Surely the F-35 isn't the first bad military vehicle the government has/will purchase...
The Navy has had fun too with the Zumwalt-class destroyer which ended up cancelled after two. They haven't had much luck with submarines either.
Weapons programs are expensive and only more so as they suffer feature creep. We all know how expensive and annoying that is in software development, in the military its just measured in billions.
You can toss NASA into the mix, from the shuttle to many proposed replacements. Government tends to spend big and fail big with a few good things leaking through.
However if you want to get into real government boondoggles simply go look at transportation projects, from light rail to tunnels and finally bridges.
On the other hand the Virginia class submarine is working quite well, and the new fleet of aircraft carriers seems to be OK if you still believe aircraft carriers are useful.
Better fighters have been produced in far less time for far less money. I think it's receiving so much attention on HN because it's an example of poor engineering.
The do-everything F-35 was actually supposed to be a cost management idea, since the exploding cost of new generation fighter programs was so big, we were just going to do one of them, rather than several for different roles. This would, the theory went, be cheaper in total for development, plus the shared parts would make them cheaper in operation, then separate role-specific airframes.
And, radically expensive and problem-prone as F-35 has been, that still might all be true. It might have been far more expensive, both in development and operational costs, to develop separate airframes for the various roles.
Furthermore, because they tried to make the aircraft meet contradictory requirements it has resulted in a plane that doesn't do several things as well as even the aircraft it is replacing, much less newer aircraft on the battlefield. All at an astronomical cost.
At a certain point it just doesn't make sense to pay far more for a weapons system that doesn't do anything well.
...and if you ever bought that, they've also got a bridge they'd like to sell you. The goal is to spend money. This is just their latest innovation in achieving that goal.
$1.5 trillion / 318.9 million people in the USA = $4,703.67 per person!
I want a refund!
The Pentagon is spending about $11 billion on the F35 for the entire fiscal year (2% of its budget).[1] About ~$30 per tax payer.
$1.5 trillion is the 55 year projection on the total cost of the program over that time frame. Including purchase, operation and upkeep. Or $27 billion per year for everything.
It has cost roughly $100 billion so far over 20 years.
[1] http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2015/02/02/Pentagon-s-Too-Big-...
By comparison that's a larger plane order than the total sum of all combat aircraft that Russia has, and six times that of Germany.
If the F35 had been split into three planes, with the same order and cost scale, the cost would not be a particularly big deal. You're talking about 5% of the Pentagon's annual budget, for 2/3 of all combat planes in the US military. That is, the cost is not the problem: it's the do-everything nature of the plane that is the problem.
You can see the F35 is the workhorse there. If it's a dud it's a huge dud.
The premise of the question is dubious. Similarly problem-plagued programs -- that have been far less expensive -- have gotten similar attention at similar stages of their lifecycle, some of which have been subsequently abandoned, others of which have dealt with the early problems to become reasonably useful.
OTOH, the fact that the manned combat aircraft seem to be reaching a point where the expense of making them minimally survivable dwarfs their utility, similar to what happened with battleships several decades ago, probably mean that there will be more triggers for attention paid to manned combat aircraft programs, both in terms of problems and overall expense, which draws attention on its own.
The other recent vehicle criticism that comes to mind has been over how much of the budget went into acquiring light vehicles such as hummers, and other RPG & IED bait.
Unlike with the F-35, this was actively costing lives, so something got done. We've slapped net armor onto a bunch of things. MRAPs have "Mine-Resistant" right in the acronym.
In this age of austerity having a fighter that cost several times more than the previous generation and yet can't do the things that it's supposed to do in the apogee of pork barrel waste. The project should have been killed years ago and yet here we are still throwing money at the thing hoping it will fly.
http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/the-pentagons-concurrency-m...
Look at the F-111B program, the attempt to build an F-111 variant for carrier use. The F-111B was too big, too unmaneuverable, and had too many other problems so after about 6 years with an initial production of 7 aircraft the program was cancelled. The Navy went back to the drawing board, sought out new aircraft proposals, and eventually ended up with the F-14 to fulfill that role. There's a long history of mistakes and bad designs in military history, but in the US at least most of those mistakes are accepted by the top brass, work arounds are developed, and better systems are procured as replacements. It's a history of lessons learned and applied to future generations of weapons systems.
The F-35 on the other hand appears to not only be enormously flawed but government leadership has consistently refused to address or accept those flaws, and has instead doubled down on the program. The F-35 was sold based on some simple promises: that it would be cheaper than alternatives; that having a common design with 3 variants would reduce costs, increase reliability, and increase capabilities; and that it would be a next generation multi-role fighter capable of easily gaining the upper hand against any competitor in any theater in the world. All of those promises have been broken, utterly. The reality is that there are three completely different planes that have similar names, but the commonality between the different "variants" is only around 30%. Worse, the plane is hugely expensive to produce and even more expensive to operate, with a dismally low "duty cycle" (with a ratio of 3-5 hours of corrective maintenance needed for every single hour of flight time). Slowly but surely the cost of the F-35 is approaching the cost of the F-22 (which is a vastly more capable aircraft). And now we see that the planes aren't actually very good at their job either.
It's like going to the car dealership and trading in your beloved and trustworthy family automobile then the salesman selling you on the idea of a fun but inexpensive and reliable high performance sports car. Then when you get the car you realize that it's a lemon, it has the performance of a Geo Metro but the gas mileage of a HUMVEE, it's in the shop every week for some new problem or other, and then when you check the paperwork you see some stuff you didn't notice when you signed and it actually cost 3x more than you thought. That situation would cause anyone to be pissed off. Unfortunately, the Pentagon is so in bed with LockMart/Boeing that they refuse to criticize it or do anything about it.
Take multiple different customers for a car, one wants to have a sports-car, one a pick-up and the third, something that can dive ... What does not work in car-design, does even less in jet-design.
Rules of engagement can prevent you from firing on another aircraft without visual ID Terrain can obscure enemy aircraft until they are WVR *Enemy aircraft can use electronic countermeasures to confound your radar
If dogfighting were truly obsolete there never would've been a requirement for the aircraft to be more maneuverable than a F-16 and short-range missiles and a nose cannon wouldn't be part of this aircraft's armament.