re: #483 Dark_Falcon

Cheney did that because Boeing had just bought McDonnell-Douglas and tried to stick the government with an outrageous upgrade price. Cheney therefore had the tooling destroyed to make clear that he would reject that sort of shenanigans and that firms that engaged in them would pay the price.

Sadly, he did not insist on continuing that sort of policy when he became vice president.

Wrong manufacturers, Dark, the F-14’s a Grumman bird and Northrop didn’t acquire them until ‘94. The upgrade cost would have been half the cost of building new Tomcats, which itself would have been cheaper than the Super Hornet has been over the life of the program even though more have been built. Cheney acted in the tradition of Robert McNamara, killing programs that he didn’t personally agree with and then making up the excuses afterward.