Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
Without working software, the F-35 stealth fighter is a trillion-dollar lawn ornament.
Called “a computer that happens to fly” by one former Air Force chief, with algorithms running everything from basic flight controls to long-range targeting, the F-35 runs off eight million lines of code. That’s actually less than a late-model luxury car like the 2020 Mercedes S-Class, which has over 30 million lines, notes a forthcoming report from a national security thinktank, the Hudson Institute.
Yet, co-authors Jason Weiss and Dan Patt told Breaking Defense that even as private-sector software surges ahead, a Pentagon bureaucracy built to handle industrial-age hardware still struggles to get all the fighter’s code to work.
