F-35

@wildgrass said
On the hawkeye replacement (no spared expense), or the financial cost of the F-35? I'm sure they thought about it.

Would $10 trillion be too much for the F-35? Or is it still worth it?

To address all of your money concerns I'll just say this. If America stopped spending top dollar for its defense assets, how long before China stops respecting the 7th fleet and decides to assert itself and expand where it wants and starts to exert control over the water around it?

@AThousandYoung - said
please provide the quote that supports this statement in which you imply manned jets are obsolete and should be replaced by drones or satellites.

'Taint a bad concept, IMO. They claim the spy plane, Arora, was made obsolete by satellites.

just FYI, the Arora supposedly displaced the blackbird spy plane.

@kmax87 said
To address all of your money concerns I'll just say this. If America stopped spending top dollar for its defense assets, how long before China stops respecting the 7th fleet and decides to assert itself and expand where it wants and starts to exert control over the water around it?

They already don't respect our Navy. They have *ballistic* missiles that can slightly alter course in decent
so they can take out our aircraft carriers. No fib. If we ever fought China in the South China sea, they'd wipe us out.

@kmax87 said
To address all of your money concerns I'll just say this. If America stopped spending top dollar for its defense assets, how long before China stops respecting the 7th fleet and decides to assert itself and expand where it wants and starts to exert control over the water around it?

Foreign entities are already hacking into the Pentagon, disrupting oil / gas supply chains, messing with our health care system via ransomware, manipulating safe levels of toxins in municipal water supplies.

This is happening now. We're obviously spending money in the wrong places.

@wildgrass said
Foreign entities are already hacking into the Pentagon, disrupting oil / gas supply chains, messing with our health care system via ransomware, manipulating safe levels of toxins in municipal water supplies.

This is happening now. We're obviously spending money in the wrong places.

true, but this much I will say.

If it becomes a bigger problem, the military won't shift the money to other areas, the congress will just
take more money via increased taxes, saying "Emergency! emergency!"

@earl-of-trumps said
true, but this much I will say.

If it becomes a bigger problem, the military won't shift the money to other areas, the congress will just
take more money via increased taxes, saying "Emergency! emergency!"

They could raise taxes by $800 billion per year and still not afford what they're spending money on right now.

Hopefully voters and taxpayers know that Lockheed is fleecing America right now. They are giving fake numbers to politicians on the number of jobs created by the F-35 program. They are touting their engineering skills, while continuing to ask for more money to fix the myriad of problems their engineers created in the design. It's sleek and cool and massively overpriced. These grifters should be in prison.

@earl-of-trumps said
@AThousandYoung - said
please provide the quote that supports this statement in which you imply manned jets are obsolete and should be replaced by drones or satellites.

'Taint a bad concept, IMO. They claim the spy plane, Arora, was made obsolete by satellites.

just FYI, the Arora supposedly displaced the blackbird spy plane.

The U-2 performs the job that the Blackbird used to do, not satellites. Satellites cannot maneuver. They either float above a specific spot (geosynchronous) or they move with a specific velocity over the Earth. They cannot provide real time images of specific locations.

There was no Aurora.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(aircraft)

Aurora was a rumored mid-1980s American reconnaissance aircraft. There is no substantial evidence that it was ever built or flown and it has been termed a myth.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201210-lockheed-u-2-spyplane

Satellites – and drones – were intended to replace it. But the 65-year-old Lockheed U-2 is still at the top of its game, flying missions in an environment no other aircraft can operate in.

https://www.businessinsider.com/air-force-50-million-upgrade-u2-avionics-for-command-control-2020-5

Work that Lockheed Martin is doing on the spy plane now is meant to keep it flying for decades to come, providing real-time information to other troops and advancing other new technology by serving as a test platform.

@wildgrass said
Foreign entities are already hacking into the Pentagon, disrupting oil / gas supply chains, messing with our health care system via ransomware, manipulating safe levels of toxins in municipal water supplies.

This is happening now. We're obviously spending money in the wrong places.

I would be very surprised if some of those cyber-break ins were/are not managed events allowed to happen. As EoT argues, its one way to get Congress to spend more money. On the other hand its a great way to send your opposition down a rabbit hole they may only discover when its far too late.

It happened before. NASA's plans for the Shuttle were somehow unclassified. The Soviets worked out that an Aladdin's cave, a veritable treasure trove of design information and aerodynamic studies including rocket motor designs were there for the fleecing. Some within the Soviet system convinced Breshnev that the Shuttle could drop a nuclear payload over Moscow. That was enough to fuel the funding of copying the Shuttle program and short cut the development time and build their own version. And they did. But as these things go, the US got wind of it and fed "improved" designs into the Soviet data acquisition system. These "improvements" had the potential to severely damage the Soviet design. The Buran which looks identical to a Space Shuttle inherited its DNA, but not its specific info in how to attach the heat tiles. After the first and only flight of the Buran, the heat tiles were apparently cooked. The Soviet system was also near its end and funding soon dried up for the program. But the Soviets invested a lot of Roubles into a design that had serious re-entry issues because of the tiles. How many missions the Buran could have made without burning up is anyone's guess and they simply did not have the money to try anyway.

As far as I can see its all Mad Magazine, Spy vs Spy. When war breaks out we'll finally know who did the hard work and who was riding on the coat-tails of other's hard work.

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna18686090

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna18686550#.WFF7CqIrKuU

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/real-life-rogue-one-how-the-soviets-stole-nasas-shuttle-plans

@kmax87 said
I would be very surprised if some of those cyber-break ins were/are not managed events allowed to happen. As EoT argues, its one way to get Congress to spend more money. On the other hand its a great way to send your opposition down a rabbit hole they may only discover when its far too late.

It happened before. NASA's plans for the Shuttle were somehow unclassified. The Sov ...[text shortened]... /www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/real-life-rogue-one-how-the-soviets-stole-nasas-shuttle-plans

Certainly, it is possible that cyber attacks are allowed to happen to generate additional revenue streams for US companies who benefit from fearful Americans.

But the same is true for the F-35. Lockheed is grifting us. Their teams of lobbyists do not argue to politicians that the F-35 makes Americans more safe. Obviously, they would not do that because they have no way of knowing. The lobbyists pitch the F-35 to politicians because it creates jobs in their district.

It's corporate welfare. The long term solution has to be cuts to the military budget. My guess, though, is that an investment in cybersecurity would cost a lot less than this boondoggle.

@wildgrass said

It's corporate welfare. The long term solution has to be cuts to the military budget. My guess, though, is that an investment in cybersecurity would cost a lot less than this boondoggle.

And it would employ a very small fraction of the people.

@kmax87 said
And it would employ a very small fraction of the people.

Good. Military-funded capitalism is gross.

@wildgrass - said
But the same is true for the F-35. Lockheed is grifting us.

Mon ami, the whole Military Industrial Complex has to be reeled in. And people grumble about Big Parma?? ay caramba!

@earl-of-trumps said
@wildgrass - said
But the same is true for the F-35. Lockheed is grifting us.

Mon ami, the whole Military Industrial Complex has to be reeled in. And people grumble about Big Parma?? ay caramba!

"Arguments to boost military spending come from the very people who oppose the economic recovery plans because the government doesn't create jobs. We have a very odd economic philosophy in Washington: It’s called weaponized Keynesianism. It is the view that the government does not create jobs when it funds the building of bridges or important research or retrains workers, but when it builds airplanes that are never going to be used in combat, that is of course economic salvation."

- Barney Frank