Word: evens
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While the nation was preoccupied waging two wars, the F-35 was lurking in the background, devouring dollars like there was no tomorrow. New data suggest that the program - the most costly in Pentagon history after the even more expensive F-22 fighter, which Gates killed - has been out of control. "Affordability," declared an internal Pentagon report critical of the F-35, "is no longer embraced as a core pillar." A too-ambitious design lashed to a too-ambitious schedule has driven up costs so fast and so high that even the Pentagon - long practiced at ignoring such mismanagement - couldn...
...cheap end of the military's high-low warplane mix of F-22s and F-35s. The Pentagon launched the F-35 Lightning II program a month after 9/11. Over the past eight years, the price-per-plane has doubled - from $69 million to as much as $135 million - even as none of the 2,443 on-order planes have been delivered. The program's cost has soared from $197 billion to as much as $329 billion. Plans to profit from prospective sales of more than 700 of the single-engine, single-seat fighters to eight allied nations are beginning...
...ever-changing blueprints, which has led to slowdowns on the production line, which has delayed flight testing. How bad is it? Last year, engineers expected to churn out 200 changes - a month! - to the F-35's design, but actually generated about 500. Even after Gates' restructuring, taxpayers could spend close to $60 billion on more than 300 F-35s before flight testing is finished, meaning costly modifications will be required...
...weapons at the same time it drafts blueprints for them (just like the way you order work on your kitchen addition to begin when the architect is only halfway through her drawings). Carter has conceded that the overlap of design and manufacture on the F-35 is "unprecedented" and - even after Gates' latest changes - "worrying...
...even as lawmakers were fretting on Wednesday that the F-35's troubles spelled risk to U.S. security, Gates urged them to keep cool. He said he had expanded the development period by an additional 13 months and thrown in nearly $3 billion more for the testing program (which completed only 16 of 168 flights slated for 2009). He also slowed production of the plane. Gates insisted that while the program's management had been poor, its technology was sound. "It will become," he said, "the backbone of U.S. air combat for the next generation...