Lockheed Martin won the biggest prize in military procurement history when it was awarded the contract to build about 3,000 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft with a price tag which may reach $200 billion.
The contract, according to the reports last week, calls for the first of the aircraft - designated the F-35 - to be delivered in 2008.
Wait. This is 2001. There's a war on.
I assume that before the Pentagon chose the Lockheed Martin version over the Boeing version they saw an actual airplane actually fly. I mean, they didn't just look at a balsa wood model with a plastic propeller attached to a long rubber band. Did they?
If Lockheed Martin could build plane Number 1 in 2001. Why will it take seven years to build plane Number 2?
According to Lockheed Martin's announcement: "Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company, a unit of Lockheed Martin Corporation, is a world leader in the design, development, systems integration, production and support of military aircraft."
So. Produce!
I know some of you get cranky when I compare Operation Enduring Freedom to World War II (see, that's one of the problems with this war. Operation Enduring Freedom is nine syllables. World War II is only three) but here we go again.
In the dark days of WWII (seven syllables - sort of like WWW being short-hand for World Wide Web) merchant shipping was being decimated by German U-Boats. In order to support Great Britain the Liberty Ship was conceived.
These would be slow, cheap almost disposable cargo vessels which, if they made one crossing safely, would have been deemed profitable.
The problem was, it took 244 days to build one. At that rate we would have built a fleet of about five Liberty Ships between Pearl Harbor and VJ day.
Henry Kaiser was given the job of figuring out how to build these things a bit more quickly. He did. At full production, utilizing pre-fabricated sections, the time was reduced from about eight months to an average of 46 days.
From all sources, a Liberty Ship was being delivered every 17 days. At Kaiser's Permanente Metals Corporation Shipyard in Richmond, California, a Liberty Ship was built from scratch in under five days, but that was a publicity stunt which was not repeated.
In the end, more than 2,700 Liberty Ships were built.
Henry Kaiser. Permanente Metals Corporation. Kaiser. Permanente. See? To see a link to
the history of HMOs go to the Secret Decoder Ring page where you will also see a picture of the
actual F-35 and a picture of two real-life "Rosie the Riveters."
Ok. So here we are:
(A) We, apparently, need a new fighter aircraft and Lockheed
Martin has been chosen to build it.
(B) We are in a war and it will likely be a long war.
(C) It will, however, not likely be another Seven Years War.
(D) If it takes seven years to deliver the first operational
plane, then the F-35 will miss this whole war.
(E) Where is Henry Kaiser when we need him?
And speaking of long wars, it took the American press corps just about six weeks to decide that this war is taking too, too long.
The press insists on covering this action as if it were a football game. Wars are fought day-by-day, but they are not won or lost on any single day.
If we aren't winning every day, then - the press seems to be saying - we must be losing.
The President has told us from the very beginning that this would be a different kind of war. Depending upon a reporter standing on some hill in Uzbekistan with a satellite phone giving us his opinion of how
the entire operation is proceeding, is foolish at best and dangerous at worst.
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