I know why the plane was picked, and it was a good reason. It was just the execution of the purchase that got porked.
At the time, the USAF was facing a pilot drawdown and wanted to turn the flight indoctrination program into a flight SCREENING program. Basically they still had thousands of potential pilot candidates, needed to reduce pilot production, and also wanted to reduce the pilot training washout rate. The proposed solution? Use a pilot screening program at the USAF Academy and Hondo to not only provide flight indoctrination to pilot training candidates, but also increase the difficulty to help screen out students who might wash out later after the USAF had expended a lot more money on their training.
So that 30+ million spent on those planes *should* have come back many times over in a lower washout rate. Unfortunately, the new trainers were essentially deathtraps. A ground test found that the engine quit "only" once every hundred hours during benign ground runs... That's a horrible failure rate, approximately 100 times the expected mishap rate of a front line fighter. It still would have been "worth it" in the long run, except the manufacturer never did figure out why they couldn't keep the dang engine running. Tards.
Anyhow, that's the why behind this fiasco. It was a good reason IMHO (remember I flew both the F-15E and T-37 as a primary training instructor) but the execution of the good idea failed miserably.
