On Feb. 3rd, 2012, David Fulghum, Bill Sweetman, and Amy Butler wrote for Aviation Week on cost overruns for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), the DOD's fifth-generation fighter sweetheart. The JSF program has run into a lot of cost overruns; each aircraft now costs about $112 million, as opposed to the original estimates of $62 million.
An X-35 in flight…sweet mercy.
Wikimedia Commons
The Aviation Week article suggests that these cost overruns could be traced to Chinese cyber-espionage. As background, the WSJ reported that the Chinese allegedly swiped a good deal of JSF information. Due to that swipe, producers may have had to redesign portions of the JSF. The article notes that "escalating costs, reduced annual purchases, and production stretch-outs", combined with "significant rewriting of software to protect systems vulnerable to hacking" evidence the cost overrun/cyber-espionage connection.
According to senior Pentagon officials, "other classified weapons programs are suffering from the same problem." Disturbingly, the article said that Chinese hackers even sat in on a secure, online program-process conference.
There's a lot more to the Aviation Week article. You can find it here.
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