The man now in charge of buying weapons for the U.S. military said that the stealth F-35 Joint Strike Fighter -- one of the most expensive defense programs in U.S. history at three quarters of $1 trillion -- was put in production so prematurely the error amounted to "acquisition malpractice."

"I can spend quite a few minutes on the F-35, but I don't want to," Frank Kendall, the Pentagon's Acting Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, said Monday. "Putting the F-35 into production years before the first test flight was acquisition malpractice. It should not have been done, OK? But we did it, OK?"