F-35: The Pentagon’s Trillion Dollar Turkey

The joke about the camel being a horse designed by a committee has a new twist. The Lockheed committee that designed the F-35 fighter got a turkey. Twenty-six years and two trillion dollars later, that turkey became the world’s most expensive weapon system.

We’re used to talking about big numbers these days, what with the Biden administration running up our national debt to $34.8 trillion. So let’s step back and try to comprehend the size of the numbers attached to the current projection for the lifetime cost of the F-35 weapon system – first, focus on $2 trillion being two thousand billion dollars. That means (adding fixes and cost overruns) if the F-35 project was a county it would rank ahead of Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Australia and Brazil.