Pierre Sprey: Does The JSF Face Even Bigger Problems Than The F-22?

For your consideration.

Ugh. Sprey knows his stuff--nobody would deny that. But let's hope he's uncharacteristically wrong about all this.

The aerospace industry and the military have combined to produce some real dogs in the past, and there's no reason to think that those days are over. The planes always sound good when you listen to industry and military propaganda about them...but somehow we still keep getting stuck with P-39s, F-4s, FB-111s and the like. Planes which may have certain virtues (heck, the Russians even found something the P-39 was good for), but which just can't really do the job they were built to do. And then there are the ones that do the job, but at a much higher cost than they were supposed to do it at.

Flawed as it is, though, the system has given us F6Fs, P-51s, B-52s, and F-15s. If we could just get more of those, and fewer of the other kind...