The Department of Defense: sponsored by Lockheed with a grant from United Technologies. Lockheed to buy helicopter maker Sikorsky for $9 billion. (NYSE: LMT) needs something to offset the bleeding from the F35. All that blood is coming from the taxpayers. They are making bank on the F-35. Just look at all the ex-Congressmen on the payroll.
The F-35 was deliberately designed to be a long term cash cow. They’ve bragged about this openly. It’s built in dozens of states as a way to make it harder to kill and they deliberately made it harder to upgrade so that they can make money long term on maintenance. They learned their mistake from the F-15 and F-16.Well, now we won’t even be able to have helicopters made on time and on budget with the capability they originally promised. We’ll finally get to see even basic utility choppers break the $100m mark and they won’t be able to take off with a full complement of troops and fuel at sea level without an additional couple billion in R&D once they become “operational.”
Lockheed Martin, right now, is a great example of everything that’s wrong with the military-industrial complex. Combine that with the clusterfark that is procurement and it’s amazing we have anything functional before it’s utterly obsolete.