The F-35 tells everything that's broken in the Pentagon
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/542412-the-f-35-tells-everything-t...By Sean McFate, opinion contributor — 03/11/21 01:00 PM EST
It’s official: The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is a “rathole” of taxpayer money, something defense experts already knew — at least those without dubious ties to the military industrial blob. Now the House Armed Services Committee chairman has joined the ranks of the outraged, saying that when he thinks about the F-35, he thinks about “failure on a massive freaking scale.”
The F-35 is an allegory for everything that’s broken in our Department of Defense, which receives more money than the rest of the federal interagency, combined. In fact, we spend more on our armed forces than the next 10 biggest militaries in the world, combined. What are we getting for our tax dollars? Unfortunately, the F-35.
Budgets are moral documents because they do not lie. The F-35 is the most expensive weapon in history, with a projected lifetime cost of $1.7 trillion. That’s more than Russia’s GDP, all spent on a single-seat plane. In fact, if this aircraft were a country, its GDP would rank 11th in the world, ahead of Saudi Arabia. Buying one costs around $110 million a copy, nearly double the price of a Boeing 737-600 airliner. F-35s are also expensive to fly. Each hour in the air costs $44,000, more than twice the cost of the F-15 Eagle, F-16 Fighting Falcon and F/A-18 Super Hornet.
The irrationality of the F-35 goes beyond the price tag — the plane is superfluous. It was devised as a flying Swiss Army knife that could meet the needs of the Air Force, Navy, Marines and Army. Instead, it proves the adage that a camel is a horse designed by committee. It is true that the F-35 can engage in dogfights, drop bombs and spy — just not well. Older aircraft remain better than F-35s at all these tasks. Dedicated bombers can fly farther with larger payloads. The A-10 Thunderbolt, an aircraft introduced in 1977, is better at ground support missions.
Astonishingly, the F-35 cannot dogfight, the crux of any fighter jet. According to test pilots, the F-35 is “substantially inferior” to the 40-year-old F-15 fighter jet in mock air battles. The F-35 could not turn or climb fast enough to hit an enemy plane or dodge enemy gunfire. Similarly, the F-35 struggled to get a clean shot at a 1980s-vintage F-16. The older aircraft easily maneuvered behind the F-35 for a clear shot, even sneaking up on the “stealth” jet. Despite the F-35s vaunted abilities, it was blown out of the sky in multiple tests.
Those who live by technology die by it too. Unsurprisingly, the F-35’s 8 million lines of code are buggy, as are the 24 million lines running the aircraft’s maintenance and logistics software on the ground. Sometimes pilots have to press Ctrl+Alt+Delete while in flight to reboot the multimillion-dollar radar. The F-35 computer code, government auditors say, is “as complicated as anything on earth.” What can be coded can also be hacked, another vulnerability for the F-35.
Hacked or not, buggy computer code grounds aircraft, as does the perpetual shortage of spare parts and critical design flaws that can, for example, melt the plane in flight. Currently, the F-35 fleet is receiving a projected $16 billion software upgrade and other components that are already two years behind schedule and $1.5 billion over budget. The plane’s builder, Lockheed Martin, claims that it could reduce problems — but only if it’s awarded an exclusive maintenance contract. Eisenhower would be spinning in his grave. Or, as a former Pentagon chief weapons buyer put it, the F-35 is “acquisitions malpractice.”
Forum
Pages: 1 
