“The flying qualities in the blended region...were not intuitive or favorable.” God, I love bureaucrat-talk. It's a pig. A trillion-dollar pig. But that doesn'

“The flying qualities in the blended region...were not intuitive or favorable.” God, I love bureaucrat-talk. It's a pig. A trillion-dollar pig. But that doesn't mean we can't put lipstick on it! Last time this came up on HN, somebody recommended reading about the life of John Boyd. For those of you interested in how large systems of people operate, how the Pentagon ends up with bad airplanes, principles of organization change, and the philosophy of strategic planning? Go read as much as you can. Boyd was no Sun Tzu, but he significantly advanced the state-of-the art in a bunch of seemingly unrelated fields. I have a feeling we'll be parsing some of his stuff over the next few decades. Aside from providing promotions to large sections of the officer core and gainful employment to many large defense contractors in various districts of various politicians, I'm not sure what the F-35 is actually for. It's like the space shuttle: it's supposed to do so many contradictory things at the same time that it doesn't seem to do any of them well. In fairness, the Osprey tilt-rotor had a lot of the same type of procurement and delivery problems. Anybody remember ring vortex state? But the Osprey at least had somewhere it was going: take a squad of marines or special operators far inland as fast as an airplane without using runways at either end. It looks like the Osprey is turning the corner and can finally deliver the goods. Not so much with the F-35. I'm not sure what to do with the program now. My instinct says keep the close air support and air superiority fighters we have and concentrate on the F-35's stealth capabilities. But strategically, once somebody figures out how to use passive radiation to paint and plot airborne targets? The stealth game is up. Required computing power may be a decade or two away, but it's well within the expected lifetime of the airframe. I think maybe you just bail out on the whole thing and go back to strategy school.