unexpectedly
Posted on 05/19/2011 7:45:45 PM PDT by decimon
WASHINGTON (AFP) – The cost of building the F-35 fighter jet, set to replace a large part of the US warplane fleet, is "unaffordable" in its current version and must be reviewed, the Pentagon's top acquisition official said Thursday.
"Over the lifetime of this program, the decade or so, the per-aircraft cost of the 2,443 aircraft we want has doubled in real terms," said Ashton Carter, the under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics.
"That's our forecast for how much the aircraft's going to cost.
"Said differently, that's what it's going to cost if we keep doing what we're doing. And that's unacceptable. It's unaffordable at that rate."
The cost of the plane has jumped to $385 billion, about $103 million per plane in constant dollars or $113 million in fiscal year 2011 dollars, said Christine Fox, the Defense Department's director of cost assessment and program evaluation.
Republican Senator John McCain called the figure "truly troubling," considering the original price was $69 million per airplane.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
But we CAN afford to send billions of dollars to people in the middle east that want us dead.
‘Kay....
It is closer to 235 million per copy and 65,000 per hour to fly the POS. Whole program needs to be scrapped.
DoD has major acquisition problems. They pay too much for everything, everything takes too long, and too often the final result doesn’t quite do everything that had originally been planned.
It may have been better if they’d allowed the services to have different planes.
They give a company billions of dollars to develop an aircraft with almost no expectation of a product in a decent amount of time. The system is little more than government redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich.
unexpectedly
What would you do to replace the F-16s and AV-8B's?
i love the planes but they need to be scrapped. They cost too much. The companies need to learn to stop scam the tax payers with ever increasing cost
That is the result of inflation. Just as surely as Oreo cookies cost more, fighter plane parts cost more also.
Even in today's economic chaos, we could find the difference by not trying to buy of the murderers in the middle east with "foreign aid."
We don't need them anymore. Obama is our president and he is awesome. Heck, he killed bin Laden with just a steely glance.
What would you do to replace the F-16s and AV-8B’s?
We don’t need them anymore. Obama is our president and he is awesome. Heck, he killed bin Laden with just a steely glance.
Yep. His evil stare did it. Afterall, he voted against every weapons system and R&D when he was in the US Senate.
Troll
Please forgive my ignorance.
So... we just keep the obsolete planes we have?
It’s just not true that they’ll be obsolete when they’re built. What they’ll be is the most advanced fighter in their class, in the world.
It is simply impossible to design one airframe that will fill the three versions of this POS.
Envision GM trying to design one vehicle that has Corvette performance, Hummer off-road ability, and minivan utility.
So what we end up with is an incredibly expensive boondoggle that does nothing well.
It will put our pilots in underperforming aircraft with few alternatives.
And by putting all eggs in this basket, we waste 20 years or more of developmental time.
But, it is a great welfare program for LockMart, P&W, GE and their suppliers.
And the lobbying dollars are greatly appreciated by Congress.
Yes but...
An Air Force of one?
Have you ever read Arthur C. Clarke’s short story “Superiority”?
I agree. Why again did we move to this thing vs. more proven platforms that could be incrementally improved and which nobody really yet matches like the F-18 and F-16?
Oh yeah. politics. This is a case where Republicans are just as much as fault, I hate to say, as the Dems. Fiscal responsibility IMHO has to include not only getting rid of social programs, but these pork defense things even the military doesn’t really want.
Some have compared it to that last Jack-of-all-trades, the F-111.
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