Posted on 07/14/2021 5:33:41 AM PDT by Kaslin
The biggest boondoggle in the history of the world will get even more expensive for U.S. taxpayers unless members of Congress finally decide enough is enough.
When the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program launched in 2001, it was hailed as a “high-performance, low-cost stealth aircraft.” Now, $1.2 trillion later, it has proven to be anything but.
Despite being the most expensive military program by any country ever, F-35 fighter jets have proven defective, dangerous and largely a useless waste of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars. And Congress’ nonpartisan watchdog agency agrees.
Last week, the Government Accountability Office released a recommendation to Congress urging lawmakers to massively cut back expenses related to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program.
The GAO called the F-35 program “unaffordable” without “cost-reduction efforts” and “achieving affordability constraints.”
Gaps between what the F-35 program was supposed to cost to operate and its actual price tag are projected to reach about $6 billion a year, according to the GAO report. In total, the fighters will cost taxpayers more than $1.7 trillion if Congress doesn’t put the brakes on the boondoggle.
In addition to being a record-breaking black hole for taxpayers, the F-35 program is also a dangerous, ineffective and hopelessly defective fighter for the military.
A February 2020 Pentagon report revealed the F-35, which Lockheed Martin has produced in various configurations since 2006, still has 883 unresolved design flaws.
Shortly after the report was released, top military brass placed permanent flight restrictions on the types of F-35s flown by the Navy and Marine Corps after they were found to be faulty and hazardous.
During sustained supersonic flight, military officials learned, the jets’ stealth coating blisters and wears away, allowing enemies to easily detect them on radar. Rather than fixing the problem, Pentagon officials chose to slap strict limits on the amount of time F-35s can fly at supersonic speeds. As a result, the jets are incapable of performing some of their most basic functions including supersonic intercepts and "maneuvering at high speeds to avoid a missile or survive a dogfight."
Problems with the jets don’t end there.
F-35s are prone to pressure spikes that cause “excruciating” ear and sinus pain. Antennas necessary to communicate with friendly forces are easily damaged and rendered useless. The jets’ multimillion-dollar on-board radars often fail and have to be rebooted mid-flight due to buggy computer code. Additionally, the computer systems used to operate the fighters are vulnerable to being hacked by foreign adversaries.
The jets are constantly in the hangar for maintenance and modifications, leaving the fleet constantly depleted and incapable of meeting the Pentagon’s goal for mission-ready F-35s.
An F-35 test pilot even admitted that the jet performed worse than 1980s-era F-15s in dogfight situations. The plane is often unable to turn or climb fast enough to shoot down an enemy jet or avoid incoming enemy gunfire.
Clearly, it’s time to wind down the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program. And many leaders in the Pentagonand on Capitol Hill agree. Even Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the chairman of theHouse Armed Services Committee, called the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program a “failure on a massive freaking scale.”
Fortunately, there’s a promising alternative to the F-35 program on the horizon.
The Air Force has already built working prototypes of the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) Fighter, the jet project expected to replace the Joint Strike Fighter Program. By discontinuing new orders of F-35s and speeding up the development of the NGAD program, taxpayers and the military will be better off.
The only thing standing in the way of gradually transitioning to better, safer and more cost-effective fighter jets is the lobbying power of Lockheed Martin. The aerospace and defense giant doesn’t want Congress to kill its golden goose.
Lawmakers and Pentagon officials continue throwing good money after bad because the fighter jet fiasco is rooted in a flawed approach to government contracting.
Once Lockheed began presenting taxpayers with the bill for cost overruns related to producing F-35s, Defense Department officials and members of Congress said nothing. When Lockheed manufactured defective jets, the federal government paid Lockheed to fix them. After F-35s were plagued with safety issues, Lockheed was awarded with a new multibillion-dollar recurring contract to provide maintenance and logistics services.
Lockheed stands to make an additional $527 billion dollars thanks to cost overruns, design flaws and unforeseen maintenance expenses before the conclusion of the F-35 program’s 66-year life cycle. In other words, the longer the F-35 program is allowed to continue — and the worse the fighters perform and the more flaws that have to be fixed — the more Lockheed is paid.
Lawmakers must choose taxpayers, as well as the brave men and women piloting America’s fighter jets, over lobbyists and business interests and move on from the disastrous F-35 debacle.
this is a fight among the Military Industrial complex titans
none of us have a say
If the democommies and the top pentagon brass want to get rid of it, then in my mind it is indeed a fine system.
I don’t believe them.
We see you
Maybe Lockheed should spend more time on fighter design and less time on diversity seminars
https://www.city-journal.org/lockheed-martins-woke-industrial-complex
With GE engines.
Having been in the military industrial complex for 33 years, I can tell you the engineers were always realistic and put in the right caveats. But none of those made it into the final presentations where everything was going to go like clockwork, easy-peasy. And, sure enough, more often than not, exactly what the engineers predicted happened. In the case of Future Combat Systems, it appeared that lying and fraud was rampant.
This is the success of the DOD acquisition bureaucracy, which is completely out of control. It is an enormous system of bureaucracy upon bureaucracy that drive the cost to the moon and performance to the basements excruciating bureaucratic process by excruciating bureaucratic process - aided and abetted by an army of contractors in DC whose job is not to provide hardware but to support the DC bureaucratic process by putting it on meth and steroids at the same time - bulking it up and driving it insane.
“Congress’ nonpartisan watchdog agency agrees” (GAO)
Um, sure. The GAO is always right, isn’t it?
Article mentions NGAD as replacement for F35. NGAD is meant to replace F22 for air superiority, which means it won’t be nearly as capable for air to ground missions. Also, the author sited $1.2 trillion as if that has been spent already. That number, which is high, is for the life of the F35 program.
Second, costs for the program have come down to the point that current build F-35 airframes cost the same as new build F-15EX aircraft that the Air Force is so ga-ga over to replace their aging F-15Cs instead of upgrading the Cs. The accounting is suspect to say the least. "We can't afford $10 million per plane to modernize the F-15C, so we need to spend $130 million on a new replacement plane instead."
And last, the F-35 has been performing well both exercises and training. This "boondogle" of an aircraft was just selected by Switzerland as their next fighter to replace their aging F/A-18s over the Rafale, Eurofighter, and F/A-18E Super Hornet, mainly on the strength of the F-35 having the lowest lifetime operating costs of the aircraft offered.
I'm tired of this chicken little chickenshit about the F-35. It is a solid aircraft, and getting better.
For close ground support just sub out 10 F-35s for 1000 A10s lol
Pure propaganda. Talk to the pilots that fly it if one really wants to know how awesome the F-35 is. It completely dominates at all the red flag exercises. It is true we’re not going to need as many F-35s as first thought due to the emergence of our 6th Generation fighter now being readied for production.
All we here from the Mainstream Media is that 1 F-35 can singlehandedly take on the entire Russian Air Force. Just to put this in perspective…3 F-35s could pay for the “Big Dig” Debacle in Boston!
We are going to get it handed to us by J-20s and SU-57s.
Seems like those big ole companies like lockheed-martin & boeing end up getting top heavy. Some of that top heaviness is in kickbacks to congress members and K street people.
The solution to one bloated, overpromised and underperforming program is another hyped, untested (but new!) program?
Yea right. That’s what they said about F-35 back when it started, when it was the JSF.
NGAD will be no different. The problems with “defense” contracting are not a bug, they’re a feature. Being able to milk the taxpayer for solutions to problems you created is the way the industry runs. They know it and that’s the way the business works.
How is the A10 going to provide close air support in someplace like Taiwan, for instance?
The Warthog is a great platform. Unfortunately, it can only operate in a theater where we already enjoy air parity (at worse) and more likely, air superiority to say nothing of a forward air base. The F-35 is designed to establish that air superiority that makes it possible for less capable aircraft, like A10s, helos and troop transports to operate.
See the difference? Two planes with two ENTIRELY different missions.
The cost per hour to fly one of those things wouldn’t even buy one Hunter Biden painting.
Too bad we didn’t spend the money on more F-22s. Instead the fabrication machinery and dies were destroyed and there will never be another F-22 built, ever.
At this point we should be looking at the F-15SE (Silent Eagle) a semi-steath version of the still-reliable F-15.
It is kinda embarrassing, though, to have fall back on a fighter developed in the 1960s.
Thanks for posting that, I came here to say much the same thing.
There is a lot of outright misinformation in that article. One example is in regards to the stealth coatings peeling off at supersonic speed. What actually happened is in one instance, there was damage to the coatings near the engine nozzle due to the afterburner plume. That kind of damage would do nothing to reduce stealth from the front/sides, which are the only directions the F-35’s stealth was intended to address. Regardless, the extent of the problem seems small, and will likely be easily addressed going forward.
To amplify on your comment about performance, pilots have been uniformly positive about the capabilities of the F-35. IR sensor coverage completely around the plane (2π solid angle), combined with the VR helmet, is a game changer. So is the system/computer integration, which greatly reduces pilot workload allowing the pilot to concentrate on tactics.
China is fielding numerous stealthy aircraft now. We absolutely need stealthy aircraft to counter that, and NGAD is a LONG ways away. It faces most of the same challenges that the F-35 faced at inception, and will no doubt receive the same negativity from naysayers. The F-22 is good, but we have few of them, nor can they be based on aircraft carriers or small airfields (as can the F-35B, the real leap forward among the F-35 variants - go Marines!).
All of the above is in addition to numerous allies relying on a robust and long-lived F-35 program.
It won’t be cancelled, this article is misguided and a fantasy to boot.
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