F-35 news....Why the USAF desperately needs the F-15EX...

via News Max.

“For over two decades, the F-35 has been the symbol of everything that’s wrong with mammoth defense contracts: behind schedule, over budget, and initially, over-sold,” explains an in-depth piece in Popular Mechanics by a reporter who’s followed the F-35 throughout the jet’s life cycle. By trying to eliminate the natural form of competition that having several weapons platforms would provide, the Pentagon ended up creating an inefficient platform that couldn’t accomplish any of its widely ranging needs very well.

“Who gets the blame for a 20-year misadventure?” Popular Mechanics asks. The answer seems to be: Everybody lost the script. “In 2013, the GAO’s Michael Sullivan asserted that Lockheed had failed to get an early start on systems engineering and had not understood the technologies involved at the program’s launch. But a RAND study the same year found the three F-35 variants had drifted so far apart during development that having a single base design may prove to be more expensive than if services had just built separate aircraft tailored to their own requirements from the get-go.”

But it’s not too late to diversify, to provide more variety, and reintroduce competition. To be blunt, it needs to happen and it needs to happen now.

Story here.