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You seem to be implicitly saying that the F-35 is obvious government waste without backing that up. Setting aside the debate about the suitability for purpose

You seem to be implicitly saying that the F-35 is obvious government waste without backing that up. Setting aside the debate about the suitability for purpose of the F-35 (no one can have a knowledgeable debate about this in public anyway, because there's just no data out there!) is the very real problem of an aging TACAIR fleet. Any significant cuts to the total buy, or stretching out the buy over more years, just makes for more problems. The airplanes the US uses to fight its wars are old and getting older. I don't really want to hear much discussion of "Let's curtail/cancel the F-35!" without hearing a corresponding discussion of "Here's what we'll do to maintain a viable TACAIR force".

ocdtrekkie 10y ago
The problem is, everything we've heard out of the military with regards to the F-35 is that it's poor at everything, and will lose in fights with enemy aircraft that are decades old. The idea that we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars on aircraft that are worse than what we already have is amazing. We do need new aircraft, but that doesn't mean we need new F-35s. We need to cut our losses on the F-35 program (as monumental as those losses are) and start developing a set of task-built aircraft that are each designed to fit their role extremely well, rather than a one-size-kinda-fits-all option like the F-35.
- engi_nerd 10y ago
  ...You are exaggerating. The DoD puts out a lot of positive pieces regarding the plane (believe them or not, that's a separate question). Cutting the F-35 means being completely hopeless with TACAIR for another couple of decades, unless somehow the services learn to be much more agile (extremely unlikely).