Well, turkeys can fly, can’t they? So what’s the problem? Over at Forbes, David Axe brings us totally predictable (and predicted) news: The U.S. Air Force Just Admitted The F-35 Stealth Fighter Has Failed.
Dan is extrapolating, just a little, from a recent article in Air Force magazine, Brown Launching Major TacAir Study with CAPE, Considering ‘5th-Gen Minus’, based, in turn, on an interview with Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., in which Brownie says he wants the Pentagon’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation to look at a “clean sheet” design for a new fighter jet that will be less sophisticated than the F-35. “Explained” Gen. Brown: “I want to moderate how much we’re using those aircraft [the F-35]. You don’t drive your Ferrari to work every day, you only drive it on Sundays. This is our ‘high end’ [fighter], we want to make sure we don’t use it all for the low-end fight … We don’t want to burn up capability now and wish we had it later.”
If you take the general literally, it sounds like we’ll have six times as many of this currently non-existent winged Ford F-150 as we have Ferrari/F-35s.
It appears, in fact, that the wheels, and the wings, of the whole $1.75 trillion F-35 charade are starting to come off in no uncertain manner. The right-wing Washington Examiner has a post up by Tom Rogan, Pentagon and Lockheed Martin heads should roll over F-35 disgrace, loudly seconding House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith for his description of the F-35 program as “failure on a massive freaking scale.”
Tom outlines the F-35’s near-infinite operational problems in some detail, quoting from the latest DoD report on the F-35 as follows: “software changes, intended to introduce new capabilities or fix deficiencies, often introduced stability problems and/or adversely affected other functionality ... the overall number of open deficiencies has not changed significantly since the completion of [the System Development and Demonstration stage] due to ongoing discoveries of new problems.” Which is to say, the more they fix it, the worse it gets.
I thank Tom for doing the legwork here, but must remark that he goes sadly awry when trying to explain why the darn thing cost so much, drawing a report from the Project on Government Oversight for the following: “lawmakers and Pentagon leaders have failed to impose accountability,” Tom says. “Lockheed Martin's F-35 team, for example, once charged taxpayers nearly $17,000 for a single golf cart. It also purchased large televisions, printers, and other equipment unjustified under the government contract. Contractors also left hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of taxpayer-purchased equipment uncovered in the rain.”
Well, golf carts, tv sets, and printers don’t add up to much. The real reason the F-35 costs so much, and delivers so little, is that the point of the F-35, like so many government programs, is simply to spend money as an end in itself. I explored this trope pretty extensively in a long, rambling post from Jan. 2020, Old Man War Machine, he jes’ keep rollin’ along, though you have to sort through about 20 column inches of assorted kvetches and groans before you get to the part about military spending, and why “heads” never “roll”. Because the big guys did their job! They spent hundreds of billions of dollars! With the very best intentions! So now you know where we’re headed, and why we’re going there!
