When I started seeing stories about this, my immediate reaction is “someone’s lying.” That’s a given, because exaggerating things just a bit is built into every part of the fabric of US military procurement. As is secrecy, greed, and other bits of Lovecraftian evil. So, take everything here with a grain of salt because public information is mighty thin, right now.
We are presented with a conundrum:
There’s an article on hackaday [h] about a model-builder who is trying to make an ultra-realistic model F-35.
The F-35 program has been a litany of glitches and problems, many as a result of the program’s pork distribution approach.
Back in 2002, I wrote (regarding the US government’s cybersecurity efforts), “adding money to a disaster doesn’t necessarily help get it done, most of the time you just wind up with bigger, more expensive disasters.”
Military technology has a short life-span; anyone who has an advantage immediately becomes a target for spies and scientists trying to figure out what makes it tick. And archeology shows us that military technology breakthroughs spread extremely rapidly, because they are a matter of literal life and death.
How do you steal intellectual property from a capitalist? Just grab it off the boardroom table.
There is enough F-35 news to justify an entire F-35 blog, except the blog would suffer from severe cost overruns and its first posting would be almost a decade from now. And, naturally, it would consist of a fragmentary paragraph that did not say anything useful. What would we call such a blog? Perhaps “This is going to be great but it will cost a lot.”
If you’re talking to someone and they bring up how the government doesn’t have enough money to X for any given X, you can dismiss them as not serious if they are not putting ‘defense’ spending on the chopping block.
“Loses contact with” is not a good phrase, when used in conjunction with an aircraft. This is really not good.