“Remember when American industry could run-up a brand new fighter from drawing board to prototype to full-scale production in the tens of thousands in about 9 months?”
Well, let’s be honest here. The P-51 Mustang was a lot simpler fighter plane than the F-35 — no computers, no exotic materials, no interoperability requirements, simple structure, etc. The cause of these long lead times is the fact that everything is so complicated. These modern fighter planes so complex, it is amazing they work at all.
They are obviously much more complicated, etc. But then again, our engineering and production capabilities are worlds more sophisticated than they were in 1944.
If one follows the money (which is always instructive), one would be pretty tempted to conclude the aerospace manufacturers were making an everlasting meal out of the project at the taxpayers expense, no?