During high-level Pentagon meetings, acting US Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan harshly criticized Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fifth-generation fighter jet program, using an expletive to describe the fighter, an ex-Defense Department official was quoted by Politico as saying.

According to the former official, Shanahan called the warplane “f***ed up”, claiming that Lockheed “doesn’t know how to run a program” and that “if it had gone to Boeing, it would be done much better”.

Politico also cited a former Trump administration official as saying that when Shanahan was Deputy Defense Department chief, he had repeatedly “dumped on” the F-35 program, slamming it as “unsustainable”.

“The cost, the out-years, it’s just too expensive, we’re not gonna be able to sustain it”, Shanahan allegedly pointed out at the time.

The F-35 is known to be the most expensive aircraft program in history, with a projected lifetime cycle total cost of $1.5 trillion.

The last few years have seen the F-35 program face a whole array of costly setbacks and technical delays.

In late October 2018, the Pentagon’s F-35 Lightning II Program said in a statement that the US was temporarily grounding all F-35 operations worldwide after the first-ever crash of the sophisticated fighter jet led investigators to suspect that a common problem exists with the jet’s fuel tubes.

Source: Sputnik