Donald Trump Targets F-35 Program in Latest Dig on Defense Spending | Hacker News Reader

Donald Trump Targets F-35 Program in Latest Dig on Defense Spending

wsj.com

5 pointskt95 comments

Sounds good to me...?

Strange how all of the sudden everyone wants the wasteful F-35 program to continue just because Trump is now against it.

One of the few good Trump campaign promises, and seemingly the only one he's shown that he intends to keep so far, is that of cutting wasteful DoD programs. People should be happy about this, especially Democrats.

The same thing happened with TPP when Trump "killed it" (but Obama actually did it two weeks earlier when he announced the TPP won't be ratified anymore). Everyone was suddenly all for the TPP because Trump "killed it".

It's a wild ride to be relatively impartial and see all of these radical and irrational changes in sentiment about a policy simply based on who is in the White House.

Policies should be supported or opposed based on principle. You can't be against cutting obvious government waste, and then pro it, depending on whether it's your guy or the other guy in office. That's how terrible things are allowed to happen under the guise of "our guy did it, so it's okay".

You seem to be implicitly saying that the F-35 is obvious government waste without backing that up.

Setting aside the debate about the suitability for purpose of the F-35 (no one can have a knowledgeable debate about this in public anyway, because there's just no data out there!) is the very real problem of an aging TACAIR fleet. Any significant cuts to the total buy, or stretching out the buy over more years, just makes for more problems. The airplanes the US uses to fight its wars are old and getting older.

I don't really want to hear much discussion of "Let's curtail/cancel the F-35!" without hearing a corresponding discussion of "Here's what we'll do to maintain a viable TACAIR force".

The problem is, everything we've heard out of the military with regards to the F-35 is that it's poor at everything, and will lose in fights with enemy aircraft that are decades old. The idea that we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars on aircraft that are worse than what we already have is amazing.

We do need new aircraft, but that doesn't mean we need new F-35s. We need to cut our losses on the F-35 program (as monumental as those losses are) and start developing a set of task-built aircraft that are each designed to fit their role extremely well, rather than a one-size-kinda-fits-all option like the F-35.

...You are exaggerating. The DoD puts out a lot of positive pieces regarding the plane (believe them or not, that's a separate question).

Cutting the F-35 means being completely hopeless with TACAIR for another couple of decades, unless somehow the services learn to be much more agile (extremely unlikely).

Amusingly, this attack on the basis of "out of control costs" comes just a few weeks after the finalized contract for Low Initial Rate Production Lot 10 of the F-35 [0], which brings the cost of an F-35A model (the model the US is producing the most of both for itself and for foreign sales) to its lowest ever figure (about $80 million or so).

[0] http://www.defense.gov/News/Contracts/Contract-View/Article/...

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