If there's a consensus on what's wrong with pentagon procurement, the bullet points are: (1) no 'feasability feedback' mechanism to reject wishlist items that

If there's a consensus on what's wrong with pentagon procurement, the bullet points are: (1) no 'feasability feedback' mechanism to reject wishlist items that inflate complexity or delivery date, (2) focus on 'joint procurement', i.e. one product that solves army / air force / navy problems, i.e. a flying submarine with wheels, (3) lead times are too long for bespoke products (by the time it's delivered your needs have changed). A-10 was built based on CAS lessons that had been learned the hard way in Nam, where helicopters had to take the place of fixed-wing airplanes that couldn't do the job. (meaning it was built to do one thing well). It wasn't a swiss-army knife. If you believe that it's not practical to build a swiss-army knife aircraft, then you probably weren't surprised by the crappy fighters we turned out in the 90s and 00s. The head airplane designer on china's F-22 killer basically laughed when he was asked about the F-35, and said 'the best thing that ever happened to us was when the US decided to put VTOL in their main fighter -- and not even in all of them.' China could never afford to do that but arguably the US can't either. A post-IOC F-35C had its wings fall off (yes) and the pentagon lockheed liaison's explanation was 'the pilot was too heavy, we're looking into it'. Even more interesting than the A-10 is the F-16; it was a backburner project at lockheed and the pentagon tried to shut it down because they didn't want it stealing any PR thunder from the bigger badder F-15. These days the F-16 is doing every job because it's cheap, easy to maintain, lots of people can fly them. Lockheed just shut down the line for these but the aftermarket is booming.