Author Topic: The F-35: Super High-Tech, But Worth the Headache for the Pentagon?  (Read 260 times)

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rangerrebew

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May 8, 2021

The F-35: Super High-Tech, But Worth the Headache for the Pentagon?

Expensive fighters provide advanced military capability, but also provide jobs and investment across a broad swath of communities. The F-35 exemplifies this, and in fact, internationalized it.
by Robert Farley Follow drfarls on Twitter L

Here's What You Need To Remember: Let there be no mistake: This is a bad process, both for aircraft development and for democracy. But it also seems to represent the only way that advanced democracies can convince their constituencies to cough up enough cash to pay for increasingly expensive aircraft.

The “New Century Series” proposal offers a dramatic organizational and technological solution to the problem of modern fighter acquisition. However, politics may offer the biggest obstacle.

People want a new vision of fighter procurement because of the disasters associated with the F-22 and the F-35. Neither process generated a bad plane; the F-22 remains the world’s most dominant fighter, and the F-35 is coming along despite a long series of hiccups. But in both cases, the process generated a cascading series of political dilemmas that endangered the projects and created uncertainty for all the participants. This led to the cancellation of much of the Raptor buy and has turned F-35 acquisition into a political crisis in several different countries.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/f-35-super-high-tech-worth-headache-pentagon-184735

Offline SZonian

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Writer is an idiot, but then again, that's the style of those on that site.  Tomorrow, another writer on that site will come out saying that the F35 is the greatest thing since sliced bread.  But I digress.  Politics killed the F22 in favor of other "projects"

F35 costs are still coming down as efficiencies are wrung out. 

Make no mistake, I'm not defending Lockheed, they really deserve a black eye for their ineptitude, incompetence and mismanagement in the early years of the program.  But the F35 packs a crap ton of technology into it that no other aircraft has seen or will see for quite some time, so those complexities take some time to sort out.

Sadly, I really believe you're going to see more and more incompetence in programs in the future thanks to companies promoting "wonder kids" into management roles.  I'm seeing it right now on one and if they are an indicator, the future is quite bleak.  Glad that I'm just a few years off from retirement and won't have to endure them and their ilk much longer.
Throwing our allegiances to political parties in the long run gave away our liberty.

Offline PeteS in CA

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Expensive fighters provide advanced military capability, but also provide jobs and investment across a broad swath of communities. The F-35 exemplifies this, and in fact, internationalized it.

So parts for the F-4 Phantom weren't built outside of the US?

Parts for the F-14, F-15, and F-16 weren't built outside of the US?

Love or hate "internationalizing", the F-35 is just the latest in a decades-long "internationalizing". If the NationalInterest article author is that ignorant, how much more ignorance did (s)he pack into that article?!
If, as anti-Covid-vaxxers claim, https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2021/robert-f-kennedy-jr-said-the-covid-19-vaccine-is-the-deadliest-vaccine-ever-made-thats-not-true/ , https://gospelnewsnetwork.org/2021/11/23/covid-shots-are-the-deadliest-vaccines-in-medical-history/ , The Vaccine is deadly, where in the US have Pfizer and Moderna hidden the millions of bodies of those who died of "vaccine injury"? Is reality a Big Pharma Shill?

Millions now living should have died. Anti-Covid-Vaxxer ghouls hardest hit.