By Sarah Tully
Click here to read this listicle in its entirety on BuzzFeed.
This plane costs more than twice the number of people on the planet. And it doesn’t really work.
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is on pace to be the world’s most expensive weapons system ever. It was designed to be the plane to do it all, and, hypothetically, will eventually replace the F-16s, A-10s, and F/A-18s currently in service.
But while the F-35 sounds awesome in theory, it is exceptionally expensive and is riddled with problems.
For one, it doesn’t really work. There are reliability issues—it cracks, it can’t dogfight and the IT backbone of the F-35 system is deficient.
The Pentagon estimates that the lifetime cost of this currently dysfunctional plane will be $1.45 trillion dollars. That’s this much money: $1,450,000,000,000.
Here are 10 things America could do with $1.45 trillion instead of pay for these insanely expensive planes that don’t really work: