>>13787696Failure was rewarded and success was punished in government contracting. As a result, monopolies formed where the goal was to grift rather than deliver. This bloated timelines from years to decades. We have a superior technology based, but outside of outliers like Tesla/SpaceX, our pace of innovation in hardware/software is absolute garbage when involving defense initiative--and these failures are publicly visible to the rest of the world, which to an extent is avoiding those same pitfalls.
This is essentially creating an outcome where in the near future, our own stature will be surpassed by other nations that are no longer held by similar bureaucratic failures.
>F-35>The program received considerable criticism for cost overruns during development and for the total projected cost of the program over the lifetime of the jets. By 2017 the program was expected over its lifetime (until 2070) to cost $406.5 billion for acquisition of the jets and $1.1 trillion for operations and maintenance.Half a trillion dollars to built the platform and its variants and another 1.1 trillion to operate and maintain it. $1.6Tn to build a fucking jet, and it took ~12-15 years to do it. By the time it entered service formally, drone warfare was basically taking off--so the platform is arguably obsolete already.
