I guess you have never heard of the concept of “too big to fail”? because you basically just made an argument that pretends that massive, corrupt and ethically dubious corporations don’t routinely employ this strategy as a defensive bulwark against society getting upset about the extreme degree of systematic theft they are doing.

There’s actually not much info on how often other jets break down.

…what?

This is…one of the single biggest metrics people talk about in evaluation of military aircraft development projects?

Why has everyone temporarily lost their critical thinking skills in this thread?

Wait I thought it was patriotic to be casually racist about Iran? Did I do that wrong? Damn I didn’t slip in enough jingoism did I?

I am not insulting Iranians and their capacity to develop weapons, I am in fact ashamed my country overthrew democracy there and yet pretends Iran is just irrationally evil like a stupid disney villain or something. Most of my country (the right, center and center “”“left”“”) isn’t interested in understanding anything beyond a superficial association of Iran with evil.

I am insulting all of you who unreflectively accept these ridiculous framings of war and national security that feed right into the cancerous growth of the military industrial complex.

I also wasn’t making fun of Iranians or being racist, I was pointing out the absurdly unfair matchup in military budgets between the US and Iran makes the comparison between the two and evaluations of the effectiveness of US weapons programs in terms of resources consumed an absolute joke.

…and the third option was a nextgen fighter development aircraft program that didn’t have horrific ballooning costs?

The F-35 would be good if they hadn’t wasted so much time and energy and weight on having a pilot in it. On board pilots are a complete waste.

no, as a manned fighter the f35 is an embarassment of an arms development program independent of any discussion about the effectiveness of future manned vs. unmanned fighters. The program is a historic cost overrun and makes the litoral class of us navy ships look downright functional and frugal in comparison.

Because anything you make with 1.7 trillion is going to look impressive unless you just throw all the money into barrels and just burn it?

Excluding the context of astronomical amounts of money like that is fundamentally disgenous to any accurate description of reality.

edit go on people, keep downvoting me to feel better because you don’t have an actual response, the jet looks cool and Musk is a pathetic loser with a billion dollars, but to admit the f35 is the same species of rot that the rise of oligarchs like Musk are an indicator of is too high a dose of reality for you :)

I mean everybody is right by accident some of the time…

I love libs defending the f35 like the good warhawks they pretend to not to be.

Yes the f35 is a good fighter jet, if you ignore THAT IT COST 1.7 TRILLION and completely forget about the concept of lost opportunity cost.

Lol downvote me you fools the f35 was set in stone as strategic catastrophe before it ever entered combat by virtue of destroying an incomprehensible amount of our shared wealth. The f35 is a tool of the military industrial complex designed to suck up as much cash as possible, the functionality of the plane is a distant concern in practice which explains why it barely works even given the obscene amount of money spent on it.

wow the terrible, frightening might of Iran’s air defense network! Good thing we have essentially (like…literally) infinite money to spend on negating and penetrating it or else those Iranians would sweep all of western Europe under their iron fist!

I think it is important to recognize that even from the beginning this frontier fantasy was a convenient, genocidal lie that told a nice whitewashed (or rather bleached) story about the “Wild West” not already being the settled home of human beings.

This aspect of the US is in perfect harmony with the process of genocide being enacted by Israel on Palestinians in Gaza.

Covid was a summoning of this new era of normalized violence disguised as a pandemic.

The genocide of Palestinians is another summoning for an era of mass scale violence and honestly it scares the shit out of me.

Most older people don’t get it, but in my lifetime I have seen the value of human lives drop through the floor as centrists smile along and nod their heads to the thinly disguised rhetoric of fascism and that can really only lead one very ugly place.

The future will be full of death on a mass scale, the rich made sure of that.