QUANTICO, Va. – With the massive cost overruns of the F-35 forcing the Department of Defense to look to save money in other areas, the military has has decided to scrap the Osprey program across all services, Duffel Blog has learned.

“We have decided that the coolness of the F-35 far outweighs its cost and will support it until Lockheed Martin comes up with something even more overblown, so we have decided to terminate the osprey bird tethering program to conserve funds,” said Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter.

“Further, while ospreys are based on every continent but Antarctica and truly offer global reach, they were crapping all over the flightline, and the uppity pilots were demanding organic herring, which is astronomically expensive,” Carter added.

Given their ability to hover over the water and lack of need for maintenance or man-made housing, neither of which the Marine Corps could afford anyway, ospreys were particularly attractive to the Corps. The Corps decided that tethering hundreds of birds together to carry troops made as much sense as anything else it had done over the past 200 years.

“The Osprey program, code name Pandion haliaetus, was a huge success initially,” said Brig. Gen. Julian Alford, head of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab. “Their talons had great grip, and they were far more aerodynamic than anything we could have developed. We were just beginning to explore their underwater diving ability when the program was scrapped.”

Widespread reports of fighting and feather plucking between the osprey, harrier, and falcon communities were largely ignored by the DoD in favor of retaining a program that it had already sunk billions of dollars into.

When asked to comment on the termination, one osprey replied, “Whatever, man. I was getting sick of carrying those fat losers around anyway. Plus, being tied to a couple hundred other dudes was cramping my style.”

As of press time, a working party was busy scrubbing osprey droppings off the roof and hood of Carter’s limousine.