F’d: How the U.S. and Its Allies Got Stuck with the World’s Worst New Warplane — War Is Boring — Medium

F’d: How the U.S. and Its Allies Got Stuck with the World’s Worst New Warplane — War Is Boring — Medium

by DAVID AXE

From all the recent sounds of celebrating coming out of Washington, D.C., 
you might think the Pentagon’s biggest, priciest and most controversial warplane 
development had accelerated right past all its problems.

The price tag —currently an estimated $1 trillion to design, build and operate 
2,400 copies—is steadily going down. Production of dozens of the planes a 
year for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps is getting easier. Daily flight 
tests increasingly are hitting all the right marks.

Or so proponents would have you believe.

“The program appears to have stabilized,” Michael Sullivan from the 
Government Accountability Office told Congress. “I’m encouraged by
 what I’ve seen,” chimed in Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, head 
of the program on the government side. When War is Boring asked 
Lockheed spokesman Laura Siebert about the F-35, she said she expected 
a “much more positive” article than usual owing to what she described 
as the program’s “significant progress.”

---

But the chorus of praise is wrong.

---

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter — a do-it-all strike jet being designed by 
Lockheed Martin to evade enemy radars, bomb ground targets and shoot
down rival fighters — is as troubled as ever. Any recent tidbits of 
apparent good news can’t alter a fundamental flaw in the plane’s design 
with roots going back decades.

Cont...