finally

[tgies]

F22 and various Cold War nonsense Reagan made up in order to drum up votes: canceled

goodbye you stupid stupid plane

Also hey maybe now we can spend those millions upon millions of dollars freed up by canceling the "let's glue sharks and knives and laser beams to old planes and stuff" projects on actual salient domestic concerns

(no we can't)

Comments

[korgmeister.livejournal.com]

Hmm, is there a story behind your dislike of the Raptor, or is it just the "White elephant" factor?

[tgies.livejournal.com]

- Costs around $350m per unit
- Totally irrelevant (Vietnam-era fighters will do more than the F22 could ever do in Iraq or whatever)
- The plane so advanced, it can't be used in a warzone
- It's not like every credible threat in the past 50 years and for the foreseeable future has been low-intensity localized guerrilla warfare, right guys
- We already have 187 of them and barring full-scale alien invasion we will never need to field 187 F22s anywhere
- Is a move in the wrong direction considering that manned fighters basically are rapidly becoming irrelevant (the F35 is probably going to be the last manned fighter NATO ever uses)
- Screw 90% of defense projects anyway

[korgmeister.livejournal.com]

Damn good points, all of them.

Particularly that last one. If the bond market ends up dislocating and the government loses its ability to deficit spend, canning pretty much every single defence spending project is going to be a no brainer.

I'd like to think that DARPA's exoskeleton is one of the good 10%, though. I'm looking forward to when commercialised civilian variants come out, they'll help my Mum a lot once the polio starts getting really bad.

[tgies.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was saying exactly that about the exoskeleton recently. Would be handy in forestry, construction, disaster relief, and the like.

The DoD's operating budget has actually increased overall this year, though, which is vexing. Even bigwigs inside the Pentagon think the Pentagon is getting too much money this year. Defense spending is absolutely out of control. If we cut it like 10%, we'd be able to buy some nice trains or something and have the better part of the money left over, and the military wouldn't even notice the difference because they are pretty much wasting it all on trying to invent retrofits for the B-1 to turn it into the Millennium Falcon and putting missile defense in like Spain or something.

[korgmeister.livejournal.com]

Really? Weird, I'd heard Obama had actually done something about the DoD's balooning budget this year. Clearly what little attention I am paying to politics these days is still from bullshit sources. Oh well.