By Giovanni de Briganti April 8, 2015 PARIS — US Air Force plans to replace the F-35 fighter’s avionics, radar and engines are an implicit admission that the current aircraft is already obsolete and that, despite a unit cost of over $250 million, it cannot match the latest foreign fighters coming into service. This is […]
March 12, 2015 Inside-the-Beltway wisdom holds that the $1.4 trillion F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program is too big to cancel and on the road to recovery. But the latest report from the Defense Department’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) provides a litany of reasons that conventional wisdom should be considered politically driven propaganda. The […]
By Winslow Wheeler An Air Force F-35A costs $148 million, each. A Marine Corps F-35B costs $251 million. A Navy F-35C costs $337 million. A “generic” F-35 costs $178 million (the average for the three models). These are production costs only; additional expenses for research, development, test and evaluation are not included. The dollars are […]
Ask a Keynesian: With U.S. Borrowing Capped, Won’t More Pentagon Spending Destroy Jobs? Robert Naiman, Huffington Post I claim that the following is a basic economic fact, which all Keynesian economists should readily acknowledge: in the current federal budget political context, in which federal borrowing is capped under the Budget Control Act, and repealing the […]
Thursday, June 20th, 2013 Washington, DC Journalist Otto Kreisher reports, “In his first major initiative as chairman of the crucial subcommittee Sen. Dick Durbin noted that the F-35 “has had more than its share of problems” and served as “a text book example” of the Pentagon’s procurement woes. Durbin challenged the witnesses to tell him […]
Saturday June 15th, 2013 Burlington VT Please watch this film excerpt from an upcoming documentary of Ben Cohen, entrepreneur, activist, and co-founder of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream explaining why the F-35 is bad for the country and bad for Vermont. Please call me (Chris Hurd) at 802.238.5256 so I can get your name, email address […]
Thursday, June 13th, 2013 Washington DC It’s time to pull the pork from the Pentagon and we should start by defunding the F-35 joint strike fighter program. With a price tag of $1.5 trillion, the F-35 is the most expensive fighter jet ever built and is the single most expensive item in the 2013 Pentagon […]
Saturday, June 8th, 2013 Washington DC Time Magazine is publishing a 5 part series on the F-35 this week. The journalist, Winslow Wheeler, is the Director of the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information, a part of the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) in Washington, DC. He has authored two books: The Wastrels […]
Thursday June 6th, 2013 Washington DC Time Magazine is publishing a 5 part series on the F-35 this week. The journalist, Winslow Wheeler, is the Director of the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information, a part of the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) in Washington, DC. He has authored two books: The Wastrels […]
Wednesday, June 5th, 2013 Washington DC The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is a textbook case of a Pentagon procurement project that reveals why it is difficult to cut the defence budget. Three versions of the F-35 are being built for the Air Force, Navy and Marines by Lockheed Martin, the largest defence contractor in the […]