The foreign purchase entanglement and moral hazard of overspending of the F35 is emblematic of making a two trillion dollar purchase over time where the money is simply wasted but driven to completion by the sheer momentum of the insane and imbecilic US military acquisition system.

If you have read my blog here at LI, you know I take the F35 to task all the time because it is a warning for today and far into the future on what NOT to do. The F35 fiasco has literally stripped the US military capability to fight in the 21st century peer combat theaters of this century.

The military value of a weapon program is the only valid justification for its expense. If someone does feel the need to defend a program, the argument should be based on the weapon’s demonstrated effectiveness and its centrality to the nation’s defense. If a weapon doesn’t work or can’t be purchased in the numbers the services need, then what is the point?

The American people today spend far more on defense than they did just a generation ago. Pentagon spending levels are nearly 50% higher than they were in the year 2000. That extra money has been sunk into numerous acquisition failures. The Littoral Combat Ship, the Army’s Future Combat System, the Zumwalt-class destroyer, the KC-46 aerial tanker, and the Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle are just a few significant disappointments from the past 25 years.

The system is clearly broken. The incoming Trump administration will have to take drastic steps to rein in the excesses of the past 25 years. With influential people now at least unwittingly admitting the F-35’s failures, it could be a good starting point. Cancelling the program outright would be very difficult because of all the foreign entanglements that were baked into it from the beginning. But limiting production until engineers complete the F-35’s design may send the proper signal to the defense industry that the status quo is intolerable.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/f-35/