Bean counters are loading the dice (beans)

The Pentagon has a problem.  Cost of the new F-35 fighter is so high that overseas customers are backing off.  It's a nice airplane everyone agrees, but they just cannot afford it.  One of the budget busters, after paying the list price for a new fighter, is the cost to fly it, Cost Per Flying Hour.
   Despite their best efforts at cooking the books, it looks like the F-35 will cost $24,000 per flying hour.  Which adds up quick. And you have to fly it if you want it to do any good.  Pilots need about 10 hours a month to stay competent in such a high performance, complicated machine.  Figure to have maybe two, maybe three pilots per aircraft, and you get to 360 flying hours a year, or $8.6 million dollars a year per airplane.  It doesn't take many years for operating costs to exceed the purchase price.  And any experienced person will figure the $24,000 per hour to be a lowball estimate.
  So, to make things look a little less bad,  the Pentagon is inflating the cost per flying hour of the current workhorse fighter, the F-16.  This is also a good airplane, everyone, including the cost-no-objective Americans, flies it.  The Aviation Week article did not give the before and after F-16 estimates, but they did quote several people expressing surprise that such a thing would be changed.  The F-16 has been flying for over 20 years, we have real numbers going back a long time, and altering them comes pretty close to lying.