Free Republic

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,...

Elon Musk again fired insults at the Pentagon’s F-35 program as he prepares to lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency and advise the White House on how to slash federal spending. The billionaire backer of Donald Trump’s election campaign slammed the “idiots” who continue to build manned fighter jets like the F-35 in a Sunday post on X, adding a trash can emoji. In a separate post on Monday Musk, who is CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX, doubled down. “The F-35 design was broken at the requirements level, because it was required to be too many things...

The Pentagon is facing a difficult decision regarding the F-35’s chronic, crippling problems with overheating brought on by its insufficient cooling capacity.Should the U.S. taxpayers pay for a costly upgrade to the stealth fighter’s cooling that will handle its immediate needs, or should U.S. taxpayers pay for a far more expensive upgrade that theoretically could handle increased future cooling needs?Before we briefly address the two options facing the Pentagon, let’s look at why cooling capacity is so important for the F-35 and why the most expensive weapons system program in world history produced a plane that was destined to have...

The most expensive weapons program in the world is about to experience cuts in the upcoming U.S. Defense of Department (DoD) budget. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a trillion-dollar program to swap out nearly every fighter jet in the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps, will experience procurement cuts under DoD's upcoming "Selected Acquisition Report" (SAR), according to Bloomberg, citing people familiar with information about the weapon's program cost. DoD is expected to order 61 F-35s in the next budget, 33 less than what was planned. The reduction comes as the F-35 program is expected to exceed $770 billion since...