The 'White elephant' Fighter, the F-35.

The 'White elephant' Fighter, the F-35. Via: John Q Public:

As Air Force senior officials prepare for posture hearings this week with the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, the subject of modernization promises to be front and center. Core to that discussion will almost certainly be the limping, $1.4 trillion F-35 program.

Belying the conventional wisdom, which touts the Joint Strike Fighter as something of a futuristic aerial Swiss army knife, the F-35 is proving to be little more than a dull, bent, and unwieldy butter knife — a jack of no trades, master of only one: burning through taxpayer dollars at a rate that would embarrass Croesus.

The bloat of the program is now placing increasingly excruciating pressure on the entire Air Force budget, this despite the F-35 being years from genuine operational capability. The pressure it is exerting is leading to a parade of rhetorical and actual absurdity of the variety that should, under normal circumstances, alarm Congress and anyone else concerned about the future of American defense.

Take, for example, a recent account filed by the nonprofit Project On Government Oversight (POGO), which exposes damning conclusions in the latest F-35 report from the Defense Department’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E).

Among the crippling problems highlighted in the DOT and E report:

• Software glitches disrupting enemy identification and weapon employment.
• A redesigned fuel tank that continues to demonstrate unacceptable vulnerability to explosion from lightning or enemy fire.
• Departures from controlled flight during high-speed maneuvering, a six-year-old problem that apparently will not be solved without sacrificing stealth or combat capability.
• Helmet issues fundamentally degrading pilot situational awareness.
• Engine problems so severe they’re limiting sortie rates, impeding the test schedule, and generating risky operational decisions.
• Nightmarish maintainability issues leading to over-reliance on contractor support.

As these and other issues mount, the F-35 Joint Program Office, led by Air Force Lt. Gen. Chris Bogdan, is apparently employing categorization and accounting schemes that overstate reliability and maintenance rates, masking the true nature of the crisis gripping the program. Hmmmm......And last but not least:  Air Force's F-35 "White Elephant" Has No Code to Shoot Its Gun......in the next four years. Only good news is that the Turkish Airforce bought 100 of these 'beauties'