Here's a Little Perspective for You

[unhappycamper]

http://isnblog.ethz.ch/government/aircraft-stories-the-f-35-joint-strike-fighter-part-i



Aircraft Stories: The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (Part I)
By Srdjan Vucetic
28 May 2014

How big is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter? By one set of measures, it is three times bigger than the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, ten times bigger than either the Apollo Project or the International Space Station or Hurricane Katrina, or one hundred times bigger than the Panama Canal. These comparisons are only moderately outlandish. US$1.45 trillion is the Pentagon’s own December 2010 estimate of lifetime operating and supporting costs for the 2,443 copies of the F-35 currently on order by the United States government, which we can then compare to the known price tags, in 2007 dollars, of these five projects.[1] Costs—also variously prefaced as procurement, actual, sunk, fly-away, upgrade, true and so on—and their contestations are central to a discourse of accountancy that surrounds all projects that require large-scale mobilization of public power. But enormous as they are, these numbers still cannot capture the size of this particular weapons program. To understand just how big the F-35 is, I wish to suggest in this two-part post, we ought to conceive it as a proper assemblage—a heterogeneous association of human and nonhuman elements that is at once split, processual, emergent, and, most importantly, constitutive of the modern international.

[JayhawkSD]

1. Well, that's kind of hyperbolic

If you applied the same standard of cost accounting the the nation's 12 supercarriers, you would come up with a number an order of magnitude larger than the F-35. Heck, you'd probably have more than $1.45 trillion for the cost of developing, engineering, building, operating, manning, maintaining, reparing, transporting, and upgrading one super carrier, let alone twelve of them.

It's also a little wierd to be comparing the cost of developing, engineering, building, operating, manning, maintaining, reparing, transporting, and upgrading the F-35 to simply building the Interstate highway system. The proper comparison would include developing, engineering, operating, manning, maintaining, reparing and upgrading the Interstate system for its lifetime in addition to building it and would create a total cost probably far exceeding that $1.45 trillion cost of the F-35.

[unhappycamper]

2. The F-35 appears to be a design-as-we-go kinda airplane,

with all the uncertainty that gos with the design-as-we-go philosophy.

Nimitz-class aircraft carriers usta cost $4.5 billion sans people and aircraft.

Ford-class aircraft carriers will cost somewhere between $16 ~ $40 billion sans people and aircraft.

And each of those deployed carriers has a support group. Ka'ching.