"The latest high-level Pentagon review of the trillion-dollar F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program did not go well for the Lockheed Martin-built JSF. But don’t tell the Air Force that. The flying branch is racing ahead with its own JSF training and evaluation, regardless of the Defense Department’s hang-ups.
Last week’s Defense Acquisition Board review by senior Pentagon officials was meant to approve a comprehensive plan for completing the stealthy jet’s more than decade-long test effort, but in a “very painful” four hours, the officials could not agree on the plan, Reuters reported.
The impasse is bad news for the ambitious effort to replace essentially all of the tactical jets flown by the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps with a family of broadly similar F-35 models costing no less than $400 billion to develop and purchase and hundreds of billions more to operate and repair. Since its inception in the late 1990s, the single-engine JSF has grown steadily heavier and more complex, has suffered frequent program delays and technical problems and isn’t slated to be fully combat ready until 2018, at the earliest. At least one aviation expert expects the military to slash its total buy of JSFs".................
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if we quit spending all that money on things, tens of thousands of people will no longer have jobs and we'll have to pay them unemployment, right?
