F-35

I had to revive this thread to point out two things:

1) 70% of Lockheed-Martin revenue is government cheese. The CEO is rewarded for all those lucrative no-bid contracts with compensation of $24.4 million.

Her entire job is stealing money from taxpayers. Lockheed is consistently, reproducibly over budget on all of their bids. A venture capitalist would not stand for it. Shouldn't we as taxpayers be able to fire her?

2) From a United States perspective, the point of Desert Storm in 1991 was to teach a lesson to our enemies that they cannot beat us on the battle field. However, the real lesson learned was that.... if you want to mess with the United States, don't do it on the battlefield. Right now we're being hacked and disinformed on the interwebs by our enemies left and right and we are impotent in combating it. We can't even punish them after the fact, they just keep jabbing. They are a generation ahead of us because we were too focused on the battlefield. Our enemy has no intention of fighting us in dogfights. We are blowing our money on useless gadgets.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/neutral-switzerland-plans-to-buy-dozen-of-us-f-35-fighter-jets/ar-AALDYXI

@wildgrass said
I had to revive this thread to point out two things:

1) 70% of Lockheed-Martin revenue is government cheese. The CEO is rewarded for all those lucrative no-bid contracts with compensation of $24.4 million.

Her entire job is stealing money from taxpayers. Lockheed is consistently, reproducibly over budget on all of their bids. A venture capitalist would not stand for i ...[text shortened]... Our enemy has no intention of fighting us in dogfights. We are blowing our money on useless gadgets.

Hi wildgrass. just a couple of comments here on your two

1) $24.4 million is rabbit feed, frankly. I am surprised how low it is.
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GOOGL Alphabet Inc. Sundar Pichai 2019 $280,621,552
INTC Intel Corporation Robert Swan 2019 $66,935,100
AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Lisa Su 2019 $58,534,288
MSG Madison Square Garden Sports Corp. James Dolan 2019 $54,116,491
HWM Howmet Aerospace Inc. John Plant 2019 $51,712,578
DIS The Walt Disney Company Robert Iger 2019 $47,517,762
PINS Pinterest, Inc. Benjamin Silbermann 2019 $46,222,113
DISCA Discovery, Inc. David Zaslav 2019 $45,843,912
UTHR United Therapeutics Corporation Martine Rothblatt 2019 $45,635,037
FWONA Liberty Media Corp. Gregory Maffei 2019 $44,045,070
KHC The Kraft Heinz Company Miguel Patricio 2019 $43,297,480
MSFT Microsoft Corporation Satya Nadella 2019 $42,910,215
VMW VMware, Inc. Patrick Gelsinger 2020 $42,549,725
UBER Uber Technologies, Inc. Dara Khosrowshahi 2019 $42,428,233
FOXA Fox Corporation Lachlan Murdoch 2019 $42,111,103
NOW ServiceNow, Inc. William McDermott 2019 $41,682,335
ADBE Adobe, Inc. Shantanu Narayen 2019 $39,145,631
NFLX Netflix, Inc. Reed Hastings 2019 $38,577,129
CVS CVS Health Corporation Larry Merlo 2019 $36,451,749
CMCSA Comcast Corporation Brian Roberts 2019 $36,370,183

2) I agree, our combatants quite often fight asymmetric warfare. And what we are left with is trying to
get the very best in one aspect of warfare but one that is rarely going to have to be that good in
fighting a foe. The US defense is quite large and spending the kind money we do on this tiny segment seems wasteful.

my opinion.

@wildgrass said
However, the real lesson learned was that.... if you want to mess with the United States, don't do it on the battlefield. Right now we're being hacked and disinformed on the interwebs by our enemies left and right and we are impotent in combating it. We can't even punish them after the fact, they just keep jabbing. They are a generation ahead of us because we were too focu ...[text shortened]... Our enemy has no intention of fighting us in dogfights. We are blowing our money on useless gadgets.

If America wants to maintain its position in the world, and if you want to maintain your standard of living, you have to do both. Have an unassailable military presence and advantage and learn to defend against the asymmetrical attack.

America downsizing or downgrading its physical presence and prowess, will only lead to power vacuums that other nations will be only to eager to fill.

@kmax87 said
If America wants to maintain its position in the world, and if you want to maintain your standard of living, you have to do both. Have an unassailable military presence and advantage and learn to defend against the asymmetrical attack.

America downsizing or downgrading its physical presence and prowess, will only lead to power vacuums that other nations will be only to eager to fill.

The two countries most likely to step forward to fill the void..

China and Russia

@kmax87 said
If America wants to maintain its position in the world, and if you want to maintain your standard of living, you have to do both. Have an unassailable military presence and advantage and learn to defend against the asymmetrical attack.

America downsizing or downgrading its physical presence and prowess, will only lead to power vacuums that other nations will be only to eager to fill.

@Kmax - "America downsizing or downgrading its physical presence and prowess, will only lead to power vacuums that other nations will be only to eager to fill"
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I am not sure we'd be downsizing. We'd be putting the money to another use like buying 2 more aircraft carriers with SuperHornets, Helos, Tomahawk missiles etc.

@earl-of-trumps said
Hi wildgrass. just a couple of comments here on your two

1) $24.4 million is rabbit feed, frankly. I am surprised how low it is.
-------------
GOOGL Alphabet Inc. Sundar Pichai 2019 $280,621,552
INTC Intel Corporation Robert Swan 2019 $66,935,100
AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Lisa Su 2019 $58,534,288
MSG Madison Square Garden Sports Corp. James Dolan 2019 $ ...[text shortened]... is quite large and spending the kind money we do on this tiny segment seems wasteful.

my opinion.

How many of those CEOs are paid primarily in tax dollars?

@kmax87 said
If America wants to maintain its position in the world, and if you want to maintain your standard of living, you have to do both. Have an unassailable military presence and advantage and learn to defend against the asymmetrical attack.

America downsizing or downgrading its physical presence and prowess, will only lead to power vacuums that other nations will be only to eager to fill.

Downsizing? The world is fighting back, right now. They're not doing on the battlefield and probably never will again. Get with the times. This happened yesterday, purposefully timed to hit over Independence Day weekend.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jul/02/latest-ransomware-attack-american-businesses-kaseya

How are we going to maintain our position in the world while we are being repeatedly attacked by enemy nations thousands of times per year? Due to our heavily-emphasized focus on the 'battlefield', we have very few countermeasures, recourse or strategies for dealing with cyberattacks except to pay them the money.

There's no other way to put it except that the F-35 is a shining example of strategic failures at the Pentagon. It's a deterrent for a war that was never going to happen. As if China and Russia are like "oooh, they're building an F-35 so NOW we should be scared?"

Maybe this is a perception problem? If a gas pipeline were taken out by a Russian-made bomb instead of a line of code maybe it'd raise some red flags on our military strategy?

Imagine if Taliban fighters invaded the U.S. and took control of hundreds of our companies. They promised to let us have the companies back in exchange for $70 million.

Do you think, if that happened, that the Pentagon would reevaluate their strategic priorities?

https://www.reuters.com/technology/hackers-demand-70-million-liberate-data-held-by-companies-hit-mass-cyberattack-2021-07-05/

@wildgrass said
Imagine if Taliban fighters invaded the U.S. and took control of hundreds of our companies. They promised to let us have the companies back in exchange for $70 million.

Do you think, if that happened, that the Pentagon would reevaluate their strategic priorities?

https://www.reuters.com/technology/hackers-demand-70-million-liberate-data-held-by-companies-hit-mass-cyberattack-2021-07-05/

Imagine if the Taliban had fighters better than the F15 and heavy bombers armed with nuclear cruise missiles.

The F35 is not designed for fighting the Taliban.

Good debate here. It's refreshing, and I am learning a lot

@athousandyoung said
Imagine if the Taliban had fighters better than the F15 and heavy bombers armed with nuclear cruise missiles.

The F35 is not designed for fighting the Taliban.

The only way to defeat the Taliban would be to totally wipe out villages. If given the chance they would do that to US cities, but given the chance we will not.

What does that tell you about fighting the Taliban?

@athousandyoung said
Imagine if the Taliban had fighters better than the F15 and heavy bombers armed with nuclear cruise missiles.

The F35 is not designed for fighting the Taliban.

This is kind of my point too. The F-35 was not designed to fight any modern war.

The war in which the F-35 development, mass production and use was necessary does not exist, and will never exist. Our enemies have all moved on to more effective strategies for attacking us, but the USA has a pile of Pentagon cash to burn. A huge chunk of this money needs to spent on cyber-warfare defense (which as far as I can see is completely feckless) and military Artificial Intelligence.

Reprioritize based on existing strategic threats. This is a normal thing. It's not downsizing or giving up or whatever other garbage has been written in defense of the F-35's continued existence. No one really has been able to identify a plausible modern scenario in which we'd ever need 1,500 F-35s in the sky. It's your neighbor building an iron dome around his house but still getting robbed because he keeps leaving the door unlocked.

https://www.stripes.com/branches/air_force/us-jets-intercept-russian-bombers-off-alaskan-coast-for-14th-time-this-year-1.649318