The F 35 (back) flies alongside the F 16 (front). US Air Force
Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James has admitted to a wide range of past and present problems with the F-35 while maintaining that the fifth-general will eventually guarantee the US continued air supremacy over rivals.
"The biggest lesson I have learned from the F-35 is never again should we be flying an aircraft while we're building it," James said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado last week.
In development stages, "People believed we could go faster, cheaper, better" by designing and building the F-35 concurrently, "and that the degree of concurrency would work. Indeed it has not worked as well as we had hoped and that's probably the understatement of the day," James said.
WNU Editor: This is so typical of how the main stream media covers the F-35 program .... scores of news reports on the U.S. Marine Corps announcement that the F-35 is now combat ready (no mention on the limits that have been imposed because it is not ready for combat) ..... and on the other side only one or two reports on the U.S. Air Force Secretary acknowledging that the F-35 has a "wide range of problems" .... who then tries to reassure everyone that it will be eventually (cough cough) be solved. And people wonder why I am sceptical?!?!?!?