The F-35 fighter jet is the most expensive weapons program in U.S. history, but one of its biggest failures isn’t in the air — it’s on the ground. The Pentagon’s Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS), conceived as an ambitious plan to revolutionize fighter jet maintenance and logistics, collapsed under the weight of bad design, poor coordination, and perverse incentives that reward failure as readily as success. Its troubled successor, the Operational Data Integrated Network (ODIN), has stumbled out of the gate, revealing a deeper, recurring syndrome in U.S. government technology programs — a systemic incapacity to deliver on large-scale, high-cost projects, where failure is not just common but structurally baked into the process. This article uses the rise and fall of ALIS, and ODIN’s faltering replacement effort, to illustrate how that syndrome operates and why it persists.

ALIS in blunderland

ALIS’s collapse was not the result of a