The former has been in production since 2005 and will be done with its design phase 20?? The latter has been in operation about as long but has yet to see action in battle.

They’re both worth something like $300 Million per copy. Add in maintenance costs and, who knows, $450M?

Don’t worry about the program tho, Congress coughed up $6 Billion just hours before passing sequester to build the 30 odd Lightnings to be delivered this year on the way to 2500 or some such.

Because all the versions ranges run from 600 miles down to 450, they fly to the battle in formation with tankers.

So we have to cut costs, keeping one carrier group in the Mediterranean. But really what difference can it possibly make? Like we’d use one to save an Ambassador or something.

http://theweek.com/article/index/240394/the-hagel-pinata

The right policy would be to forget about the whole thing. America doesn’t face a deficit crisis, nor will it face such a crisis anytime soon. . . Unfortunately, neither party is proposing that we just call the whole thing off. But the proposal from Senate Democrats at least moves in the right direction, replacing the most destructive spending cuts — those that fall on the most vulnerable members of our society — with tax increases on the wealthy, and delaying austerity in a way that would protect the economy.

House Republicans, on the other hand, want to take everything that’s bad about the sequester and make it worse: canceling cuts in the defense budget, which actually does contain a lot of waste and fraud, and replacing them with severe cuts in aid to America’s neediest. This would hit the nation with a double whammy, reducing growth while increasing injustice. …

….A middle-of-the-road solution would presumably involve a mix of spending cuts and tax increases; well, that’s what Democrats are proposing, while Republicans are adamant that it should be cuts only. And given that the proposed Republican cuts would be even worse than those set to happen under the sequester, it’s hard to see why Democrats should negotiate at all, as opposed to just letting the sequester happen.

So here we go. The good news is that compared with our last two self-inflicted crises, the sequester is relatively small potatoes. A failure to raise the debt ceiling would have threatened chaos in world financial markets; failure to reach a deal on the so-called fiscal cliff would have led to so much sudden austerity that we might well have plunged back into recession. The sequester, by contrast, will probably cost “only” around 700,000 jobs.

But the looming mess remains a monument to the power of truly bad ideas — ideas that the entire Washington establishment was somehow convinced represented deep wisdom.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/22/opinion/krugman-sequester-of-fools.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=all&_r=0