Barack Obama tried to embrace him early on as a model for Muslim democracy, a policy that proved to be nearly as fruitless as the Russia Reset.
.. Trump, who has yet to appoint an ambassador to Turkey, has gone further, fulsomely calling Erdogan “a friend of mine” who gets “very high marks” for his leadership.
.. Trump seems never to have met a thug he doesn’t want to imitate and flatter. What’s inexplicable is why the administration, led by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, would go ahead with the F-35 deliveries after Republican and Democratic senators tried to block the delivery until Turkey releases Pastor Brunson, drops its bid to buy Russian missiles, and improves its overall behavior.
The F-35 was leverage. We just squandered it
.. Worse, we did it just days before the election, handing Erdogan a political prize that he can wield as evidence that the United States doesn’t dare to oppose him and that he can continue to behave as he pleases.
In the meantime, a country now moving into Russia’s orbit will acquire one of the most sophisticated pieces of military hardware ever made.
.. If and when Erdogan goes fully anti-American — he’s already nine-tenths of the way there — what’s to keep him from allowing Russian technicians to take a closer look, so they might gain a better idea of how to shoot it down? Or from using it against American allies in the region, including Israel? If Obama were making this delivery today, Republicans would call it treason.
.. Should that happen, history will record that the United States did nothing to help, and much to hinder, the forces of freedom.
Are modern fighter jets too sophisticated for warfare? Answer Request
An F-35 can trash half a dozen 80’s-era planes without difficulty and fly back unharmed. What it can’t do is fight 200 P-51 Mustangs.
.. Swarms of cheap unmanned planes are a different matter: you can construct a military-grade drone capable of carrying a grenade-sized warhead for $1500, so the choice is between one F-35 or a swarm of 100,000 drones.
.. Now, the swarm can’t beat the F-35 in air-to-air combat – it’s way too slow – but the F-35 does not dare getting close to what is in effect a flying minefield of lethal kamikaze obstacles all eager to collide with it. And thanks to solar power, the small drones have long range and endurance, and can simply form a killer cloud around airfields, waiting for anything to emerge so they can blow it up on the tarmac.
The Navy is already building its first drone swarms in a project called LOCUST:
.. The Chinese or Russians may be the first to take advantage of the new technology.
The Most Expensive Weapon Ever Built
according to French intelligence sources the strikes had unquestionably been carried out by a pair of F-35s: not only that, but one of them had gone on to buzz Assad’s palace in a fuck-you show of force.
.. Israel is very proud of its machines. Four thousand people were invited to see the two F-35s arrive at Nevatim air base in the Negev on 12 December
.. Netanyahu gave a rousing speech celebrating the ‘long arm’ of Israel’s defence equipment. ‘This long arm was just made longer and mightier today,’
.. Israel is the only country that has been allowed to make significant modifications to the F-35: its variant, nicknamed the Adir (‘the mighty one’), includes a few extra computer systems of Israel’s own devising. There’s a picture of Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s defence minister, sitting in the cockpit of an F-35 during a visit last summer to Lockheed’s Fort Worth facility: he’s grinning like a little boy. Israel is now down to purchase fifty F-35s, at a total cost of $7 billion.
.. Obama and Netanyahu signed a new Memorandum of Understanding, according to which Israel is promised $38 billion of military aid over the next decade. Twenty per cent of that money is going to F-35 procurement: a nice subvention of American taxpayer dollars to an American company
.. Donald Trump, then still president-elect, tweeted: ‘The F-35 program and cost is out of control. Billions of dollars can and will be saved on military (and other) purchases after January 20th.’
.. Over the lifetime of the project the US is expected to have spent $1.5 trillion designing, building and maintaining 2500 planes
.. It would also have to be able to bomb targets on the ground five hundred miles away from base – an impressive range, for a fighter – and operate from the deck of a heaving warship at night and, if push really came to shove, hover and land like a helicopter.
.. But the expense was largely the point. An enormous project brings an enormous number of jobs, and Lockheed sensibly ensured that everyone and his neighbour was invested in keeping it from going belly-up. The joke term for this is ‘political engineering’
.. the F-35 programme now involves more than 1200 suppliers in 45 US states, accounting for forty thousand jobs in Texas alone.
.. McCain is a leading representative of a dissident American military tradition that prefers light and agile to massive and lumbering, but it may not be insignificant that his home state, Arizona, is one of the few where Lockheed has recently shed jobs
.. F-35 customers now include Turkey, Italy, Canada, Norway, Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands and Denmark.
.. This means that every F-35 sale is a boost to the coffers of Britain’s own largest arms company. (BAE has also been allowed to do the foldy bits at the end of the wings.) And the opportunities are everywhere. There are aluminium sheets from Milton Keynes, electronic modules from Billingstad, circuit boards from Ankara, hydraulics from Melbourne, wiring systems from Rotterdam, manifolds from Adelaide, wing parts from Turin and actuators from New York. So when Trump threatened to slash the cost of the F-35 programme, or divert some of the custom to cheaper competitors, it wasn’t only American defence contractors who were in the firing line. Everyone had something to lose.
.. The ‘military-industrial complex’ turns out to be very simple: the juggernaut has its own momentum. Once it’s rolling it can’t be stopped, even if you’re Donald Trump, something he finally came to acknowledge on 16 March, when his budget plan for the next fiscal year allowed for the ramping-up of F-35 production as part of a proposed 10 per cent increase in overall military spending.
.. Thanks to its stealth requirements, with its weapons all stored internally to stop them alerting enemy radar, it’s an ugly, fat-bellied thing
.. But it flies well.
.. it achieved a kill ratio of 20:1, meaning that for every twenty enemy aircraft downed, only one F-35 was lost.
.. One of the gizmos that comes as standard with every F-35 is a carbon-fibre helmet
.. Each has to be custom-fitted to an individual pilot’s head using a bit of 3D modelling. They cost $400,000 apiece: another figure to snort at, perhaps, but then each AMRAAM missile costs $400,000 too
.. the F-35 helmet beams in the pictures gathered by six infrared cameras mounted on the outside of the airframe. This means that just by turning his head the wearer can see what’s above him, behind him and even below the aircraft’s floor.
.. Picture of enemy airfield not clear? Click. The active radar array will scan a high-resolution image of the area of interest. Then all the pilot needs to do is touch a point on the map and the selected weapon will take it out in seconds. Click.
.. Friendly aircraft are indicated in green on the radar screen, potential threats are yellow and enemies red. Unless you’re colour-blind, it all makes operating a deadly aircraft so very simple: what’s not to like?
.. no one is in a position to get into dogfights with the US any more
.. The last American fighter jet to be recorded lost to an enemy aircraft was an F/A-18, shot down by an Iraqi MiG in 1991.
.. The man in the pilot’s seat has become just another node in the network, through whom information is filtered: he’s already an anachronism. Even before we have drone swarms of lightweight autonomous vehicles performing air interdiction with the help of artificial intelligence, it isn’t clear how much future there is in piloted warplanes.
.. The combined marketing muscle of all the Lockheeds, Boeings and Raytheons in the world has failed to come up with any definition of what a ‘sixth generation’ fighter would be. This, it appears, is the end of the line.
Donald Trump’s Tweet Sets Up Jet Dogfight
President-elect suggests a Boeing plane could be used as substitute for Lockheed’s F-35 combat jet
It is unusual for a president or a president-elect to publicly negotiate government procurement spending on weapons programs. Mr. Trump’s approach of negotiating via Twitter has shaken defense contractors and the complex defense bidding and procurement process. He has said he sees it as his job to try to save taxpayers money, but defense experts have said he is tackling a process that can’t be orchestrated in 140-character social media posts.
.. Mr. Trump cannot award government contracts without going through the formal competition and bidding process.
.. Pentagon officials have long said the two planes served very different roles, with the F-35 providing more radar-evading features and serving as an airborne command post. Variants of the F/A-18 are used as attack jets and to provide electronic countermeasures to protect U.S. forces.
.. The two jets have faced off to win contracts for overseas governments, with the F-35 prevailing in most of them.
.. However, Canada last month said it would order the Boeing jets after the government dropped plans launched by the previous administration to buy the F-35.
.. The Pentagon said the average cost of the model used by the Air Force has fallen to $102 million, though some budget watchdogs said this excludes some expenses such as fixing past design problems. Defense analysts estimate the F/A-18 costs $70 million to $80 million.