a1bill,
Frost, it's just local sport here, to see who can slag it the most.
How the plane is responsible for the US procurement maze is a strange thing.
It is not a local sport, it is the beginning of a $1Trillion experiment or more as time goes on. The plane isn't responsible for the US DoD procurement maze, the US DoD along with L-M are responsible for the plane.
I suspect you were not around when Robert McNamara's "Folly" evolved much along the same path the F-35 is following. I was. But, there are differences between the two. First McNamara's F-111 involved only two services, the USN and the USAF. The F-35 in involves three services with distinctive differences in mission requirements. The F-111 aircraft that was put into service by the USAF was at best a compromise as only 100 or so were built before the program was terminated. The USN version never got far before it was terminated for various shortcomings. The F-35 is unstoppable because of US political involvement and overreach. The USAF took a long time to figure out how exactly to use the F-111 compared to its originally advertised capability. For awhile it didn't do much except suck in quite a few geese on the lakes in Maine during low level penetration trials. Plans to move on developed starting with the F-14, then the F-15 and F-16 programs, all "long runway" successful in their own right.
So if one in the Pentagon were to study the McNamara "Folly" saga, a mitigation plan would develop to avoid a repeat of a past mistake. IMHO, this didn't happen on the JSF soon to become the F-35. In fact what happened was a "I wish" and "Sure we can" joint development plans between the customer and selected aircraft manufacturer including the engine manufacturer. For starters:
1. How many fast jet STOL/VTOL planes had L-M produced?
2. How many carrier based fast Jets had L-M produced?
3. How many stealth aircraft had L-M produced?
Yet, L-M was awarded a very vague and open-ended contract for 3 models of an aircraft with pie in the sky promises to three users that can never be met as each share in the deficiencies of one to the other. Mitigation plan? Well, lets add in a concurrent engineering requirement and build all the models at the same time, eliminating the development and proof of concept steps, production from the get-go. So now we have 100+ F-35 scattered about doing development and proof of concept steps that should have been done in the beginning, all on the basis of saving time and money, yeh, right! So where are we 14 years later? Where we should have been years ago with a mitigation plan in place to avoid the F-111 pitfalls.
LO seems to have a thing for anything Marine?
As the Marine statement said, it's a start not a finish
I don't think the characterization here is correct. The USMC may very well be a start but the finish line is somewhere ahead in the fog. And it isn't just a Marine thing, it is a CYA situation aptly demonstrated by nearly everyone responsible for the well being of the most important and costly aviation program in US history. If you and others are happy with the track record, performance and probabilities this will turnout differently than the previous 'Folly", so be it. History says it will not.