THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Will there ever be a report that will end the Pentagon's favorite Pie-In-The-Sky cost overrun weapons system? A video documentary by the producers of The Retro Report is the latest attempt.

By the time the F-35 program is fully up and running — with an American fleet of more than 2,400 planes planned by the late 2030s — projected total costs will exceed $1 trillion. One billion dollars will be needed just to pay for the highly advanced pilot helmets, running to $400,000 apiece. And though champions of the supersonic F-35 hail it as the ultimate sky fighter for the 21st century, skeptics ask if it is worth all the money and effort, or even if it will prove as effective in its mission as David’s little stone was in its day.

To put it mildly, the Joint Strike Fighter is a complex piece of machinery. History suggests that the more intricate a device is, the more ways there are for things to go wrong. Lt. Gen. Christopher C. Bogdan, the Air Force officer in charge of F-35 development, stands firmly by the program, but he acknowledged to Retro Report that the plane’s initial design may have been overambitious and thus trouble prone.

Red flags went up even before the Pentagon awarded the contract to Lockheed Martin in October 2001. The Government Accountability Office, Congress’s research arm then known as the General Accounting Office, cautioned that assorted technological problems raised the specter of cost overruns, performance failures and production delays. All those fears were borne out. The project is seven years behind schedule, costs have soared, and eyebrows arched higher after a prototype was outmaneuvered by an older F-16 in a mock dogfight early last year.

It breaks with the past by meeting the requirements of three military branches — the Air Force, Navy and Marines — each of which traditionally developed its own planes. Three in one. Swiss Army knife. Jack-of-all-trades. These are some of the labels attached to the F-35.

As much as 80 percent of its parts are the same for all three services, including engines, fuselage, weapons and supersonic capability. Each branch, however, will have its own variant: a conventional takeoff and landing version for the Air Force, a model that can perform short takeoffs and landings on Navy aircraft carriers, and a helicopter-like design that makes possible the vertical landings desired by the Marines.

Having the services share most of the technology was meant to be a big money saver. But harsh realities intruded, in part because it is complicated, not to mention expensive, to give each branch what it wants. To help defray expenses, the United States has signed up eight other countries as paying partners. But at least one of them, Canada, may be rethinking its commitment. The recently elected prime minister, Justin Trudeau, promised during his campaign to pull out of the program, though he has yet to act on that pledge. A Canadian withdrawal, still not a certainty, would increase the costs for everyone else.

And so the cost will rise higher and higher, supported by the dispersal of manufacture into congressional districts across the land. The chances of it ever achieving dominance in any mission role is slim to none thanks to the requirement to do every mission role. Well, actually it will succeed in one mission, to make its manufacturers and supporters wealthy from the public tit.