> The F-35, by comparison, was a platform vehicle, with the base suited to adapting to a variety of capabilities and missions. That means more voices demanding priority of features, more expensive engineering to get a variety of polygon pegs into the same round hole, and many first-of-its-kind features for a variety of ancillary tasks.

> No real surprise that it didn't work out.

For a humorous presentation of this, watch the movie Pentagon Wars:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA

That movie was wonderful. Highly recommend watching it if you haven't.

>> More than that, thr SR-71 was purpose-built.

Not really. The SR-71 was the final plane of an extended program called OXCART which created the A-12. The program was nominally to replace the U2, but even oxcart was within a large aircraft design plan. There was even a interceptor (YF-12) that was meant for shooting down Valkyrie-class mach3+ bombers. These aircraft were very similar to the 71, so similar that most people seeing them might not spot any difference. Any assessment of the 71's development costs is therefore very difficult.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_YF-12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_A-12

"YF-12C: Fictitious designation for an SR-71 provided to NASA for flight testing. The YF-12 designation was used to keep SR-71 information out of the public domain."

I am always reminded of this scene HBO movie The Pentagon wars when I read about the F-35.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA

Exactly this. Hyper specialized boundary pushing things are easy compared to general purpose good for everything projects.

The basic concept isn't even a terrible one. It was a reaction to the many functionally-overlapping aircraft that the various service branches were having designed and built. But it seems clear at this point that the F-35 tried to be too general purpose.

Our vaccine effort is a perfect example of this. We got heroic, efficient results in developing vaccines because the requirements were so clear.

Distribution is much, much harder!

AND, the problem with F-35, as stated directly in the article, was not that we CANNOT build cool things, its that we didn't need something too fancy, and it became too fancy through add-ins that were not slated as requirements.

Yeah it was "design by (military) committee" turned to 11

I'm surprised it got off the drawing boards