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Unprecedented:
Canada has convened two days of international meetings in Washington next week to discuss problems around the controversial F-35 stealth fighter jet program.
The meeting comes as Defence Minister Peter MacKay and Gen. Walt Natynczyk, chief of the defence staff, both affirmed Canada's plan to buy a fleet of F-35 stealth fighter jets at a high-profile military event Friday.
Controversy has surrounded the F-35 procurement as the plane's manufacturer, the U.S. defence giant Lockheed Martin, and the Pentagon move to restructure the program for a third time.
The longer this drags out the more money somebody is making ... and the less security and modernization we are getting for our military.
Malpractice ... or corruption? Makes one wonder how many obvious "problems" were ignored and how much cash and "favors" traded hands in order to get this bird in the pipeline.
The man now in charge of buying weapons for the U.S. military said that the stealth F-35 Joint Strike Fighter -- one of the most expensive defense programs in U.S. history at three quarters of $1 trillion -- was put in production so prematurely the error amounted to "acquisition malpractice."
"I can spend quite a few minutes on the F-35, but I don't want to," Frank Kendall, the Pentagon's Acting Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, said Monday. "Putting the F-35 into production years before the first test flight was acquisition malpractice. It should not have been done, OK? But we did it, OK?"
5 comments:
We could say FU we're not paying. That is what the Greeks are doing.......
Ironically, we are one of the few remaining countries with a strong enough economy to afford the thing ... the rest are entering a decade of massive cutbacks.
Ironically, we are one of the few remaining countries with a strong enough economy to afford the thing ... the rest are entering a decade of massive cutbacks.
As more, and new, information comes to light and the "I told you sos" start to fly the fact is that Canada will still need a new fighter soon. If Lockheed Martin messed this up that badly, we are out the hundreds of millions that we have already put into the project, and that is just the way it is. Perhaps the government in power is holding the line to see what the final outcome is based on agreements that they have from Lockheed Martin with respect to the Industrial Benefits (and regional benefits) already negotiated.
Time will tell. I can't imagine that the department wants to start from scratch as we all know how that works out... think of the Sea King replacement debacle and the Fixed Wing SAR debacle. The best purchases that we have made lately with aircraft have been off the shelf, no bidding purchases of the C-17 and C-130J. I can't see that happening with a new fighter purchase though because there is so much money at stake.
That's the whole thing isn't it; once you're in this deep you end up just grinning and taking it up the arse :) I keep being shocked at just how utterly theoretical the technology was ... just untested computer models. I guess it all existed digitally ... in theory ... but that's a far cry from even having workable models of each new technology and component.
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