F-35: The Pentagon’s Trillion Dollar Turkey

The Pentagon and Lockheed have created an aircraft project that has been struggling for 23 years at a cost to American taxpayers of $1.7 trillion! It is long past the time to kill the F-35 fighter.

The joke about the camel being a horse designed by a committee has a new twist. The Lockheed committee that designed the F-35 fighter got a turkey. Twenty-six years and two trillion dollars later, that turkey became the world’s most expensive weapon system.

We’re used to talking about big numbers these days, what with the Biden administration running up our national debt to $34.8 trillion. So let’s step back and try to comprehend the size of the numbers attached to the current projection for the lifetime cost of the F-35 weapon system – first, focus on $2 trillion being two thousand billion dollars. That means (adding fixes and cost overruns) if the F-35 project was a county it would rank ahead of Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Australia and Brazil.

The Endless F-35 Flaws

So what did we get for $2 Trillion? We got a jet that costs $44,000 for every hour it’s in the air – twice the cost of an F-15 Eagle, a F-16 Fighting Falcon or an F/A Super Hornet.

We got a fighter with a readiness rate of 46%. That means if we have to go to war this afternoon more than half of our F-35 fighter force would be left on the ground because they don’t work as advertised.

We got a fighter that is already obsolete. As a former naval aviator, my sympathy is with the highly trained pilots assigned to an F-35 squadron. If their stealthy aircraft systems don’t protect them, they have the prospect of a fight against far superior aircraft unless they are escorted. Lockheed and the Pentagon know that. How can you tell? America has been at war since 9/11 and the F-35 hasn’t flown a single combat mission. The Pentagon understands bad publicity, so it sent F-35s to Iraq and Afghanistan so they could claim it was a combat war machine. With regard to combat the A-10 Warthog, on the other hand…

We got a fighter – the Air Force F-35A – with an internal 25mm Gatling gun, the GAU-22, with an annoying tendency to crack its mounts and other parts of the airframe. The cannon was put on the F-35A for two reasons: an Air Force desire to replace A-10 Warthogs with the F-35 and to reassure the Pentagon that the F-35 can attack enemy ground targets. Neither of those unlikely events has yet happened. As you might suspect by now, there are also limitations and problems with the GAU-22.

(The photo below is an F-35A using its 25mm gun on a firing range.)

The F-35A’s gun is fed by a magazine that holds180 25mm rounds. That gives the pilot 3 seconds of firing time, even in one-second bursts. The A-10 has a magazine that holds 1150 30mm rounds that gives its pilot 18 seconds of firing time. Additionally, the 30mm round has much greater penetration and explosive power than the 25mm round.

(The photo below is an A-10 at work in Afghanistan.)

There were so many public and private arguments about the F-35’s gun and the Air Force plan to have the F-35 replace the A-10 Warthog and its famous 30mm Avenger cannon, that comparison flights were arranged in 2018 and 2019 between the F-35A and the A-10. Reports that were made available of those live comparisons are heavily redacted, but words still leaked out like, “fix the F-35A gun.”

We got a fighter with eleven internal fuel tanks that need a computer to control the pumping system between the tanks. Why? Because the F-35 has a center of gravity problem that affects it’s controllability in flight. As a result, pilots say it takes a flight of four F-35s half an hour to complete air-to-air refueling. Operators work around that time problem by half-filling the F-35 tanks. Not a swell idea for a fighter’s range or loiter time in a combat theater.

Airborne refueling of the F-35Cs will get even more difficult when the small MQ-25 tanker drones replace the Navy’s KC130 tankers. That drone can only fill three quarters of the tanks in one F-35C. The Pentagon doesn’t want to talk about all this -- because it can’t be fixed.

We also got a fighter that can’t go supersonic to evade attackers or missiles. Why? Because to reach Mach1 in an F-35 means its pilot must ignite his afterburner, which triples his fuel burn rate. Not only that, but the F-35 Program Office also says the fighter can’t go supersonic with its afterburner even for a minute or two without damaging its stealth coating and “the myriad antennas located on the back of the plane that are currently vulnerable to damage.” That means if an F-35 goes supersonic to avoid being shot down and survives, it will have degraded stealth capabilities and damaged antennas that need to be replaced.

Lockheed, the Pentagon, and the Air Force have quietly dropped the term “supercruise” to describe their 5^th generation turkey. Supercruise means a fighter can reach Mach1.6 without using its afterburner. That implies the F-35 is not a 5^th generation air dominance fighter. Which of course it’s not.

Other fighters have been able to supercruise for 70 years, like the British Electric Lightning was able to do in 1954. Today, the F-22 and Su-35 can supercruise at Mach1.6 without using afterburners. That’s the F-35’s top speed -- with its afterburner.

As early as 2008 the RAND Corporation analyzed the program and stated the F-35 is inferior and “can’t turn, can’t climb, can’t run.” In 2013 an Australian analyst doubled down on RAND and wrote that the F-35 in combat would be “clubbed like baby seals.”

Why F-35 Funding Has Become Endless

Why is the seriously flawed and hideously expensive F-35 project being allowed to continue, year after year, with the blessings of the Pentagon and Congress? Besides insider-trading Senators and Congressmen, who also get “contributions” to their PACs by Lockheed Martin lobbyists, the main cause was the way the Pentagon sold the project to Congress.

The Lockheed pitch was – besides a promise of work in many states – that the new plane will be a low-cost, single engine fighter to replace the F-16 and the F/A-18 Hornets. It would be designed to complement more expensive fighters like the F-22 and the Navy’s F/A-18 Super Hornet.

Then the design-a-plane-by-committee took over. What was to be a relatively inexpensive and lightweight fighter gradually metamorphosed into a very expensive single-engine aircraft that was even heavier than a twin-engine fighter.

Problems Too Difficult To Solve

The enormous weight of the F-35 has forced Pratt & Whitney to design an engine with a much higher power-to-weight ratio than even the F-22’s marvelous engines. The only way that Pratt & Whitney could achieve the thrust needed to lift the F-35’s weight was to increase the engine’s turbine inlet temperature far beyond any engine they had ever built for a fighter – 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit.

The huge temperature increase -- 900 to 1,100 degrees – guaranteed the engine would have reliability and longevity problems. That sad guarantee is being fulfilled today.

Then there is there is the rising cost of maintaining the F-35.

Unbelievably, the Pentagon does not control the data for the F-35 program! Lockheed does. As a result, the Pentagon cannot provide the data to other more competitive companies. They can’t even give Air Force maintenance crews access to technical data needed for much of the maintenance work done on the F-35. Lockheed Martin has an absolute monopoly on the highly profitable maintenance contracts for the program.

To add insult to incompetence of Department of Defense contract lawyers, Lockheed says it can reduce the F-35 problems – but only if it’s given an exclusive contract covering all F-35 maintenance!

Help Is On The Way

The Trump administration will have a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

Musk is already on record about manned fighters in today’s wars by saying, “Unmanned aircraft have been used effectively for the past two decades. Standoff munitions launched from aircraft flying beyond the enemy’s air defenses are also a viable alternative. The U.S. Army is in the process of developing five long-range, precision fires systems that will be capable of striking targets up to 1,000 miles away. Cruise missiles currently in the inventory and emerging hypersonic missiles under development now mean there are plenty of alternatives to manned aircraft to strike distant targets.”

Those two billionaires will find out that the F-35 program represents everything that is wrong with the Pentagon. They will also learn that the Department of Defense, that spends more on defense than the next ten largest militaries on the planet combined, can only produce a $2 trillion F-35 turkey after 23 years of development. I reckon the F-35 program will disappear much faster than it took to create. Hopefully overnight.

Vivek and Elon also understand numbers like billion and trillion. Therefore they will also understand that $2 trillion will buy 400 Virginia class fast attack submarines or at least 150 Columbia class submarines – the ones that launch intercontinental ballistic missiles. Or even 800 Arleigh Burke destroyers.

I am happily waiting for DOGE to park the ill-starred F-35 alongside all the other obsolete military aircraft in our Arizona boneyards.