-By Warner Todd Huston
It has been a tough few decades for high-end military procurement, for sure. Promising projects, hardware, weapons systems, trains, planes, and automobiles — not to mention numerous boats — have been started, millions spent on them, only to be unceremoniously cancelled due to those pernicious political whirlwinds. Our nation has an aging military infrastructure and we are losing ground to other nations.
But one project looks to have weathered those whirlwinds. That would be the F-35 Lightening II fighter jet. And this one is a must for national security, too.
I was happy to have been invited to a presentation of the F-35 in Rockford, Illinois put on by Lockheed Martin. There I heard about the F-35 from its development team, I heard from two Illinois congressmen, and was fortunate enough to have had a chance to fly the cockpit simulator (very fun, by the way).
As it happens, Illinois supplies quite a few parts and computer systems for the F-35, so a demonstration in Illinois was a very apt locale.
The new F-35 is already undergoing flight tests at various bases across the country and the military is training pilots to fly them as we speak. I keep saying “the military” and not the Air Force for a specific reason. This is not just a Navy plane, nor is it solely an Air Force or a Marine fighter. In fact, one of the reasons this project has survived the budget cutter’s axe is because it satisfies more than one role of a new fighter required by our military.
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Presenting The U.S. Military’s New Fighter, the F-35 Lightning II”