THEATRUM BELLI

The Pentagon has a time honored tradition of assigning PR nicknames to its aircrafts. The moniker of Lockheed's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is "Lightning II", named after Lockheed's glitzy but rather unsuccessful WWII fighter, the P-38. A cursory examination of the record of the F-35's namesake generates compelling evidence for why we need to rename JSF, quickly.

The darling of the Army Air Corps in the early 1940s and of vintage fighter buffs today, the P-38 was considered the high tech and high cost wonder of its time. It pioneered twin engines (with counter-rotating props and turbo-chargers), tricycle landing gear, stainless steel structural components, and a radical airframe design. At a time when fighters cost about $50,000, it cracked the $100,000 mark. Even so, it got torn apart so badly in dogfights against the far smaller, more agile, faster-climbing Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs that it had to be withdrawn from the skies over Germany as a fighter -- in favor of the far more effective, half as expensive P-51. Relegated to the minor leagues of reconnaissance and ground support in Europe, mostly in Italy, the P-38 proved itself equally inadequate in ground attack; it was simply too flammable and too easily downed by rifle and machine gun fire.