The Air Force Just Bought 100 Stealth Fighters That Can’t Fight

thedailybeast.com

The U.S. military has signaled that it might cancel essential upgrades for more than 100 early model F-35 stealth fighters flown by the Air Force, rendering the radar-evading jets incompatible with many of the latest weapons.

In that case, some 6 percent of the flying branch’s planned 1,700-strong F-35 fleet would be unfit for combat, sticking U.S. taxpayers with a $20 billion tab for fighters... that can’t fight.

Experts say the military never should have bought the planes the first place, as they rolled out of Lockheed Martin’s Fort Worth factory before the F-35’s design was complete and thoroughly tested—a deliberate strategy called “concurrency” that the military hoped would speed up the program’s progress.

“The risk that the services would be stuck with less-than-capable aircraft is one that the Pentagon knowingly took when leaders decided to overlap the development and testing of the program with the production,” wrote Dan Grazier, an analyst with the Project on Government Oversight in Washington, D.C.