Pierre Sprey was a major contributor to the design of two of the most successful aircraft in US military history — the F-16 and the A-10. He was very critical of the current F-35 fighter design as dangerous, buggy, and ineffective, and blamed the procurement process for the poor design and massive time and cost overrun. This is a quote from a 2020 interview with Sprey for the Public Affair radio show:
.. that’s the reason I left the Pentagon, I’d still be working there, I’m very committed to getting better airplanes that actually defend the nation better, but the reason I left was it became impossible to design airplanes or tanks or ships that were better than their predecessor and cost less. Because the nature of this enormously corrupt military industrial complex procurement process, is corrupt all the way to the base. I mean corrupt but legal of course, this is not something you can jail people for, although there’s probably underground there’s probably plenty of jailable offenses going on, but it’s not inherently that way, inherently it’s legal, because it was designed to send more money to contractors, and when that’s the primary reason for getting a new airplane, it can’t possibly be effective in combat, it cannot do well by the pilots, and can’t do well by the people on the ground that you’re trying to protect
The transcript is from around 49:46 in the interview.
Sprey elsewhere described the F-35 as a “turkey”. The F-35 has now been in development for 22 years, with an estimated total programme cost of $1.7 trillion, and is still not authorized for full-rate production (see Government Accountability Office report). F-35 development appeared to stall in 2022.