Year 2019 and beyond should be big for the F-35…
New U.S. Stealth Jet Can?t Fire Its Gun Until 2019 - The Daily Beast
Relative to the $1.5 Trillion number: Excerpts from a WSJ article written by USN Vice-Admiral, Norbert R. Ryan, Jr.
In 2013 alone, the Government Accountability Office reported that the Pentagon’s top 85 major defense-acquisition programs experienced overruns of nearly $411 billion. Reporter Andrew Tilghman of the Military Times observed that this amount in itself is almost enough to cover the entire cost of sequestration for the Defense Department.
The Ford-class aircraft carrier has seen cost overruns of $2 billion. The price tag of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has topped out at $1.5 trillion and is now $160 billion over budget. Raiding military health-care plans for $2.6 billion in savings over six years suggests that Congress is looking in the wrong places to rein in spending.
Insisting, as some observers in and out of the military do, that weapons systems must be immune to cutbacks inevitably means that the money must be taken out of personnel. That’s akin to forcing soldiers to pay for their own bullets.
The new congressional leadership should remember that nothing is more important to America’s national security than protecting the one weapon system that has never failed—the men and women of the uniformed services.
Mr. Ryan, a retired U.S. Navy vice admiral, is president of the Military Officers Association of America.