[caycep]

I think the biggest problem is that it's the pentagon's flagship program, and it suffers from bureaucratic bloat, military-industrial complex crony-ism, and typical pentagon big-project feature creep.

Should have been a skunk-works project kept under wraps until as late as possible, a la the F-16...and even that project didn't survive without a little bloat.

Like some others have said, drones are probably the equivalent rebel project that the F-16 was back in its day...

[einhverfr]

It's biggest problem is complexity. Full stop. Any engineer can tell you that. The interesting question will be what hidden problems lie in wait, only to be discovered at the worst possible time....

What people will do to spend more money in order to maintain an image of technical superiority.

[Symmetry]

By all accounts Boyd (of OODA loop fame) did a really good job of saying "no" to unnecessary features people wanted to push onto the F-16.

[greedo]

Funny thing about aircraft is that a well-designed aircraft can excel in many roles despite those roles not being part of the design spec. The F-16 was designed (at least in the YF-16) to be purely air to air. Turned out to be an excellent ground attack plane. F-15's motto was "Not a pound for air to ground." yet the F-15E Strike Eagles is excellent at strike and interdiction roles.

[greedo]

The F-16 wasn't a skunkworks program by any stretch.

[caycep]

well unofficially, at least so they say, in the very beginning, the lightweight fighter program was conceived in secret by 5 guys in a back room in a pentagon - John Boyd, Pierre Sprey of the Close Air Support/A-10 fame, and a couple others known as the "fighter mafia". Much of the specs, requirements, and various aerodynamic parameters were determined before the bureaucratic majors and colonels knew about the project. The prototype aircraft were designed by engineers as side projects at Lockheed and Northrup, more or less under the radar. It probably helped that all the bigwigs were haggling about the F-15 at the time, which acted as a smokescreen.

It wasn't until it became apparent that the YF-16 was the real deal and probably going to be successful that it was finally exposed to the Pentagon procurement process, where it started to put on the pounds, and lost a bit of the agility that made the prototype aircraft famous (i.e. it had delta kinetic energy moves that the F-22 and F-35 can only accomplish via thrust vectoring).

[greedo]

The LWF (lightweight fighter) project was a well publicized procurement program. The YF-16 wasn't designed in secret, it was part of a three way competition between Boeing, Northrup, and General Dynamics.

The fighter mafia had tremendous influence in the development of the F-16 (and F-18), but it definitely wasn't a skunkworks program developed in secret and only unveiled at a later date like the U-2/SR-71 etc.

[roel_v]

1,5 trillion skunkworks?