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)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
I remember there being some controversy about Germany's type 212A sub fleet only having like 1 out if the fleet of 10 subs combat ready. For some reason I can't find an article now :/
The F-35 is relatively cheap for its capabilities. It's really more like 3 different planes that happen to share a few parts, and it would absolutely dominate against any fighter that came before it. Russia and China are extremely interested in getting the US public to hate the airplane specifically because it's so good. There's a reason everyone else is buying F-35s from us and pretty much nothing else.
There’s a reason everyone else is buying F-35s from us and pretty much nothing else.
Correct. Same way apple was really interested in selling people the i-phone 5. It's overly designed proprietary junk that barely works, but is extremely expensive to purchase and is very profitable for the seller.