The F-35 program cost $1.7T but early deployments exposed low readiness rates and immature software. The Zumwalt destroyer cost over $4B per ship but its main gun became unusable due to $1M per round ...

Combat exposes weapon flaws missed in testing like maintenance complexity and environmental stress that controlled trials cannot replicate. Many failed weapons were overdesigned or mismatched to ...

Across decades of conflict, only a select group of weapons proved so reliable and adaptable that they remained in service ...