F-35 warplane costs driven up by production choice: U.S. general

[unhappycamper]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/19/us-lockheed-fighter-bogdan-idUSBRE91I01120130219

F-35 warplane costs driven up by production choice: U.S. general
CANBERRA | Mon Feb 18, 2013 7:24pm EST

(Reuters) - A decision to start production of Lockheed Martin Corp's F-35 fighter jet before it was fully tested has driven up the $396 billion cost of the troubled project and increased risks, the U.S. general heading development of the warplane has said.

~snip~

"A large amount of concurrency, that is, beginning production long before your design is stable and long before you've found problems in tests, creates downstream issues where now you have to go back and retrofit airplanes and make sure the production line has those fixes in them," Bogdan told ABC's Four Corners program late on Monday.

"That drives complexity and cost. Let's make no mistake about it. This program still has risks, technical risks, it has cost issues, it has problems we'll have to fix in the future," he said in his first interview on the problem-plagued F-35.

Australia's government is looking at buying 24 more Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornets amid continuing delays and setbacks in the Joint Strike Fighter project, which is the costliest program in Pentagon procurement history.

[leveymg]

1. The thing was simply ill-conceived, a stop-gap solution, and is now obsolete.

The F-35 was supposed to take an all-things-for-all-missions role. It is so compromised by its conflicting purposes that it turned out to be the Duck-billed Platypus of warplanes, an evolutionary dead-end, and a damned costly one at that.

I say, stop throwing money into this program, take whatever systems can be transplanted, and keep the old airframes flying until a new generation of specialized drones and forward control aircraft can be devised.

In the meantime, don't start any new optional wars.