When Secretary of Defense Robert Gates went to Chicago last summer to make the case for killing the F-22 — the world’s premier air supremacy fighter and the only “fifth generation fighter” currently in production anywhere — he argued that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter would be a more cost-effectve alternative. Though the JSF “has had development problems to be sure,” Gates said, “It is a versatile aircraft, less than half the total cost of the F-22, and can be produced in quantity with all the advantages produced by economies of scale – some 500 will be bought over the next five years.”
Well, not long after Gates’s speech — and the administration’s successful effort to kill the F-22 — a Pentagon study was revealed showing that the JSF program had again fallen badly behind schedule. Rather than procuring 500 planes by the summer of 2014, as Gates had predicted, the Pentagon now expects to field just one operational squadron (or 12 planes!) of F-35s by 2014. The Air Force will not have its first squadron until 2016. And that is based on an assumption that there will be no further delays in the program — an assumption that only a fool would make.
