The military is looking to develop new fighter jets after the federal government’s greenlight for F-35’s 20 years ago ended up being a massive and costly failure.

The Air Force launched development of an affordable, lightweight fighter and the aim was to replace hundreds of Cold War-vintage F-16s and complement a small future fleet of sophisticated—but costly and unreliable—stealth fighters, Forbes reports.

But "over 20 years of R&D, that lightweight replacement fighter [the F-35] got heavier and more expensive as the Air Force and lead contractor Lockheed Martin packed it with more and more new technology."

Now the airplanes have become the "very problem it was supposed to solve," Forbes writes, saying America needs new planes altogether.

These F-35's cost a $100 million apiece, and came with a set of problems. They were high maintainnce and buggy. So much so, they are now absolete, and going to trash.

“The F-35 is not a low-cost, lightweight fighter,” said Dan Ward, a former Air Force program manager.

Cenk Uygur points out this was a bad idea from the start, saying that the very planes they were trying to replace citing reasons of weight, were lighter than the F-35's. "The F-16 is 17 tons, and the F35 is 25 tons," he said.

Moreover, the military ordered far too many planes and got only a fraction. "The Air Force alone ordered 1200, they got 200," says Uygur.

All of this led to a $3 trillion waste of taxpayer money.

But some from the military are still trying to cover it up and protect their friends over at Lockheed Martin.

“The F-35 is a Ferrari. You don’t drive your Ferrari to work every day, you only drive it on Sundays. This is our ‘high end’ [fighter], we want to make sure we don’t use it all for the low-end fight. I want to moderate how much we’re using those aircraft,” said Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Brown Jr.

He's trying to say there is need for a new low-end fighter to pick up the slack in day-to-day operations. Today, the Air Force’s roughly 1,000 F-16s meet that need. But the flying branch hasn’t bought a new F-16 from lockheed since 2001. The F-16s are old.

So they’re using new boogymen to convince Americans that it makes sense to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on building these new fighter jets every year.

"Pentagon leaders have hinted that, as part of the U.S. military’s shift in focus toward peer threats—that is, Russia and China—the Navy and Air Force might get bigger shares of the U.S. military’s roughly $700-billion annual budget. All at the Army’s expense," Forbes reports.

"No, it's not a Ferrari, it’s garbage. Don't let him get away with it," said Ana Kasparian. "It was supposed to cost less, it was supposed to be more efficient."

But the question is why did it take so long for the military to realize that these planes were high cost and low efficiency? Here's why:

"One of the other reasons why these F-35’s have flaws is because these members of congress who approved the project allowed for something known as concurrency," says Kasparian. "That means that they could begin production of the fighter jets before they do the actual tests, and that actually led to all sorts of design flaws and delays, and when the military had them they would have to send them back for repairs," she explains.

Pointing to some jobs that the plane production facilities created, Uygur said, "they use those jobs as a political shield to take a trillion dollars of American taxpayer money and put it in their pockets."

"Wasting our money is not the bug, it’s the feature. The more of our money that they waste, the more of our money goes into their pockets. What did it cost us? Education of our kids. We could do free college for all of our kids at a fraction of this price….not even 10%, let alone healthcare, let alone wages," he concluded.