> The F-35 is a Ferrari, Brown told reporters last Wednesday
It became a Ferrari due to feature creep and an enormously complex and expensive technology stack. The F-16 is not a Ferrari and NATO needs a multirole single-seat fighter that is affordable to purchase and fly.
My most charitable view is the F-35 became a jobs program for Lockheed Martin and subcontractors. People were trained and (allegedly) useful technology was developed. But the price tag appears unreasonable by an order of magnitude, and this puts no accountability on the program management or people signing the checks.
As for arguments about technology trickling down from the F-35:
* The argument needs evidence. I've seen no attempt to identify the value of the technologies developed against the time and money spent.
* Too much time was surely spent on integration and one-off details specific to the F-35 platform, and this is sunk cost unlikely to be recovered in future platforms designed by new teams.
The US has done this before, they had a winner with the F5E/F-20 Tigershark back in the day, they could have sold those to everyone but they killed the program to boost F16 sales.
It was cheap to buy, cheap to run (like really cheap for the capability which in the case of the F20 matched F16’s of the era) but because the USAF didn’t want to buy them it got cut off at the knees.
Damn thing has a thrust to weight ratio of 1.16 to 1 (it could accelerate in a vertical climb) and do Mach 2, largely because they shoved a single F18 engine in to replace the two much older engines the F5 had.
It became a Ferrari due to feature creep and an enormously complex and expensive technology stack. The F-16 is not a Ferrari and NATO needs a multirole single-seat fighter that is affordable to purchase and fly.
My most charitable view is the F-35 became a jobs program for Lockheed Martin and subcontractors. People were trained and (allegedly) useful technology was developed. But the price tag appears unreasonable by an order of magnitude, and this puts no accountability on the program management or people signing the checks.
As for arguments about technology trickling down from the F-35:
* The argument needs evidence. I've seen no attempt to identify the value of the technologies developed against the time and money spent.
* Too much time was surely spent on integration and one-off details specific to the F-35 platform, and this is sunk cost unlikely to be recovered in future platforms designed by new teams.