F-35 news. It's not about first production planes...it's about the combat capable lie!

via Daily Beast.

The U.S. military has signaled that it might cancel essential upgrades for more than 100 early model F-35 stealth fighters flown by the Air Force, rendering the radar-evading jets incompatible with many of the latest weapons.
In that case, some 6 percent of the flying branch’s planned 1,700-strong F-35 fleet would be unfit for combat, sticking U.S. taxpayers with a $20 billion tab for fighters... that can’t fight.
Experts say the military never should have bought the planes the first place, as they rolled out of Lockheed Martin’s Fort Worth factory before the F-35’s design was complete and thoroughly tested—a deliberate strategy called “concurrency” that the military hoped would speed up the program’s progress.
“The risk that the services would be stuck with less-than-capable aircraft is one that the Pentagon knowingly took when leaders decided to overlap the development and testing of the program with the production,” wrote Dan Grazier, an analyst with the Project on Government Oversight in Washington, D.C.

Story here. 

We covered this a week or so ago but it appears that the mainstream media is just catching up to the story thanks to the Think Tank pushing it.

Awesome.

But its also apparent that the talking points have been rolled out and passed along to the trolls to tamp down the outrage.

What are we hearing?

6% or something like that of the F-22 weren't upgraded.  They say the same applies to every fighter that has ever been produced.

I don't know.

What I do know is that this is the first time we've put a plane into production before testing has been completed.

But even that misses the point.

What is the point then?

The USAF and USMC declared these planes combat capable.  Now the program office is stating that they might not upgrade almost 200 planes to MAKE them combat capable because it would be too expensive.

That means someone lied.

That is the freaking story!

There is no need to get into the weeds on this.  A bird's eye view tells you everything you need to know.  This isn't about numbers or costs (even though the costs are mind blowing).  This is about trust.  Military leadership is trusted.  If they lie about procurement then they'll certainly lie about operations, combat deaths/injuries and even about how well a fight/war is going.

It's just that simple.