F-35 Dominance, And Budget Cuts, Are Forcing Lockheed Martin's Rivals To Hunt For Sales In Increasin

[unhappycamper]

http://www.ibtimes.com/f-35-dominance-budget-cuts-are-forcing-lockheed-martins-rivals-hunt-sales-increasingly-1665206



The United States does not need and cannot afford the Pentagon’s request for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which will cost -- incredibly -- a mind-boggling $134.5 million per plane. * see comment below

F-35 Dominance, And Budget Cuts, Are Forcing Lockheed Martin's Rivals To Hunt For Sales In Increasingly Unstable Markets
By Christopher Harress
on August 21 2014 6:39 PM

By the time the Lockheed Martin F-35 is fully combat-ready in 2018, it will be well on its way to 50 percent of the global jet fighter market.

That success, unprecedented in the history of military aviation, could push U.S. and European current-generation fighters -- which do not have the stealth capabilities of the F-35 -- out of production for good, according to Richard Aboulafia, a top expert in the defense and aeronautical industry. But the threat the F-35 poses to current jet fighters only underscores a far deeper issue in the defense industry: The new fighter's success may push Lockheed Martin's rivals to sell advanced, lethal aircraft to countries that may be unstable, led by undemocratic regimes or turn hostile to Western interests. Cuts in the U.S. defense budget may have the same effect.

“The U.S. has always had the advantage that it has a really large military, meaning there was a lot of business for contractors,” said Ivan Eland, a senior fellow at the Independent Institute, a non-profit research organization. “But when that business dries up for whatever reason -- budgets cuts, sequestration, or all the money is being sucked into this F-35 super project -- we start selling to places we probably shouldn’t.”

The sale of 10 Apache helicopters to Egypt in April by Boeing, according to Eland, was one such sale. “That sale of Apaches to Egypt was madness,” he said. “Egypt has gone back and forth -- from Hosni Mubarak to the Muslim Brotherhood then to Sisi. These revolutions go in cycles, so that sale is a good piece of business one minute, then it’s a humanitarian disaster when the weapons are turned on the population the next.”

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F-35 purchase price will average $178 million per plane in FY2015

With all the problems and delays facing the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, critics of the program have had plenty of ammunition at their disposal. Now, they're about to get one more figure to lob at proponents of the plagued fighter – its cost. Now, we know the F-35 program itself is very pricey – the latest reports claim the jet has already cost an eye-watering $400 billion over the course of its development so far. The latest forecast for the unit cost, though, isn't a much more encouraging sign.

According to Winslow Wheeler, a staffer at the Project On Government Oversight, each individual jet should cost between $148 million and $337 million in fiscal year 2015, with an average per-unit price of $178 million, DoDBuzz reports.

"This data is the empirical, real-world costs to buy, but not to test or develop, an F-35 in 2015," Wheeler wrote on blogging site Medium.com. "They should be understood to be the actual purchase price for 2015 – what the Pentagon will have to pay to have an operative F-35."

Wheeler, who counts stints working on security issues with the Senate and the Government Accountability Office among his accolades, unsurprisingly expects the conventional takeoff and landing variant employed by the Air Force – the F-35A – to be the cheapest of the plane's three variants, at $148 million.

[Enthusiast]

1. Fuck the F-35.

Fuck war and all the criminals that would create a war for the sake of profit.