AFAIK the US is using economic blackmail to force its allies to sign on to this epically shitty money pit. And once Canada has the F-35s they will be forced to purchase all of their spare parts, upgrades, modifications etc. from the US via Lockheed-Martin.

The Rafale is a better fighter, better bomber, better pretty much everything, is significantly cheaper, and Dassault allows countries to fully license manufacturing so it can be a completely domestic project.

Plus the Rafale has 2 engines, which turns out to be a surprisingly important factor when routinely patrolling vast stretches of ocean and tundra thousands of miles from civilization.

go upside down over a mig and flip the bird at some ruskie commie flyboy

The last generation of fighter pilots has been born.

For killing civilians or so called militants? Drones are fine.

Going up against a developed country? A drone would be lucky to take off let alone bomb anything unless it is fully autonomous and can be expected to operate without any direction from the ground.

They have all the same problems GCI systems had back in the 50s-70s but far worse. Expect them to get jammed and even worse taken over and used against you. That and the pilot is a pretty small part of the package when carrying 10000+ pounds of ordnance in an airframe built for high speed flight, though a very expensive part.

Missiles are basically suicide drones stripped of any pretext of surviving their mission anyways, no heavy landing gear or fuel needed for the return trip.

The F35 is shit.

The F-35 is a direct response to the somewhat useful F-22 Raptor being outdone by the new generations of Chinese Chenyang and Shengdu, built with stolen technology from, you guessed it, the F-35 project.

It's utter bullshit. I wouldn't be surprised if company men were leaking secrets to the Chinese just so they could turn around to the Pentagon and say "Look, they're building something 5% better using our technology, please give us another trillion to build the next generation of stealth fighter."

Also the Marines *insisted* that it be VSTOL, so they could use them on their baby aircraft carriers that aren't big enough for real jets, and this completely unnecessary specification is probably the source of at least half of the F-35's many, many design problems.

Aside from the possibility of the controls of the drone being jammed/hacked and possibly being turned against their owners, (which is a legitimate concern that DARPA is trying desperately to overcome), no reason at all.

We'd have those already if Japan won the war... and the Coast Guard remains underfunded.

Wealth redistribution is a pernicious evil of socialism!

Wait, you mean all the money is _coming_ from the poor, and _going_ to a few politically well connected people?

Well, that's tots different. FREE MARKET CAPITALISM, YOU BITCHES. SUCK IT UP!

Yes, it's very much about maintaining an inflated, wasteful budget that congress is goaded to implement continuously. Additionally, it's a great way to, as Pierre Sprey literally states, funnel money to defense contractors. I'd include it allows excuse for research as well - which isn't always a waste.

This is obvious: A lot of congresspersons depend on defense contracts to attract skilled workers and generate jobs and wealth for their district/state. Because people with degrees vote more, and because jobs make politicians look good so they can brag - even if it doesn't result in much of a net effect - they usually welcome defense contractors and the public funds that finance them. Furthermore, if defense contracts disappeared a military base might have little reason to exist somewhere, and not only would soldiers and skilled contractors have to go elsewhere (along with their money and votes), all the regular maintenance, construction, and service jobs at the base would leave too (the jobs not done by soldiers obviously).

All this for "defense" when we could be doing massive public works with contractors to rebuild shit, install national fiber-optics, etc... I'm sure we can all come up with better ideas than building a jet with every piece of technology invented jammed into it.

I'm in favor of mech suit projects but only if they have the capability, should their operator be killed or incapacitated, of engaging the enemy autonomously while blaring heavy metal music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8__8--YAm4

You're having that moment NOW?

I just thought that if they were on top of anything, it was the thing they spent 1/4 of our money on.

It's probably just me but I feel there's a limit to how far idiocy will take you. Those two planes have been in development since the early 90s, (1993 maybe?) and somehow everyone who talked about these flaws got ignored. Now that they are in production, we can finally have experts on TV telling us what huge pieces of crap they are. (I know, tinfoil hat and whatnot...)