From Pine View Farm

“Up in the Air, Junior Birdman” 2

Daniel Ruth reports that you can now ride your shiny new F-35. Well, sort of:

Defense Department officials heralded the F-35 as now quite capable of providing “basic air support,” but only if other military aircraft are involved to provide “basic air support” to the F-35 while the vaunted fighter jet conducts its “basic air support” of dropping a snarky Bronx cheer on the enemy below. Think of this as a bodyguard needing a chaperone to stave off potential muggers.

Follow the link for more on this particular air farce.

Aside:

From the beginning, the F-35 has been little more than the dole for defense contractors.

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2 comments

  1. George Smith

    August 8, 2016 at 8:29 pm

    “And Pentagon officials have acknowledged the Chinese successfully hacked into government and defense contractor servers to gain access to the F-35’s stealth technology.”

    This is all bull. While the F-35 may indeed be overpriced bull, answering with your own anecdotal stink isn’t recommended.

    Look at a bigger picture. How do hackers stealing 8 million lines of code nullify stealth, if it even has it?

    The F-35 has also mustered its share of cheerleaders.

    I wouldn’t be one of them but, again, look at any mission and how the US fights wars. For the last fifteen years it hasn’t fought anyone or any power that could lay a glove on it, except in close contact on the ground.

    What’s the mission?

    The US military has lots of expensive weapons systems it now can’t risk against a capable enemy because the loss of even one entails a potential pr catastrophe unless we’re engaged in total war. Nuclear aircraft carriers, for instance. One loss is an apocalyptic event.

    What if an F-35 was shot down by a Russian air defense system? How do you answer that one? Escalation? Fire the general who OK’d deployment? Both? Neither?

    It was seventeen years before the military put the V-22 Osprey in the field. Now it’s used a lot. Where it works against “enemies” who don’t pose much of a threat, relatively speaking.

     
  2. Frank

    August 9, 2016 at 1:24 pm

    Your question, “What’s the mission?” is really the point. There is no mission. “Because you can” is not a mission.

    As for the hacking stories, I am convinced that the Pentagon and other agencies (and companies and news outfits) pull them out because, to most persons, even those who may be adept in userland, a computer is still a mystickal magickal box and the word “hacking” scares them. Hacking stories invoke the woo-woo factor as a misdirection play.

    The geekiest geeks I know, even the rabidly politically conservative ones, could manage only yawns about the Hillary email server scamdal because they run their own damn email servers and know that there is no there there.

    I recently met a retired State Dept. employee who had served abroad. He told me stories of how cumbersome the classification system is; he talked about hearing news of events in the media long before receiving official classified “notification” of them (no details about specific events, of course). His said that the classification system is so cumbersome and information so over-classified that many government employees look for work-arounds just to get their jobs done.