The Defense Department committed "acquisition malpractice" by putting the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter into production years before the first test flight, acting Pentagon acquisition chief Frank Kendall said today. "It should not have been done, but we did it," he said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The Pentagon's optimistic belief that design tools, simulation and modeling would preclude the sort of problems typically uncovered in testing turned out to be wrong, he added. "And now we're paying...
