F-35 Thunderjug, Doing What It Does Best

h/t CDR Salamander

Which thing is fail beyond anyone's wildest expectations.

Surprising me not a whit, it turns out that the Mission-Capable rate of the F-35A Thunderjug has not increased, but rather dropped in the last year, compared to the year prior, and now sits at under 50%, the second lowest number of any airframe on the entire inventory list. (And, Word To The Air Farce's Mother, the F-22 isn't covering itself with much more glory, either. Thank heavens we picked the second-best airframe in that selection process too, right?)

Yet again, we remind anyone listening, it's long past time for TPTB to stop lying to everyone including themselves, admit that the F-35 in all variants is the Flying Edsel, shitcan this entire monstrous p.o.s. program, use the remaining inventory as air strike targets, and try again from scratch. This cursed plane has only destroyed one military target of value: the Pentagon.

And anyone who ever touched the F-35 project from start to finish should be court-martialed, drawn, and quartered, including, if necessary, the corpses of any retirees who have already died. If they remove smaller body parts of offenders like tongues and fingernails with hot pincers during questioning, so much the better.

Pour encourager les autres.

Queen Alheimer's, Doing What She...Um...What Was I Saying...?

h/t 100% F'ed Up

Posted with only one comment:

Second (after the V.P.) on the list of Presidential succession.

Let that thought sink in, and remember who voted her into her leadership position.

I'm Here, At This Point

Go read this spot-on rant today at Gun Free Zone .

"I don’t want to divide up the country.  I don’t want to occupy New York City or San Francisco.  I just want to take the minority of outraged Radicals and build a monument to freedom with their skulls."

If someone posted that next Wednesday at noon was National Housecleaning Day, and gunfire broke out at that point within earshot, I can't tell you I wouldn't join in the festivities.

I can tell you that for anyone who joined in, everything after the first shot is essentially free, (you can only hang a man once, after all) and the things that would stop anyone at that point would be only their own death, a lack of ammunition, or a dearth of further targets, and nothing less.

With CA, AZ, GA, and FL, we're watching Democrat BAMN tactics subvert multiple federal and state elections, openly, brazenly, and entirely free of any sort of fear of consequences or repercussions.



They aren't even bothering to try and hide it. h/t Xenophilic blog

At that point, this is no longer even a country, just a banana republic, and the answer to that is lead travelling at muzzle velocity, not only philosophically to a moral certitude, but every time things devolve to that point in world history to date.

The Democrat Party is willing to burn America down in order to steal it, and they are now the open enemy of the state and the people, and they're going to get their reply ballistically, not rhetorically. Once you're kissed in the forehead that way, there is no further reply. Nature is brilliantly subtle like that.

Nothing less will suffice any longer, unless I read tomorrow that entire counties of their operatives have been rounded up in mass arrests for federal prosecution for election tampering, and are being tried in batches at the local stadium.

The only open question now is timing.

I'm not telling anybody to open that party, but I'm telling you that party's getting opened, and once the genie's out of the bottle, all bets about how long, how widespread, and how bloody are rampant speculation based more on hope than reality.

We had a country.

One side has consistently refused to live under the rules of that country.

They are about to reap the consequences of that course of action, in a Darwin Award-winning manner, and it's liable to be the Third Punic War for them, their families, and anyone carrying water for them, before the dust settles, whether it happens in dribs and drabs, or all at once from coast to coast.

But the match and the fuse are about to have a fateful meeting.

---

Before we get there, though, TLDavis has a suggestion.

My thoughts on that:

Before we get to “massive social unrest”, what does it take for people to start dropping wrenches in the gears of everyday life?

Think about it:

How many stop lights a day can crews replace?
What happens to traffic when all the ones within two miles of Douchebag Central get shot out, one at a time, and every intersection in all directions is now a 4-way stop?

How many suspicious packages can the Bomb Squad handle simultaneously?
What about if left on major arteries into downtown?
At rush hour?
What happens if one of them goes off first, to show they’re not all just for looks?

What if a few barrels of chemicals and hazmat get spilled, “accidentally”?
On major highways? Or at bridges and tunnels and other natural chokepoints?

What happens when some thoughtful souls all decide to shove 5# of rags into every toilet in a public building?
Or just dump a coffee can or two of Readycrete there?
Or, both?
And pull the fire alarms on their way out?

And then do the same thing at the local university?
What happens when you dump 10K college kids out of classes all at once?

Who do you call when persons unknown shoot a length of wire across all the high tension power lines a block away in each direction?
Or saws through the poles an inch a day, until one day a gust of wind kicks up, and fate takes a hand?
What happens when all the locks are epoxied closed on a long weekend?
At the Welfare Office?
You’re going to protect every public building, everywhere, 24/7/365/forevermore?

How many pounds of Bondo and limburger cheese or expanding foam does it take to kill an ATM?
What happens when you hit every ATM for miles?
What if you do the same thing to city parking meters?

How hard is it to jark a card key reader so no one can get into the parking lot?
Or disable the swing arm gates?

What happens when people start dropping tire-killing caltrops around whenever the mood strikes?
What if they were painted black, and left at the driveways to the police stations?
Or the city maintenance vehicle yards?

What if people started setting up random sandbag and cone “detours” around town, just to f**k with traffic flow?

We haven’t even gotten to the WWII resistance tactics of screwing with signs, street addresses, etc.

So when everything comes to a halt, and the Krooked Korruptocrats can’t even get to work, and don’t have time to steal an election, and the city or cities in question are in total chaos, and you have no one to arrest, or investigate, or question, and there hasn’t been a single casualty, or a single bullet fired, then what?

What happens when Phase II becomes taking the pain to private enterprise?
Especially those corporate entities that have funded the Communists and TPTB?
And the NGOs and “community organization” douchenozzles trying to replace you demographically?

And nobody’s had to wait for “massive social unrest”.

In fact, they’ve instigated it.

And you haven’t blown up the power lines into the whole city.
Just the ones going to City Hall.
Or the Vote Stealing Office.
Or the Welfare Desk.

Civilization is a fragile thing.
The myriad and multitudinous ways it can be screwed with make any defense recockulously impossible.
That sword cuts both ways.

Ponder what happens if you let the bastards know that burning up the social contract has consequences in both directions.
Just that.
They’ll get the message.
Via megaphone.

And long before we get to blood in the streets, and at no cost to your economic livelihood.

Snipers are always more economical than artillery or carpet-bombing.

Abort This Thalidomide Baby

Both of the above are the pride of long-outdated technology; both are full of the exact same substance, by design. But unlike the mongers of the upper item, 19th century ceramicists of the caliber of Wedgewood would have never, in their wildest dreams, designed their wares so that the user of the lower item had to sit inside it. That attempted "improvement" has been solely the province of Lockheed-Martin, purveyors of a hoary line of solidly awful and craptastic designs since pretty much ever, after they got past the ubiquitous C-130 and the SR-71.

From Cold Fury today:

This is the U.S.’s Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, the next generation of American fighter jets. It has been in development since 1992. All told the program is slated to cost upwards of a trillion dollars. 

It’s also supposed to be a single plane shared between the Marines, Air Force, and Navy. This is where the problems start.  

And it is one of the most colossal pieces of shit ever created.

 The F-35 Thunderjug (named as it ought to be, after the once-ubiquitous underbed depository of nightsoil, whose lineage to the F-35 is a direct line) is a testimony to the ghost of Robert MacNamara, the last genius who foisted such a colossal piece of offal on the DoD and the American people, his crowning gold-plated turdnugget being the FB-111, an imaginarily “joint” fighter bomber so horrid it was too heavy to land and take off from the carriers it was supposed to grace, and was sh*tcanned by SecNav and CNO, back when admirals and service chiefs still had a pair. So instead, both the F-4 and A-6 soldiered on until the F-14 and F-18 took over.

The supposed advantages of the F-35 are illusory, the compromises to produce an AF, Navy, and Marine aircraft are legion, and the best thing SecDef Mattis and Trump could do to cement the renaissance of the US military is to kill the entire boondoggle, tie it around the necks of the Obozo, Clinton, and Bush (both of them) administrations, and start all over with appropriate aircraft tailored to be world-beating fire breathers for each of those services, in the respective services’ intended roles.
If sub-assemblies, whether one or many, happen to be shared in common, well and good, but the point of an aircraft is to win in the role it is designed for, and you can no more make a Marine expeditionary CAS bird, a Navy carrier-based tactical bomber, and a USAF ground-based bomber the same aircraft than you can take a surface sailor and put him in a USAF air wing or Marine grunt battalion.

They are complementary roles, and similar, but not identical. Sandpaper and toilet paper are both useful items, but hardly interchangeable.

And anyone in charge of the F-35 with service rank should be cashiered from the military, in any grade from O-10 down to W-1, and the entire production team punished and penalized to the legal limits of DoD’s discretion for future work. They have sold out the country for promotions and contracts, and that needs punishing.

Instead of trying to cram everything including the kitchen sink into a mythical all-in-one A-6/A-10/F-14/F-16/F-18 replacement (and also Piper Cub/B-17/C-47/PBY/B-52/Zeppelin replacement, if you read the sales brochures), figure out what made each service’s airframe needing replacement work, and make each of those better, to the limit of 2018 technology, rather than that of 1985. It may be that they can largely share a cockpit, but everything from forward of the stick and behind the pilot’s seat to the tail should probably be hugely different in each version, for 10,000 good, sound aeronautical engineering and tactical reasons. This is why a B-2 doesn’t look anything like a C-17, or an F-22, and all of those are in the same service.

The F-35 isn’t having teething problems; it’s a thalidomide baby. It’s not an actual human fetus, so abort that disaster, with extreme prejudice, and don’t spend another penny on the catastrophe it was always going to be, is, and will always be.

Make the F-35 Thunderjug, the prototypical DoD Turd With Wings, go away forever.
Stop rewarding Lockheed's horrid sub-standard aeronautical engineering and superb ability to bamboozle and bribe their way to contracts, instead of make world-beating aircraft.

Like James Cameron should have done decades ago with the atrocious sequels to Aliens: pretend they were all just a horribly bad dream, and never really happened, and the fans will instantly forgive you. Put first you must have that "come to Jesus" moment, admit the error, and then you have pull the "flush" handle on the prior effort.

After a good advance on a trillion dollars has been utterly wasted, America and her military have been punished enough.