I am hoping the F35 was enough of a earth tilting catastrophe that a lot of the dangerous violent competent military potential of the flailing US oligarchy was already was siphoned off into good old corruption.
It sounds like hyperbole but when you start to look at the numbers, it is like a whole war was fought where winning involved burning a civilization toppling amount of money on a dysfunctional weapon.
The program has definitely had issues but the F-35 is a very effective aircraft, nothing on the “market” as it were even comes close. There’s a reason they’re selling well internationally despite their cost. (at least, they were selling well)
It’s worth mentioning that a lot of the negative rhetoric surrounding the F-35 originated from Pierre Sprey, who was a fucking idiot with a chip on his shoulder at best or a Russian asset at worst.
Overall though, the costs were worth it. We can produce (or used to be able to produce before tariffs) F35s cheaper than rival European fighters that don’t even have stealth capabilities at a lower cost at a faster rate.
Overall though, the costs were worth it.
No, no they weren’t.
This isn’t a cool military video game where you compare stats between units and nerd out about it, that money could have gone to providing people in the U.S. a future and that future is gone forever now.
Those costs became salaries and paid engineers and skilled tradespeople, lawyers and financiers, auditors and test pilots, illustrators and modelors, janitors and security guards, truck drivers and inventory specialists, logisticians and mathmericians, scientists and metallurgists, flight doctors and software developers… and on, and on, and on - it may be one of the single biggest job creating programs in the USA in a Generation. That money also got routed into mutual funds and 401k’s and into the communities where all those people live and work. While there are certainly more noble and more effective uses for money, the F35 program has provided a living for a great many people.
It’s high but the point was to spread the cost over it being the single plane for all of NATO with all countries buying it. Problem now is Trump being an idiot and people are backing out.
No, the problem is the program spent an obsene amount of money, just because you also can no longer trust the people controlling the program doesn’t mean the program wasn’t a titanic, strategic faceplant of burning so much money that any future conflict is already lost.
longer response
…but also, this is what military nerds seem to refuse to understand about this, you can’t act like it is a detail that maybe now you can’t existentially trust the person you are buying an incredibly advanced fighter aircraft from, as if that wasn’t directly connected to why the f35 itself is a strategic failure of a program, and as if there is any sense that you can consider the f35 separately from the incredibly incompetent politics and runaway cancerous military industrial complex surrounding it.
I will concede maybe I was being overly negative about the capabilities of the plane, but this whole conversation is still absolutely absurd, we might as well be arguing about comic book super heroes if we aren’t going to include the context of this program was CLEARLY a strategic failure for everyone involved from the beginning, because the existential risk to the security of other nations at the highest levels is now threatened (sureee the U.S. military can’t hack their own jets… … …).
The f35 is meant to be a lynchpin of an integrated battlefield, collating, identifying and tracking targets. It is like you took all the corporate surveillance of a microsoft 11 laptop and made it into a fighter jet, it is constantly gobbling up, receiving, and sending data… which is exactly what makes it such a powerful asset… but need I remind you… looks over at the dumpsterfire that is the U.S. it was designed over there.
Honestly, I would be very surprised if the f35 didn’t have multiple kill switches purposefully built into the design from agencies that actually have no idea the other agency or entity also put a killswitch into the f35. I don’t know if I believe any single person actually knows all of the backdoors that were essentially designed into the aircraft.
Why wouldn’t the plane be an endless hallway of backdoors for U.S. military industrial interests and intelligence agencies? Every creator of weapons of war since the first weapon would do the same thing if they had the chance and didn’t care about the consequences (the U.S. clearly does not care about the consequences if you haven’t noticed).
As evidence: see any modern smartphone, computer, car, tractor, tv or other electronic device “from” the U.S. and imagine if any time somebody started asking difficult questions to the greedy person in charge they could pump up their toxic masculinity and attack them back with “THIS is a serious matter of national security”.
Additionally something that national security staff at many major allies of the U.S. right now have to be thinking is that nobody really knows how much information has been accessed by completely untrustuable, unvetted or people proven already to be untrustworthy in the Trump administration, this is a strategic intelligence failure up and down the entire breadth and width of the U.S. military empire since potentially ANY of the information from ANY of the people that are crucial to making all of that stuff function… well somebody might know their address now might they?
I don’t relish this, this is bad, I am just being honest.
You’ve got to imagine that if the US somehow got into a shooting war with a country they had previously sold arms to, and it were possible to remotely disable their aircraft, that someone in the MIC would say, “Hold on. If we use this kill switch, the world will see it and literally no countries will ever buy weapons from us again.”
Your longer response just shows me that you are emotionally attached to raging against the machine. There no point is conversing. A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.
The program has definitely had issues but the F-35 is a very effective aircraft
AFAIK it’s essentially untested. The only way to test it would be to use it in a real shooting war against an enemy who can shoot back. The war in Ukraine has showed that a lot of assumptions about how a war would play out are wrong. It may be that the F-35 can be defeated by a few $500 drones, and is essentially useless in a war.
deleted by creator
That’s what scares me. We had two things; banking and the military. Now all we’ve got is weapons.
When all you’ve got is weapons
…
Uhh something something hammer nails
I am hoping the F35 was enough of a earth tilting catastrophe that a lot of the dangerous violent competent military potential of the flailing US oligarchy was already was siphoned off into good old corruption.
It sounds like hyperbole but when you start to look at the numbers, it is like a whole war was fought where winning involved burning a civilization toppling amount of money on a dysfunctional weapon.
The program has definitely had issues but the F-35 is a very effective aircraft, nothing on the “market” as it were even comes close. There’s a reason they’re selling well internationally despite their cost. (at least, they were selling well)
It’s worth mentioning that a lot of the negative rhetoric surrounding the F-35 originated from Pierre Sprey, who was a fucking idiot with a chip on his shoulder at best or a Russian asset at worst.
That is fair but the cost is insane, and you have to rely on the US not being insane.
Overall though, the costs were worth it. We can produce (or used to be able to produce before tariffs) F35s cheaper than rival European fighters that don’t even have stealth capabilities at a lower cost at a faster rate.
This isn’t a cool military video game where you compare stats between units and nerd out about it, that money could have gone to providing people in the U.S. a future and that future is gone forever now.
Those costs became salaries and paid engineers and skilled tradespeople, lawyers and financiers, auditors and test pilots, illustrators and modelors, janitors and security guards, truck drivers and inventory specialists, logisticians and mathmericians, scientists and metallurgists, flight doctors and software developers… and on, and on, and on - it may be one of the single biggest job creating programs in the USA in a Generation. That money also got routed into mutual funds and 401k’s and into the communities where all those people live and work. While there are certainly more noble and more effective uses for money, the F35 program has provided a living for a great many people.
That amount of money could have provided those people a future instead of a job that paid well for a bit.
It’s high but the point was to spread the cost over it being the single plane for all of NATO with all countries buying it. Problem now is Trump being an idiot and people are backing out.
No, the problem is the program spent an obsene amount of money, just because you also can no longer trust the people controlling the program doesn’t mean the program wasn’t a titanic, strategic faceplant of burning so much money that any future conflict is already lost.
longer response
…but also, this is what military nerds seem to refuse to understand about this, you can’t act like it is a detail that maybe now you can’t existentially trust the person you are buying an incredibly advanced fighter aircraft from, as if that wasn’t directly connected to why the f35 itself is a strategic failure of a program, and as if there is any sense that you can consider the f35 separately from the incredibly incompetent politics and runaway cancerous military industrial complex surrounding it.
I will concede maybe I was being overly negative about the capabilities of the plane, but this whole conversation is still absolutely absurd, we might as well be arguing about comic book super heroes if we aren’t going to include the context of this program was CLEARLY a strategic failure for everyone involved from the beginning, because the existential risk to the security of other nations at the highest levels is now threatened (sureee the U.S. military can’t hack their own jets… … …).
The f35 is meant to be a lynchpin of an integrated battlefield, collating, identifying and tracking targets. It is like you took all the corporate surveillance of a microsoft 11 laptop and made it into a fighter jet, it is constantly gobbling up, receiving, and sending data… which is exactly what makes it such a powerful asset… but need I remind you… looks over at the dumpsterfire that is the U.S. it was designed over there.
Honestly, I would be very surprised if the f35 didn’t have multiple kill switches purposefully built into the design from agencies that actually have no idea the other agency or entity also put a killswitch into the f35. I don’t know if I believe any single person actually knows all of the backdoors that were essentially designed into the aircraft.
Why wouldn’t the plane be an endless hallway of backdoors for U.S. military industrial interests and intelligence agencies? Every creator of weapons of war since the first weapon would do the same thing if they had the chance and didn’t care about the consequences (the U.S. clearly does not care about the consequences if you haven’t noticed).
As evidence: see any modern smartphone, computer, car, tractor, tv or other electronic device “from” the U.S. and imagine if any time somebody started asking difficult questions to the greedy person in charge they could pump up their toxic masculinity and attack them back with “THIS is a serious matter of national security”.
Additionally something that national security staff at many major allies of the U.S. right now have to be thinking is that nobody really knows how much information has been accessed by completely untrustuable, unvetted or people proven already to be untrustworthy in the Trump administration, this is a strategic intelligence failure up and down the entire breadth and width of the U.S. military empire since potentially ANY of the information from ANY of the people that are crucial to making all of that stuff function… well somebody might know their address now might they?
I don’t relish this, this is bad, I am just being honest.
You’ve got to imagine that if the US somehow got into a shooting war with a country they had previously sold arms to, and it were possible to remotely disable their aircraft, that someone in the MIC would say, “Hold on. If we use this kill switch, the world will see it and literally no countries will ever buy weapons from us again.”
You are going to tell that to me with a straight face lol?
Your longer response just shows me that you are emotionally attached to raging against the machine. There no point is conversing. A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.
AFAIK it’s essentially untested. The only way to test it would be to use it in a real shooting war against an enemy who can shoot back. The war in Ukraine has showed that a lot of assumptions about how a war would play out are wrong. It may be that the F-35 can be defeated by a few $500 drones, and is essentially useless in a war.
But her emails!