Only people who deserve to have their jobs cut
Yes clearly the f-35, notorious for having a logistics train that is on the verge of collapse during what passes for peacetime in Natoland, clearly needs fewer factory workers.
“We have some parts shortages that we’re experiencing that (have) left a number of folks who don’t have work in a work area,” the spokesperson said.
lol lmao
This flimsy supply chain is actually Lockheed's intentional design
They made the aircraft more complicated than it needed to be, not to fulfill various performance requirements, but rather to distribute small and mid-sized parts manufacturing facilities into a very wide array of congressional districts. And thus distribute small handfuls of well-paying jobs. This was calculated to create pressure against the competing Boeing fighter project, and it worked.
Holy shit. Can you reccomend any reading on this? I must know more.
Here's one source, there are others. I actually heard about this 10 or 15 years ago and this is a recent article about it:
Adding so much new technology serves a political purpose unrelated to any combat function. Each gadget added to a weapon needs to be built somewhere and so becomes a new subcontract to the whole endeavor. Spreading these subcontracts around the country guarantees support in Congress. As more congressional districts have a piece of the acquisition action, more members of Congress will have a vested political interest in seeing the program continue. The F-35 program takes this practice, sometimes called political engineering, to an extreme. Lockheed Martin’s F-35 website includes a page dedicated to the program’s economic impact: An interactive map shows suppliers in 47 states.
https://www.pogo.org/analysis/has-the-pentagon-learned-from-the-f-35-debacle
Also: https://infogram.com/f-35s-1hke6098w1v565r
Yes....YES! increase the costs of maintaining a failing project so expensive we could have colonized the moon by now.
There is such a beautiful irony in the way that an ascendant MIC has made an actual war economy impossible
“(Defense companies) can’t necessarily count on the kinds of margins that they have had in the past,” Gertler said. “So there are a lot of defense companies adapting to that reality in different ways. Lockheed is being very forward about what they’re doing on the personnel side.”
The shareholders demand more money every month, did someone get addicted to their fat profit margins?
It hasn't though. The US is breaking records in terms of military hardware exports. If anything, the gravy train has sped up.
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-arms-exports-hit-record-high-fiscal-2023-2024-01-29/
Sales of U.S. military equipment to foreign governments in 2023 rose 16% to a record $238 billion, the U.S. State Department said on Monday, as countries sought to replenish stocks sent to Ukraine and prepare for major conflicts. The figures underpin expectations of stronger sales for the likes of Lockheed Martin (LMT.N), opens new tab, General Dynamics (GD.N), opens new tab and Northrop Grumman (NOC.N), opens new tab, whose shares are forecast to rise amid rising global instability.
I'm sure that Ford had every intention of making their self-importance urban tractors sound like a fucking fighter jet.
