I know you’re as fascinated as I am – admit it. It’s like every horrible project we’ve all ever been involved with, rolled up in one, and with the entire budget of several countries at stake.

Unfortunately with vast amounts of money at stake, there are also political lies, vendor lies, and completely disinterested analysts who totally don’t own shares in Lockheed-Martin or any of its competitors, all trying to make sure that those of us who just read news are not deceived by anything at all. I try to sort through it, by assuming that almost any news story is probably a product placement.

I wrote about this story when I first started the blog, and all of my readership were eager to learn about the eldritch horrors that lurked in the basement of the largest military procurement, ever. [stderr] At that time, we discussed the “pay more, get less” paradigm, in which a defense contractor and the client (in this case the totally uncorruptable US Air Force) work together to manipulate the price of an aircraft years after a procurement contract has been signed. For example [all numbers SWAGged] the Air Force agrees to buy 30 F-35s. Lockheed Martin’s sales guys say “Sure, we’ll give you the 30-unit pricing, which is $250 million each. Sign here.” ($7.5 billion) Then, don’t you just know it, there are cost overruns and the cost of carbon fiber goes through the roof so Lockheed Martin comes back and says “we need $300 million per plane, since you guys are strictly VIP Lounge members, I’m sure that’ll be OK.” The Air Force asks Congress for a bit more money and tells Lockheed Martin, “sure, that’s fine.” But then there are program overruns, bar bills, and development delay and the Air Force starts to worry a bit, so they tell Lockheed Martin, “tell ya what. Just sell us 23 planes and let’s go with the original $7.5 billion price tag.” See what happened? The Air Force just allowed $1.5 billion in cost overruns but the money has already been appropriated and, since congress is mostly interested in funnelling defense pork into its districts, they don’t care. Now, the planes are not $300 million apiece, they are $326 million. And, so it goes. The F-22 which was, legitimately, a pretty good plane, had its acquisition curtailed because after a few rounds of “pay more, get less” the Air Force wound up with something like 50 F-22s, but 25 of them were already obsolete because things like the radar, which was not developed in lockstep with the plane, is no longer compatible with the first version. “Sure!” the Air Force shrugs and turns them into spare parts. Then a couple wear out, 2 or 3 crash, and pretty soon the Air Force realizes it only has enough F-22s to do flyovers at football games. I believe the Air Force made a big deal out of sending a few F-22s to go prowl around Raqqa while the US was bombing ISIL, who were mostly a threat to themselves. Anyhow, the plane went remarkably quickly from “Wow this thing is great” to “we don’t have enough to use for anything real.” They don’t even have enough to give to Ukraine, apparently. OK, that’s a jab, but they probably won’t give any to Ukraine because they’re afraid a Russian spy might see one (in spite of them showing them off at Army/Navy day every year, and demonstrating their performance in countless air shows). An expert combat pilot can take a look at how a plane performs and tell a lot about it.

I have, elsewhere, referred to the F-35 as “the plane that ate the Air Force” and I’ll stand by that. Like the F-22, they pushed it out of the hangar for a few flights, to bomb ISIL. Don’t spend any time thinking about how pathetic is is that there were stealth fighter/bombers dropping 500lb bombs on individuals with AK-47s – individuals who had no anti-aircraft capability at all except to shoot in the air and hope they hit something. All that stealthy technology was useless. You know what they needed? A-10s. Except the Air Force was in the process of shutting down the A-10 program so its budget did not compete with the F-35’s. So, the combat history of the F-35 is real, in the sense that it exists, and that’s a big feather in everybody’s cap. [The F-22 is super cool and looks great at air shows but it’s not as nimble as an F-16 and a lot of cringing happened at the Air Force as they envisioned their amazing dog fighting demon losing over and over and over and over and over and over and over to F-16s]

So everybody (by which I mean nobody) will be shocked to learn that the Air Force is already increasing its “pay more, get less” for F-35s.

“Procurement request documents obtained by Bloomberg show revised figures for F-35 deliveries in 2026, with the USAF receiving only 24 jets rather than 48.” [theaviationist]

The per-plane price just doubled, without doubling. Before the program gets killed, I predict it will double and double again.

The original plan for the F-35 was that it would be a great dogfighter, a hardcore bomb-sled, and OK at ground support. In fact, like one of those weird folding multi-tools, it’s capable of giving your fingers a nasty pinch, but it’s got too much wing-loading to be a knife-fighter, not enough bomb capacity to serve as a strike fighter, and not enough fuel to loiter for ground support, unless the enemy have prominently marked themselves on a map so the strike can bore straight in. I guess the good news is that there won’t be a lot of experimental dog-fighting against F-16s because this thing doesn’t dog-fight as well as an F-22, which means that F-16s – which were designed in the late 1970s – would snack on F-35s. Meanwhile, a new budget drain has opened up, namely the Turnip-47 or whatever they’re calling it, which is basically an F-15 with greater, bigger, gnarlier engines and a gold stealth coating. [The bit about the gold is not intended to be truthful]

Imagine that you show up at your new workplace, ready to kick some ass and take names, and find out that they’re already scouting your replacement. Don’t cry for the F-35, and don’t cry for Lockheed-Martin because 1) they already got paid and 2) Boeing will be building the F-47

Meanwhile, I have mentioned elsewhere that the F-35 had some problems with its logistics. Probably the #1 worst idea in the program was that all engine repairs (except ours, natch) were to be performed in Turkey. That was before one of the Turkish aerospace companies leaked all the CAD data to Chinese spies who took it (natch!) but the Chinese were cunning enough to see it was a trap and did not attempt to build F-35s of their own. I imagine they use it as course materials in their aerospace engineering program. Anyhow, one of the other big problems with so much stealth and secrecy is that you can’t just find a local mechanic. In fact, things like the replacement turbine blades are un-attainable except from the US. Many evil, bad, European  countries looked at the logistics and said, “what?” Meanwhile, Saab is offering technology partnerships with any country that buys more than a certain committment level of Saab-ness. All of that makes a certain amount of sense – the idea of having a combat aircraft logistical system that reports constantly the the US might have been an apparent problem, to the extent that it makes me wonder if Lockheed-Martin ever actually thought the aircraft would be finished.

The detailed parts analysis in the F-35 seems great on paper, because it will tell you, in principle, “you flew 12 strikes on civilians in Gaza and your weapons-bay doodlehoodle needs maintenance. Click here to order parts from Georgia, USA.” That’s cool – total lifecycle management. Except that real planes are not that predictable.

“24 Experts Arrive In Kerala To Repair Stranded British F-35B Fighter Jet” [ndtv]

Now, that is promising. Imagine you’re an Israeli air wing commander, and you need that F-35 to bomb some civilians in Gaza – then, suddenly one of your planes breaks down somewhere half across the world and you discover that a Globemaster is 1 foot too narrow to fit the plane. As of current writing, because of the difficulty in learning how anyfuckingthing on an F-35 works, and unavailability of parts, it has been sitting there since early last month. This is not exactly a showstopper, but it’s embarrassing as hell for everyone involved, and it’s grounds for serious doubts in everyone else.

The Kerala Tourism Department was the first to share an image of the aircraft on social media with a humorous caption, and this was quickly followed by similar posts from Milma (Kerala’s dairy cooperative), the Kerala Police, the State AIDS Control Society, and several private organisations.

That is genius marketing. So is this: [defasia]

Just this February, senior U.S. officials renewed their push to entice India into the F-35 club, arguing that the world’s most prolific stealth fighter would close the technological gap with China’s expanding fleet of J-20s — which are already operational across multiple Eastern Theatre Command bases — and counter Pakistan’s expected acquisition of China’s J-35A, a naval stealth derivative widely dubbed Beijing’s “mini-F-35.”

And then there’s the Russian marketing:

Although the Su-57 trails the F-35 in certain stealth metrics and Western avionics sophistication, Russian designers point to key advantages: a vastly superior aerodynamic performance, extreme agility with thrust-vectoring engines, double the combat range compared to the F-35B, a higher missile payload, and powerful radars tailored for multi-domain operations.

Crucially, Russia sweetened the deal in May with an unprecedented proposal to grant India full access to the Su-57’s source code — a level of transparency and customisation the U.S. has never entertained for the F-35.

Under Moscow’s plan, the Su-57 sale would come bundled with a broad license-production arrangement, enabling Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) to manufacture large sections of the stealth fighter locally while absorbing advanced technologies that would directly benefit India’s indigenous AMCA fifth-generation program.

An important thing to remember is that stealth is a very short-lived technology. Once someone figures a way around it, then suddenly it’s no longer “Super Plane” it’s just “Bob, a Plane” – the Chinese have already published information about their sensor suite that can detect F-35s. The Pentagon’s response: “fake news” somehow would not console me if I was an F-35 pilot. Meanwhile, if you’ve been tracking the unfortunate reality simulation we are all trapped in, the US used some B-2 stealth bombers in Iran, which it flew from California, to Iran, and back, so they did not have to land anywhere and get ogled by hoi polloi. It’s funny to see people complaining about the “carbon footprint” of all the private jets that the rich and shallow flew to Jeff Bezos’ wedding, when the cabron footprint of that little B-2 round trip was probably 100 times worse.

I also found it highly amusing that the Indian defense press made a point of mentioning that the broken down F-36 had flown from the HMS Prince of Wales, which is a ship that has had a notoriously painful debugging cycle of its own.

The US strategy for maintaining the mystique of its planes appears to be to never get them in an actual fight.

I just spent a few minutes trying to get Krea and Midjourney to give me an F-35 in the position of a lawn-dart, but the AI does not seem to realize that aircraft do, in fact, do that.

According to google: “at least 3 children have died from lawn darts” and lawn darts (being an obviously bad idea for kids) were taken off the market. Meanwhile, guns are the leading cause of death in children and teens.