A recent editorial in the Times, The Fighter Jet That’s Too Pricey to Fail The F-35 is a boondoggle. Yet we’re stuck with it., strikes a welcome chord with me, since I just ran a similar piece, The F-35 Flying Turkey, Fiercely Flapping Its Wings, last week. Yet, as the second sentence of the subhead suggests, the Times, after starting strong, gets all wimpy on our asses in the clutch:
Whatever its flaws, the F-35 is a sophisticated plane, capable of generating a dynamic image of the battlefield that can be shared with friendly forces. Its cutting-edge helmet for the pilot melds imagery from many sensors into a single picture — though that, too, took a while to get right.
In short, the F-35, whatever one makes of it and however overpriced, is here to stay for a few more decades as a deterrent in the skies against a resurgent Russia and a rising China.
“Whatever its flaws”, New York Times? Its fucking “flaws” are that it fucking doesn’t work! Back in 2016, Mandy Smithberger and Dan Grazier wrote an article for War Is Boring, Everything Wrong With the F-35 explaining why the plane’s “sophisticated technology” unfortunately doesn’t work and weighs it down so much, robbing it of both speed and maneuverability, that the plane was routinely defeated in mock combat by planes 30 years its senior. In 2019, Andrew Cockburn, writing in the Atlantic, had this to say:
The F-35 first saw combat last year [2018], seventeen years after the program began. The Marines sent just six of them on their first deployment to the Middle East, and over several months only managed to fly, on average, one combat sortie per plane every three days. According to the Pentagon’s former chief testing official, had there been opposition, these “fighters” could not have survived without protection from other planes.
Oh, and what about that “resurgent Russia” shit, New York Times? According to Army Technology magazine, in 2019, Russia had a defense budget of $46.4 billion, compared to a U.S. budget of $717 billion! France, the UK, and Germany had a combined budget of $150 billion! China’s defense budget for 2019 was $177 billion,1 while India, Japan, and South Korea had a combined budget of $150 billion! Further furthermore, New York Times, dropping hundreds of billions of dollars on a rarely airborne “Hanger Queen” that can’t even defend itself when it is off the ground doesn’t make us stronger! It makes us weaker!
Here’s some advice, New York Times: WAKE THE FUCK UP! WAKE THE FUCK UP, AND GROW THE FUCK UP, AND STOP LYING TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE!
1. China “hawks/alarmists” push for $277 billion. Even if that’s close to accurate, the odds ae still heavily in our favor.
