Posted on 02/16/2025 6:57:33 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Lockheed-Martin's F-35 Lightning II stealth multirole fighter is one of those development boondoggles that we've become all too familiar with, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Elon Musk's DOGE boys are looking at perhaps canceling it.
The Spectator's Teresa Mull wrote Wednesday that while in Hegseth’s view,“'efficiency' does not equate to funding cuts (he wants DoD spending to increase), one quick and easy way to curb waste right out the gate would be to abandon the F-35 fighter jet, fire every senior person involved in its commission and put in place systems to ensure that such horrors never happen again."
Seriously, the development of the jet was that bad.
Although I'm certain that the entire program needs the green eyeshade treatment from DOGE, I don't think that Mull made the case that the F-35 is a “totally flawed” “monster" that the Air Force, Marines, and Navy should "cease using."
It's a short article and even shorter on specifics.
One specific detail left out is that, despite the jet's unspecified "871 unresolved deficiencies," the F-35 is the safest jet to fly in our arsenal. "The Air Force's F-15 Eagle has a lifetime Class A accident rate of 2.36 per 100,000 hours of flight, with a spike early in the Eagle's flying career and a relatively low accident rate 10-30 years after reaching operational status," while the Air Force jet the F-35 is meant to replace, the F-16, "has a lifetime Class A rate of 3.45 per 100,000 hours."
The F-35's accident rate is 1.5 crashes per 100,000 flight hours. That's the lowest for a new jet, ever.
It's such an overpriced, useless hunk of jet ...
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
But Air Force Pilots seem to love the F-35. See here:
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/31-pilots-told-us-why-they-love-f-35-stealth-fighter-83606
The F-35’s god’s-eye view of the battlespace and its ability to share that data with many other platforms in the air, on land, or sea increases the lethality of everyone fighting alongside it. That’s a unique capability, and it would be missed.
I can’t wait for the MSM to say Musk will kill it so he can sell the X-35. Of course, he’ll have to buy the name from Lockheed. Maybe he’ll name it the X45/47.
A lot of AF/Navy pilots that post on YT seem to disagree...no names like “Viper” or “Tomcat” or “Warthog”...among DoD pilots the F-35 is known as “Fat Amy”.
My understanding is that the f-35 was designed to be a queen bee attack plane, being supplemented by multiple drones that would act as multipliers to the plane’s capabilities.
RE: I can’t wait for the MSM to say Musk will kill it so he can sell the X-35
What’s with the obsession with the letter X from Elon?
Does the F-35 use the Interwebs to do all that?
To cancel a program without a follow-up plan is just stupidly poor planning kinda like they did with the F-22 and B-1B.
Steven Green, and not a few commenters here on FR, have never strapped a fighter to their butt, never been pointed straight up with zero airspeed, never had an unfriendly at six o’clock, or never wandered hundreds of miles intoI Indian territory on a dark night, yet seem to have expert opinions on the F-35.
The same game was employed against the F-22, and now we have a relative handful of 20-year-old Raptors to fight a war against China while trying to keep Russia, Iran, and the Norks in line.
It will be interesting to see the posts that follow in this thread.
Didn’t Israel use F35s in their recent attack on Iran?
Musk envisons X being a superstop of everything. Equivalents of Amazon, paypal, ebay, your banking, your social media,
I think X is kind of a variable, like in math.
The age of drones is here and we better get in the game.
How about those obsolete aircraft carrier targets we have ordered? 10 of them at $15+Billion each.
Why was the F22 abandoned. From all reports it was a fantastic aircraft. A friend’s son flew them.
I would stop building new aircraft carriers. For the time being, I'll maintain the ones we'll have. But I will have eventually deactivate them because they're obsolete and in the future, they will become a huge liability.
An Aircraft Carrier today is the equivalent of a Battleship during the 20th Century.
Because Obunghole said so.
. Donald Trump changed the game and cut a legit, rational and business like deal with the LMCO CEO that cut out the pols vigorish and allowed long term, streamlined production to allow huge cost savings while cutting politicians power to extort
He saved almost 20 million bucks on the purchase price of the plane and pretty much saved the F-35
The F-35 is a critical program with serious, government induced programmatic issues. The F-35 program needs to be straightened out, not canceled.
Israel reportedly has excellent results from the F-35. However, theirs are modified in various ways and the IAF does its own maintenance.
The upgraded Israeli F-15EX is a better bomb truck for a lot of Israeli situations, and upgraded Israeli F-16s are still very useful.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/israel-just-proved-f-35-fighter-unstoppable-213426
I really wanted to.
I spent some time in the AF Recruiting office the summer after High School discussing the matter.
I was a couple inches too tall & didn’t have 20/20 vision, so the best they said they could do was to put me on a flight crew in a non-pilot role.
I don’t know whether I could’ve cut the mustard and got my wings, but do know a fair shot at burning a supersonic hole in the sky was a helluva lotta incentive.
My money says DOGE doesn’t get the F-35 canceled, but they do find a lotta excess spending that duly, uhh, “eliminated” greatly reduces to unit cost.
Why have a pilot in the aircraft? Having one severely limits the performance capabilities of the platform? There is a seismic shift that is going to happen in every type of war-craft.
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