I chalk a lot of this up to teething costs. The situation, will, hopefully, improve greatly over time. The second to last chart shows a comparison of the Navy

I chalk a lot of this up to teething costs. The situation, will, hopefully, improve greatly over time. The second to last chart shows a comparison of the Navy F-35C with the F-18 and EA-18 Growler, noting theatterbfaces additional challenges over the F variant for having an advanced electronics suite. The F-35C compares reasonably well against the Growler, and is already similarly stocked with massive amounts of electronics systems. Alas, things will get worse before they get better. The F-35 was built and designed with old electronics technology. TR3 (Tech Refresh 3) is underway to start upgrading the core computer systems amid other things, and was supposed to be delivered this year, but has been pushed back and back; the software & integration isn't ready. Planes had been rolling off the line with TR3 and then being unable to be flow. The Air Force has gone back to requesting TR2 planes even. Just this month forces have started flying them with incomplete feature suites (I personally really like this flying beta idea, to gain experience faster). And TR3 is just the first major leap! https://www.defensenews.com/air/2023/11/21/upgraded-f-35s-fly-with-partial-software-as-dod-hunts-for-delivery-fix/ https://www.defensenews.com/air/2023/11/21/upgraded-f-35s-fl... Next up comes block 4 with a massive suite of targeting, electric warfare & other upgrades. This is such a huge huge software and systems challenge, building an advanced multi role highly networked fighter. This is going to be a struggle. But I don't really see this as ever being a fast task, as going smooth for anyone. It feels like work that had to be done. And we should be trying to share & learn through hurdling through how to tie together so many wild advanced tech projects; we should be learning from this (alas, unlikely most software practitioners will ever get to reap the learnings here). But costs are pretty low per unit now! And we're going to figure this stuff out. It will eventually get better. It takes time, with such heavily integrated systems. I mostly just wish we could all be collectively learning better about the technical challenges & strategies, that these lessons surfaced & understand how better to architect systems (just as plane designers copied lessons from each other for decades), but that seems fairly impossible with software.