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Comment by shalmanese | Hacker News Reader

There's 3 seperate aircrafts in the F35 program which, if we designed any 2 of them, could have been coherent, well designed, well executed single aircrafts. It doesn't matter which 2, pick any 2 of the 3 missions and we could have gotten 2 great aircrafts.

But planners looked at the costs and said we simultaneously can't justify 3 seperate programs and also we can't simplify it down to one program, hence the ungainly mess that resulted.

Like I said before, if someone could have convinced any 2 of the branches of the military to knife the other one, we could have reached a much better place than we are now. That we didn't was a co-ordination problem.

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I wouldn’t call the F-35 a mess, all 3 are solid aircraft and the F-35A was both cheaper than the F-22 and can be exported.

Rather than having the branches pick 2 of 3 the real question IMO is if making more F-22 instead of trying to include the F-35A would have simplified the F-35B and F-35C enough to be a net benefit. That isn’t about one side losing the fight, it’s a question of which approach results in all sides being better off.

However, from a military contractor standpoint the F-35 was a gravy train and ultimately any talk about efficiency means reducing profit. In that context things worked wonderfully for Lockheed Martin and it’s many suppliers and subcontractors.

The F-35A was fine, it was mostly the B that clusterfucked the project. Again, if we're talking about incentive problems, those are just straightforwardly co-ordination problems.

It’s complicated, the weight reduction redesign spurred by the B significantly improved the other 2 variants. So arguably the B was a major benefit to the project even if it drove up prices and added significant delays.

The only way to quantify if it was a success or is in comparison to having the B end up as a separate project. Which comes down to a cost benefit analysis, though we don’t actually know as much as that alternate because it didn’t happen.

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