SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 02 2014, @05:46PM
Obama floated that idea for the best place to spend the stimulus money, but Congress shot it down fast because, first, it was something that Obama wanted, and second, that would have mean a lot of money would have gone to construction companies, and a lot of them might be (gasp!) union (i.e., vote Democrat). Keep in mind that this was all done very soon after a major Interstate bridge collapsed and there was a lot of media attention on the crumbling and aged infrastructure, so if you can't get Congress to spend money after a fucking bridge collapses, what chance do you think you can get it to happen now?