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"If the Air Force and industry can design a new fighter in one year, it could come up with all sorts of cool new planes."
Is the author 12?
I was gonna make a comment that highlighted the problems with engineering the F-35 and why whatever this is is probably cheaper and more effective, then I remembered that the US hasn't fought an air force since like WW2 and none of this shit is necessary. Fuck the US military.
"This is the fancy new thing we use to drop smart munitions on weddings and funeral processions" doesn't have the same pep though.
The next generation will be able to differentiate between bad guy weddings and good guy weddings with 73% accuracy!
love too go toe to toe aerial dogfighting with a squadron of quadrillion dollar super secret squirrel jet fighters against some farmers with Soviet-Afghan War hand-me-down AKs every year for 20 years
First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?
Also: LOL, sucks to be one of the cucked NATO countries who bought the F35!
love how every plane since WWII is just wasted fucking money exclusively used to bomb peasants and play trillion dollar wargames.
Well if they actually did what they were designed to do and fight a total war with a rival superpower, both sides would have already nuked each other before they could take off from their bases.
Russia's Sukhoi Su-57 “Felon” fighter
Isn't it amazing how NATO slaps a pejorative name like "Felon" or "Scud" onto foreign military equipment and then every English-language source reports that like it's a fact? Then it can be the "Patriots" vs. the "Scuuuuuds" on the news. (Bill Hick has an original bit on this, but I can't find it.)
Half the NATO names aren't pejorative at all. Meanwhile we call our drones "Reaper" but western media probably doesn't use that very often for some reason.
Not all are pejorative, sure. It's more the "you named this? ... I named this!" dynamic. Like Europeans calling every island St. George and ignoring native names altogether.
I have a friend that is really into military shit and he always told me the F35 wasn't AS bad as the internet was making it out to be.
I mean, it's absolutely a marvel of engineering on a technical level and filled to the brim with the sorts of things that military sci-fi authors have been wanking themselves dry over for the past 40 years. The problem is that all those fancy fiddly systems break and that it would have been more reasonable to use all that fancy technology to create multiple different planes that each actually excels in any one of the niches the F-35 is supposed to cover, instead of creating a mediocre jack of all trades boondoggle that's stretched so thin that it needs cutting edge tech just to work at all.
Also that it's a death machine created to make a few oligarchs in the imperial core very rich at the expense of everyone from its intended victims, to the dumb bastards that have to fly it, to the populace of the countries that buy this boondoggle who are just subsidizing the whole farce.
My understanding is that its real weakness is that it's designed to fight a war it couldn't possibly win.
Like the AC-130, it's something that just assumes air superiority. What's it going to do if it's outnumbered by jets that are approximately as good but are a tenth or less of the cost? I've heard people dead ass say that it could beat any other jet ten to one, but even if that were literally true, how many can be realistically produced and fielded in an actual total war situation? Is that supply chain even stable?
I dunno, I'm not a war nerd, but all of this gear assumes a kind of warfare that cannot be fucking fought so long as ICBM's exist, or otherwise assume current production capacity could be sustained during a real war, or, worst of all, that we will never again sustain serious losses or something.
how many can be realistically produced and fielded in an actual total war situation?
all of this gear assumes a kind of warfare that cannot be fucking fought so long as ICBM’s exist
I think you're onto something here, but you have it backwards. You don't need to produce a jet that's economical to produce at scale in a total war scenario because such a scenario will never exist as long as nukes do.
Is that the jet that beheaded a dude?
Damn Americans taking jobs from ISIS
It's true it's not, the problem is they want to use it for a wide range of roles it is not adept at when it's really only good at being a strike-fighter and is very cost inefficient for the CAS mission with short operation time and low payload. Additionally although the electronics on board are state of the art, it is not well suited to an air superiority mission either again from it's limited fuel, but also it is actually impressively outclassed by not just the F-22, but Russian SU-30S and SU-57.
Simply it's trying to be used for too many things when it was really only designed for one.
Imagine being that guy reading the headline and first sentence of the subheader, then asking out loud, "hmmm, is my mind blown, I can't really tell." Then reading the second sentence of the subheader and saying again out loud, "oh why yes, it is."
lmao it's not only a murderous industry but it's a grift too.
Yes, Mr. congressman, that'll be a few trillion dollars for our shitty fighter
That X-32 is what a plane would look like if they could be a doofus.
Because 90% of the MIC is just a capitalist grift. They can easily make good planes if they use the government to do it.
It's sad that space exploration is part of this. The Space Shuttle was the 1970a version of the F-35 in terms of being a useless expensive thing that can't do anything well because it's meant to do too much at once. And NASA is still stuck with it, Congress keeps forcing them to try and build shuttle derived rockets instead of something actually good or cost effective, so the shuttle contractors still get paid.
