I’m one of the most persistent skeptics of “free trade” with the ChiCom’s on FR. From my perspective, the only good communist is a dead communist, and it is beyond my comprehension how giving the PRC a trade surplus with which they can fund a military expansion on our consumption is a good idea. The wholesale export of our productive economy to the PRC is suicide, both economic and military, IMO.
But hey, there’s a whole lot of Republicans who think that this is jolly good thinking, and they continue to cover up the obvious by sticking their fingers in their ears whilst chanting “Free Trade!” at the top of their lungs. To counter this, these same “conservatives” want to spend a trillion bucks on air platforms to counter a threat we never need have faced, if we’d only been content to beat the communists (which we did) and leave them beat.
Buuuut noooooooooo.... “conservatives” couldn’t seem to be content with beating the communists when we saw the USSR fall... so we had to plump up the next bunch of commies in China by allowing them permanent MFN status and then admitting them to the WTO.