Is the Joint Strike Fighter really in QDR trouble, or is talk of major cuts some kind of evil Pentagon negotiating ploy? These days, you can get arguments for either position. One straw in the wind, however, is a recent interview given by Tom Burbage, Lockheed Martin’s F-35 program manager. He confirmed in a Fort Worth Star-Telegram story his concern about a possible DOD “agenda” to scrap one of the three F-35 variants. He added that he didn’t know what was going to happen in the end. Sounds ominous to us.
The Air Force awarded a $13.08 billion contract to the Sierra Nevada Corporation on April 26 for its Survivable Airborne Operations Center aircraft, the successor to the service’s E-4B “Doomsday” plane. Like the E-4B, officially called the National Airborne Operations Center, the SAOC will be meant to withstand a nuclear attack and keep…