Now a nearly trillion-dollar defense budget isn’t unaffordable in a strict sense; it’s just unaffordable in a sane sense.
Defense spending — which accounts for nearly half of federal discretionary spending — has to be tamed, along with entitlement accounts. We just don’t have the money, people.
What has this largess given us?
The F-35’s engine can’t do the job
Navy has a fleet of foul -ups
Latest Air Force wonder weapon isn’t
And now the latest:
The U.S. Air Force can’t use its F-22 Block 20 jets in conflict—because it would require too much effort and cost too much to get the aircraft ready for battle, a top service official said.
“They will never be a part of the combat force. They don’t have the most modern communications. They don’t shoot the most modern weapons. They don’t have the most modern electronic warfare capabilities,” said Lt. Gen. Richard Moore, deputy chief of staff for plans and programs for the Air Force.
The Air Force is asking to shed 32 Block 20 F-22s in its 2024 budget—a divestment that was blocked by Congress last year.
The service plans to use the money it will save—roughly $485 million a year and $2.5 billion across the next five years—to fund its Next Generation Air Dominance program, Moore said, its new, secretive fighter jet.
Ah a new weapon platform. Well we know that is where the profitability is for the Defense-Industrial Complex.
If the defense corporations finances were run like the US defense budget those responsible would have been canned a long time ago.
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As offered here before, the Shiny defense industry seems to have decided that the most profit is in milking the “development” phase, rather than actually building anything.
For all the money spend developing the F-22, they actually built less than 200 of them. The planes we see in combat are the 15, 16, and 18, which all date from the 70s. Seems the only thing the 22 shoots at is balloons.
Interesting proposal in the Raytheon proxy statement this year. When you or I make a mistake, we get a lecture on “personal responsibility”. Seems that, when a “JC” makes a decision for the corporation, based on his own financial interest, not that of the company or shareholders, he is entitled.
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Bacevich reiterates Eisenhower’s words here:
https://www.daily-journal.com/opinion/commentary-eisenhowers-misgivings-about-military-power-still-ring-true/article_002f463e-d4a6-11ed-b6b5-a73dedc3fc2c.html
“Every gun that is made,” he said, “every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
Expenditures justified as essential to preserving the American way of life subverted what they purported to uphold. “This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense,” Ike insisted. “Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
Ike took aim at the “disastrous rise of misplaced power” stemming from the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry.” Abetted by a pliant Congress, military and corporate leaders collaborated to advance their shared interests with the well-being of the American people consigned to the status of afterthought. The resulting corruption, hidden in plain sight, perverted national priorities and suborned democratic processes.
Today Eisenhower would be accuse of being “weak on defense”!
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