With budget cuts coming to the Department of Defense, The F-35B might be cancelled:
“A lot of design compromises were made especially to give the Marine Corps the STOVL capability which, by the way, they’ve never used in combat,” he said. “And who says the Marines need a fast jet in combat?” said McPeak, now chairman of Ethicspoint Inc., a consulting firm in Lake Oswego, Oregon.
Cutting the Marine version of the F-35 is just plain dumb. Why? Because we could also see cuts in our big deck carriers, too. It is true that the Marines haven't used their Harrier's capabilities to take off from improvised air fields ashore (but we haven't faced an enemy able to pummel our air fields--will that always be true?), but their true value is providing a reserve naval aviation capability after our big decks have to pull back from high threat environments until it is a bit safer for them to close with the enemy.
While cutting our big carriers over time isn't the worst decision based on my views of the future value of carriers, I'd rather see the money saved plowed back into the Navy to have more hulls in the water.
Oh, and as I try to do when I mention the F-35, I have a (very) small number of Lockheed Martin shares. Honestly, if they went out of business tomorrow I wouldn't even notice the monetary loss. But just in case you think it affects my judgment (which predates my stock acquisition), I like to put it out there.
