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Dec
18,
2012

The Lemon Of The Skies

By Charles P. Pierce
at 10:45AM

Tom Pennington/Getty Images

A view of the F-35 during the United Kingdom F-35 Lightning II delivery ceremony in Fort Worth, Texas. The ceremony marked the first international delivery of the plane.

Last week, we stepped briefly into the puzzlement that is the F-35 military airplane, which didn't start out as a fighter jet, but which now is a fighter jet because that's the best way to sell the boondoggle to the people who buy such things on our behalf, and with our money. (We've even managed to rope the Canadians in on this con. I hope they don't get mad and ask for Neil Young back.) Well, I'm sure you'll be happy to know that, even though the F-35 continues to be the lemon of the skies, there are some people for whom it is a positive boon.

Lockheed Martin expects to earn a profit in the high single digits under a new contract signed last week for the fifth batch of its radar-evading F-35 fighter planes, company officials said. The company signed the latest contract, to build 32 planes, on Friday. It came after a year of contentious negotiations with the Pentagon, which has dealt with a series of cost overruns and delays in creating the sophisticated jets. The F-35, the Pentagon's largest program, could cost $396 billion if the military builds more than 2,400 planes for the Air Force, Navy and Marines. Pentagon officials said the price of each plane would drop by 4 percent in the fifth batch from the fourth. Excluding the engines, its target price is $105 million for each of 22 planes for the Air Force, $113 million for each of three planes for the Marines and $125 million for each of seven planes for the Navy.The Pentagon will require Lockheed to cover a slightly larger share of any cost overruns than it did on the last batch. The company will also have to fix some of the technical problems with the planes without earning a profit on that work.

I don't believe those cost figures as far as I can throw Leon Panetta's desk But this should serve as a reminder of the kind of thing that's going on while the president and Congress agree on how much an old widow lady is going to have to cut back on her grocery spending.

Tags: Lockheed | fighter planes | F-35

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About The Politics Blog

This blog is about politics, which, according to Aristotle, a truly veteran scribe, is the result of humans being the only herd animals capable of speaking to one another. Or shouting at one another, or giving to each other the ol' bazoo, for all of that, although there is no translation for "bazoo" in the ancient Greek. Thus, for our purposes here, this blog will be about politics in its most basic form — to wit, how we speak to each other for the purposes of governing, or choosing not to govern, ourselves as a small-r republican political commonwealth. It will be the policy of this blog not to treat ignorance with respect simply because that ignorance profits important and powerful people. It will be the policy to operate on the principle that, while there may be two sides to every question, rarely are they both right. If this blog sees a man walking down the street with a duck on his head, it will report that it saw a man walking down the street with a duck on his head. It will not need two sources for that. It will not seek out someone to tell it that what it really saw was a duck walking down the street with a guy on its ass. It will be the belief of this blog that, as Christopher Hitchens once said, the only correct answer to the question, "Is nothing sacred?" is "No." And there will be fun.

About The Authors

  • Charles P. Pierce

    Charles P. Pierce

    Charlie has been a working journalist since 1976. He is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America. He lives near Boston with his wife but no longer his three children.

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  • Esquire Contributors

    Esquire Contributors

    Thomas P.M. Barnett, Chris Jones, Tom Junod, Scott Raab, Eric Rauchway, John H. Richardson, Eli Sanders, Mark Warren, John Weaver, and other smart people, occasionally.

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