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Posted on 03/18/2016 6:40:44 PM PDT by maddog55
Officials are finally admitting the F-35 fighter has turned into a nightmare—but it’s too late to stop the $400 billion program now.
Way back in the early 2000s, the U.S. military had a dream. To develop a new “universal” jet fighter that could do, well, pretty much everything that the military asks its different fighters to do.
But the dream of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter turned into a nightmare. The program is six years behind schedule and tens of billions of dollars over budget. And now, 16 years after the JSF prototypes took off for their first flights, top officials are finally owning up to the trauma the $400 billion fighter program has inflicted on America’s finances and war readiness.
In a remarkable period, beginning in February and lasting several weeks, senior officers and high-ranking bureaucrats finally publicly copped to the warplane program’s fundamental failures.
(Excerpt) Read more at thedailybeast.com ...
Man, how many F-22’s could they have had over this boondoggle.
And f22 variants for other roles. Variants that could actually work.
all this time, were other countries making better?
but GOPe says we don’t need a shake up.
20 trillion debt, worthless fighter, Obama letting terrorists and MS13 in.
we are WAY PAST needing a shake up.
Active Duty ping.
Good thing they haven’t scrapped a buncha old planes yet.
People need to be in prison over this.
The program is six years behind schedule and tens of billions of dollars over budget.
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that’s cause they didn’t ask Trump to be in charge of construction...
The program is six years behind schedule and tens of billions of dollars over budget.
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that’s cause they didn’t ask Trump to be in charge of construction...
You’d think they would have learned from the F4 Phantom program that one plane can’t fill all roles
I was just going to say it’s a good thing we can still make F-15’s & F-16’s.
You are right. I used to work for Lockheed, and I left because they are a bunch of crooks. Generals need to be relieved, demoted, and kicked out. Lockheed should be fined out the ying-yang, and someone has to go to prison.
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So it dumped the world class F-22. So typical.
Good for you in leaving them.
Traitorous bastards putting a buck before the country.
Really it doesn’t matter. Arab countries doesn’t have flight superiority. North Korea? Still using MIGs from the ‘50s.
Daily Beast . . . always has an agenda. Stirring the pot by showing money is being wasted by the military will encourage the “let’s cut the military’s bloated budget” crowd. No doubt there is waste. But this plane is early in its life cycle and will improve with experience. Neither the P-51 nor P-38 were particularly brilliant in their first iterations.
Moreover, no responsible journalist would talk about the aircraft without mentioning the huge role Congress, both Dims and Rats, had in screwing up this aircraft. It seems like it is assembled from pieces made in every Congressional district to ensure largess goes to the appropriate Congressman’s constituents. Navy backers insist on this, Marine backers insist on that, AF on something else, and suddenly the damned thing will hardly fly. Hearings were probably held on why it is not gender neutral and whether short females see can out of the cockpit.
These F-35 articles have become common and other than quoting a new “source” here or there, the articles are mostly the same. Nothing is going to change very fast here. The author is right, though, about us being committed to them whether we like them or not.
I’m glad my family members are not going to war in them.
Now a squadron of nice new shiny F-22’s? that’s a different matter!
A flying computer with 24 million lines of software code. Maybe a bit too complicated for its own good.
Then they should search for old Free Republic threads where some Freepers defended the F-35.
Those Freepers were wrong.
Perhaps they didn't know how wrong they were. Maybe some of them did know how wrong they were, but their jobs were tied to this horrible mess.
Either way, our nation is in a world of hurt come the next war (and there will be one).
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