content: The X-32 was the only contender to meet the budget of the Joint Strike Fighter Competition. It only lost to the F-35 because of looks. A little background info on these planes if you need it (sorry archive isn't working) The F-35 completely blew over the budget and still does to this day. Boeing is skilled at production in scale and meeting budgets. It is completely political. Comey worked for Lockheed. Lockheed skunk-works is in California. Obama was more than happy to fatten the pig, whenever he could find wasteful spending programs.  Think about Silicone Valley, the magic helmet, Vegas shooting, employment history of Paddock: just follow the money. The F-35, Space Shuttle, the SLS, and Constellation program were plagued with the same issues. Besides the F22, the A-10 was on its last legs. That, I think was on purpose by Hussein. The A-10 is the warbird BRRRRRAPP,  that Isis-type characters hate to hear the most. The whole point of the F35 was for a hypothetical confrontation with Russia.That is is other reason behind "Russia, Russia, Russia" from the left, who before made fun of it as "1980s called and they want their foreign policy back"  Remember that line? Remember later the WW3 they were trying to instigate with Russia? The F-35 was never feasable without some hypothetical scales of production.  That's why all the partners and hype and war mongering etc.It's crazy. Meanwhile the A-10, which has become a coffin,  is a daily hero on the battlefield suppressing enemy combatants. How does selling the world our technology keep the US safer? It certainly fattens someone's pockets and careers. Why do the marines need to launch aircraft off their carriers? The vertical take off was in response to Harrier international sales. Less need of a carrier if you take off and land anywhere. The Russians built missles that can take out carriers, so there was a panic about that as well. The JSF program was meant as a catchall. The biggest shot in the dark is economies of scale. Another reason to sell to every branch and country as possible, hoping at some point it would be magically cheap.   Back to the Boeing proposal, economies of scale is their expertise.  Their prototype was ugly their airframe would have been many times cheaper.  They could have kept a handful of over budget F-22s and dressed up the X-32 and ramped up A-10 programs with gobs of extra cash. The reason why they didnt just make for F22s was supposedly that they wanted a fighter they could sell to other countries to offset costs and they didn't want to risk possible hostile nations getting access to all the secret shit on the F-22. Granted that kind of invalidates the whole idea of the F35 supposedly being the most advanced fighter ever made when its own project goals flat out require that it be less technologically advanced than this other, older jet. Plus it caused bullshit wastes of time and money to be added to the project like the stupid vtol variant that only the UK actually wanted because they still have a weird hard-on for the Harrier and are too cheap to build a proper aircraft carrier. It's purposefully impaired program built in conflict of interest.   I think it was like "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" type sabatoge. They were also replacing armor with carbon fiber to be more "green" in those last 8 years. Russia figured out that fighter planes are only good for bombing third world shitholes. SAM batteries disguised as shipping containers on the back of big rigs is where it's really at, and why America is going to get its asshole gaped when/if there's another major war. If we built thousands of these instead of hundreds of fighters that cost 100x as much, we'd be secure from anything short of a comet strike. But, that would make it harder to fight the jews' wars in the middle east, or their wars to "stabilize" the global banking and oil industries. So we've got three aging bomber platforms, one so old that your grandfather's generation flew in it. The B2 bomber is a terrible bomber that requires climate controlled hangers, has ancient computers that are costly to maintain, and refused to put it above Syria like we did with Libya.  Yet we're buying all of these fighter jets when we rarely fight other fighter jets.