More proof the US defense industry has nothing to do with defending

America
KUWAIT CITYThis has been a classic week in the defense procurement industry.
The armed services are trying to boost their worst aircraft, the totally worthless F-35, by trashing their best, the simple,
effective, proven A-10 Warthog.

The A-10 is popular enough that the USAF had to come up with a reason for wanting to get rid of it, and the one it produced is
the sort of thing that would make any therapist chuckle with glee: The USAF said it needed maintenance personnel to handle its
precious new high-priced fighter, the F-35and that the only place it could get them from was the maintenance crews currently
keeping the A-10 flying. Nope, there were no other options! The only way to find a good crew is to gut the one effective groundattack aircraft the USAF has in its inventory, in favor of the worst fighter ever designed.
It makes no sense. Ill just say that right up front. The reason it doesnt seem to make any sense is that it doesnt. There are no
secret reasons here, no top-security considerations that justify any of this. Its corruption, pure and simple. The sooner you
understand that the US defense industry has nothing at all to do with defending America, and everything to do with making Dick
Cheneys buddies even richer, the more quickly youll be able to understand whats going on.
I used to believe the Navy was the most corrupt of all the services, but going by recent form Id have to say that slimed-up torch
has been passed to a new service. The USAF now wins as the most deeply corrupt of all. In fact, its no contest.
What is the air forces job? If you ask the USAF, its all Top Gun stuff: Owning the skies, downing enemy fighters in high-tech
dogfights. Thats the mission they love, dream aboutand spend their money on.
But theres a problem with that. Nobody will play with us. Its like investing your entire sports fund on a stable of polo ponies
(except polo ponies are cheap compared to air-superiority fighters) and finding nobody in the neighborhood even knows what
polo is, let alone wants to spend all that money to play against you.
What the USAF really gets called on to do is bombing raids, usually on small, low-value targets, and close air support (CAS) for
US ground forces or their allies.
The problem with that is that the USAF hates that job. For all kinds of reasons. Its not as glorious as dueling enemy fighters; its
downright dangerous; and worst of all, it calls for really ugly, cheap airplanes like the A-10 Warthog.
The A-10 is one of the few US aircraft designed to focus on CAS. After the USAF spent a decade sending expensive, fast fighters
to napalm the jungle, even the USAFs speed freaks had to admit they needed something actually built to attack ground forces,
spend more than a few seconds over the target, and survive. Thats why the A-10 entered the inventory way back in 1977.
But even after Vietnam, the A-10 couldnt be billed as a counterinsurgency aircraft. It had to be sold for use in the great American
defense fantasy, the NATO-Warsaw Pact ground war. But however they sold it, they built it right, with two priorities: air-toground firepower and survivability. So its primary weapon was a fantastically lethal 30mm nose-mounted Gatling gun that could
shred a column of BMPs on a single strafing run, and its wings were reinforced to carry a huge payload of air-to-ground
munitions. Its cockpit was enclosed in a titanium bubble to protect the pilot, the twin engines were mounted aft and to the rear,
because simulationssome of the earliest simulations used in combat aircraft designshowed that that was the hardest place for
ground-based guns to hit; and the entire electrical system was redundant.
It was, and still is, one of the most effective aircraft designs in history. And the USAF hated it, right from the start, for two
reasons that have nothing to do with combat effectiveness. First, it required the Air Force to cooperate closely with ground forces,
which revived all sorts of Officers Club feuds. Second, it was ugly (which it isntits actually a beautiful design, but it doesnt
look like the paper-airplane silhouette the Air Force loves). I remember one quote from a bitchy fighter jock back when the
Warthog first came into service: It was designed to take a lot of hits, and boy is it going to take a lot of hits. Har-dee-har-har.
Maybe you hadda be there, or hadda be a snooty fighter jock, because those guys hated the idea of flying anything so stubby.
What they wanted was more fast, high-flying fighters. And back when the USSR was still a going concern, they were always able
to scare the corrupt hicks in Congress into funding them. But then the Soviet Union went out of business, and we were fighting
wars that would never, ever involve fighter duels. You know the old joke, I went to a fight but a hockey game broke out? Well,

that outcome is a million times more likely than the USAF needing fast fighter jets against the Taleban, or Islamic State. Thats
about as likely as I went to a fight but a polo match broke out.
After the first Gulf War, the USAF did one of its classic studies, comparing the effectiveness of all US attack aircraft. The fix was
in, as usual. What the USAF wanted was a public-relations victory for its dumb-ass new stealth fighter, the F-117. But the truth
is, the F-117 has never been a good aircraft, especially in ground-attack role. The real work of destroying Saddams armor from
the air was done by the USAFs only two reliable aircraft, the A-10 and F-16, especially the A-10, which carried the load all
through the war. Everyone knew that, but the USAF couldnt admit it, because that might risk the funding it wanted for its fancy,
useless stealth fighter, the F-117.
That made for some awkward moments in the post-war report. Yes, the USAF admitted, the A-10 survived the war as well as its
fast competitors; and yes, they had to admit that the A-10 flew more sorties per day because it took way less maintenance; and
yeah, it was true that you could buy ninethats nineA-10s for the price of one F-117. But the F-117 was new and fast and
stealth and all black like the Batmobileevery childish high-tech BS mess the USAF has always loved, whereas the A-10 was
slow and ugly andworst of allcheap.
So the postwar report did all it could to avoid praising the A-10.
Heres the key paragraph, in which the USAF tries to find a way to avoid the obvious conclusion that the A-10 was just plain
better at the key job of CAS than the F-117:
Based on its performance in Desert Storm, advocates of the F-117 can argue that it alone combined the advantages of stealth
and LGBs, penetrated the most concentrated enemy defenses at will, permitted confidence in achieving desired bombing
results, and had perfect survivability. Advocates of the A-10 can argue that it, unlike the F-117, operated both day or night;
attacked both fixed and mobile targets employing both guided and unguided bombs; and like the F-117, it suffered no
casualties when operating at night and at medium altitude. In short, the argument can be made that to buy more capability, in
the quantitative sense, the most efficient decision could be to buy less costly aircraft. Moreover, to buy more capability in the
qualitative sense, it may be a question of what specific capability, or mix of capabilities, one wants to buy: in the F-117 versus
A-10 comparison, each aircraft has both strengths and limitations; each aircraft can do things the other cannot. Therefore,
despite a sharp contrast in program unit costs, based on their use, performance, and effectiveness demonstrated in Desert
Storm, we find it inappropriate to call one more generally "capable" than the other.
Did you catch that last line? It says straight out, Yes, the A-10 is way cheaper and just as effective, but we find it inappropriate
to call it a better aircraft."
And the reason they found it inappropriate is as simple as a liquor store holdup:money. The USAF is about money, not defense,
and there was huge money in the F-117 program. Especially because the aircraft didnt work very well. One of the creepy, weird
features of the US defense procurement business is that programs that dont work make much more money for the big contractors
than the ones that do what they promised. Theres money in those fixes, and re-fixes, and fixing the last fix. Trillions, in fact.
So the USAF has done its best to promote bad aircraft designs, and sabotage good ones, for decades. And now the USAF has a
new aircraft design to love: the F-35. The USAF loves the F-35 more than any other project in history. You can guess why:
Because its a disaster. The biggest, most expensive, most shameful procurement scandal in American history. I hear you asking,
Wait, waitare you saying its even worse than the F-104 Starfighter, the plane the Bundeswehr called'The Flying Coffin'?
Yes, I am. Because as bad as the F-104 was, it didnt cost $337 million per plane. Thats the projected cost of this godawful flying
pooch, the F-35. $337 million per plane. Yes, folks, for slightly more than one billion dollars, you get three very bad airplanes.
You can check off all the worst features of American military aircraft design programs, and the F-35 has every single one.
* Multiple-Service Design Input (required to satisfy demands of the USAF, the Marines, and the US Navy, guaranteeing
endless expensive conflicts about design requirements for aircraft-carrier landing ability)? Check.
The F-35 is a crawling abortion from the JSF (Joint Strike Fighter) program, which was supposed to produce a single aircraft
that both USAF and USN could use, just like the F-4 Phantomand we know how well that worked out.
If you promise not to laugh, Ill explain the three services different demands for the F-35s design. I swear to you, this is like the
story of the Three Bears, if each bowl of porridge cost a trillion tax dollars. OK, heres how it goes: The USAF wants the F-35A,
a relatively straightforward model that can land on ordinary runways.

But that wasnt good enough for the Marines, because theyre still in love with their bullshit Harrier jump-jet toys. So the USMC
demanded that its version of the F-35, the F-35B, have the ability to hover like a helicopter and take off and land vertically, like
those cute and totally useless Harriers from back in the day.
And then the Navy chimed in to demand that its version, the F-35C, be reconfigured to take off and land on aircraft carriers.
Thats almost too perfect: A useless, hugely expensive aircraft designed to land on an even more useless and expensive surface
vessel. Its a good quick explanation on why everyone in America who isnt a personal friend of Dick Cheney is having such a
hard time right now.
Every one of these design variants imposes a cost on the basic design, which is why the F-35 looks like a General Motors
product from the bad old days.
You can usually tell whether a fighter aircraft is a good design or not by its design. You look at the F-35, with its fat fuselage and
messy landing gear, and see that it is literally the product of a committee, and worse yet, an inter-services committee. It reminds
me of the Wagon Queen Family Truckster, the lemon Clark Griswold got greased into taking across the country in National
Lampoons Vacation.
Expert testimony confirms that this is, in fact, a flying version of the Wagon Queen. The RAND Corporation, not exactly a
radical peacenik group, reviewed the test data on the F-35 and called it a double-fail, adding that it cant turn, cant climb,
cant run. A less diplomatic reviewer called it a dog, plain and simple.
*Reliance on dated, steal-able stealth technology? Check.
The F-35, like the F-117 the USAF loved back in 1992, puts massive emphasis on stealth tech and anti-radar avionics which can
be stolen by rival (i.e. Chinese) manufacturers. Can be stolen, and were, in fact, stolen, back in 2008.
And what hackers didnt steal online, the PLAs designers had delivered to their workshops, thanks to an F-117 stealth fighter that
was shot down over Serbia in 1999.
If anyone in USAF could think clearly, that event alone would have ended all this crap about stealth. In the first place, a Serbian
battery shot down the USAFs precious F-117? The Serbs were a weary, aging, minor Balkan enclavebasically some grayhaired Chetnik veterans trying to keep the dream of an independent Serbia alive despite the fact that they were running on
slivovitz fumes. And they managed to shoot down our supposedly undetectable stealth fighter? Yeah, really stealthy, guys. I bet
with that kind of ninja-like stealth, you could manage to get arrested overflying WalMart.
And what happened to all that stealthy tech when it ended up face-down in a Serbian field? It was packed off to the Serbs
backers, Russia. And, knowing Russia of that era, it was no doubt sold on to any buyers who could come up with the cash, such
asoh, I dunno, maybe Chengdu Aircraft Industry Group?
So all the design costs, all the hundreds of billions of dollars that went into stealth avionics and fuselageits worthless now.
Unless you happen to be a Lockheed Martin shareholder. Then, of course, its worth quite a lot to you.
*Repeated, mysterious failures to meet program deadlines, with unexplained no-shows at important milestone events?
Check.
This summer, the F-35 was supposed to have its big international air-show debut in the UK. It didnt show. Chuck Hagel, who
just exudes confidence, said bravely, This aircraft is the future, which I think is what they call Dystopia. Because this
aircraft, the F-35, wasnt there.
Nobody was willing to risk the F-35 in the air, in front of all those non-Lockheed witnesses, because thered been an unexplained
engine fire in one just a week before the airshow.
This wasnt the first, or even the tenth, time that the F-35 had bombed on a milestone. In fact, thats the only kind of bombing it
does well. Since 2007, the F-35 has been grounded 13 times because of problems dangerous enough to make it un-flyable.
Sooner or later, even a war fan like myself has to face a disgusting fact: the Defense industry has never cared about defending
America. I didnt really grasp how bad it is until 9/11. Thats when we found out, once and for all, that the United States Air
Force wasnt interested in defending American airspace.

When the USAF realized there were hijacked jets heading for a kamikaze strike on D.C., it was paralyzed, becauseand I cant
say this loud enoughit had never given any thought to defending US airspace. There were no jets on patrol, and when a couple
of smart pilots cut short their training mission to try to help, they were going to have to ram their jets into the hijacked planes,
because there were no air-to-air missiles available to shoot down the hijacked jets on 9/11. The USAF had literally never thought
about having to shoot down enemy jets over US airspace, so they didnt have any missiles, and would have had to order pilots
to ram the hijacked planes to bring them down.
Well, yeah, but they learned their lesson, right? The armed services probably flooded our borders with fully-armed fighters after
9/11, right?
Wrong. They patrolled Americas skies for a few months after the WTC attacks, then stopped. They just werent into it:
After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the military flew 24-hour combat patrols over Washington and
New York. Those round-the-clock patrols ended [in early 2002] after administration officials said stricter airport security,
stronger cockpit doors and more federal marshals on flights had sufficiently reduced the threat of attacks.
The Air Force has always belonged to the fighter jocks, and these lunkheads arent interested in anything but dumb-ass Top Gun
fantasies. They just cant seem to get it through their buzz-cut heads that the golden age of the dogfight ended in 1945. Theyve
always hated anything that might challenge the notion of manned fighters as apex predators, which is why the US had to buy its
first drones from an Israeli company, despite the fact that all the early research on RPVs, as early drones were called, was done in
the US. The USAF knew long agolike 40 years agothat drones were going to be very important in future warfare, but they
just didnt *like* them. It ruined their whole varsity-QB notions of being Top Gun. One of them said in an interview with
Aviation Weekthis was long, long ago, but I remember every wordone of em said, Look, you dont get promoted by
managing toy airplanes. You get promoted flying fighters.
That quote shocked me, gullible little patriot that I was back then. Didnt they care that these RPVs could help America on
tomorrows battlefields? Short answer: No, they didnt. And they still dont. These guys are in business, and their business flows
easily as mercury across the divide between armed services and private industry. The very last thing they worry about is
defending America.
Theres only one bit of good news here. The F-35 is a dog of a plane, yes. Itll help to bankrupt this countrys hard-pressed
taxpayers, absolutely. Itll make a sleazy clique of contractors and Duke Cunninghams even richer, yup; but it may not make
much difference in our military capabilities.
Thats because the whole notion of manned fighters, Top Gun crap, is over. If the US and China, or Russia, ever have that big war
the DoDs planners drool over, every manned aircraft will be blasted out of the sky in minutes. After that, it will be drone vs.
drone, missile vs. missile. The Chinese manned fighters are way better than the F-35, as US simulations have shown
conclusively, but theyll vanish from the skies too. It will be a war fought by lumpy dweebs in recliners, flying drones and
making embarrassing little video-game noises to themselves while feeling for the last Dorito in the bag, not fighter jocks in
tailored uniforms.
Ive said before that drones are already here, already capable of doing everything manned fighters do, only better.
The only reason theyre not the flagship of the US services already is the same reason the contemptible F-35 is still Americas
main fighter: money. Its a bitter thing for us guys who grew up on Janes and model glue and the entire Revell model catalogue,
but this is all about money, and nothing to do with defense.
Nothing will get done. No one will go to jail for any of this filth. You can get 15 years for robbing a 7-11, but the filth in the
three-letter agencies, the service procurement officers who slip into comfy industry jobs between administrations, the corrupt
project managers socking it away on an aircraft they know is worthless; not one of those pigs will do a day in prison for any of it.