Posted on 07/27/2019 7:55:43 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
When something isn’t very good, someone may joke that it’s still “good enough for government work.” Maybe the thinker who coined that expression had the F-35 program in mind.
The F-35 (also known as the Joint Strike Fighter) is a military jet that was supposed to be able to do it all. The program was started in the 1990s with the intention that it could serve the Air Force, the Navy and the Marines and their various mission needs with only minimal changes to the initial platform. That would deliver cost savings across decades as one jet replaced (at least) three other types of plane. It seemed like a great idea in concept.
But, predictably, the jet that tried to do everything ended up having more problems than successes. By the time designers had added stealth technology, short runway functionality, and various weapon systems, they had a jet that was too bulky, too slow and too costly. “The result is an expensive jack-of-all-trades, but a master of none,” The National Interest's Dave Majumdar writes, calling the JSF “one of the 5 worst fighter jets ever made.”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. By this time, Lockheed was supposed to be churning out F-35 jets at a cost of $40-$50 million each. Instead, the military now says it wants to buy 470 of the fighters, at a cost of $34 billion. That would be more than $80 million per plane, twice what was promised.
Yet even as it tries to buy more of these planes, throwing good money after bad, the Pentagon admits the JSF program is failing. The Air Force’s top testing official wrote in 2016 that the F-35 is “not effective and not suitable across the required mission areas and against currently fielded treats.”
It also falls short of existing platforms. Military analyst Dan Grazier writes, “In the air-to-air mission, the current F-35 is similarly incapable of matching legacy aircraft like the F-15, F-16, and F-22.” And when it comes to supporting troops on the ground, one job the JSF was supposed to be designed for, “testing shows the F-35 is incapable of performing most of the functions required for an acceptable close support aircraft, functions the A-10 is performing daily in current combat.” One reason for that failure is that the F-35’s guns aren’t very accurate. A report noted that pilots routinely miss their targets because of software failures.
Plus, contractor Lockheed Martin struggles to even keep the F-35 in the air. “A handful of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters built during the early days of the program could become unflyable by 2026, after just 2,100 flight hours,” Popular Mechanics wrote this year. “The culprit is almost certainly the F-35’s design and production plan, which involved starting to build the planes before the final design specifications were set.”
Just last month, the Pentagon’s Inspector General said Lockheed may have over-billed the military by more than $10 million for spare parts that were never delivered. “We determined that the DoD did not receive RFI F‑35 spare parts in accordance with contract requirements and paid performance incentive fees on the sustainment contracts based on inflated and unverified F‑35A aircraft availability hours,” a report concluded. Spare parts wouldn’t save the plane, but we shouldn’t be wasting money on parts we never even get.
The Washington Post reports that “the late senator John McCain called the F-35 a ‘poster child for acquisition malpractice’ a ‘scandal’ and a ‘tragedy’ at different points during his tenure as Senate Armed Services Committee chairman.” I frequently disagreed with Sen. McCain, but he was correct here. Even after all the time and money invested, the F-35 isn’t very good.
Not very good isn’t good enough for the men and women in military uniform. They deserve the best tools our country can give them. The over-budget, under-delivering F-35 is not such a tool, and it’s not “good enough for government work.”
I can’t believe Lockheed doesn’t just pull the plug on it.
One of the biggest problems was the Marine Corps variant with the demand to have VTOL capabilities, which was a huge engineering problem.
Get some upgraded F-15s out there, and get the F-22s going again. Upgrade and update the A-10. A ground attack aircraft needs to be able to go low and slow, the straight wing design is great.
What do you think the unit cost of an F-16 Block 80 is?
$75-80 million.
the F-35 program has met its program unit cost targets when inflation over the past 15 years is taken into consideration from the original cost goals.
Pilots love it.
Just be glad the managers at Boeing did not win - they don’t even know how to design a commercial airplane.
The JSF was a lobbying operation to transfer defense dollars to the hands of contractors. In that regard it has been a wild success. Airfloght or combat readiness, while not totally unwelcome outcomes, aren't necessary.
I think it (all variants) is terribly short-ranged but by all accounts is a game-changer.
The amount of time and effort to bring ANYTHING new to the military has become ridiculous unfortunately is going to lead to only a handful of companies capable or willing to bother. Yes even fewer than now.
People in the biz, commenting on defense-related forums, really, really like the F-35.
http://elementsofpower.blogspot.com/2015/09/dave-majumdars-f-35-punk-journalismagain.html
[ Today, Dave Majumdar, once a promising aero reporter, apparently needed some rent money. Why else would he fabricate another F-35 click-bait hit piece for the lower-brow crowd, (update: the Punk is now the ‘Defense Editior’ of the digital rag) rehashing the pap that David Axe used to set off a disinformation cascade? Now I could spend all night Fisking Majumdar’s craptastic article to include “27 8x10 color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence” but there’s only a couple of things worth my time, nailing Dave to the wall, that should cast the rest of his ‘pap’ under the proper spotlight. The first is his apparent (willful?) inability to discern information from ‘spin’:]
http://www.worldaffairsboard.com/showthread.php?t=59927&page=39
[The F-35 is certainly valuable, but Russian agents looking up the F-35’s skirt isn’t necessarily a terrible strategic threat. Russian industry just isn’t capable of building anything comparable whether they have the hardware specs or not. Additionally much of the F-35’s capability is software driven and not even allied operators have access to the core code.
This is a trend that actually started with the F-22, where the situational awareness and computational power is more valuable than the physical hardware of the jet. F-22 pilots have repeatedly said that the F-22’s speed, maneuverability, acceleration, and even stealth are some of the least impressive aspects of the jet. The F-35 takes the informational and networking dominance even further and that kind of capability isn’t readily replicated by examining the jet itself.]
The icing on the cake is the fact that the Israelis are said to have flown to Tehran and back. Would the Iranians have liked to have shot one of them down? Sure. Better luck next time:
Note that due to fuel constraints, the Israelis might have flown in a straight line. Tehran is 400 miles from the Iraqi border. That’s a lot of Iranian airspace to fly through without SAM radars lighting up and sending missiles up at those planes.
The Israelis can order any American fighter they want that’s not the F-22. They went head-over-heels for the F-35:
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/iranian-commander-kept-secret-israeli-f-35-stealth-fighters-had-violated-iran-airspace
[Israel is the first country outside the U.S. to acquire the F-35 fifth-generation fighter, of which it could take up to 75.
Noteworthy Israeli F-35 deals have been severely criticized because the aircraft are more expensive than those purchased by the U.S. Air Force (USAF) since they feature several unique (and indigenous) systems to satisfy Israeli Air Force (IAF) operational requirements.
However former Minister of Defense Avigdor Lieberman explained that “The F-35 squadrons are the pinnacle of technology, and will assist the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and air force in meeting the many security challenges Israel faces head-on. They are a central aspect in protecting the safety of the people of Israel along the country’s borders and even away from them.”
The U.S. in fact has given Israel more military aid than any other country in the world – currently around $4bn a year – and its laws on arms sales require that Israel always maintains military superiority in the Middle East.
Israel has praised the Lockheed Martin F-35 as a “game-changer”. ]
Why not build a new A10 with today’s technology?
Another Boeing PR placement? They should be more concerned with their own malpractice on the “737” MAX.
I’m pretty sure we can’t get the F-22 going again. IIRC we scrapped the tooling.
Not while there is money on the table.
It’s comparable to the cost of a Super Hornet.
People are surprised when the government tries to design a horse by committee.
Where is Billy Mitchell when we need him?
Maybe these guys know we have the tic-tac UFO fighter. Who cares about your old gen 5 fighter? Ha ha.
I am now getting old and in my lifetime there has not been a single weapon system that has not been trashed by the “experts” in the Press and even within the industry.
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