Did The U.S. Air Force 'Water-Down' The F-35 Capabilities To Meet Deadlines And Congressional Demands?

Photo: Lockheed Martin

David Axe, War is Boring: We Have Proof the U.S. Air Force Watered Down the F-35 to Avoid Embarrassment

Flying branch is rushing new stealth fighter into service despite flaws, limited fighting capability.

On May 18, 2012, the U.S. House of Representatives dropped a figurative bomb on the U.S. Air Force. Fed up with delays and cost overruns on the U.S.-led international F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program — an ambitious effort to replace nearly all the thousands of jet fighters in the U.S. military and allied air arms with a single basic model — the House wrote language into the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act requiring the Pentagon to set deadlines for bringing the F-35 into service.

This was a problem for the Air Force’s Air Combat Command, which oversees most of the flying branch’s fighters and which had hoped to take a wait-and-see approach with the complex, failure-prone F-35, a single-seat, single-engine supersonic stealth fighter that the military hopes will be able to strike targets on the ground and in the air with equal prowess while also evading detection by enemy sensors.

Update: US Air Force Diluted F-35 Capabilities to Meet Deadline, Congress’ Demands -- Sputnik

WNU Editor: Unbelievable .... the F-35 program has missed all deadlines and budget caps ..... and it just keeps on getting worse.