Your substance is right and I have no major disagreements with any of your points. I do have some comments and a few very minor corrections which do not substantially change your argument, but which you may find useful. I'm going to assume that someone who wrote such a reasoned response would find these minor corrections of interest.

On requirements: as an engineer I know how disastrous it is to write bad requirements. But having a thorough set of bad requirements is better than not having requirements at all. Without requirements, just about anyone is free to make them up as they go along. As you said, the government did decide that it didn't know how to build planes and the defense contractors did.

But, also, the government has, by and large, shifted its engineering focus away from systems design and more towards systems engineering and integration. Also, in general, the government cannot pay the same kinds of salaries that contractors do. So, even if the government had wanted to take a more active role in systems design, it would have found itself lacking the right people to do so effectively.

This doesn't excuse the lack of requirements, but it does offer an explanation as to why the government didn't take a more active role in design.

> There was also a large reliance on computer simulation in lieu of real world testing. Predictably there were some sizable problems simulation did not catch, which resulted in major revamps and retrofits.

Most notably, the government provided an incorrect computer model of the dynamics of the arresting gear found on aircraft carriers. The initial F-35C arrestment hook was designed against this incorrect model. When testing revealed this deficiency, the hook had to be redesigned.

> But with the F-35 the government approved "concurrent production" which meant that production F-35's were getting built before all of the testing was complete.

Yes, in large part because the government believed that improved computer simulation would eliminate the need for a separate engineering and manufacturing development phase. We've seen how that worked out.

> Right now there are about 170 production F-35's out there

From different production lots, so not even all production aircraft are the same. Later production lots include fixes that must be retrofitted on earlier lots.

> and operational testing is far from finished.

What the government calls Operational Testing (OT, what is also known and talked about in the linked document as Initial Operational Test & Evaluation, or IOT&E) is different than a layman's interpretation of the term.

Traditionally, once the government completed a very detailed set of specifications and the contractor built a few prototypes, these prototypes were flight tested by the contractor (with government oversight, of course). Once the developmental testing was done, the completed aircraft and all its test results and paperwork were handed over to the government. "Here's your plane, it meets all your requirements." Then the government would conduct testing in environments representative of actual deployments and combat conditions. Operational Testing. The OT force for F-35 just stood up last year. OT has really barely even started.

> Put all of these facets together and it's a much worse situation than what we had with the F-22.

An amplification of previous trends, as I said earlier.