But, seriously, I’ve walked through some of these subcontractors sites. They’re often small businesses run by a politically connected ex-officer, a few revolving door phds (to establish their R&D creds), a disabled (or minority) vet, and a mass of warm bodies to pump money into the local economy. (Ironically most of the money goes to Walmart and eventually goes overseas).
Corruption conquers countries more often than war.
sucks to be an early adopter, but this is no different than a gen0 Apple hardware, to draw some parallels.
what really gets me is that because of rules upon rules on acquisition, making such thing and marketing them as they really are (tech demonstrator, prototypes, unrefined products, whatever you want to call them) would never fly. you have to twist those as great budgeting opportunities, inflate the earning options of export versions etc etc.
it's like generations of rotten politics coming into play, portraying it as a greedy company and some unscrupulous congressmen is not wrong per se but a little reductive.
The power structure, the actual humans making decisions are all that is important.
And currently that behemoth is hell bent on not giving a fuck about itself, its components [the humans] are mostly looking out for themselves, there's not enough institutional inertia to change this, etc.
I'm not saying it needs to be dismantled, torched to the ground, blablabla, but of course there needs to be deep, systematic, qualitative and quantitative changes. Personnel, ideology/dogma, leadership, training, culture, process, structure.
"Congress" (or more precisely the upper echelon of the power structure - Congress/courts/administration are just the venues where the show happens) is in a gridlock over moral issues, that means everything else is at best performing at the level of the status quo, at worse things become chips in the very high-stakes poker game.
This of course leads to a lot of inefficient posturing and back-and-forth, and the preservation of the gridlock.
It offers Lockheed Martin one-point-five trillion dollars, much of which will be spent in key Congressional districts.
That's all.
I suspect that those responsible for making decisions about the F-35 are perfectly fine with this. Rhetoric aside, our government and military appear to think they exist in a world where direct Great Power military conflict is not a possibility. The F-35 seems perfectly adequate to swiftly wreck anywhere on Earth that is not Europe, China, Japan, Russia or India. And that seems to be our actual goal in terms of capabilities for the immediate future.