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The F-35 programme has been an expensive boondoggle for years, despite repeated efforts to bring programme costs under command and deliver a functional aircraft. Current program costs are estimated at $406.5 billion, and that's before y'all gene in repair and maintenance over the lifetime of the fighters. The all-in price is expected to break $1.i trillion over the coming decades, loftier plenty that the Air Force could be forced to slash its aircraft orders by a total tertiary. That's according to an internal Air Force cess on the ongoing status of the F-35, Bloomberg reports.

The Air Force estimates that it must either cut the operation and support costs of the F-35 by 38 pct over the next decade or slash virtually 600 aircraft from its fleet. The current plan is to society ane,763 shipping in total, only if support costs don't come up down the Air Force may reduce its order by 590 aircraft. The report also notes that the Air Force has "very limited visibility" into how the increasing funds it pays to Lockheed for "contractor support" are spent.

The Pentagon expects to spend roughly $38B on F-35 support and maintenance through 2028 and is seeking to cut that by 38 pct. In his most recent report, the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, Robert Behler, wrote:

Reliability growth has stagnated. Information technology is unlikely that the programme will attain the JSF ORD (Operational Requirements Document) threshold requirements at maturity for the majority of reliability metrics. Most notably, the program is not likely to achieve the Mean Flying Hours Between Critical Failures threshold without redesigning shipping components.

F-35-2

The F-35 in flight.

The same report noted that overall armada-broad availability rates remain at roughly 50 percent, the same level accomplished in Oct 2014, despite a significant increase in the number of aircraft. Parts shortages accept really become more common, not less, over the same period of time. The same report documented substantial ongoing problems with Block 3F fighters.

The growth in cost is on the Lockheed side of the equation and is tied to programme management, maintenance, repairs, software development, and overall engineering science. The Air Force is reportedly attempting to gain amend visibility into why these costs are increasing at a time when the program should exist in total swing. The US Regime Accountability Office stated final October that while the F-35 brought unprecedented and unique capabilities to the US military, the out-of-control sustainment costs put the Pentagon at risk "of beingness unable to leverage the capabilities of the shipping it has recently purchased."

The F-35 Is Already Obsolete

A nifty deal of ink has been spilled on whether the F-35 delivers enough improvements and advantages over fighters like the F-16 or F-22 to justify its price. While that's absolutely a valid question, I think it misses a larger signal: Drones take already rendered the F-35 obsolete.

Yous could argue I'thousand jumping the gun, since we don't notwithstanding have a drone capable of flying literally every mission the F-35 is expected to perform (at least, we don't know that we have one). But this is arguing the problem from the wrong style around. The F-35 has been in development for 16 years already; the $one.1 trillion program costs we discussed above contemplate a program that operates through 2070. When the first fragile wooden biplanes flew over the battlefields of Europe, only a handful of mavericks thought the plane or the aircraft carrier would supervene upon the battleship. But information technology happened. Similarly, the German 5-i and Five-2 weren't initially seen as being the forerunners of technology developments that would render unabridged fleets of nuclear bombers irrelevant. In each case, rapid technological development resulted in meaning shifts in military strategy and left older hardware — which was ofttimes incredibly impressive in its own correct — largely obsolete.

I don't know when nosotros'll take a drone capable of flying every single mission the F-35 can handle, but I'd wager it'll exist long before 2070 rolls effectually. It may happen earlier we've fifty-fifty finished debugging the plane, judging by how well that's going.