The F 35 (back) flies alongside the F 16 (front). US Air Force
Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James has admitted to a wide range of past and present problems with the F-35 while maintaining that the fifth-general will eventually guarantee the US continued air supremacy over rivals.
"The biggest lesson I have learned from the F-35 is never again should we be flying an aircraft while we're building it," James said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado last week.
In development stages, "People believed we could go faster, cheaper, better" by designing and building the F-35 concurrently, "and that the degree of concurrency would work. Indeed it has not worked as well as we had hoped and that's probably the understatement of the day," James said.
WNU Editor: This is so typical of how the main stream media covers the F-35 program .... scores of news reports on the U.S. Marine Corps announcement that the F-35 is now combat ready (no mention on the limits that have been imposed because it is not ready for combat) ..... and on the other side only one or two reports on the U.S. Air Force Secretary acknowledging that the F-35 has a "wide range of problems" .... who then tries to reassure everyone that it will eventually (cough cough) be solved. And people wonder why I am sceptical?!?!?!?
3 comments:
WNU Editor,
As reported, the new U.S. carriers, the Littoral Combat Ship, the new U.S. nuke subs, are all being "developed" "concurrently", with bleeding edge technology.
Goodby US Navy.
As the lead times for weapons development have exponentially grown, due to the complexity of the systems, and the urge to add in bleeding edge tech has proliferated, "concurrent development" has been seized upon by the Military, the Politicians and the Corporations,
Rather than the previous policies of continuous improvement.
Continuous improvement creates stable production, ongoing innovation and stable, but reasonable profits.
"Concurrent development" on the other hand, creates a one time lottery win, with a massive, ongoing service costs, that generates massive profits.
TopGun doctrine holds that a Pilot needs at a minimum, 40 realistic training sorties a month, to stay rated. The Air Force F-35A, the most developed and proven model, has at it's best, flown 9 sorties a month. The rest of the time, it's been in the shop, being serviced and repaired.
Are you telling me Jay that you are a cynic too?
:)
WNU Editor,
The Politicians, the Brass and the Corporations don't even bother to pretend any more that it's about Defence,
Instead, they are just trying to shove taxpayers money into their pockets as fast as possible,
I hear that next week, we will be bombing the YPG in Kobane, the week after that, the Yardzi's in Sirinjar, then the Ukies in Kiev.
It's all done so we won't waste the taxpayers money on roads, schools, education, medical care, pensions, or an economy.
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