This Country Is Spending $1.7 Trillion on Planes That Don't Work

It’s been a while since we checked in with our old friend, the F-35 next generation strike fighter, aka The Flying Swiss Army knife. Fortunately, David Axe at Forbes has been on the case, and we’ll let him deliver the punchline, albeit a punchline decades in the making.

But over 20 years of R&D, that lightweight replacement fighter got heavier and more expensive as the Air Force and lead contractor Lockheed Martin packed it with more and more new technology. Yes, we’re talking about the F-35. The 25-ton stealth warplane has become the very problem it was supposed to solve. And now America needs a new fighter to solve that F-35 problem, officials said.

Is anyone ever going to ask the question seriously whether this country’s defense spending makes any damn sense at all, and mean it?

Brown’s comments are a tacit admission that the F-35 has failed. As conceived in the 1990s, the program was supposed to produce thousands of fighters to displace almost all of the existing tactical warplanes in the inventories of the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps…But the Air Force and Lockheed baked failure into the F-35’s very concept. “They tried to make the F-35 do too much,” said Dan Grazier, an analyst with the Project on Government Oversight in Washington, D.C.

The only number that’s important to remember about this lemon is $1.7 trillion, which is how much of our money the government will have poured into this rathole in the sky by the end. On the electric Twitter machine, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has been good at estimating other uses for all that money. For example, for that money, we could have cancelled every dime of student loan debt. Or a survival check of $5,135 for every living American. Or house every homeless American 28 times over. Or, and this is me just spitballing here, put together a general COVID response package that is the envy of the world. Or, as a former Republican president once put it:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

I like Ike.