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The US military's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft is proving to be a pain in the neck in more ways than one. Not only did the Pentagon spend almost $400 billion to buy 2,400 aircraft - about twice as much as it cost to put a man on the moon - the F-35 program is 7 years behind schedule and $163 billion over budget. This at a time when cuts in the defense budget are forcing the Pentagon to shrink the size of the military. CBS 60 Minutes took a closer look at the troubled fighter plane a few months back, but their rebroadcast on Sunday evening seems like as good a reason as any to revisit one of the biggest ongoing budget debacles in U.S. military memory. David Martin gets an inside look at what makes the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter the most expensive weapons system in history.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday June 02 2014, @01:16PM
The F-35 program, like most other military programs, does not exist to protect America, but to protect the profitability of the military contractors involved in creating it.
That's not to say that they aren't doing some interesting work, or coming up with cool technology, or that the engineers are bad people. But the point of the exercise is to transfer as much of the public money as possible to major shareholders of Boeing, and the delays and cost overruns aid that goal.
And remember, stuff like this constitutes at least 1/4 of the US federal budget. But for some reason, fully funding the VA is out of the question. And domestic programs? Fuggedaboutit!
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Informative) by TK on Monday June 02 2014, @01:46PM
Lockheed Martin is making the F-35. Boeing was the second choice for the JSF program, but the Lockheed prototype beat it out.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday June 02 2014, @01:57PM
Thank you for the correction. Not that it makes all that much difference to someone like me, who, like most people, is a stockholder nor employee of either company, but still has to foot the bill.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.