"Whole world 'bout to find out why the US doesn't have free healthcare!"
whole world sees totally hollowed-out military industrial complex that exists only to enrich the ultra-wealthy
The funniest part of that "find out" bullshit is that the world already did. It's called March 2003. When we invaded a country we had already sanctioned to shit and back, had total air superiority, and still managed to fuck it up so bad we'd have lost to an insurgency if we hadn't lowered recruitment criteria to get more boots on the ground instead of relying on aircraft.
Edit: absent nukes that whole argument can fuck off
Even the mock war games that were held as training directly for that were rigged for the side playing as the US
Mock OPFOR were told they should give the American side a 'safe entrance', they weren't allowed to use chemical weapons, they were told to just reveal some troop locations to the US side...
Softest military in the world
If they ever get into a direct, hot war with an opponent that actually has modern armor/aircraft, they're in for one hell of a rude awakening (assuming it doesn't go nuclear first)
You know what really baked my noodle? I was a big WW2 nerd and then we went to war when I was a teenager. Where were the ration cards? Where was the society at war? The entire thing was just this low hum in the background. A thing you could choose to ignore. You could ignore it all. That's not how you fight a war if you want to win it. That's how you fight war if you want it to just make money for war industry. And then (I know, I know) my friends went over and got shot at and made a third, or a quarter, what blackwater mercs were making. I was like "what the fuck is this? You could have 3 or 4 more guys for every one of these warjoy trigger happy dipshits. WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?"
They flubbed it. They fucked it all up intentionally. Just so contractors could make more money. Kickbacks. Half a million people dead for their boondoggle. The Iraq War truly is what radicalized me. "War is a racket" and all that jazz but that war, that fucking war, it was a smash and grab, it was pure gangster capitalism. Sorry I'm kinda rambling here but that's why I don't see the US military winning a knockdown drag out fight. Not if it's that kinda military. Doing it right, making do with limitations? Not enough profit to skim. Not enough fat to trim. So no wonder they skew the war games to prop up the illusion. It's cheaper that way. And that money saved? It can get siphoned off by the MIC if it gets tested in battle.
Edit: What I'm trying to say is you can either have a military designed to make money or you can have one designed to win wars. You can't have it both ways. And we all know the way the USA has chosen.
The reason they didn't go for full on WW2 rationing or the draft or anything is they saw the public backlash after Vietnam. Wars need to be sold to the US public as some hazy far off thing that doesn't directly affect their lives. They're fine with people over there being killed for profit, as long as it doesn't inconvenience them personally.
Yes, and I remember how they didn't even allow filming the caskets coming home like they did in Vietnam, to say nothing of actual combat footage on the nightly news. That's how "over there" they tried to make it. Goddamn... it was so fucked up.
The prevailing theory regarding the media coverage (or lack thereof) is they felt 'guilty' over how they 'altered the American people's perception of the Vietnam War unfairly', which...lol.
That is partly why a lot of things went unquestioned, why they started (and continue) to just swallow State Department talking points whole; it's not like Vietnam was significantly better, but they actually reported on what was happening now and then, instead of just fobbing off the troops 24/7. Of course, they also took a wildly paternalistic view of the Iraqi/Afghani people, I remember when they helped pull down one of those statues of Saddam that he had near his palace (?), the whole tone was "oh these poor Iraqis need our help, they don't know how to do this".
The crowd around that statue when it got pulled down was like 90% journalists. It was pure theater. At the time I was laughing at the idea that Europe is full of statues of profoundly evil men but they just kinda deal with it. Like "oh that's just Charles the Awful, he killed a thousand babies, now pigeons shit on him no big deal." But the media had to have their "I'm doing my part!" gesture to the state department.
The F-35 program isn't "ineffective" lol. It's not designed to fulfill combat roles, it's designed to make money. It's been more profitable than any other technological project in MIC history. It's a roaring success as far as the players are concerned.
the military industrial grift vortex always yearns, always hungers for more
It is so fucking weird watching Biden keep trying to start WWIII with anyone who will take him up on it while the wunderplanes can't fly, they don't have the capacity to build the wunderboats, the wundermissiles don't hit anything, and the wundertanks are getting washed in Ukraine by hardware store drones. While they can't even produce enough shells to keep up a semblance of a fight in a one-front proxy war and they can't even bully the poorest country in the Middle East.
and yet there are still idiots that will parrot the whole "oh see what the MIC has now, the secret stuff is like 20-50 years ahead of that"
no. lol no it is not.
This is my favorite cope.
What exactly is the deterrence value of a capability no one knows about?
I saw it so much when the Chinese weather balloon wandered over the US
So many people I thought to be smarter than they proved themselves to be were going on about how the US had secret signals interception abilities and the only reason they didn't intercept the "spy balloon" earlier is because they were spying on the information going back to China using this secret high tech stuff
Pure undiluted copium
And then it turned out that they'd tracked it the entire time because it's just a weather baloon, and no one gave a shit until it turned in to a big stupid political thing.
"The whole point of a doomsday machine is lost... if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world?"
Just you watch bozo. When The Ghost of Tallahassee kills 500,000 PLA soldiers on the first day of WWIII, we’ll see how fast they fold
Just tell them that if it was true the specs would have been posted on the warthunder forums already.
Liberals are dreamers who believe in the power of positive thinking. They live in a fantasy land where they can wish for things to happen without any regard for practicality or reality. Their idealist views lead them to ignore pesky details such as production capabilities and supply chains.
That definitely wasn't the original plan for Ukraine. The backfiring of Russian sanctions have made de-dollarization more plausible than ever, and NATO believed their fighting doctrines were going to work.
I agree that the US is a rentier empire but I'm not sure they quite know that yet.
Yeah, but you forget the most important reason they'll win the war:
wundermissiles don’t hit anything
Do you mean javelins? Because himars have been quite effective at striking civilains in Donetsk
Program officials set a 65% availability goal for the F-35 fleet.
F-35 defenders will undoubtedly say the 30% fleet-wide figure doesn’t mean much because many of the aircraft counted are in a life-cycle period, such as undergoing major overhauls, during which they would not be expected to be pushed into combat service. There is some truth to that, but the testing director took that into account. The report provides the full mission capable rate for the “combat-coded” aircraft, or those assigned to active squadrons with an assigned combat mission. The portion of the F-35 fleet that is supposed to be ready to fight at a moment’s notice has a full mission capable rate of only 48%.
The Pentagon established a 60-day goal for repair times at the depots. As of February 2023, it took an average of 141 days to cycle an F-35 through the depot process. That was actually a slight improvement from the situation identified by the Government Accountability Office in a 2017 report, when the average time was 172 days.
1.5 trillion for an aircraft that has roughly the same reliability after light use as a Jaguar F Type that was recovered from a swamp
1.5 trillion
What's another few hundred billion? I wonder what the final cost will be. $3t? $3.5t? More?
The F-35 fighter will now cost more than $2 trillion | Responsible Statecraft
The F-35 fighter will now cost more than $2 trillion
The eye-popping price tag has not fixed the maintenance issues plaguing the program, a government watchdog says
Apr 17, 2024
This is very edifying bc the last time i was in a screaming match about the us being a paper tiger armed with wunderwaffen i cam to the conclusion that the massive, massive logistical costs of the F-35 would probably result in entropy defeating the entire fleet even if it was used in a pitched war against an enemy with no air defense. The things have a small payload so they'd need twice as many sorties as older, better planes. So they're in the air twice as long, which means they need massive amounts of maintenance on ship or on base, and if anything seriously goes wrong they can't be repaired in the field, if parts exist to repair them at all.
How long before F-35 apologists start claiming that being able to fly is not a key combat role?
I pop in to the Chapo discord and there's always at least one guy who is die-hard "Aktuly the F-35 is a really good program and the naysayers are just in the bag for the F-22, so you shouldn't listen to them."
Incidentally, I've also heard all the critics of Boeing are being paid by Airbus.
There are MIC leg humpers in a 'leftist' space?
Gross.
There's inevitably a
take that amounts to "There's a secret shadowy organization behind the news article telling you the F-35 is bad, and its intentions are even worse!"But the end result is a pedantic argument over some functionally unknowable question of which overpriced, badly engineered Pentagon vanity project is the biggest waste of money. Less MIC leg-humping and more "Um, aktuly, you've fallen for Pentagon 11D chess!" contrarianness.
I'm in the bag for the damn F-16. It should have never been abandoned, they should have just built hundreds and hundreds of the things with robot brains.
Okay but 16 is less than half of 35
More seriously, they do have F-16s with robot brains. They're called Predators and they're terrifying, particularly when employed inside a defensive perimeter.
But they're not great at power projection. F-22s/35s are built for extended range.
Counterpoint: it is good for capitalism to devour itself.
I wonder what the cost will be a year from now. And two years from now. And...
The F-35 fighter will now cost more than $2 trillion | Responsible Statecraft
The F-35 fighter will now cost more than $2 trillion
The eye-popping price tag has not fixed the maintenance issues plaguing the program, a government watchdog says
Apr 17, 2024
F-35 may just be the most expensive Rube Goldberg machine ever constructed. :)
The surreal and obscene thing is the growing astronomical cost doesn't even matter at this point. It's a sunk expenditure and no pol would ever actually take steps to investigate or kill the project however fucked up it is or how fucked up it gets. The cost will keep going up as they throw traincars full of cash at problems.
---
Edit
Maybe when it gets to $3t the American media will suddenly remember the F-35 exists and there will be some detailed tv news investigative report. Some dipshit reporter will look earnestly at the audience and say "How is this possible? How did this happen?" As if it's a mystery.
These types of projects make a lot more sense when you look at them as vehicles to divert tax money from stuff it's meant for and back into the pockets of the oligarchs.
Someone was yelling at me about russia because their oligarchs steal public money and that's not the same thing as unbelievable cost overruns on military projects and equating the two means i'm a putin shill.
Which was all very confusing because i wasn't even talking about that.
I find whenever libs hear something they don't like their immediate reaction is to start bleating about Russia.
In bad country all dissenters are labeled foreign agents by brainwashed population.
Some dipshit reporter will look earnestly at the audience and say “How is this possible? How did this happen?” As if it’s a mystery.
The investigation will then result in jailing few middle-grade people from MIC and military and everthing will be back to
even bigger scandal with new ICBM projectnormalAnd the Cold War 2.0 is on the horizon. This time surely featuring Russia and China. And somewhere in hell there will be endless laughter booming all the time. It'll be from Reagan and his cronies once they hear about Star Wars 2.0. Imagine how much that tech will cost.
I would argue we never even left the first Cold War, we only had a slight thawing for some time, but now we are again in it co,mpletely with proxy wars, (modified) red scare, yellow peril and even iron curtain is again visible. Even Star Wars is back, but as a farce. Space Farce.
Space Farce
I know that will have insane cost overruns. But I meant an actual, nonsense system of "gee-whiz-bang" laser (etc) tech that will never work because having it work was a big lie to begin with. This project would be at least a multi-trillion dollar intentional boondoggle created to routinely suck up ginormous amounts of cash. Star Wars 1.0 was designed that way but it never actually - cough - got off the ground.
This project would be at least a multi-trillion dollar intentional boondoggle created to routinely suck up ginormous amounts of cash.
Exactly. Also China already managed to humiliate them greatly with the magnetic cannon, and will even more in the future.
F-22 is even more absurdly expensive, but it at least somewhat works compared to F-35.
So far the only air to air kill of F-22 was the Chinese balloon lmao.
This isn't why. We would save money by switching to single-payer government healthcare. The only thing stopping us is the fat cats at the top of the healthcare industry. From a monetary perspective there's nothing stopping us at all.
sent this to my lib friend and he sent back some cope about how the J20 is even worse actually ("if you believe the leaks"), the problem is inherent to stealth coatings, and actually its not that much worse of a rate than the f22 or the b1/b2. Not sure why "all our other planes are shitty too" is supposed to be better lol
I basically just said the f35 program had a 10 year lead on the j20 and that I haven't seen any such leaks. Maybe the more relevant thing is that china doesn't have a huge fleet of them (yet anyhow), and doesn't really need to, given that they aren't engaging in globe spanning armed conflicts like the US likes to. And that the f22 used to have a better availability rate but it's plummeting
That last bit is the elephant in the room. US wants to have a global empire and this means being able to project force anywhere across the world. This requires far more resources than simply being able to defend yourself or even project power in a particular region. US is forced to spread their resources ever thinner, while their adversaries keep getting stronger. A great example of this problem has been recently seen with Russia backing DPRK which pins a ton of US resources in the occupied Korea.
f35 program had a 10 year lead on the j20
Fancy way of saying, "our new airplane is 10 years older than their new airplane"...
My favorite part of the F-35 debacle is that they had to shore up the program's weaknesses by coming up with another set of upgrades for the F-15 instead of retiring it as planned.
Holy shit two trillion on useless fucking planes the amount of good that could have been done with that money is truly staggering.
I hate this stupid shitty system so much
So many money-making innovations! Such as:
- Proprietary subsystems that must be serviced by commercial contractors
- Having parts manufacturing located in every single congressional district to ensure that the program will never be cut, only expanded
- Modularity to entice buyers into expensive mid-life upgrades
- Lots of buzzwords about capabilities, to distract such things as quantifiable specs
Americans should be proud that this jet has allowed for so many strong innovations in generating shareholder value.
HAHAH... only 30% can fly and of those, only 30% are FMC.
So... 450 in service as of this document, DoD Sept 31, 2023 ... I'm unsure if this is worldwide of just the USA military though.
450 * .30 = 135 (Able to fly at least one of their possible missions)
135 * .30 = 40.5 (Able to fly all their possible missions)
Pretty sure its standard that any fighter going up has a wing-man, so that means nobody flies without a buddy.
40.5 / 2 = 20.25
Gotta round that down to an even 20.
Anybody know how many airbases/aircraft carriers can support these things? Outside the USA would be the important number to look for...
Lockheed Martin c suites sure do love this grift of a program that's for sure.
