More damages.. slightly dented Su-25s and completely destroyed Ecureuils

Strike of Tu-95MS using Kh-101 cruise missiles

Launch..

.. and impact

The trolls have proven over and over again that they can’t be forced to understand something they fundamentally don’t want to. They insisted for years that the F-35 was a bomber, or “flying brick,” and an unbelievably expensive one at that… and then a funny thing happened.

What a load of crap.. you seem to have a very short memory, hopsy.. the fact is that the trolls were on the fan side, not on the naysayer side. Those trolls insisted for years that the F-35 was kinematically an almost-F-22, with acquisition cost of ~$50 million, with operating cost comparable to the F-16 and with sensor suite a generation ahead of anything else. And they have been proven wrong again and again.. not single thing of that has been proven true..

The plane got into the hands of actual pilots who proved all of the troll/fanboy arguments wrong, and the price of the F-35 has fallen below its competitors and continues to fall.

Yes, it continues to fall by shifting other cost into different categories, removing engines from contracts and rising up operating cost to unheard levels. And yes, countries like Norway are only able to buy less than two dozens of this unbelievably affordable aircraft while eating up a substantial chunk of their defense budget..

WTF are you trying to fool here?

Kudos…. Hope you didn’t waste your entire day searching for a non-profit that gave Russia a favorable rating. Unfortunately, you are confusing ratings over information released to the public on budget information (which pretty much every developed nation does), and the real issue I was referring to- corruption, kickbacks, and accurate reporting of defense spending.

This is the first rating I’ve spread into… not sure how many others are in existence, but you’re welcome to provide yours which rates Russia between Sierra Leone and Kyrgyzstan.. you must have looked pretty hard to find something like that..

You can disagree, but the high profile cases were even reported in Russian news, In 2011, the military prosecutor estimated that a fifth of defense spending was stolen or misappropriated.

I am quite sure Russians lose sleep over what Reuters is reporting about Russia roughly as much as you’re losing sleep over what is reported about the US in Russian TV. Maybe it’s even true, much of what RT says about the US is also true.. so why not..

You’ve made absurd claims that the DoD or U.S. government is “hiding” the true cost of the F-35 by including such things as long lead items into contracts that are a matter of public record, in spite of a multitude of budget documents and reports (that are also a matter of public record). Then try to claim you can find accurate information Su-30 costs from Russia. It would help if you (and Defense-Aerospace) took even a few minutes to look at procurement practices in the DoD.

These claims are far from absurd.. whenever you or Spud are quoting LRIP cost, you never include these additional contracts worth billions.. they are known and published, right, excepts no one quotes them, anyway.. oh, because they don’t belong to that particular lot, how convenient.. a simple Joe from Montana who does not have PhD in economics will never learn about how much he had to pay for the flying schoolbus, even if the cost is undeniably “public”..

Yes, Russia is synonymous with “budget transparency” especially in their defense industry.
They rank among the elites in openness and transparency: Just below Sierra Leone and just above Kyrgyzstan.

Poor boy.. what exactly did you need to know from Russian budget they didn’t want to tell you?

Here the results according to International Budget Partnership’s Open Budget Survey (OBS). Russia is right there, below Sierra Leone..

http://www.internationalbudget.org/wp-content/uploads/OBS2015-OBI-Rankings-English.pdf

“Hidden separate contracts” are a common practice? Really?

Hidden in the sense of not being attributed to any particular lot, so that the lot price looks cheap. Most folks do not go any further than this, so the true cost is effectively “hidden”.

There is more data/articles/interviews available on the F-35 and its progress in reducing costs available than probably just about every non-US fighter combined… and yet certain fanboys absolutely insist there has to be some nutty conspiracy underway that hasn’t been detected by the auditors and bean counters of a dozen different nations

There is a lot of data about Russian aircraft, as well.. I have seen complete BOMs for Russian Su-30SM orders, incl. foreign content, you won’t find that on the F-35.. the problem is you can’t read cyrillics, but that is a problem of your own, not mine..

omg… I just realized that the $1.6 billion that DA added up on top of the Lot 9 costs for upgrades & retrofits… DON’T MENTION LOT 9 AT ALL… ANYWHERE.. They all belong to a totally different contract number “N00019-14-G-0020”.

nobody cares where it belongs.. the money has to be paid, that’s what matters.. this is exactly how the F-35 become so affordable.. by paying true billions under hidden separate contracts which can’t be attributed to a particular lot..