It seems we are witnessing what "too big to fail" means.
It means that instead of making the painful admission that the contractor signed up to do something that they could not, and that the customer failed to control the deviation of reality from the promise, DoD will spend any amount and sacrifice any capability to drag the program over a hastily repainted finish line.
So its like the Super Hornet that Bill Sweetman trashed:
-Bill Sweetman, Just How Super is the F/A-18E/F?, Interavia Business & Technology, April 1, 2000-
-The Navy and Boeing have intensified a propaganda campaign. Unfortunately, the campaign is likely to damage their credibility in the long term, because it focuses on a few basic statements which don't mean anything like as much as the casual reader is meant to think.
For example: "The airplane meets all its key performance parameters." This is true. In 1998 -- as it became clear that the Super Hornet was slower, and less agile at transonic speeds than the C/D -- the Navy issued an "administrative clarification" which declared that speed, acceleration and sustained turn rate were not, and had never been, Key Performance Parameters (KPP) for the Super Hornet. Apparently, some misguided people thought that those were important attributes for a fighter.-
-Bill Sweetman, Watch Your Six Maverick, Interavia Business & Technology, February 1, 2000-
-The Navy's operational evaluation (Opeval) of the Super Hornet ended in November, and the report is expected late in February. It will probably find the Super Hornet to be operationally effective and suitable, because the impact of any other recommendation would be devastating, but the Navy will have to do some deft manoeuvring to avoid charges that the report is a whitewash.-
-Bill Sweetman, Super Hornet gathers speed, but critics keep pressure on, Interavia Business & Technology, March 1, 1999-
-The Pentagon has conceded that the MiG-29 and Su-27 can out-accelerate and out-turn all variants of the F/A-18 in most operating regimes, and that the E/F in turn cannot stay up with the older C/D through much of the envelope.
Navy data from early 1996 (published in a General Accounting Office report) showed that the new aircraft was expected to have a lower thrust-to-weight ratio than the late-production (Lot XIX) F/A-18C/D with the General Electric F404-GE-402 engine. Its maximum speed in a typical air-to-air configuration would be Mach 1.6, versus Mach 1.8 for the smaller aircraft. In the heart of the air-combat envelope, between 15,000 and 20,000 feet and at transonic speed, the Lot XIX aircraft would hold a specific excess power (Ps) of 300 ft/sec out to Mach 1.2, while its larger descendant could not hold the same Ps above Mach 1.0.-
and now advocates:
Rhino's Revenge (Super Hornet upgrades)
and the navy loves.