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Post by PrisonerOfHope on Mar 26, 2012 23:06:12 GMT -5
With that kind of money, we could feed every starving person in the world... Why the Pentagon’s New Fighter Jet Will Now Cost More Than $1 TrillionVisitors take a closer look at a Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jet at the Singapore Airshow on Feb. 2, 2010. (ROSLAN RAHMAN/AFP/Getty Images) by Cora Currier ProPublica, March 23, 2012, 4:05 p.m. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is the Pentagon’s big plan for future warplanes — it’s slated to replace nearly all of the other tactical jets in the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. But getting there is going to be slow and expensive, as a new government report details. The JSF program is a massively expensive undertaking. It has cost the government $400 billion to date, and is estimated to run more than $1 trillion to develop, buy and support nearly 2,500 aircraft through 2050. A major problem, according to the Government Accountability Office report, is that the program is charging ahead with procurement while testing is still in progress. As Michael Sullivan, one of the report’s authors, told Congress, “the manufacturing processes are just never able to get stable because there's so much information coming in from testing and so many engineering changes that are going on.” In a statement to Congress, the Pentagon officials in charge of the F-35 program said they "have put the program on sound footing for the future" but acknowledged that there was "no more money to put against contract overruns or problems." The GAO report was notably stern. Here are some of its findings. Only a portion of testing is finished: Continued at link: www.propublica.org/article/why-pentagons-new-fighter-jet-will-cost-more-than-1-trillion
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