Quote:
Originally Posted by RN7
On another note the F-35 is a disaster waiting to happen. Nobody has any confidence in its ability to do the job it was has been lavishly funded to do except for Lockheed Martin. However With the economy the way its is the Pentagon may eventually no longer have the funds to keep pouring into the bottomless hole that the F-35 has become. I really hope that the sixth generation F-X fighter is accelerated to replace the F-35 in production
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The ongoing saga of the F-35 is embarrassing and annoying for the US, but let's be honest, the US wastes huge amounts of money in the defence area year after year. For countries like Australia, it's a real problem. We sunk (for us) lots of money into the F-35's development and we're counting on its delivery to fill a capability hole. We've bought a bunch of Super Hornets as a stop-gap measure because the F-35 has been delayed for so long. Australia's defence budget is a tiny fraction of America's, we really can't afford to cover the ever-rising projected per-unit cost of the F-35, and we can't afford to sit around for a decade waiting for the damn things to become combat-effective.