More like by the time the US works through its existing stockpiles (probably never, they’ll expire first) the next generation of VLO cruise missiles will have been in production for five or more years.

EDIT: Oddly enough, the article says that this is precisely the plan. I’m sure China, Russia, and other potential adversaries agree with the criticisms levelled by the House Armed Services Committee: the US should absolutely cancel its investments in future capabilities and use that money to fund more Tomahawks to sit in warehouses instead.

EDIT2: There’s a 2011 figure floating around suggesting the US Navy has a stockpile of around 3,500 Tomahawks. That’s enough for 5 more invasions of Iraq, 17 more Libyas, or 35 years at the article’s suggested use rate of 100/yr. Even with John McCain at the helm and Lockheed Martin in charge of developing the new missile, the US would struggle to run out of Tomahawks before it was ready.

Keep the lights on? Their electricity comes from Ukraine!

It is not about where the electricity comes from, but about the ability to pay for it under western neo-liberal ‘reforms’. Here is one article on the subject from an American mainstream/establishment publication; note the date, i.e. not post-hoc rationalisation.

Foreign Policy – Putin Is My Sugar Daddy

For all the talk of minority rights and Crimean autonomy, in interviews, many of the residents here are just as quick to change the subject to poverty and their own dire situations, to which they feel “the West” — often conflating both western Ukraine and Western Europe — can provide no answers.

Crimeans were given the rare opportunity to avoid the fate of so many other impoverished peoples who have found themselves at the tender mercies of the IMF and took it. I suspect folks from Greece could sympathise with this desire to avoid the European hatchet-men.

Speaking of added money, there is a story recently that KC-46 development is coming in $1bn over budget.

Apparently it’s for a film on Iran Air Flight 655.

I would’ve thought CGI would be cheaper…

You are confusing cause and effect. The fact that you can actually describe nations as ‘pro-US’ and ‘anti-US’ indicates the nature and axis of the problem: the US. It is the US which cannot tolerate the existence of nations that differ from itself and seeks to sanction, subvert, overthrow or invade them at any opportunity. It is the US which produced the doctrine “you’re either with us or against us” during the Cold War (recall the US’ demonization of India and the Non-Aligned Movement) and repurposed it for the War of Terror. The only reason Venezuela would be reluctant to consider Gripen is out of justifiable concern that it would be subject in future to precisely the kind of sanctions regime that it faces now, not out of some elemental aversion to ‘made in America’.

Special ops training?

Rafale is a fine aircraft but i think french pride ( thats the nice way to say it ) has made it more expensive then it had to be.

France wishes to retain all the skillsets and technological capabilities required of a sovereign nation and Rafale is structured accordingly. The Swedish approach is necessarily different because it has fewer resources to draw on, a much reduced domestic market since the end of the Cold War, and a government which is no longer committed to maintaining national capabilities. Each nation is unique and its aerospace projects necessarily reflect this. It would be as foolish for France to adopt the Swedish model as for Sweden to adopt the French model.