F-35 breaks down too often...

via Bloomberg

The Pentagon’s chief weapons tester said the next-generation F-35 jet continues to fall short of full combat readiness targets and, despite some progress on reliability issues, all three versions of the fighter are breaking down “more often than planned.”

None of the Air Force, Marines and Navy variants of the Lockheed Martin Corp. fighter are meeting their five key “reliability or maintainability metrics,” Robert Behler, the Pentagon’s director of operational testing, said in prepared remarks Wednesday before two House Armed Services Committee panels.

Story here.

The circle will be broken.  You can't keep pushing the can down the road.  Eventually they will have to come to terms with this jet being in development for 20 years yet still not meeting basic readiness requirements.

Question.

Name another program that would be allowed to fail on such a consistent basis yet still have supporters?

I can't think of one.

Payloads over platforms.

The F-35 has stunted US missile development.  We have sacrificed our tomorrows for today.  It's pathetic.  We need long range anti-air, long range air to ground and long range anti-ship missiles to meet the future.  But we've failed to put them into place because certain "mafias" inside the US military are so wedded to penetrating manned air.

Pathetic doesn't quite describe it.