The F-35 is the most expensive weapons program in history, with a total cost of $1.5 trillion.
The F-35 program has been plagued by cost overruns and delays, has been grounded twice, and even has been criticized by those within the Pentagon.
The $1.5 trillion that will be spent on this wasteful Pentagon program is an enormous sum. It is equivalent to the cost of the sequester.
Join our broad coalition as we work to build support at the grassroots to pressure our lawmakers to rethink their commitment to this costly weapons program.
F-35 Bad Deal 
Great site.Keep up the great work.This aircraft is all about Lockheed raping the taxpayer and giving us an inferior product.We need to go to a fly before buy.Companys need to build it and fund it themselves then present it to the goverment for purchase.We need laws that protect the taxpayers and sensible thought when it comes to our defence.
This is an era of modern dark ages. Huge military complex of certain so called advanced countries are robbing the collected taxes from people who earn through hard workings. The intellectual elite must participate to rectify this evil .
Nye Commission Report 1932. General Smedley Butler : War is a Racket 1932….. and still we marvel as though this waste is something new!
As president, Dwight D. Eisenhower somewhow stated that the military industrial complex most be controlled, something to be feared. We cannot let coorporate tycons and corporativism rule America and americans. America deserves more respect.
shared this on my Facebook page. Norm Dicks was my congressman, I wonder if he was a supporter of this program? I don’t think we have any of the construction from LM here.
I hope that you don’t take this the wrong way but that video was a bit overly polite in its criticism of the F-35. Christine Moore has both English and French versions of her criticism of the F-35 on youtube. Both Adi and the Canadian Beaver Band have songs on the F-35 on youtube. Will try to put a bit of basic content on MN ASAP’s page to pass along to you.
We don’t need this.
Support life, not death.
Please rethink this costly, weapons program. We can do better than this.
Wedon’t have 1.5 trillion to waste on that plane.Spend that money on fixing our terrible roads and bridges.
If I was a shareholder, then I would say we all need this jet.
Unfortunately, I am not !
If I was a shareholder, then I would say we need this plane, not matter what.
Unfortunately, I am not a shareholder.
What a waste. And all those congressmen who talk about wasting money on foodstamps. One of these planes would amount to all we spend on foodstamps. Its’ time to rethink our priorities and get rid of money wastes like this plane!
No airplane should be bought before it has been tested. Private industry that wants to sell our military equipment , should develop the system themselves. That would be an incentive to do it right. To play Devils Advocate, they said the F-18 was a terrible airplane too, and we know it is not.
Where is th humanity in all of this?
The F-35 JSF aircraft designs will not meet specification nor the operational requirements laid down in the JSF JORD (Joint Operational Requirements Document) by significant degrees, noting that these operational requirements and resulting specifications, themselves, were predicated on the capabilities of the cold war threats from an era past and subsequently subjected to the illogical and deeply flawed process known as CAIV (Cost As and Independent Variable).
The designs of all three JSF variants are presenting with critical single points of failure while even the most basic elements of aircraft design (e.g. weight, volume, aerodynamics, structures, thermal management, electrical power, etc.) will almost certainly end up in what Engineers call “Coffin Corner”.
In essence, the unethical Thana Marketing strategy is using to sell the JSF, along with the acquisition malpractice of concurrency in not only development, the production and testing but the actual designs of the JSF variants, themselves, have resulted in the JSF marketeers writing cheques that the aircraft designs and JSF Program cannot honour.
For more information on why the F-35 can’t cut it into the modern battlefield.
http://www.ausairpower.net/jsf.html
Australia was sold the deal not the product, we where in the same position in 1939, we had nothing.
As a former and now retired aerospace company engineer, I have witnessed first-hand the incredible foolishness of buying a weapons system before it is fully tested and before all of the inherent development problems have been successfully resolved. As President Eisenhower warned us in 1960, the unhealthy relationship between defense contractors and their government contract monitors is a serious ethics problem that is partly responsible for the incredible cost overruns of the F-35 and other high-cost defense procurement programs.
By the way, who is the F-35 supposed to protect us from anyway, the Chinese, the Russians? Does anyone really believe that either of these two potential adversaries is going to spend $1.5T on deploying their own versions of this ineffective contraption? Certainly not China, they appear to be spending most of their R&D dollars on developing and building new electronics plants to further erode our shameful balance of payments deficit with that country. If the present trend continues, they won’t have to defeat us in battle but can just buy us instead or cause us to go bankrupt by withdrawing their enormous trove of T-bill holdings.
The F-35 JSF aircraft designs will not meet specification nor the operational requirements laid down in the JSF JORD (Joint Operational Requirements Document) by significant degrees, noting that these operational requirements and resulting specifications, themselves, were predicated on the capabilities of reference cold war threats from an era past and subsequently subjected to the illogical and deeply flawed process known as CAIV (Cost As and Independent Variable).
The designs of all three JSF variants are presenting with critical single points of failure while even the most basic elements of aircraft design (e.g. weight, volume, aerodynamics, structures, thermal management, electrical power, etc.) will almost certainly end up in what Engineers call “Coffin Corner”.
In essence, the unethical Thana Marketing strategy is using to sell the JSF, along with the acquisition malpractice of concurrency in not only development, the production and testing but the actual designs of the JSF variants, themselves, have resulted in the JSF marketeers writing cheques that the aircraft designs and JSF Program cannot honour.
For more information on why the F-35 can’t cut it into the modern battlefield.
http://www.ausairpower.net/jsf.html
Fifth generation is just a trade mark name – otherwise meaningless.
Thanks! 🙂
“According to that Pentagon report, Ms. Moore reported, the F-35 was no good in temperatures under 15 degrees and pilots should avoid clouds even in good weather.”
http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/03/07/the-commons-think-of-the-f-35-as-a-senate-with-wings/
I worked at the facility in Fort Worth in the Engineering Test Laboratory for 27 Years. Trust me every thing about the cracks appearing in the test aircraft are true. The ground test aircraft and there are 3 of those, are cracked in so many places on bulkheads, longerons, aircraft skin that all testing has been stopped.
There have been many repairs attempted and some were done so badly out of incompetence while the guilty parties are busy pointing fingers at each other and claiming not to be at fault. Some repairs have been made to the airframe but now the data gathered from these test aircraft is compromised. As far as it’s use to determine the strength and longevity of the airframe can’t possibly be of much use.
It’s no wonder that in the fleet the reliability has gone way down and the problems continue to escalate.
Almost all of the work accomplished offsite by others has to be reworked by those in the lab before any testing can be accomplished. Some of this rework requires days, weeks and in some cases months to correct prior to testing.
These problems are not isolated to just the lab but includes the assembly line as well in fact on the assembly line the problem is magnified just by the number of individuals affected and the extra amount of time required to assemble the finished aircraft.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
I’m here at Luke AFB, where the F35 has just landed permanently for training. They’re moving the F16’s out because of this. Huge, huge mistake. Luke AFB will be no more before we know it, eliminating tens of thousands of jobs for the local area. So sad.
Thank you for this informative website. I live in the UK, where in spite of swingeing austerity cuts, the government is committed to spending £2.5 billion on F-35 fighter jets. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26124894
I hope my country won’t buy that thing. There are plenty of other planes – why not European-made ones? – for a country as small as mine that will do the job just as well.
It is time that foreign nations stop buying American military products only to suck up to America. We are America’s allies, not America’s slaves (or the modern day equivalent of “slave”).
One (and only one) problem with this video. Almost everyone like these people said the same things about the F14, F15, F16, A10, and F18. Then, Israel’s Wars, the Libyan shoot downs, and the first Gulf War proved them all wrong. Despite the development problems, that has plagued all Fighter Aircraft for almost a century, a trail by combat is the only true decider in the history books.
With that said, they are 100% right about all the money spent. People, both military and civilian, should be in prison for this BS Development Method. For the same amount of money the F-22 problems would have been fixed and we would have money left for more F-22s. And OH…… Someone should have went to Prison for that BS too.
Knowing what I do about these things after working 25 year for DoD as an enlisted Flight Operations Specialist and Civilian Specialist, I can say that this system of acquisition will bankrupt DoD and America if we continue to operate in this manner. The trouble being, they don’t operate in any OTHER manner. Military aircraft acquisition had it’s heyday when the Boeing Tankers and Bombers were refined to function in our defense inventory. These aircraft were absolutely Cost-Effective assets. The C-130, T-38, T-37 and C-141 were also quite cost-effective aircraft. I have ALWAYS maintained that the Department of Defense CEASE the reemployment of Military Career enlisted and officer personnel in ANY civilian capacity. These so-called “Double Dippers” are the most obvious factors in our current acquisition debacles. It would behoove the Pentagon to employ people who understand economics and cost-effectiveness, and NOT military politics, schmoozing and pulling strings in order to purchase these aircraft and other assets. As we can tell, those “Lifers” who salute the flag with a tear in their eye when these contracts are developed and approved will disappear before your eyes when their products start to malfunction.
Maybe you all missed a little thing: the initial purpose of this program was NOT to build a great plane (challenge accepted 🙂
It was to kill the foreign competitors by aborbing a HUUUUUGE part of the credits allocated to the defense departments of the U.S allies.
For example several european countries have bought it: all this money is going to the U.S industry, not to the european one. The aim of this long shot is to jeopardize the future of this sector (no customers no money, no money no innovation, no innovation no new cool products, no new cool products no new customers…).
The first kills are the Eurofighter and the Rafale (supposed to be bought by the europeans countries…). The next ones will be americans (the A10 is one of them, more to come). Friendly fire.
(hello from a french guy … ooops excuse me from a cheese-eating surrender monkey).
No one ever seems to figure out that Lockheed Martin probably has 2 sets of books on what these aircraft cost.. To the public and government the prices is $165 million per plane. But in the other set of books it’s probably far way less. They then take that extra profit they make off each plane and put it towards the R&D of their black-ops aircraft like the TR3B which are those flying black diamonds that have exotic propulsion systems that are classified as anti-gravity drives.
The only thing I disagree with here is the focus on the blame. The government is the customer, the specifier, the giver of contracts for campaign donations. It’s cronyism, not democracy or capitalism. It’s Harvard boys consorting with West Point boys using taxpayer money in a game of fraudulent monopoly.
The first people to go to jail should be congressmen who paid for the privilege of having tax dollars flow to their districts through Northrop. True that Northrop made plenty of money, but that cash is a small fraction that $1.5 trillion.
To claim that the pentagon “got sold a bill of goods” by some cheap corporate huckster reflects more on the incompetence of the customer than the seller. Due diligence anyone? You don’t get that out of the Federal Government. They have no incentive to care and consequently, they don’t.
The British buy of this aircraft is paid for by production for others purchases. The only real cost to the British will be horrendous maintenance and flight costs.
That is why the British will , almost certainly , buy enough for their aircraft carriers and no more.