As part of the Fiscal 2011 US Defense Department Budget Requests, Defense Secretary Robert Gates on February 1 2010 proposed US$11 billion for the F-35 Joint Strike Figher (JSF) program and outlined a strategy to stabilise project cost and schedule. He also changed and upgraded the leadership of the JSF Program Office. Following Secretary Gates’s

The Williams Foundation unequivocally endorses the government’s decision to place a firm order for 14 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters. This represents strategic thinking of the first order, for which the Rudd government, and indeed its coalition predecessors (who took the decision to join the nine-nation JSF program in 2002), deserve credit. No single defence force-structuring