Aaron Mehta talks about all the issues with the F-35 fighter jet, a plane that has been in development for 20 years and still can’t do many of the things it was designed for. Mehta describes his long investigation into the F-35 project, which upon initial release had 13 “category 1” deficiencies, which are problems that could result in the death of the pilot or loss of the airplane. Some of these deficiencies have been fixed or “downgraded,” but serious questions remain about the F-35’s safety for its intended uses. Mehta also explains the ways the project was made politically untouchable from the very beginning by distributing the manufacture of its components among 48 states and many foreign countries. Now a project that produces planes that basically don’t work can never be dismantled.

Discussed on the show:

“Five F-35 issues have been downgraded, but they remain unsolved” (Defense News)

“The Pentagon has cut the number of serious F-35 technical flaws in half” (Defense News)

“The Pentagon is battling the clock to fix serious, unreported F-35 problems” (Defense News)

Aaron Mehta is Deputy Editor and Senior Pentagon Correspondent at Defense News, covering policy, strategy and acquisition at the highest levels of the Department of Defense and its international partners. Follow him on Twitter @AaronMehta.

This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: NoDev NoOps NoIT, by Hussein Badakhchani; The War State, by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.com; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; Listen and Think Audio; TheBumperSticker.com; and LibertyStickers.com.

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The following is an automatically generated transcript.

Show TranscriptScott Horton 0:10

All right, y'all welcome it's Scott Horton Show. I am the director of the Libertarian Institute editorial director of antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan. And I've recorded more than 5000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at ScottHorton.org. You can also sign up to the podcast feed. The full archive is also available at youtube.com/ScottHortonShow. Okay, you guys on the line, I've got Aaron Mehta from defensenews.com Welcome to the show. How you doing, Aaron?

Aaron Mehta 0:48

I'm good Scott. Thanks for having me.

Scott Horton 0:50

Happy to have you here. I love this subject. We've been covering this thing for years and years here. unresolved issues in the F 35. Will they ever be resolve says here five f 35 issues have been downgraded, but remain unsolved. A piece with let me mention your co authors here, Valerie in cinah. And David B larder and Valerie incentive had done this huge piece last year, I guess, about a year ago. All about that. 35 there for defense news that's also worth looking at for sure. So I guess let's go through it. First of all, what does it mean? That it these issues have been downgraded from what category two what here?

Aaron Mehta 1:38

Yeah, sure. So just a brief history. As you mentioned, my colleague Bao last year got a hold of some previously somewhat classified as fo Yo, which isn't legally classified, but basically means we don't want to have to tell people about these stuff. documents that basically laid out what are called category one deficiency For the F 35, that's defined essentially, issues that could cause death, for the pilot can cause loss of damage to the airplane, basically means you can't operate the thing in combat, or be able to perform. And it's actually the missions it's supposed to do. Basically, category one is bad. So that we found that there were 13 of these things time. And so this would have been covering through the end of 2018. So we did a big project on that, as I mentioned,