[danpalmer]

I recently found out the “price” is now at or below $100m per plane now which was a real surprise to me.

I also found out (afraid I don’t have a source to hand) that re-engineering the A10 (is that right?), the darling of F35 criticisers would cost more to retrofit up to modern requirements.

[justrealist]

I think it's pretty fair to ask whether the joint program was the right decision in the first place, and the criticism 10 years ago was fair, but yeah it's far too late to turn back.

[danpalmer]

Yeah it seems like there's a lot of fair criticism of the politics of the program, how work was allocated and bid for, etc. I know very little about it, but it doesn't sound great.

However I think a lot of the criticism focuses on things that aren't really true. The price is one aspect, where the amortisation is now paying off and it's no more expensive than alternatives. Another is the capabilities of the plane – it's not designed for warfare from the movies or from the age when many armchair onlookers were growing up, and so it's easy to make it sound like a boondoggle, when in reality it's a modern platform built for how war works in the 2020s.

[herewulf]

> built for how war works in the 2020s

So it's a pilotless drone?

[justrealist]

It's meant to act as a low-observability information platform / data hub that can coordinate pilotless drones.

[lmm]

> I recently found out the “price” is now at or below $100m per plane now which was a real surprise to me.

Yeah that's because every time the price of the programme goes up, they "buy" more planes so that the per plane cost goes down. Any plane can be "cheap" if you agree to pay up front for a million of them to be delivered "eventually, nudge-nudge, wink-wink".