The F-35's Painful Lessons Must Inform Future Programs

[discocrisco01]

The F-35 program will turn 20 years old this fall. That’s longer than the entire service life of many legendary aircraft programs. The B-36, for example, was retired 13 years after its first flight in 1946. The F-86 went from first flight to retirement in 18 years.

But two decades in and at a cost of $177.6 billion and counting, the F-35 remains functionally a prototype unready for full-rate production. The program still struggles with nearly 900 design flaws, cannot be relied upon to perform well, and is unaffordable in the numbers the services need. The military can and should learn some very important lessons from this painful experience before it commissions another major weapon

https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2021/05/f-35s-painful-lessons-must-inform-future-programs/174166/

[Darwins_Retriever]

1. Lesson 1: Should have awarded the contract to McDonnell Douglas instead

Their design actually met all requirements and was made a subcontractor to prevent a challenge of the award. (Texas was a BIIIIG winner). Who had just won the presidency?

[dalton99a]

2. It's just a self-perpetuating jobs program for the military-industrial complex .

Everyone knows the product is a piece of garbage