Senior Air Force Officer: The F-35 Is An Epic Waste

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has already been discussed in two previous posts on this blog, the first, The F-35: A Flying White Elephant, on March 8, 2013, and the second, Flying White Elephant Succeeds in Knocking out a Tank , on October 31, 2013.   As I wrote previously, "The entire program is now expected to cost taxpayers nearly $1.51 trillion; Each individual plane is now estimated to cost $160 million - more than double the $74.5 million the DoD initially estimated they'd cost."

Here's the lastest chapter in the ongoing saga of the worst military boondoggle in the history of the Untied States of America, as published by Business Insider in an article entitled, Senior Air Force Officer: The F-35 Is An Epic Waste, a reprint of  Britain 'should consider scrapping F-35 stealth fighter' by Defence Correspondent Ben Farmer that originally appeared in The Telegraph of London.
 
Excerpts:

"The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter being built for British and US forces is based on outdated ideas of air warfare, it is claimed. The aircraft could be unable to evade enemy radar and be too expensive for long campaigns. The critique in the US Air Force’s own journal concludes that the new fighter may even have “substantially less performance” than some existing aircraft."

“Specifically, its performance has not met initial requirements, its payload is low, its range is short, and espionage efforts by the People’s Republic of China may have compromised the aircraft long in advance of its introduction.”

"Advances in Russian and Chinese radar defences mean it is not clear that the stealth technology will still work, the analysis warns, adding: “The F-35 might well be the first modern fighter to have substantially less performance than its predecessors.”

Farmer cites a 24-page analysis entitled The Comanche and the Albatross...About out neck was hung by Col. Michael W. Pietrucha, USAF, published in the May-June 2014 issue of Air and Space Power Jounal.  Col. Pietrucha concludes:

"The F-35 program has long since passed the point where we can expect it to provide a substantial improvement in a broad war-fighting context over its predecessors. Designed for a European conflict that did not occur and a threat environment less advanced than the present one, the F-35 program offers little improvement over its predecessors and demands vast resources from diminishing funds."

Do you care that hundreds of millions of dollars of your money--our taxpayer money--are being squandered by an out-of-control coterie of Pentagon generals and their cronies in the aerospace industry?  

Do you care that those multi-trillion dollar boondoggles  are rubber-stamped by a supine and complicit Congress, whose venal and obsequious senators and representatives are bought and paid for like cheap hookers by those same aerospace companies and are pocketing tens of thousands of dollars in barely-legalized bribes?

If so, then Col. Pietrucha's study is well worth reading.