The claim that something is a jobs program is often used to justify not caring about waste, but that doesn't really make any sense. If your goal is to maintain a large pool of skilled individuals, it makes sense to do lots of highly efficient projects. When you do things efficiently, you can provide jobs to more engineers, and support a wider range of projects to maintain a more diverse skillset, plus you get more useful products out of the program.

Most people who do complex, difficult jobs estimate for the complexity and difficulty. This project is both years behind schedule and at roughly twice its initial budget. There are also regularly reports of serious flaws in its day-to-day operation.

I believe it's fair to say both that the project is difficult and that this particular effort appears to have delivered a lower-quality product at higher costs and timelines than most of its peers.

> it’s partially a jobs program to keep engineers employed and experienced in case there is a real need for immediate defense work.

This is always true and they usually have better results.

What are the peers of the F-35?

That car has no peer.

A more relevant question to ask is... in head on air to air combat, is there a plane that can match it or beat it?

https://www.lockheedmartin.com/f35/news-and-features/raaf-fl...

Air to ground benefits from the extra carrying capacity but if you have air superiority then drones etc are again vastly more effective for the price. Sure, it’s got nice avionics right now, but that stuff gets replaced long before the aircraft gets retired.

That said we didn’t actually built that many F-22’s so we really needed something to pick up the slack.

More on a serious note, for the cost of one of these aircrafts, you can get more than 1/10th of their weight in gold. Either gold or the aircrafts are way too expensive, I think it is the latter. I wonder, what the Chengdu J-20 costs...

Only a small proportion of the program involves software, and at that they were, for example, designing VR/AR helmets as a feature. What people are talking about being an entire industry was tacked on as a minor feature.

Imagine designing hardware where your single product is developed as computer tech advanced from 1993 to 2006 (program inception to first production flight, more or less)

There was an estimate that the program employed a quarter of a million people, because of how spread out contracts like this are it's hard to really come up with a comparison.

JSF is on a similar level of complexity of the entirety of Google, and has been in development about five years longer.

Which back then was seriously on the ropes, with SJ coming back to turn it around. Nobody would have listed Apple as an industry leading company. How times change.

Sure, people "depend" on FB for comms etc blah blah, but the world functioned fine before them if not maybe slightly less convenient. Netflix, come on. It's just entertainment. Nothing more. Google? Maybe search could be built to work again. Amazon? Maybe people actually buy local again. Apple? So we don't have luxury devices that cost more than some people make in a year.

*Obviously excluding the sudden loss of jobs. It's just a thought exercise.

Even just a single component, like the engine, is a massive engineering undertaking. If the company developing the powerplant under-delivers the entire program can be a bust.