What does it take to abandon a project? The basics of good project management teaches us that some projects fail, and the best thing to do is to kill those projects early, before they take on lives of their own. In the case of the F-35 jet, the idea of a fighter jet that could be used by all services sounded good, but failed miserably in practice.
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The first mistake was to assume that one plane could be used by all services. Ideally, there would be a significant percentage of parts that could be used in planes built for each of the services. But the final configurations would be very different - customization on a small scale, and not "one size fits all". No one thought of the trade-offs to use a single plane. No one thought - too many stake holders make a project fail.
The next mistake was to get the plane up and flying, and then apply continuous modifications to the jest in the field. We saw this in the automobile industry years ago with recalls - where bad design made it to the customers' driveways, and then the cars had to be fixed by the local dealerships at much greater cost. "Agile" project management techniques ares inappropriate for a fighter jet, yet some people are using the principle to "save money and time" - when it is totally inappropriate.
The A-10 jet is very good at what it does, and will be kept flying until the F-35 is retrofitted enough to do the job the A-10 does as well as the A-10 does it. The B-52 bomber also does its job better than any of the replacements designed to take its place - and there are no plans to retire this work horse of our air fleet. In fact, there are father/sons who have flown the same plane, and there may soon be a grandfather/father/son combination as well.
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So where am I going?
As I write this, New Hampshire has just had its Presidential primary, and the two "anti establishment" leaders (Trump and Sanders) won. Americans are totally pissed off at a government which no longer functions as needed, and they are giving our ruling elite a vote of no confidence. Using examples such as the F-35 jet (whose parts are made all across the country to give as many congressmen as possible a stake in preserving the project), it is obvious that the elite is no longer able to make the hard decisions needed to keep this country healthy. We need leaders who could scuttle projects like the F-35 jet, even though people would be put out of work nationwide by these actions.
Our problem as Americans is simple - how do we determine who we can trust? The uneducated people in this country are largely supporting Trump, as his "toughness" is being taken as if he'd be a strong, decisive leader. But this is all bluster. If we want a country run as if it were a business, one can do much better than choosing a leader who has had his businesses go into bankruptcy 4 times.
Yet, the educated people also have a problem by choosing Sanders. He is an avowed Socialist in a country that looks skeptically at Socialism. (His policies would be in the middle of the road in Europe or Canada. But this is not Europe or even Canada.) Could he get anything through a GOP controlled congress? It looks doubtful at best.
One of the TV pundits noted that we're seeing a seismic shift in politics, where one (or both) of the major political parties may fail to survive the next 20 years. And I think this is a strong possibility. The era at the beginning of the 1900's was very similar to that we have today. There were financial crises in 1907 and 2008 that business and government were ill-equipped to handle, there were political elites out of touch with the general public, and there were people strongly motivated for radical political change. The election of 1912 is the closest analogy we have to this year's election, and America then had 4 viable candidates who could have been elected President: Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, and Debs. This year, we have the "establishment" represented by Bush and Clinton, and "revolutionaries" represented by Trump and Sanders. Will we retreat from this revolution as we did in 1912 when Wilson was elected? Or will we choose that political revolution by voting our elite out of power? That is the big question to be answered in November - and I hope we choose wisely....
