F-35 Cancelled, then what ?

[t43562]

I suppose this is close to completely irrelevant please do not take too much notice.

I worked for a big technical company full of nice people of whom many were extremely clever and able. We nevertheless spent many many many millions trying to "take hills" that could not be taken because that was what we were told to do.

Our competitors had a long time to look at our failing ways, chose different priorities and now cannot spend the billions of dollars they earned while we were all made redundant and the company exited the business.

I'm just saying that it seems emotional to claim that X engineers are good people or evil people. They are totally constrained by what they have been told to do - by the excessive optimism of the people writing the cheques. With the wrong goals, the quality of the engineers is not really relevant to the outcome.

What is more, each of them in their narrow area can do superlative work, making the best tradeoffs possible without the end product being successful.