Can Tom Cruise Save the Weapon that Costs More than Australia?

　　Only one man can rehabilitate the tarnished image of the F-35 warplane, and he goes by the name of Maverick.

　　The F-35 is the most expensive weapons program in history with projected lifetime costs of one trillion dollars--or more than Australia's entire GDP. The program has been plagued by so many cost overruns and delays that the Economist warned of a possible "death spiral."

　　For budget hawks, the F-35 program is a target rich environment. The 2010 bipartisan Bowles-Simpson Commission on deficit reduction suggested halving the number of F-35s for the Air Force and Navy and replacing them with F-16s and F-18s, which would save close to $30 billion from 2011 to 2015.

　　The magazine Foreign Policy recently asked experts to name defense programs that should be axed, and the top choice by far was the F-35. As one expert put it: "We have had only one fighter jet shot down by an enemy fighter jet in the last 40 years. We simply don't need to spend over a trillion on a new fighter at this point."