Eh it's a lot more complicated than just "gov bad private good"

The goals of the F35 were to be the fighter for all the branches of the military. The problem is that they all have very different requirements.

Marry that with a tech-fixes-everything attitude and you have a Frankenstein of an aircraft with so much "technology" that it gets in the way of the human pilot's instincts.

And lastly, the project has been strategically split up by contractors in a way that it creates jobs in so many congressional districts, so congress members are loathe to shut down a program that brings jobs in their district.

All this is done by PRIVATE sector contractors.

It doesn't matter that much that they're "PRIVATE sector contractors". Defense contractors do not operate like normal private-sector companies. In normal companies, they try to keep costs limited, so that they can maximize profit. They can normally only charge so much money to customers, so the less they have to pay in costs, the more they keep as profit.

In defense companies these days, they usually do what are called "cost plus" contracts. That means the government pays them whatever it costs to do the job, plus a profit margin. So, the incentive is to bloat the project beyond all belief, because that increases the costs. Then the profit is multiplied, since the profit margin is fixed.

Splitting the project up among a ridiculous number of contractors to cover as many congressional districts as possible doesn't help the situation.

Basically, the F-35 is a huge make-work program for the US.

Yea, of course private sector will rationally benefit when government is running around like a chicken without a head throwing money around. I don't want to get into the reasons why the incentives are setup like they are - that's a very broad discussion. I agree (without being a fighter jet expert) that F-35 seems like a terrible idea of near-infinite complexity that no amount of money will make right.

Near infinite complexity has no meaning as a descriptor of complexity. Infinity isn't something you can describe approaching without convergence.

It was a figure of speech :) Here's a great paper about the topic of complexity http://shaffner.us/cs/papers/tarpit.pdf if you feel like digging deeper.

You'd expect someone at the top to say something like 'You know, that sounds like a spectacularly terrible idea' though.

i think the comparison to spaceX isn't valid really. the technology contained within a fighter jet far outweighs that of a rocket. rocket science isn't exactly that anymore, but these newer fighter jets are pushing physics in pretty serious ways. just take a look at any f-22 demonstration. my jaw drops at the things it does, and that's just its flight capability. and the f-22 is even outdated at this point. rockets basically implement capability known for many decades. that being said, of course these programs are insane, including their budgets. for example, the f-22 has a total program cost of "only" $67 billion.

You expected a bureaucracy to work logically?

A lot of the blame comes down to voters. They refuse to pay teachers a pension and demand they be paid based on performance, but they approve a higher defense budget because spending more on guns is never a bad idea.

Space doesn't shoot back, though.

That is: Defeating intelligent adversaries is considerably more difficult than defeating gravity.