“No, it shows my disgust as a taxpayer.”
ALL development programs suffer growing pains, more so when the state of the art is being expanded as it is with the F-35. It is essentially 3 programs in one, albeit with unprecedented parts commonality amongst the 3, but LMT did not attempt to make a single variant perform all 3 missions. That would be folly - see the F-111. The liftfan concept for the S/VTOL Marine variant has been widely praised for its ingenuity and superior performance, still with supersonic capability! Be patient, the program isn’t in production yet...
JC
As time goes on, the commonality is going down, not up, the price is going up, not down, and the TCO is going through the roof.
There have been umpteen project managers over the life of the project and now we’re closing in on a per-unit acquisition cost double initial estimates and a program cost approaching $1 trillion (with a “T”) dollars.
That’s absurd.
As a taxpayer, I don’t have to be patient. If the contractor cannot bring it in on time and on budget, then they should be canned or the project canned if no one else will bring it in on time, on budget.
I’ll remind you that the U-2 came in under time, under budget. The SR-71 came in under time, under budget - two past projects of Lockheed where they had only one customer and one mission. Likewise, we’ve gotten more than our money’s worth out of a large number of platforms over time (eg, B-52, C-130, F-16), but when we go into multi-mission, multi-nation projects, the costs go through the roof.
Any multi-nation project, even for a single-mission, will see costs that go through the roof.
I’m really not sympathetic to the notion that we should consider other countries’ acquisition requirements or their mission requirements in our warfighting platforms. I really don’t care about their needs. I care about our needs. If they want a shiny new fighter, they can pay for it out of THEIR tax monies.