Now We Know Why Donald Trump Went to War Against the F-35
Money.
"We're just beginning – it's a dance," Trump told reporters after his briefings, per The War Zone. "It's a little bit of a dance. But we're going to get the costs down and we're going to get it done beautifully."
President Donald Trump spent a good chunk of time in the run-up to taking office dissing the freakishly-expensive F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program as a complete and utter money suck.
Now we know why: Military briefing slides shown to then-president-elect Trump in December 2016 offer one of the most blunt Pentagon assessments of the notoriously unreliable aircraft in recent memory.
The briefing slides, obtained by The War Zone through the Freedom of Information Act, were shown to Trump by F-35 Joint Program Office chief U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Chris Bogdan on Dec. 21, 2016, just over a week after the president-elect slammed program costs as "out of control" on Twitter.
While Bogdan's briefing asserts that the "big, complicated" F-35 program is "critical to U.S. and allied air dominance for the next 50 years," one slide offered a uniquely forthright assessment of the airframe: at 6.5 years behind schedule and $13.5 billion over budget, the F-35 program has found it "difficult to overcome a troubled past."
Translation: This thing sucks, but there's no going back now.
Trump was, surprisingly, vindicated. The day after the Bogdan briefing, the president-elect attempted to put his much-hyped powers of negotiation to work with a tweet threatening to turn Pentagon attention to Boeing's F/A-18E/F Super Hornet if F-35 manufacturer Lockheed Martin couldn't get the cost of the airframe under control.
"We're just beginning – it's a dance," Trump told reporters after his briefings, per The War Zone. "It's a little bit of a dance. But we're going to get the costs down and we're going to get it done beautifully."
Things haven't improved much in the intervening years. The Pentagon's 2018 operational testing and evaluation assessment of the F-35 released in January detailed ongoing reliability issues that have aggressively truncated the airframe's service life well below official projections, with "no improving trend" among the number of aircraft available for training and combat missions.
This article originally appeared at Task & Purpose. Follow Task & Purpose on Twitter.
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