Why the Pentagon’s New Fighter Jet Will Now Cost More Than $1 Trillion

A new government report raises red flags about the F-35, the Pentagon’s flagship fighter-plane program.

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is the Pentagon’s big plan for future warplanes — it’s slated to replace [1] nearly all of the other tactical jets in the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. But getting there is going to be slow and expensive, as a new government report details.

The JSF program is a massively expensive undertaking. It has cost the government $400 billion to date, and is estimated to run more than $1 trillion [1] to develop, buy and support nearly 2,500 aircraft through 2050.

A major problem, according to the Government Accountability Office report [2], is that the program is charging ahead with procurement while testing is still in progress. As Michael Sullivan, one of the report’s authors, told Congress [3], “the manufacturing processes are just never able to get stable because there's so much information coming in from testing and so many engineering changes that are going on.”

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