Lockheed-Martin's F-35 Lightning II stealth multirole fighter is one of those development boondoggles that we've become all too familiar with, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Elon Musk's DOGE boys are looking at perhaps canceling it.
The Spectator's Teresa Mull wrote Wednesday that while in Hegseth’s view,“'efficiency' does not equate to funding cuts (he wants DoD spending to increase), one quick and easy way to curb waste right out the gate would be to abandon the F-35 fighter jet, fire every senior person involved in its commission and put in place systems to ensure that such horrors never happen again."
Seriously, the development of the jet was that bad.
Although I'm certain that the entire program needs the green eyeshade treatment from DOGE, I don't think that Mull made the case that the F-35 is a “totally flawed” “monster" that the Air Force, Marines, and Navy should "cease using."
It's a short article and even shorter on specifics.
One specific detail left out is that, despite the jet's unspecified "871 unresolved deficiencies," the F-35 is the safest jet to fly in our arsenal. "The Air Force's F-15 Eagle has a lifetime Class A accident rate of 2.36 per 100,000 hours of flight, with a spike early in the Eagle's flying career and a relatively low accident rate 10-30 years after reaching operational status," while the Air Force jet the F-35 is meant to replace, the F-16, "has a lifetime Class A rate of 3.45 per 100,000 hours."
The F-35's accident rate is 1.5 crashes per 100,000 flight hours. That's the lowest for a new jet, ever.
It's such an overpriced, useless hunk of jet that [checks notes] countries like Belgium, Japan, and South Korea that weren't even in on the development contractor dollars can't seem to buy enough of them. That's one helluva endorsement.
Pilots seem to love it. The F-35's god's-eye view of the battlespace and its ability to share that data with many other platforms in the air, on land, or sea increases the lethality of everyone fighting alongside it. That's a unique capability, and it would be missed.
And Another Thing: While my wife is a former employee of Lockheed-Martin, she didn't work anywhere near the F-35 program. I own no shares in the company.
But I'm more than willing to be proven wrong here because I believe in two things. The first is that America needs the best jets and that our pilots deserve the best jets. If the F-35 isn't the best, then we need to start working on the F-36 or whatever, pronto. The second is that American taxpayers deserve something better than the screwing-over we typically get from the Pentagon and its contractor buddies — and that our entire arsenal needs a second, third, and fourth look.
At the very least, DOGE should take a high-powered loup to the F-35's maintenance costs. While production costs have come down nicely — a fully modern Air Force F-35A (without the fancy VTOL or carrier requirements of the Marines' F-35B and the Navy's F-35C) is $82.5 million. The latest version of the F-16 — an impressive upgrade but still based on a 1970s airframe — is about $65 million.
Not exactly a bargain, but it's certainly in line with its greater capabilities. Still, maintenance costs are too high, and readiness is too low. Maybe the mere threat of DOGE will convince Lockheed to offer a serious discount on those maintenance costs.
If Hegseth and the DOGE boys do decide to kill the program, my advice would be to kill it slowly. Milblogger (and retired Navy officer) CDR Salamander devised a rule about procurement that goes something like this: don't stop building the Current Thing until the New Thing is ready to go.
Indecisiveness and development delays with big-ticket items like the NGAD stealth fighter and the navy's Ford-class aircraft carriers have left us dangerously dependent on aging platforms like the F-22 and the Nimitz-class carriers that, frankly, we built too few of.
So, if the F-35 needs to die, then make its replacement a high-priority/high-speed job. In the meantime, keep making F-35s, perhaps at a lower rate of production, until that replacement is ready to fight.
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