The recent publication of the 2010 QDR reveals once again, in typically leaden and mind-numbing prose, how the Pentagon is incapable of coming to grips with the mismatches among strategy, programs, and resources that its decision makers create for themselves, even when budgets are at the highest levels since the end of WWII. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (also called the JSF) has become a metaphor for the larger mess of the Pentagon's self-destructive pathological behavior.
Consider the first sentence in the Wired.com report attached below — “If the Pentagon doesn’t get its Joint Strike Fighter just right, the U.S. military is screwed.” Just right? Give me a break.
The JSF, like all Pentagon procurements, is in deep trouble, and Secretary Gates just fired the two-star program director and will replace him with three-star — apparently operating under the assumption that pumping up an already bloated bureaucracy will get the JSF problem “just right.” That is more nonsense — this disaster was written in the wind: the seeds were planted in the early 1990s, and the outcome was perfectly predictable — the simple fact is that the JSF was doomed not to be the “right stuff” from the very beginning.
The software chapter in
