The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed

As someone who has some familiarity with this process, just like safety regulations are written in blood, Federal Acquisition rules are written in misuse of money, sometimes criminally.

Yes, we have swung too much towards the bureaucrats but I'm not sure throwing out everything is solution to the issue.

Move fast works great when it's B2B software and failures means stock price does not go up. It's not so great when brand new jet acts up and results in crashes.

Oh yea, F-35 was built with move fast, they rolled models off the production line quickly, so Lockheed could get more money, but it looks like whole "We will fix busted models later" might have been more expensive. Time will tell.

The F-35 was Lockheed's entry in the Joint Strike Fighter program. The JSF has roots going back to 1996. The X-35 first flew in 2000. The F-35 first flew in 2006, and didn't enter service until 2015(!!).

That's nearly 20 years to develop a single airframe. Yes, it's the most sophisticated airframe to date, but 20 years is not trivial.

The F-35 had many issues during trials and early deployment - some are excusable for a new airframe and some were not. I suspect the issue wasn't "move fast, break things" but rather massive layers of bureaucracy and committees that paralyzed the development pipeline.

The F-22 was part of the Advanced Tactical Fighter (ATF) program which dates back to 1981. It's prototype, the YF-22 first flew in 1990, and the F-22 itself first flew in 1997. It entered production in 2005. Again, 20+ years to field a new airframe.

Something is very wrong if it takes 20+ years to field new military technologies. By the time these technologies are fielded, a whole generation of employees have retired and leadership has turned over multiple times.

You're looking at this all wrong. Taking 20 years to develop an airframe is fully intentional. The whole point of that project is to keep military contractors in business in peacetime because if war breaks out it will be much harder to start a company from scratch. If the company were efficient and pumped out aircraft like a normal company the government would be stuck with thousands of otherwise useless machines to maintain. By dragging out the development for decades they can keep the engineers employed without burdening themselves with enormous O&M costs.

Obviously this will have to change if war breaks out for real, but in theory they won't be scrambling to hire people and will have at least some production capability. They will be scrambling to expand the production lines, but they won't be starting from 0.

A lot of people see defense contractors as an enormous waste of money, but to the government it is a strategic investment.

Is this goal documented by the Department of War somewhere? Or are you guessing that there has to be a strategic reason for what seems quite wasteful. It sure seems like there's more efficient ways to achieve this goal.

What would you suggest as a more efficient way to achieve this goal? Building thousands of advanced fighter jets for private citizens? Keeping highly skilled engineers up to date on the most modern technologies and maintaining specialized factories is inherently expensive. You can't leave the factories mothballed because you need to keep the skilled workers employed and practiced with manufacturing.

Maybe there could be something like a weekend warriors but for machinists? One weekend a month, one week a year you build fighter jets. This does mean there needs to be private sector demand for those skillsets so the reservists have relevant day jobs.