Word: programed
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...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 Gates told Congress that its recent cost and schedule snafus were "unacceptable." And while the Pentagon is not about to kill the program, the rush to push the plane down the assembly line and into the skies highlights the nation's continuing inability to pit its limited resources against real threats...
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...
...response to what I consider to be unacceptable delays and cost overruns over the past year, this department has taken a number of steps to fundamentally restructure this program," Gates told a House panel on Wednesday. "I have replaced the [F-35] program manager ... while withholding more than $600 million ... from the lead contractor" - that would be Lockheed Martin, the nation's biggest defense firm, the same company that built...
Just last summer, Gates toured the huge Fort Worth, Texas, factory where the F-35 is coming to life and declared himself satisfied. "My impression is that most of the high-risk elements associated with this developmental program are largely behind us," he said. Cheaper F-35s rolling off the assembly line seemed to bolster the wisdom of Gates' earlier decision to kill the F-22 fighter, because cheaper F-35s could fill any resulting...