F-35 funding cut to 2011 levels for the next 2 years

The Hill "supports" military programs in their own little way. After the overly optimistic (read Ponzi scheme) assumptions and lies to our elected officials don't pan out, they have to pick up the pieces via a death-spiral scenario or cancel it.

More money has been pulled from the F-35 program because of poor performance.

This from AV Week, "Senate Appropriators Slice $700M Off JSF"

The Senate defense appropriations subcommittee, which is led by the full Senate Appropriations Committee’s top Democrat and Republican, continues “to strongly support this program and believes that the F-35 is showing progress since it was restructured last year.” But with too much planned “concurrency” in production and testing, and with testing only 10% complete, the senators call for funding the program at 2011 levels for two more years to limit potential outyear cost growth.

“For each aircraft that we build this early in the test program, we will have to pay many millions to fix the problems that are identified in testing,” Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) said at a 2012 defense markup hearing Sept. 13.

Emphasis mine. How is that 2014-15 scenario looking for you Mr. MacKay? The per-year production doesn't look like this (from the 2007 MOU):

2011---78
2012---142
2013---178
2014---243
2015---252
2016---255

Even the recent MOU production order predictions are faulty to the point of being a joke.

Huge problem.

There is still a Defense Acquisition Board (DAB) to get through. Testing may be "10% complete" but not one weapon has been cleared yet. They don't know how effective the aircraft can be because major war systems depending on huge amounts of software are still not there. The "mistake-jet" syndrome is in full effect. So production gets lowered significantly and the business plan has absolutely no hope of their $60M fighter; with, or without an engine. That sir, is fraud; pure and simple.

The global manufacturing base for this aircraft is hurting. They should have been pushing out a much larger number of widgets by now. Today, investors shouldn't wonder if what they saw on the PowerPoint slide years ago was false and over-optimistic to the point of being misleading.

It is unfortunate that some still can't grasp the problem.