Why is the US spending so much on the F-35 fighter?

A new $100 billion helicopter programme! http://news.yahoo.com/pentagon-moving-ahead-vertical-lift-aircraft-044714179–sector.html Read the comments (over 600).

This is another joint” programme….to do all things….lift, sprint, attack etc. and will end up doing all things badly $100 billion dollars later….you read it here ;- )

People are angry their tax dollars are being fleeced….as I get older I am no longer in boy-wonder love with the next new toy beloved of politicians who so easily send young men to their deaths for the greater glory of….the politicians!

People have realised we don’t need to spend billions when simpler solutions to do the required mission are just as good.

Good example is tens of Billions spent on Bradley vehicles….combat vehicles that can’t be used in combat because they can’t deal with IEDs (read part of the story here

http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/archive/2011/October/Pages/Army%E2%80%99sGroundCombatVehicleTheSagaContinues.aspx

Rumsfeld had the right idea…if we need an armoured vehicle why not just buy that can do the job now? (he suggested a Slovenian one could do the job) instead of an over-engineered one that still has the same thin aluminium skin that offers no extra benefits (except to shareholders of the companies selected to make them).

Other people in the comments have expressed it better than I could….

Anthony Marr 2 hours ago

I don’t know if this term has been used, but “flying white elephant” comes to mind. Even if the F-35 is working as originally planned, it falls short of the optimal design for the technology due basically to it’s being conceptually a 3-way Jack-of-all-trades compromise to answer the conflicting specs of the Navy, Air force and Marines, and serves none particularly well. Of the three, for example, only the Marine Corp wants the F-35B Short Take-Off and Vertical Landing (STOVL) version, but in doing so, the F-35A (for the Air Force) and the F-35C….

Nick 2 hours ago

“When the F-35 confronts an adversary in the air, the enemy plane “will die before it even knows it’s even in a fight,” That sounds awesome, but I ask: who are we dogfighting in the air? Al-Qaeda? The North Koreans? …

…….F-35 project is an astronomical waste of money. But I suspect that not everybody looses in this fiasco: follow the money trail in Congress and I bet you will find a lot of lobby money in some congressmen’s pockets in exchange for juicy local contracts that keeps the military’s industry machine running. That’s what this is really all about, not whether this project makes sense or not.

GOVugh 6 hours ago

Our last six years of history tells us, something is to big to fail is a lie and we should have dumped it five years ago.
No these idiots keep pouring money down a bottomless pit…

Eric Palmer of ACIG.org has been saying this for years http://elpdefensenews.blogspot.co.uk/

List of members of Congress with family members as lobbyists is here http://www.legistorm.com/member_family/about.html

Yes Su-30 is a excellent type but how much will 24 air-frames cost plus how much will they cost to run for 30 year remember Argentina has no money and Su-30 burns a lot of fuel

Tempest, great posts (also earlier ones for Argentine Navy)….I fear though that countries don’t always buy the optimum kit based on say your reasoning….Argentina does have the money (G20 economy) but there appears to be a political decision not to spend money on the armed forces….

In addition, still some (small) fall out after the sovereign debt default in 2002 (was 132 bn!..one seventh of third world debt at the time) which means certain state assets might be impounded (remember the Navy ship held in Ghana?) if agreement is not made with the remaining bondholders (still about a quarter of the debt not re-scheduled and was bought at a discount by mainly American funds).

This generation of civilian politicians still remember the excesses of the military (like all out-of-civilian-control militaries everywhere)….”the disappeared”…throwing dissidents out of a helicopter over the South Atlantic etc. ….and this might account for their reluctance to put money on the table to the former oppressors.

…..politicians don’t care (or know) what planes are bought as long as they can do the job within the budget given….defence ministers and politicians also talk on visits and air shows and hence hints of buying Chinese to do the job because it’s cheaper (helicopters were purchased) but I can’t see the FAA would take any “Eastern” gear foisted on them (above suggestion of 24 Su-30 would be an excellent choice with their long legs though annual costs as you say of twin engine planes would be higher than single…and would also be worrying for MPA!)…seems they’d rather buy second hand stuff from more traditional sources…

Theres video evidence of Syrian forces dropping canisters of chemical agents from an MI-17, I would class that as a “real threat”.

To stay polite as Sens would say 😉 why would you make such a statement based on the evidence? We have the radar track and the Turks themselves say the helicopter was at 14,200 feet!

….and even if the Syrians were mad enough to do that (and they’re not!) there are better ways of deploying CW than simply throwing cannisters of chemical agents from a Mi-17 helicopter at 14,000 feet!

And you consider this mad scheme to deliver CW at this height 3 miles up chucked out from a helicopter possible and a “real threat”?! And why would the Syrians cross the border into Turkey to wage chemical warfare in full glare of the world?

The last thing the Syrians want to do is to escalate things and provide a pretext for intervention (whereas Erdogan has precisely the opposite motive…not all Turks share his relish for assisting and arming the jihadists/ Al Qaeda loonies and help them cross the border to eat a few human hearts and livers and chop off the heads of a few christian monks they find 😉

The point is the Turks knew what they were doing when they blasted the Mi-17 out of the sky….what have they have got to hide? (other than of course e.g. helping to infiltrate armed loonies to cross the border, arresting al nusra crazies with chemical weapons (ironic isn’t it?)…if the shooting down was revenge for the Turkish F-4RF (radar track also available and context known) then it was as Sens says simply a criminal act.

The Turks don’t like infiltration by Kurdish fighters but when they do the same thing to the Syrians by smuggling in the Al qaeda loons, they don’t like it when they are called out for it!

Owlcat asked what would you say if the Greeks did the same thing as the Turks and blasted a Turkish helicopter out of the sky if it had crossed its border in the same way just a few miles away im Samos or Rhodes? We know the Greeks wouldn’t do such a thing, not because they know it’s wrong, but because it would eventually come out that they did not follow the known rules and deliberately sought to kill.

These people have to know the days of carrying out war crimes, while never over, may have consequences.

There are no Nuremberg trials but the International Criminal Court is waiting for these kind of people.

(Relax Americans, you have a get-out-of-jail card! Because of your exceptionalism your government (not ratified under Clinton, Bush jr refused, Obama sitting on fence) while happy to see others in the dock has chosen not to join in the court!…great isn’t it…how can the greatest country on Earth (wipe tear from eye) ever do anything wrong and even if they did remember they’re on the right side anyway (ours!) and they have determined whatever they do is for everyone’s and the greater good!:cool:

(I say b******ks! Even Nixon as US president is not above the law just like you lot in Langely are also not above the law…don’t forget if Nixon hadn’t resigned as president he would have been impeached).

Candidates for the International Criminal Court (other than Hague etc.) are the Sheikhs and Princes that fund the rent-a-mob mercenaries and killers after things kicked off a couple of years ago. Assad (and his father) are not angels (we all know about Hama when Assad Snr was around and now understand better the context) but they are a million times better than Al Nusra/Al Qaeda lot (who no doubt will bring the chickens home to roost back to Europe where some of them live once they’ve learnt a bit of butchery on their tourist trip to Syria..well done Hague).

The Sheikhs paying for all this are not remotely interested in any Arab spring or democracy for anyone…just look at their own despotic fifedoms! No democracy there! Just spend the nations wealth like its your own personal piggy bank and bribe the masses with a monthly tax-free stipend (don’t worry we’ve got plenty more where that came from) when the natives look a bit restless (as Saudis did when the spring was taking off) just in case.

Meantime, give them the opium of the people…add another man-made religion with an imaginary God like Zeus or Odin or Thor (they’re not real!) to the mix because we can control them better (don’t worry we can keep the real loonies under control…no you can’t because one day they’ll do to you what you did to Gaddaffi!). The real question for William “16 pints” Hague is when will we intervene to bring democracy to Saudi, Bahrain etc?

(Do make sure it’s after the Boeing $60billion dollar deal is completed with Saudi for F-15SA etc…US mid-term elections soon and lot of jobs at stake (and money for defence contractors) and once we’re voted back in we’ll worry about it afterwards (no, let’s not…what’s to worry? It’s a shot in the arm for jobs and we’ve got oil money back..what’s not to like? …anyway we can’t say no to them lovely lobbyists from Saud who pay so well and help fund our re-election campaign and pay our kids college fees etc (some good ideas here your highness, everyone has their price and we know no one has scruples or principles (luckily they’re just like us ‘cos we don’t have any either!:) ), or help get jobs for lazy layabout sons and daughters jobs because no one else would employ them and know all the best restaurants (sounds a bit like the Brussels gravy train! ;-))

As for your video evidence, it’s all out there! But unfortunately it is a devastating rebuttal of jihadist claims and show they are the ones doing most of the dirty stuff!

http://www.liveleak.com/browse?q=Syria

Plenty of videos there showing how incompetent the al qaeda crazies are…they even kept using the same actors for their claims!

Shots of same captured Syrian soldiers, later killed and same soldiers produced as evidence of Syrian Government crimes!…but the war crimes are carried out by the Al nusra types!

(obviously saving money on the fake PR videos…all the more left over for a prince to gold plate his bathroom taps!)

Note to Langley 🙂 : lads, no point telling the al qaeda loonies not to take videos or pictures of them proudly using chemicals weapons…because firstly they’ve all got phone cameras and they like being on film, secondly they really are loonies and believe they will go to heaven (doesn’t exist you tossers!) and to them eating a beating human heart or still warm human liver is what it’s all about! 😉

Second note to Langley :): sorry lads, I’ve got another one: please stop the amateur photo shots planted every now and then in the press (best ones (to laugh at of course) were the earliest ones with rebels posing in pristine clothes recovering from explosions (that they had set up themselves!)…laughable attempts to show the al nusra loonies as some kind of “heroic” figures like the French resistance against the Nazis…don’t bother…they are what they are…we all know what these rebels are and they’re horrible! A rose by any other name…etc…

Blimey! That�s got to be some record for this forum…

…post #5 quoted in post #1178…..and still you seemed to have missed my point.

How can �mental health screening� prevent a shooting-spree?

I�m sure I made similar points in a previous post but I�m not reading right back to find it:

It seems you have already made all the points I was thinking of and made them far better than I could, right at the start of this thread.

Sorry I missed it because I only read the last few posts when there had been over a thousand posts.

Still, I have learnt a few things I did not know before:

Fair enough…a bit more to it then at first meets the eye…p1ssing our pants because the Daily Mail tells us the end is nigh doesn’t help of course.

….to sell papers, get ratings etc you have to wind people up (to get plenty of letters from “disgusted” of Tunbridge Wells), which is why the Sun, Daily Mail, Fox News do well…get people going and never let the facts get in the way of a good story!

I get (and accept) your point about the US guns checks…if you are a criminal and a terrorist you’re not going to register your weapon…

I also get the average person is just wasting time and money….politicans might look good at election time because it looks like they’ve done something with tightened gun controls, but in those circumstances it will change nothing…loonies will kill regardless of gun control…got it!

What is criminal, and I am surprised why there is no outcry and just blind and passive acceptance of the NRA position, is there is no screening in the US for mental problems….does this mean someone with a screw loose can just go and buy a gun or machine gun?

@trumper…I believe that we cannot extrapolate so simply and easily from here to the US because things are so different…..why? Because we have so many fewer guns in circulation and because access to guns is so tightly controlled.

Checks here include home visits if you want to keep weapons at home, looking at how securely they are held, etc. before permission is granted.

While there are a few more guns visible generally nowadays than before and it seems criminals can get hold of guns fairly easily now, but they could have got hold of guns then just as easily in the days of the Krays Twins or the Richardsons in the 50s or 60s.

(That “they loved their mums, were kind to animals and never killed outside their own etc.” is the biggest load of idealised bolloxs of a never-was golden age of yeoman, salt of the earth, doffing their caps to Dixon of Dock Green, characters who were all like Arthur Daley or Grouty in Porridge…they were what they were: plain and simple thieves and villians).

If criminals wanted to get hold of firearms then they did. Jack “The Hat” Mcvitie was shot with a gun in The Blind Beggar pub (apparently witnessed by at least half the population of East London!) ….this is still the best country in the world to live in and thankfully it’s a long way to go before we ever get to the gun situation in the US.

Yeah, that monumental fanny Diane Feinstein has said that “all military veterans are mentally unstable & we should take away their guns”

While her statement is a bit sweeping and not fair by tarring every vet as a potential Rambo, we do know a lot more about post-traumatic shock (and delayed reactions when it is still not resolved years later) than we did a while ago….

Diane Feinstein, while she might well be a fanny and be an all round no-good do-gooder (;-)), after the school massacare last year she did try to bring back the expired assault weapon ban (brought in by Clinton in 1994 and expired since 2004).

It was mainly Republicans (and 5 Democrats) who blocked this….is the NRA lobby so powerful? Is it possible taht some compromise with exemptions for serious collectors etc could have been made?

..but the NRA don’t even want more background checks for assault weapons on the grounds that this won’t reduce crime or keep kids safe in school…

They might have a point as such checks won’t necessarily pick up the nutter that killed so many people last year…but I just found out Lanza fired 155 shots in five minutes in the Sandy Hook shootings that killed almost thirty people last year.

Surely it can’t do any harm to have such checks and more scruntiny must be better just in case it does pick up even a few potentially flaky people and make it harder, or at least a bit more difficult for then to get hold of automatic weapons and this might save some lives…they might get one or two but not dozens…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZgX9kkTTNk

Thanks for this video showing guy shooting at cops with a AK47….proving it does happen…pretty frightening to have this bloke pull up in front of you and start firing an AK-47 apparently on full auto… the fact that he tells teh cops to kill him is he is off the scale bonkers is neither here nor there….