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: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday June 02 2014, @01:28PM
Same thing happened with the shuttle program, whenever you hear someone in aerospace (or more generally, .gov) claim it'll do everything for everyone all the time for less money, you know it'll be late, fail a lot, and be super expensive.
Yet if you customize and do manual labor for each device to custom craft the best solution, like the pension filing system, they'll get equally savaged for not implementing a multi-billion dollar IT project to fail to replace what a multi-million dollar hand labor department accomplishes.