Word: pentagonals
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...test flight over Maryland last week, the Pentagon's F-35 jet fighter landed vertically for the first time - like a helicopter - as it was vaunted to do. But at just about the same time, its price tag was climbing in the other direction. A Swiss Army knife of the skies, it's designed for vertical takeoff and landing to please the Marines and their smaller ships, while more conventional versions are slated to satisfy the demands of the Air Force and Navy. All of a sudden, however, the F-35 is in big trouble. On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Robert...
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...
...strange predicament for the modest jet that was supposed to be the 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...
...Europe, Russia and the Far East. The U.N. reckons Marjah has the world's highest concentration of opium production. So Operation Moshtarak is more than a military offensive; it is also the biggest counternarcotics operation ever attempted. It marks a new emphasis by the White House and the Pentagon on choking off the Taliban from their drug funds and ending their support among the Pashtun tribes of southern Afghanistan...
...program will be no cure-all for the Pentagon, whose networks are hacked hundreds of times a day. Adriel Desautels, the chief technology officer at Netragard LLC, a Massachusetts-based antihacking outfit, says that while "it's better than nothing," there are simply too many vulnerabilities to protect the Pentagon's estimated 10 million computers. Desautels likens it to 1,000 Dutch boys trying to stop water from flowing through a dike springing millions of leaks. "The threat is defined by the real black hats, and it's impossible to know what the black hats are researching," he says...