The U.S. Air Force’s chief of staff wants the service to develop an affordable, lightweight fighter to replace hundreds of aging F-16s and complement a small fleet of sophisticated F-35 stealth fighters. But an affordable, lightweight fighter is exactly what the F-35 was first conceived to be.
No the F-35 was a spectacular success.
Lockheed Martin used it to obliterate Boeing and all other competitors in the bid for that generation of fighter jets.
The key is that they designed a complicated mess of an aircraft (3 actually) and spread out the production of these systems to an obscene number of individual congressional districts, making it impossible for hundreds of grifting lawmakers to refuse the opportunity to "brang the jerbs".
in Soviet Russia factories disingenuously exploit the quota system
Saw a huge thread in the comments of /r/programming of people talking about the variations of "soviet factory overproduces or meets quotas by doing a dumb thing" like making a single 10-ton nail or whatever the fuck, and boy was it annoying
What if the real weapons platform was the half trillion dollars we made along the way
Yep. We've also produced more fighters for less money. The cost per plane is way lower than previous fighter jets. So the program is considered a huge success.
Hm I thought they were super costly per unit
I mean, in raw numbers, yes. But not compared to the F-16 or F-22, for example.