That's what the X-craft are for, to mature the nascent technologies to the point that we can make a weapon out of them.
It was 18 years from when the X-35 flew to when it saw some combat. That is too long.
Just that one pet peeve.
The fundamental issue is the time it has taken to get the plane into service. You give an opponent 18 years to noodle on how to counter it.
Yeah, not really. Programs have an Engineering and Manufacturing Development phase that comes after it becomes a program. That's where that specific aircraft is taken from an X plane to a fleet aircraft. We used to use Y but that seems to have fallen into disuse. There's a lot of real development work that happens between a prototype and an LRIP aircraft. If we want our fleet aircraft to have safe envelopes that allow them to effectively used then that development work needs to happen. If we're willing to accept more risk for our fleet aviators and maintainers than we could cut it short but we've said we aren't willing to do that. No one wants fleet aviators to become test pilots or have wings fall off during maneuvers within an approved envelope.
We don't see how long private companies take to make iphones, chips, tvs, and new materials but if you can see it took Apple 24 years to truly realize the concept of a PDA. And there was a lot of work going on in parallel that they didn't own such as the WWW, wifi, cell networks, etc. When the DoD does something like an F-35 they're essentially doing the entire ecosystem at once and not just the airplane. They're developing all the new systems, hardware, software, and materials in parallel. So that would be like the DoD developing the internet, wifi, cell systems, and an iphone all at once.
The DoD acquisition system is FAR from perfect but I think it gets a lot of undeserved beatings and unfair comparisons to non-analgous for profit companies.
