The F-35 may be unsalvageable

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

The 2021 reviews of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) are in, and they are not glowing.

On Jan. 14, 2021, then-Acting Department of Defense (DOD) Secretary Christopher Miller labeled the JSF a "piece of [expletive]." Then, on March 5, 2021, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) called the program a "rathole," and asked whether it was time to stop spending that much money for "such a low capability?"

The JSF has become the embodiment of the DOD's broken weapons acquisition system, which has been on the Government Accountability Office's High-Risk List since 1990. The F-35 was originally conceived as the low-end of a high-low strategy consisting of numerous cheap aircraft that would replace Cold War workhorses like the F-16 and A-10 among other aircraft. The plan was for the JSF to be complimented by a smaller fleet of more advanced fighters, to be developed later.

The program has been under continuous development since the contract was awarded in 2001 and has faced innumerable delays and cost overruns. Total acquisition costs now exceed $428 billion, nearly double the initial estimate of $233 billion, with projected lifetime operations and maintenance costs of $1.727 trillion.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-f-35-may-be-unsalvageable/ar-BB1eZTYE

[regnaD kciN]

1. Half-a-trillion dollars down the rathole already...

...but, of course, we can't even consider Medicare For All because of Teh Deficit and Fiscal Responsibility.

[area51]

10. THIS.

How many people's lives could have been saved by giving them healthcare for the $428 billion?

[rickyhall]

2. How do you screw something up that badly? And Trump had nothing to do with it.

[Mosby]

3. This is a hit piece.

More than a dozen countries have bought this aircraft, its the most advanced 5th generation fighter currently available. Combined with the F-22, gives the US complete air superiority.

[VMA131Marine]

4. It is definitely a hit piece.

Not a remotely balanced assessment.

[flotsam]

5. In the last week

an F35 fired a round that "exploded prematurely" and caused over a million dollars of damage to the F 35 that landed successfully. If a single round cooks off and causes over a million dollars of damage and the plane can still land it is a POS.

[speak easy]

6. Dust off the F-22s.

The best fighter. Ever.

[EX500rider]

9. So the F-35 costs too much so get one that costs twice as much while doing less?

The F-22 can do air superiority but the F-35 can carry significantly more ordnance, launch off carriers and do VSTOL depending on model.

[speak easy]

7. The F-35 is the sort of boondoggle

that gives dogs a bad name.

[Kid Berwyn]

8. They knew, going in, it wouldn't work.

...Part of the enormous cost has come as a result of an effort to share aircraft design and replacement parts across different branches of the military. In 2013, a study by the RAND Corporation found that it would have been cheaper if the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy had simply designed and developed separate and more specialized aircraft to meet their specific operational requirements...

Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-went-wrong-with-the-f-35-lockheed-martins-joint-strike-fighter/

[EX500rider]

11. I doubt the RAND study would work out in the real world.

Designing 3 separate 5th gen planes is unlikely in the end to cost less then designing one, even if the one is more complicated.

Even planes designed and 1st built in the '70's now cost over $70 million.
For example the new 4th Gen F-18 Super Hornet's are around $70 million and the F-15-EX is about $88 million.
And neither are as capable as the F-35 in over the horizon engagements.

If the F-35 was as bad as these stories make out South Korea, Israel, Japan, Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Singapore, UAE etc. would not be buying them.

[Kid Berwyn]

13. What the reality shows supports RAND.

Even by Pentagon terms, this was a dud: The disastrous saga of the F-35

The military-industrial complex spent $2 trillion building a "flying Swiss Army knife." Now it's been shelved

By LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV
Salon.com, FEBRUARY 27, 2021

Excerpt...

The F-35, on the other hand, can't fly at twice the speed of sound. In fact, it comes with what amounts to a warning label on its control panel marking supersonic flight as "for emergency use only." So it's OK to fly the thing like a 737, but if you want to go really fast, you have to ask permission, which promises to work really, really well in a dogfight. What are pilots going to do if they're being pursued by a supersonic enemy jet?

The F-35 will carry four different air-to-air missiles, six air-to-ground missiles and one anti-ship missile, but the problem is, all of them have to be fired from the air, and right now, the F-35 isn't yet "operational," which means, essentially, that it's so unsafe to fly the damn things, they spend most of their time parked.

Take the problem they have with switches. The developers of the F-35 decided to go with touchscreen switches rather than the physical ones used in other fighters, like toggles or rocker switches. That would be nice if they worked, but pilots report that the touchscreen switches don't function 20 percent of the time. So you're flying along, and you want to drop your landing gear to land, but your touchscreen decides "not this time, pal" and refuses to work. How would you like to be driving your car and have your brakes decide not to work 20 percent of the time, like, say, when you're approaching a red light at a major intersection?

But it gets worse. The heat coating on the engine's rotor blades is failing at a rate that leaves 5 to 6 percent of the F-35 fleet parked on the tarmac at any given time, awaiting not just engine repairs, but total replacement. Then there's the canopy. You know what a canopy is, don't you? It's the clear bubble pilots look through so they can see to take off and land, not to mention see other aircraft, such as enemy aircraft. Well, it seems F-35 canopies have decided to "delaminate" at inappropriate times, making flying the things dangerous if not impossible. So many of them have failed that the Pentagon has had to fund an entirely new canopy manufacturer to make replacements.

Continues...

https://www.salon.com/2021/02/27/even-by-pentagon-terms-this-was-a-dud-the-disastrous-saga-of-the-f-35/

Truscott’s piece was written earlier this year. What I did not include in the excerpt is equally infuriating. The plane is a lemon.

The Scientific American piece was 2017. Here’s an important takeaway for those who never met a weapons system they didn’t like:

The Pentagon is trying to argue that just because taxpayers have flushed more than $100 billion down the proverbial toilet so far, we must continue to throw billions more down that same toilet. That violates the most elementary financial principles of capital budgeting, which is the method companies and governments use to decide on investments. So-called sunk costs, the money already paid on a project, should never be a factor in investment decisions. Rather, spending should be based on how it will add value in the future.

[machoneman]

12. When a bunch of foreign countries bought the F-35, trained pilots, mechanics and more, it proves...

...the aricraft works and works well. Keep in mind these same allies, 12 so far at a minimum, had and still have a lot of other excellent, modern and very capable fighters they could have bought.

They did not.

It proves to me the F-35 is a keeper.

[EX500rider]

14. "F-35 Hitmen Put U.S. And Partner Lives At Risk"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davedeptula/2021/03/29/f-35-hitmen-put-us-and-partner-lives-at-risk/?sh=7a92560568cb