The F-35, once touted as the world's most promising combat jet fighter, is so plagued with massive cost-overruns and poor design that the best thing to do is scrap efforts to make more than 100 of them fully ready for combat, according to the Pentagon's new chief of the program.
Vice Adm. Mathias W. Winter said the Defense Department is considering "leaving 108" F-35s in "their current state" because the Pentagon cannot afford to spend the money to fix the planes, the National Interest reported Monday.
"In total, Congress has authorized — and the Pentagon has spent — nearly $40 billion purchasing approximately 189 F-35s that, in their current configuration, will never be able to perform the way they were expected to when taxpayer dollars were used to buy them," wrote Dan Glazier, a retired Marine Corps captain and expert on the F-35 with the Project on Government Oversight.
"That's a lot of money to spend on training jets and aircraft that will simply be stripped for spare parts," he added.
Michael P. Hughes, who served 21 years in the Air Force and is now a professor of finance at South Carolina's Francis Marion University, noted that Lockheed Martin prompted the F-35 as a "fighter jet that could do almost everything the U.S. military desired."
"But it's turned out to be none of those things," he wrote on the Conversation website.
It was billed as a "joint strike fighter" for the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy, as well as for eight U.S. allies.
But its development is a decade behind schedule and the planes, which aren't ready for combat, cost more than $100 million apiece, "roughly twice what was promised," Hughes wrote.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.