The chasm between contractor and client was on full display on June 19, 2013, when the Pentagons chief weapons tester, Dr. J. Michael Gilmore, testified before Congress. He said that less than 2 percent of the placeholder software (called Block 2B) that the Marines plan to use has completed testing, though much more is in the process of being tested. (Lockheed insists that its software-development plan is on track, that the company has coded more than 95 percent of the 8.6 million lines of code on the F-35, and that more than 86 percent of that software code is currently in flight test.) Still, the pace of testing may be the least of it. According to Gilmore, the Block 2B software that the Marines say will make their planes combat capable will, in fact, provide limited capability to conduct combat. What is more, said Gilmore, if F-35s loaded with Block 2B software are actually used in combat, they would likely need significant support from other fourth-generation and fifth-generation combat systems to counter modern, existing threats, unless air superiority is somehow otherwise assured and the threat is cooperative. Translation: the F-35s that the Marines say they can take into combat in 2015 are not only ill equipped for combat but will likely require airborne protection by the very planes the F-35 is supposed to replace.
These programs exist to siphon as much money as possible from the taxpayer. What wins wars is lots of cheap, but effective, stuff and good strategy.
Thing is, there hasn't been a real war between world powers for quite awhile. Is this going to happen sometime soon?
Back in the WWII days... it took real skill to drop bombs and dogfight... now they can't fly a plane/jet into combat because it needs software?!
And the idea of the F-35 replacing this just makes me LOL:
http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/NFS4/A-10_Thunderbolt_II_In-flight-2.jpg
Seems like they keep making that same mistake of trying to have one airplane capable of all tasks, and it never really works.
I know it's not an apples to apples comparison, and backers of the program even say as much in the article, but I still can't wrap my head around the fact that the proposal for the Lightweight Fighter Program was instituted in 1972, the YF-16 first flew in 1974, the YF-16 was chosen over the YF-17 in 1974, and the F-16A entered operational service in 1980.
The JSF program was initiated in 1996, the X-35 first flew in 2000, contract was awarded in 2001, and the earliest IOC for any F-35 variant is December 2015 (and you know that will be probably pushed back multiple times).
WTF?
Didn't they try that with the F-4 Phantom?
I beg to ask though, with the cost in combat aircraft going up, is a plane that costs 6 or more times than currently available aircraft really 6 times more capable? No. The basic designs of current fighters are easily adaptable to upper 4th gen standards like AESA and semi-stealth.
And the idea of the F-35 replacing this just makes me LOL:
Consider this: the air force’s non-stealthy A-10 Thunderbolt II—a close-air-support aircraft that the Marines routinely call upon and which the F-35 is replacing—can carry 16,000 pounds worth of weapons and ordnance, including general-purpose bombs, cluster bombs, laser-guided bombs, wind-corrected munitions, AGM-65 Maverick and AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles, rockets, and illumination flares. It also has a 30-mm. GAU-8/A Gatling gun, capable of firing 3,900 rounds a minute.
By comparison, the F-35B, which the Marines insist they will field in 2015, will carry two AIM-120 advanced air-to-air missiles (which protect the F-35 from other aircraft, not grunts on the ground) and either two 500-pound GBU-12 laser-guided bombs or two 1,000-pound GBU-32 J.D.A.M.’s. In other words, a plane that costs at least five times as much as its predecessor will initially deploy carrying one third as much ordnance and no gun whatsoever.
But Us Weekly and Vogue don't hire Peabody award-winning journalists who are ex-CIA employees, as the author of the article is.WTF, isn't Vanity Fair like a pop/fashion type of magazine? Not sure how much trust I'll put in their reporting on an issue like this, but could be an interesting read.
Lockheed has no competition so they sit on their asses and milk the Pentagon. This winner-take-all contract was, in theory, save money, but it destroyed any hope of competition. The Pentagon should have let either Boeing or Northrop to compete with Lockheed to build the 5th generation fighter.
Lockheed Martin won the contractworth more than $200 billionafter the much-chronicled Battle of the X-Planes. In truth, it was not much of a competition. Boeings X-32, the product of a mere four years work, paled next to Lockheeds X-35, which had been in the works in one form or another since the mid-1980s, thanks to untold millions in black-budget funds the company had received from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a supersonic short-takeoff and vertical-landing aircraft.
Yeah, but according to the article, the "competition" was merely a formality:
For ten cookies can anyone guess what these two have in common?
They keep finding that you can get 80% of the capability at 20% of the cost by cramming modern avionics into 80s airframes...which is downright embarrassing for the defense contractors.
So Boeing's new X-32 lost out to a plane that was designed long ago?
For ten cookies can anyone guess what these two have in common?