So how much does an F-35 actually cost?

May 17, 2011 6:58 AM

Fresh on the heels of Lockheed Martin's delivery of the first production F-35 to the USAF, you might be wondering how much it actually costs. It depends on who you ask. Blackfive takes a crack at it, prompting a rather snippy response from Bill Sweetman over at Ares. Throw in additional commentary and a rebuttal, and head down the rabbit hole into the wonderful world of defense acquisition.
posted by kjars (94 comments total)

I still don't understand why we need the F-35 in the first place. When was the last time we were engaging in aerial dogfights?
posted by thsmchnekllsfascists at 7:06 AM on May 17, 2011 [2 favorites]

Hold on. "Battle for US Air dominance?"

What exactly is the role of the F-35, and why are current aircraft insufficient in contrast to the planes being flown by other countries?

As far as I can tell, the F35 is being sold as a bit of a "jack of all trades," which if experience has been any guide, means that it's going to suck.
posted by schmod at 7:09 AM on May 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

Of course we have to spend twice as much as the rest of the world put
together. What if the rest of the world ganged up on us? Joined by the
inhabitants Alternate Earth 438? Then we'd just barely be ahead in
firepower!
posted by DU at 7:12 AM on May 17, 2011 [7 favorites]

The whole system is mind-smashing. I have no problem paying $40 for a titanium screw as it serves a structural purpose, but we're also forced to pay $300 for a small bag of common aluminum washers. Or instead of having a local company rebuild a pump for the in-flight commode (about $400) we had to pay $10,000 for a new one. And those $100 hammers? That sadly is just the list price from your local Snap-On dealer. @groan@ most days I just try not to think about this stuff.
posted by ironbob at 7:14 AM on May 17, 2011

I will give it this: It is a cool-looking plane! This is a boon for Revell.
posted by Mister_A at 7:15 AM on May 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

The big question is: can the F-35 Lightning II withstand the shitstorm to come in this thread?
posted by ShutterBun at 7:17 AM on May 17, 2011 [3 favorites]

I still don't understand why we need the F-35 in the first place. When was the last time we were engaging in aerial dogfights?

Well, first of all, the F-15s and F-16s are being retired at a rapid rate so we need something to fill that function. One of the reasons we don't get in a lot of dogfights is that our fighters are so much more capable than anything anyone else flies. Secondly, the main idea of the F-35 is that it isn't just an air to air platform. It can carry a shocking array of air to ground munitions, from precision missiles to cluster weapons, paveways and nukes.
posted by Lame_username at 7:18 AM on May 17, 2011 [4 favorites]

I thought the point of the F-35 is to justify the F-22. See, once we sell the F-35 to all the other countries, we'll need the F-22 to kick their asses.
posted by ryanrs at 7:18 AM on May 17, 2011 [12 favorites]

I'm not sure if we need the F-35, but the older airframes (F-16, F-18, most of the C-130s and the ancient B-52s) are older than the crews and maintainers taking care of them. They're becoming a safety issue--hell most cars don't last 10 years and we're squeezing 30+ out of high speed aircraft.
posted by ironbob at 7:18 AM on May 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

I thought the point of the F-35 is to justify the F-22

Except that the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act effectively de-funded F-22 production.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 7:23 AM on May 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

Newsflash to those who assumed "air superiority" was an unrevokable "achievement unlocked" kinda thing, rather than something that needed to be maintained.

Not that I know enough to agree with it, but the notion of "one nation having some scary-as-fuck" war machines might actually be a pretty decent "why bother?" deterrent for would-be adversaries, generally speaking.

With regard to the U.S.'s particular standing, it could simply be a case of keeping up appearances.
posted by ShutterBun at 7:24 AM on May 17, 2011

Here's a really interesting write-up on the roles of the F-35 and how it is intended to replace the F-16 and A-10 and complement the F-22, which itself is the replacement for the air-to-air F-15. It was written several years ago, but has been updated to reflect recent design and mission changes.
posted by Mister_A at 7:24 AM on May 17, 2011

As best I can tell, there are two different claims walking past each other. First, that given the money we have already spent it will be just as (or not) cost-effective (including maintenance costs) to buy F-35s as buy older aircraft and update them for current missions. Second, that given the total cost including what we have already spent the whole thing was a bad idea.

I'm in no position to evaluate either claim, but it would be nice for them to settle on one.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 7:25 AM on May 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure if we need the F-35, but the older airframes (F-16, F-18, most of the C-130s and the ancient B-52s) are older than the crews and maintainers taking care of them. They're becoming a safety issue--hell most cars don't last 10 years and we're squeezing 30+ out of high speed aircraft.

Current plans call for the B52 to be used through 2040.
posted by schmod at 7:27 AM on May 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

Well, it's possible for both to be simultaneously true.

It's possible that in retrospect, given the total cost for what we've spent, the whole thing was a bad idea.

But that doesn't mean that as of right now, the correct thing to do isn't to continue with the program. That is the nature of sunk costs — they're sunk; it doesn't make sense to make future decisions based on them, since the money has already been paid out.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:29 AM on May 17, 2011

One of the reasons we don't get in a lot of dogfights is that our fighters are so much more capable than anything anyone else flies.

Or perhaps not picking fights with Nation States that have an actual ability to defend themselves?

Actors without armies only have to poke America with a stick and America will spend itself into bankruptcy. Beyond $40 screws you have fuel costs to keep that $40 screw in the air.
posted by rough ashlar at 7:32 AM on May 17, 2011 [2 favorites]

The overall idea of the F35 makes sense to me. Instead of the USAF having F16s + F15s, the Navy have F-18s and F-14s, and the Marines having Harriers, they all get variants of one aircraft that's cheaper than any of the above were when introduced.

Perhaps the program was mismanaged or something - I have no idea, haven't followed it - but I think that over the next several decades it will probably end up cheaper than trying to continue using several different aging aircraft.

I never really understood why we needed to spend so much to develop and purchase the F-22 though.
posted by kavasa at 7:34 AM on May 17, 2011 [2 favorites]

This is why grandma has to live in your basement kids.

The country can't afford to pay for Medicare anymore when it has to spend $65million per airframe x 120 odd airframes, plus fuel, ammo, repairs, training and projected lifetime upgrade costs. Add all that up and you're looking at exactly 27 MD salaries, 44 nurses, 72 orderlies, 119 hospice beds, 310 man-year of kidney dialysis, 515 man-years of full service nursing home care (not including prescription drug costs) and 4,318 sessions of chemotherapy per airframe. We just can't afford to put all that unnecessary health cost on the public credit card when we have necessary expenses like the F-35. Something has to give. You're going to have to dig deep and sacrifice. And hey, it's not like you have a job you could be doing instead anyway.

Now go get the bedpan, grandma's had a little accident and there's no one else to take care of it.
posted by T.D. Strange at 7:39 AM on May 17, 2011 [17 favorites]

I read this:

The F-35A is more than 100 nm down on combat radius (about 15 percent),

and stared at it blankly for several seconds before I realized that "nm" in this context doesn't mean nanometers, but nautical miles. Though I admit, for a moment there I was sort of hoping we had fighter jets the size of subatomic particles.

Bonus headdesk points: My entire (short) professional life has been making software for the Air Force.
posted by Tomorrowful at 7:43 AM on May 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

I'm also guessing "incumbent president awards F-35 fighter contracts to business in your county!" has a more enticing ring than "local V.A. hospital hires 72 orderlies, etc."
posted by ShutterBun at 7:45 AM on May 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

The F-35A is more than 100 nm down on combat radius (about 15 percent), and is just below the 590 nm threshold requirement, due to higher requirements for engine bleed

Watch out! There are invaders just beyond that yellow photon!
posted by Galaxor Nebulon at 7:47 AM on May 17, 2011

recent design and mission changes.

I really, really don't like hearing that phrase when referring to military and aerospace technology. Sounds vaguely reminiscent of the Space Shuttle and the Bradley Fighting Vehicle.
posted by schmod at 7:47 AM on May 17, 2011

The elephant (or perhaps mouse) in the room is the fact that much cheaper drones are now taking away the need for the close air support/air strike role that these planes were specced for. The predator is doing everything in Afganistan that the A-10 was used for even just a few years ago in Iraq, for a lot less money.

With a good chunk of their mission being replaced by robots, the value proposition for the F-35 as a combo air superiority/close air support craft starts to evaporate. Half its mission is being done more cheaply by machines.

We'll be building robot dogfighters soon too. I think fighters are going to be relegeted as an obselete twentieth century technology much more quickly than their proponents are willing to admit.
posted by bonehead at 7:48 AM on May 17, 2011 [8 favorites]

I'm not going to try to justify the cost of programs like this, but there are a few reasons why things are so expensive (aside from the usual defense contracting grift):

1) First and foremost is certification. Even just looking at civil stuff, a GPS that goes in a general aviation aircraft is orders of magnitude more expensive than the Garmin you stick your car windshield because of certification. The aircraft model must function, period. If it breaks mid-flight, you can kill people. It not only has to not kill people, but it has to survive a relatively harsh environment in the form of vibration, shock, low air pressure (air is used to cool the equipment and less of it means electronics run hotter), temperature extremes, and on and on. It can't interfere with other electronics on the aircraft. If your car radio suddenly can't pick of 95.7 FM it's not a big deal, but if you can't talk to air traffic control because a new piece of electronics is stepping on those frequencies you're in trouble. Modern aircraft have dozens of radios, satellite links, receivers, etc., and they all have to play nice with each other and the airframe. There are also military-specific things that are really, honestly, hard to do - anti-jamming, anti-spoofing, among other things.

Lots of technology, difficult environment, airframe needs to survive in a wide variety of circumstances/damage. And it has to work right, every time.

2) The Air Force and the rest of the military operate on three words: Diminishing Manufacturing Sources. The way it works is like this - I start a new program (new aircraft, new modification, whatever), and usually I make a "lifetime buy" based on the expected life of the aircraft or the amount of time I expect to use the mod. Let's say I commission a new aircraft and expect to use them for 20 years. So I buy the airplanes, the spare parts, engines, all at once for a twenty year service life. Manufacturers build these things, then shut down the production lines - a lot of the equipment is unique and not available on the open market. Now, 20 years later, we're going to extend the life of the aircraft. I need more spares, but no one is building them. So, you either commission more spares (which can be expensive because you're essentially starting up new manufacturing lines from scratch) or you find replacements for the equipment or the whole aircraft. Replacements of any kind need to be certified, see point 1.

3) These projects are really just not that efficient. If Boeing builds a new commercial airliner, they usually try to come up with a design and then shop it out to customers (more or less - they generally have customers in mind when designing new aircraft and they have some input into the design). Boeing self-funds the R&D for the commercial airliner and have an incentive to keep costs down. The military, on the other hand, will fund Boeing/Grumman/whoever to develop a new aircraft in addition to the purchase price of the aircraft. See previous comment about DoD contracting. Boeing now has no incentive to keep costs down, because the government is paying them for every hour they spend on R&D.

Such is the life of military acquisitions.
posted by backseatpilot at 7:49 AM on May 17, 2011 [15 favorites]

The F35B VTOL is pretty cool. Watching the video it's apparently very easy to fly: "Push down on the joystick to go down, pull up to go up, let go of the joystick and it stays level." Seems logical, but the Harrier was apparently very complicated and non-intuitive. Computers now do all the balancing work, like a Segway.
posted by stbalbach at 7:53 AM on May 17, 2011

The swing-wing F-111 which failed to live up to expectations, was also originally planned to be used by the USAF and USN. The USN passed on it, developing the F-14 instead. The UK cancelled their order for 50 F-111s, but Australia bought a total of 28.
posted by Daddy-O at 7:57 AM on May 17, 2011

I'm OK with this as long as we get to make the Bush tax cuts permanent and dismantle Medicare, too. Privatize Social Security and I'm down for 5 or 6 hundred more, even.
posted by Benny Andajetz at 7:58 AM on May 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

Eisenhower answered this question a long time ago, although his quote may not reflect current market prices:

"Every gun that is made, 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. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat."

Speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors "The Chance for Peace" (16 April 1953)
posted by SouthCNorthNY at 7:59 AM on May 17, 2011 [12 favorites]

TD Strange - I mean I'm sympathetic to that argument, we'd solve a lot of our fiscal issues if we eliminated the American military. There would in fact be some risk entailed in doing so, though, and half-steps don't make a whole lot of sense. If you're going to have an air force at all, you do need to update its equipment every few decades, and the F-35 is orders of magnitude cheaper than the F-22, and probably cheaper in the long run than continuing to use elderly fighters with subsystems they were never designed for tacked on with hot glue.

Bonehead? This:

"The elephant (or perhaps mouse) in the room is the fact that much cheaper drones are now taking away the need for the close air support/air strike role that these planes were specced for. The predator is doing everything in Afganistan that the A-10 was used for even just a few years ago in Iraq, for a lot less money."

Is just not true. Drones are seeing use, sure, but having seen A-10s and Apaches go to work overseas, they are absolutely not in any way replaced by a drone carrying 1-2 missiles.
posted by kavasa at 8:00 AM on May 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

I think the major question is why continue to fund horrendously expensive aircraft when the drone revolution is right around the corner. Instead of spending so much money on frankly irreplaceable aircraft we could buy a large number of unmanned drones.

Pilots would be safe, performance would be improved (no pilot means a huge number of systems can be removed, computers don't black out under high g forces), uptime improvements would be significant (computers don't get tired, drone pilots could actually swap out during the middle of a shift).

A drone is theoretically so much better at both the dogfighting mission, the close ground support, the air superiority, etc that continuing to fund manned fighters is entirely for the sake of vanity.

Upgrade the existing fighters to meet whatever imaginary scenario necessary but spend that new money on a nice drone fighter.
posted by vuron at 8:01 AM on May 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

Drones are seeing use, sure, but having seen A-10s and Apaches go to work overseas, they are absolutely not in any way replaced by a drone carrying 1-2 missiles.

Because drones right now are pretty small. Build a drone with an A-10's bomb load and that would change entirely. How much cheaper is it to build a combat craft if it's not a tragedy if one or two get shot down? If you never lose a pilot?
posted by bonehead at 8:05 AM on May 17, 2011

"John Boyd used to say, It is not true the Pentagon has no strategy. It has a strategy, and once you understand what that strategy is, everything it does makes sense. The strategy is, don't interrupt the money flow, add to it." [broken link]

F-15SE Sneaking Up On the F-35

...much cheaper drones are now taking away the need for the close air support/air strike role that these planes were specced for.
Stealth Drone’s First Flight

But the deep issue is:
"Today, the United States is spending $500 million apiece for stealth bombers. A terrorist stealth bomber is a car with a bomb in the trunk—a car that looks like every other car."
[The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation]
posted by dragonsi55 at 8:05 AM on May 17, 2011 [3 favorites]

Drones and "push-button" war tactics are bad P.R. for both the proponents and outside observers. Sending in men to do a terrible & awful thing is mitigated by the fact that they are risking their own lives. Drones may be capable of accomplishing the same goal, but given the lack of risk (beyond money) is seen as gutless and does little to reassure spectator nations of your conviction. (If you're not willing to risk your own boys' lives, maybe you'd better rethink the whole plan, no?)

Beyond their personal capabilities, men in combat aircraft will always serve a need as a political representation of "yes, we're willing to risk this." The same has been true since the space race, when robots or automation could have accomplished much of the same end results.

Not to get all von Clausewitz on it, but I would say that if you care enough to go to war, but not enough to risk your soldier's lives, you've already lost.
posted by ShutterBun at 8:08 AM on May 17, 2011 [2 favorites]

TD Strange - I mean I'm sympathetic to that argument, we'd solve a lot of our fiscal issues if we eliminated the American military. There would in fact be some risk entailed in doing so, though, and half-steps don't make a whole lot of sense.

We don't have to eliminate the military, and development costs are expected. It's perfectly reasonable to maintain a defense force, or even a powerful airforce and navy capable of defending our prodigious international shipping interests. But arguments that the country is broke and can't afford to maintain basic services for it's citizens, like what the entire Republican establishment is arguing right this second, fall on deaf ears when they can find a couple trillion to expand a military already light years ahead of any possible threat and to start new wars in countries that haven't attacked us every couple months.

It's take for granted in this country that the defense budget is untouchable and that our Imperial wars of choice are the only priority that matters. We've never had a serious public discussion about what we've chosen to give up.
posted by T.D. Strange at 8:11 AM on May 17, 2011 [2 favorites]

Not to get all von Clausewitz on it, but I would say that if you care enough to go to war, but not enough to risk your soldier's lives, you've already lost.

Considering the lack of actual Declarations of War for the various violations of Nation State boundries, the lack of care starts with the paperwork.
posted by rough ashlar at 8:11 AM on May 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

Drones are seeing use, sure, but having seen A-10s and Apaches go to work overseas, they are absolutely not in any way replaced by a drone carrying 1-2 missiles.

Also, the unit cost of a Predator drone is about 4.5 million dollars, which is not much lower to that of an A-10 (not to mention the fact that the latter was paid for decades ago). The main advantage of the drone is that, even if it is shot down, its highly-trained pilot is in an air-conditioned container in Florida, not in a cave in Afghanistan under the tender care of the Taliban.
posted by Skeptic at 8:13 AM on May 17, 2011

"Today, the United States is spending $500 million apiece for stealth bombers. A terrorist stealth bomber is a car with a bomb in the trunk—a car that looks like every other car."

Unfortunately, there's probably still a lot of "well, nukes beat the hell out of Kamikazes" thinking going around, regardless of what the Ewoks accomplished.
posted by ShutterBun at 8:14 AM on May 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

How is that even relevant ShutterBun? If a computer can do the task better, faster, longer and at no risk to the pilot while being cheaper than the human piloted plane then there is absolutely no reason to not use drone technology when appropriate.

One does not need to shed blood for the weapon to be an effective deterrent. If you can exert force anywhere in the world without risking the lives of your own soldiers that becomes a very powerful tool.

If anything the lack of risk would result in the weapon being used even in borderline situations because the cost-benefit would shift significantly in favor of using the weapon.

Sacrificing blood can be accomplished via infantry actions because drones aren't going to replace the infantryman anytime soon.
posted by vuron at 8:15 AM on May 17, 2011

I would say that if you care enough to go to war, but not enough to risk your soldier's lives, you've already lost.

Was the introduction of tanks a case of not caring about war enough? Hundreds of thousands of soldiers died in WW1, going over the top. Tanks were instrumental in changing this, with much lower risks to many fewer soldiers.

If technology can lower the risks and costs of combat, aren't we morally obliged to our soldiers, if no one else, to use it?
posted by bonehead at 8:17 AM on May 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

If you can exert force anywhere in the world without risking the lives of your own soldiers that becomes a very powerful tool.

Hence the desire to have a large paperwork hurdle to jump in the form of a formal Declaration of War.

Tazers are supposed to be an alternative to being shot, but are being used as compliance. Don't taze me bro and ride the lighting as sayings in the last 10 years showing how a 'powerful tool' gets applied in lesser and lesser cases.
posted by rough ashlar at 8:20 AM on May 17, 2011

"We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat."

According to the FPP the F-35 fly away cost is $65 million. Wheat currently costs ~$5.25/bushel. That works out to ~12.4 million bushels of wheat per F-35. Thus, the opportunity cost of the military industrial complex is about 25 times what it was during the Eisenhower administration. Ridiculous.

If technology can lower the risks and costs of combat, aren't we morally obliged to our soldiers, if no one else, to use it?

You know what else can lower the risks and costs of combat? Not fighting wars.
posted by jedicus at 8:22 AM on May 17, 2011 [7 favorites]

The whole system is mind-smashing. I have no problem paying $40 for a titanium screw as it serves a structural purpose, but we're also forced to pay $300 for a small bag of common aluminum washers.

That's a canard of accounting. All the parts are accounted for under "equal allocation" which means that the cost of sourcing the washers, installing them and maintaining them and every other loose part is divied up equally amongst all items. There are no $435 hammers or $1,000 bags of washers. Its a common trick politicians use when they want you to think they are "fighting" the government. If we are gonna get change and get this budget cut, we gotta get the facts straight.
posted by Ironmouth at 8:22 AM on May 17, 2011 [4 favorites]

You know what else can lower the risks and costs of combat? Not fighting wars.

What's your plan for that?
posted by Ironmouth at 8:23 AM on May 17, 2011

But arguments that the country is broke and can't afford to maintain basic services for it's citizens, like what the entire Republican establishment is arguing right this second, fall on deaf ears when they can find a couple trillion to expand a military already light years ahead of any possible threat and to start new wars in countries that haven't attacked us every couple months.

It's take for granted in this country that the defense budget is untouchable and that our Imperial wars of choice are the only priority that matters.

The SecDef and the President want to cut the defense budget. Call your congressman and tell them you agree. I mean it.
posted by Ironmouth at 8:27 AM on May 17, 2011

You know what else can lower the risks and costs of combat? Not fighting wars.

Ask the Libyans about that.
posted by bonehead at 8:29 AM on May 17, 2011

If a computer can do the task better, faster, longer and at no risk to the pilot while being cheaper than the human piloted plane then there is absolutely no reason to not use drone technology when appropriate.

On an individual, tactical level, I couldn't agree more. But if one nation is attempting to exert its political influence on another by "sending our robots to kill your men," it's just not gonna work. I mean, assuming one nation has decided to go to war against another, how deep can their conviction (and commitment to win) be if they decide to send in the drones?

It's the same reason you can't borrow someone else's chips at a poker table. If you're not willing to risk something of your own (i.e. people) then you should rethink going "all in."

Maybe in today's world, one nation might think: "well, these people need to die, because they are our enemy." It would behoove them to ask: "how many of your own people are you willing to risk to effect that?" If the answer is "none," then you'd better think again.

I'll come right out and say it: killing enemies with drones is for pussies. I'm all for protecting our servicemen & women as much as possible, and giving them whatever is in our ability to make their job safer & with the highest guarantee of success. But if anyone honestly thinks they have an enemy that isn't even worth risking one of their own to vanquish, then maybe there's another way.
posted by ShutterBun at 8:30 AM on May 17, 2011

In some sense if there was no military industrial complex, the thousands of engineers who worked on these cutting edge technologies which sometimes go on to have civillian uses (RADAR, Microwaves, Cryptography, etc) would end up employed by the private sector instead... curing cancer? Inventing us flying cars?

Who am I kidding. We'd probably end up with 3D televisions a bit sooner, or holograms of Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga in our living rooms.

In some sense, in the very large macro view of the world, the human race has to get off this planet before we kill ourselves or run ourselves out of resources. Military research is vaguely related to that, a lot more so than any other industry anyway.
posted by xdvesper at 8:33 AM on May 17, 2011

Unfortunately we have had several very public discussions about spending priorities in this country. Every 2,4,6 years - the electorate continues to choose "more guns, less butter".
posted by akash at 8:35 AM on May 17, 2011

Here's what I don't understand: In WW2 we produced and lost massive numbers of aircraft. This wasn't a problem because airplanes at the time were unsophisticated. They were basically flying cars. Converting an automobile assembly line to build planes wasn't that hard.

It seems to me that these planes will likely only be used to enforce hegemony against minor nations that the U.S. can overawe when necessary, but that primarily these aircraft are built not to be used but simply to project U.S. power.

In the event of a truly serious conflict where we lost planes on any sizeable scale how in the world would we be able to maintain such a sophisticated air force? Could we actually replace these kind of planes in any sort of timely fashion? And if we could replace them could we pay for them?
posted by MasonDixon at 8:40 AM on May 17, 2011 [2 favorites]

I'll come right out and say it: killing enemies with drones is for pussies

Speaking as an American, I really couldn't care less if you want to call me a a pussy. If you try to fight me, I'll kick you in the balls and play as dirty as I can, because the point of a fight is not to avoid being a pussy, the point is to win. In war, I want to minimize unnecessary deaths because' that's ethical - but I really couldn't care less about your notions of pussyhood. We drop bombs from ten thousand feet, we order artillery strikes from offshore, we use night-vision goggles and huge armored tanks and we cheat in all kinds of ways because war is not a game and the point is to kill the other guys for whatever reason we think we need to. Maybe we shouldn't be killing them this particular time. God knows I've got my objections to this basket of wars. But the idea that we need to send in human beings instead of drones purely to avoid being "pussies" shows a distinct lack of understanding of what a fucking war is for, and jesus, if firing a laser-guided bunker-buster from a zillion feet up in the air while enjoying total air superiority isn't a pussy move to begin with, I don't think just switching to an unmanned drone doing same is a meaningful difference.
posted by Tomorrowful at 8:43 AM on May 17, 2011 [7 favorites]

TD - nationalized healthcare is a pretty monumental addition to public spending, and without finding that money elsewhere we're just going to be borrowing more money. The interest payments on that debt are going to mount to the point where all of our tax revenue goes to funding debt payments rather than providing services, just as can happen for private citizens. So I'm sympathetic to "severely cut or eliminate DoD spending to fund healthcare," but I'm far less sympathetic to "maintain DoD spending as-is and fund healthcare in addition to it".

As Ironmouth says, there would need to be a lot of pressure to cut defense spending for it to actually happen, and that cutting in turn needs to happen to make other stuff possible.

Re: drones vs. manned aircraft. I honestly don't know - I've never operated a drone or flown an aircraft. I wonder if current wireless communications technology can transmit and receive visual data of a high enough quality at a low enough latency to really make ground attack operations possible. I don't know that it can. I'm like 85% certain that the drone pilots we've got aren't in Florida or anything either - they get deployed to the area of operations too, because trying to operate a remote device over satellite would be pretty impossible. Spotting a specific vehicle seems easier to me than picking out friends and foes in a firefight on the ground and only shooting at the foes - manned aircraft have certainly fucked this up, doesn't it seem possible that unmanned would be even worse at it?

Shutterbun - your argument isn't really persuasive to me. What level of training and equipment allows one to go to war with a good conscience? Should we have invaded Afghanistan with a bunch of 5th-graders wielding kitchen knives to prove our dedication to the cause? 5,000-some American servicemembers have been killed in Iraq, does that mean it was a good war (I would submit that in fact it is one of the most horrible things we as a nation have done)? What about the groups various affiliations that have given tens of thousands of lives in Iraq - they obviously want it more than we do, right? What about the hundreds of thousands of civilian lives lost there, what does that prove? Or is it just death? If bad sci-fi became reality and aliens landed and started indiscriminately killing humans tomorrow and our best bet was to send robot fighter-planes into the air, would that prove that our dedication was insufficient?

Perhaps most saliently, power elites have throughout history been very willing to send the non-elite out to die. That congress or the President or the People are willing to risk the lives of people they don't know is neither necessary nor sufficient justification for anything, to me.

Tomorrowful's "war is not a game" point is a different, but I think good, tack of response.

The only good arguments for or against tele-operated combat equipment, as far as I'm concerned, are technical ones.
posted by kavasa at 8:50 AM on May 17, 2011

What's your plan for that?

Stop invading countries that haven't attacked us.
posted by T.D. Strange at 8:58 AM on May 17, 2011 [2 favorites]

What's your plan for that?

I guess my plan would be this: whenever we're thinking about starting a war, we don't start it.

To make it easier to reduce the temptation to fight wars, we'll cut the defense budget by 10% per year until our military spending is on par with the NATO average, as a percentage of GDP. All of the direct federal employees who lose their jobs to these cuts can get a job with a new civilian agency devoted to infrastructure projects. The military likes to tout that it prepares soldiers for jobs in the civilian world; this is just taking out the part where you have to shoot at people first.

On balance we'll save money because it will be cheaper to pay people to build high speed rail lines than to get shot at, because bulldozers are cheaper than tanks, and because we'll actually get something out of our investment. There will be no shortage of jobs in the former military industrial sector, they'll just shift to high speed rail, renewable energy, public transit, electrical infrastructure, high speed internet everywhere, etc.

And because wars by proxy are just as bad, we'll end all military foreign aid and replace it with the foreign branch of this new civilian agency, devoted to providing basic infrastructure in the developing world (clean water, sanitation, roads, electricity, etc).

So there: we take great strides towards balancing the budget, we stop violently meddling with other countries, and we improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world.
posted by jedicus at 8:58 AM on May 17, 2011 [7 favorites]

You know what else can lower the risks and costs of combat? Not fighting wars.

Ironmouth : What's your plan for that?

All snark aside... Diplomacy?

We've been using the stick for so long, I wonder how good we'd be at using the carrot again. That said, having a strong military gives us a lot of diplomatic leverage, so I understand that the defense budget is essential to the health of our nation, I just wonder how much we could move to different national security endeavors (like rebuilding infrastructure) if we didn't outspend the rest of the world at quite the rate we are currently hitting.
posted by quin at 9:00 AM on May 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

Drones are indeed tele-operated -- Predators from Nellis AFB in Las Vegas. The latency is an issue, but commands to the drones are generally high-level -- "fly in a circle around such and such coordinates," not "turn left." A fighter drone would have to take similarly high-level commands like "follow that guy and follow a missile when you get a chance."

I'm sure a human could beat one drone in a dogfight, but could he beat 10 drones firing missiles at him from all sides? Because they'd cost about the same.
posted by miyabo at 9:01 AM on May 17, 2011

There are all sorts of questions, frequently voiced, about the F-35, and whether it's a necessary kind of plane, a good plane, or even a good idea for a plane.

On another level, absolutely divorced from strategic, moral, or philosophical considerations... I sure hope that it has some hidden whiz-bang features, beyond just being a quasi-stealthy bomb/missile truck that doesn't carry many bombs or missiles. In addition to the radar, artificial omnidirectional line-of-sight, and extensive networking with other F-35s, there are rumors to the effect that it has some secret EMP capability.

Of course, if it doesn't have these things... or they don't actually have that much tactical value... well... hmm...
posted by darth_tedious at 9:09 AM on May 17, 2011

TD - nationalized healthcare is a pretty monumental addition to public spending, and without finding that money elsewhere we're just going to be borrowing more money.

Pedant here. We didn't nationalize healthcare.
posted by schmod at 9:10 AM on May 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

That's fair, Tomorrowful, and if I can hedge my bet a bit in your favor, I rephrase it as "fighting wars entirely with drones is for pussies." (if you or anyone here is a drone pilot/operator, please keep in mind I don't think you're a pussy)

But also keep in mind there are multiple ways of looking at war. While yours is more pragmatic (we kill more of them= we win) I'm thinking more philosophically: we want to win the *right* war, if you follow me.

But I do disagree that you think I don't understand what a war is for. Let's face it, it's not "for" anything, but (hopefully) only *because* of something. Yes, there is a desirable outcome, but I don't think anyone's goal these days is as simple as "kill lots of them while we risk nothing." As fucked up as it is, how much worse would the Iraq war look if the casualties were "Iraq: 300,000 ; United States: 0"?

Patton was famous for saying that no soldier ever won a war by dying for his country, but by making the other guy die for *his*." That's a great speech for troops heading into battle, but these days, it makes little sense. In the Battle of Mogadishu, some 1,000 Somalis were killed, versus 18 Americans, and yet we pulled out. Would drone technology have turned the tide? I doubt it, but maybe. Somewhere along the line, America decided that Somalia's freedom was worth no more than 18 lives lost in combat. (and let's not forget the huge role that politics played in that particular confrontation)

What message did that send to the Somali warlords? That the U.S. can be scared off by mere body count, while "we" cannot. And how would drones improve things? They would let our enemies know that we are so politically afraid of losing one of our own that we dare not risk them in combat. Are we "winning" now?

Risking of human life lends a certain "legitimacy" to an endeavor, if you will. Imagine if Kennedy had omitted "returning him safely to the earth" from his moon-shot speech. If all we had to do was land a corpse on the moon, we'd have gotten there in half the time. Think of the V2 rocket, as a wartime weapon. Kind of a dick move by a desperate enemy, dontcha think?

Yeah, yeah we have weapons now that are far more destructive and far-reaching than that, but the point still stands that unless we are willing to pit our own men & women against theirs, we've no right engaging in war at all.

It's just not cricket. (and if you don't think the rules of cricket have any place in such a nasty business as war, it turns out there's a lot of other things that people have ruled "out of bounds" in the past, so "victory at any cost" is no defense for such an argument.
posted by ShutterBun at 9:32 AM on May 17, 2011

The Chinese are rapidly developing the Chengdu J20 as a tactical counter to the F-22/F-35 generation of aircraft. I imagine Taiwan and Japan are following this with some interest, and planning for acquisition of some F-35 variants, at least, as counters.

As to the role of drones, one thing that is currently central to drone operations is that they are essentially slow flying, aerodynamically efficient designs, that can stay up a relatively long time without refueling, and be launched and recovered from relatively low tech, forward operating bases. Thus, no mid-air refueling is needed for their operation. But high speed jet fighters, by nature of their flight profiles, require mid-air refueling to achieve effective combat radius operations, particularly when launched and recovered from difficult "basing" like aircraft carriers. Just taking the pilot out of such aircraft doesn't eliminate the need for mid-air refueling, which is currently one of the big technological stumbling blocks to developing and deploying high speed jet powered drones. Nor has anyone yet suggested how unmanned drones can accomplish all weather night landings on U.S. carriers. Until the mid-air refueling and carrier operation issues are resolved successfully, high speed jet drones aren't as likely to be first line operational choices as it might seem they should be.
posted by paulsc at 9:36 AM on May 17, 2011 [2 favorites]

I thought I read somewhere that drones are not a good replacement for the aging-but-beloved A-10.

I understand that the low munitions load can be compensated for by adding more drones (in a "rotweiler versus rotweiler's weight in chihuahuas" sort of model), and a drone should be able to loiter longer. Are there other reasons?
posted by wenestvedt at 9:43 AM on May 17, 2011

Shutterbun - your argument isn't really persuasive to me. What level of training and equipment allows one to go to war with a good conscience? Should we have invaded Afghanistan with a bunch of 5th-graders wielding kitchen knives to prove our dedication to the cause? 5,000-some American servicemembers have been killed in Iraq, does that mean it was a good war (I would submit that in fact it is one of the most horrible things we as a nation have done)?

If I may be permitted to use both sides of the blade (given our current attrociously beligerent...errr...activities) I would say this:

G.W. Bush's willingness to put American soldiers' lives at risk in Iraq is (oh dear) somewhat indicitive of his personal conviction that it was (oh mama) justifiable.

Again, Iraq is such a dreadful example, because it's really such an horrendous breach of...pretty much everything. Maybe if we could limit the discussion to "rational conflicts" I guess.

But even with the current Iraq war, you can still kinda see my point by looking at the juxtaposition re: drones. Imagine if there were 100,000 Iraqi casualties, vs. 12 drones destroyed. Wouldn't we (or at least more of us) be thinking awfully hard about "how difficult this decision was" for W?

Granted, I think we'd all be HAPPY with an outcome of "zero American casualties," but going in without even the risk? That shit wouldn't fly, would it? (yeah, yeah, Clinton sent in airstrikes every fortnight, etc. At least there were pilots flying the planes)
posted by ShutterBun at 9:45 AM on May 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

I'll come right out and say it: killing enemies with drones is for pussies

I'd rather be a victorious "pussy" than a "real man" who loses. War is for winning, plain and simple. If things are so important that organized killing is on the line, you better play to win and not work out some sort of gender crap. Lives will be lost and if you are not in it 100% to achieve your political aims, why would you dare risk the lives of a single person?
posted by Ironmouth at 10:23 AM on May 17, 2011

>> You know what else can lower the risks and costs of combat? Not fighting wars.

> What's your plan for that?

The US is in three announced wars of choice at the same time and many undeclared wars all over the globe. It spends as much money as all other nations put together, and has been at war for 70 years in a now.

And yet you act as if it's inconceivable that any other state of affairs could possibly exist.

One simple thing would be a great start - simply refuse to engage in wars of choice. Iraq is a perfect example there - they hadn't invaded the US or one of its allies, the US simply chose to invade them.

Really, there are other ways to live than the permanent war society.

The fact that there is no light between the Democrats and Republicans on this matter does not mean that the truth lies in the tiny region between "very warlike" and "insanely warlike" that the two parties span - it is simply that both are corrupt to their cores with their members personally benefitting from this criminally deplorable state of affairs, and are too short-sighted to understand that they are rapidly tearing down the affluent, comfortable, liberal economic system that benefitted hundreds of millions of Americans of generations, creating instead a permanent impoverished underclass who will never again have a real chance at a Job which isn't a MacJob no matter what "good choices" they make.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 10:26 AM on May 17, 2011 [2 favorites]

You know what else can lower the risks and costs of combat? Not fighting wars.

Ironmouth : What's your plan for that?

All snark aside... Diplomacy?

Let me know when that works out.

Think of it this way. Many, many, many wars have been avoided by diplomacy.

But what is your diplomatic solution in September 2001 when we want bin Laden and the Taliban won't let him go? What is your diplomatic solution when N. Korea crosses the DMZ.

Or to be even more to the point, what is your diplomatic solution when America won't let you have an election because Ho Chi Minh will win it? Doesn't Ho have the right to resort to arms?

What is your diplomatic solution when the Japanese Empire is hell bent on conquering huge oil reserves and enslaving the population of half of China? An embargo and diplomatic talks? A wise move, but Japan would not play along and instead, in the middle of talks, attacked. Followed by Germany declaring war on us. Do we tell them we want diplomacy?

This is real life. Sometimes things suck. We should be ready for that, but also make the fuck sure we don't get ripped off in our getting ready.
posted by Ironmouth at 10:28 AM on May 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

I'll come right out and say it: killing enemies with drones is for pussies

Why are we still using pussy as a pejorative? For one thing, it's misogynist. For another, pussy is awesome.
posted by Scoo at 10:32 AM on May 17, 2011

One simple thing would be a great start - simply refuse to engage in wars of choice.

Agreed that Iraq is a war of choice that should have never been engaged in. But Afghanistan was not.

Viet Nam, war of choice, should not have been engaged in.

Korea, war of necessity.

Second World War--War of necessity

First World War--War of necessity

Spanish American War--War of Choice, should have never been fought

Civil War, war of necessity

Mexican War--War of Choice should have never been fought.

War of 1812--gotta think about that one.

Revolutionary war--War of necessity.

One other point. I had an Irish roommate once. He started talking about how Ireland never did any of this. I said if Ireland had the power, can you stand here and tell me they would not have done it? He said, no he couldn't.

Those who have the power wield it. Our job is to make sure it is only when necessary.
posted by Ironmouth at 10:33 AM on May 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

I'll come right out and say it: killing enemies with drones is for limpdicks.
posted by polyhedron at 10:44 AM on May 17, 2011

In the event of a truly serious conflict where we lost planes on any sizeable scale how in the world would we be able to maintain such a sophisticated air force? Could we actually replace these kind of planes in any sort of timely fashion? And if we could replace them could we pay for them?

The Second World War lasted almost 6 years. The next World War will last 6 weeks. That's how much faster operational tempo is today. The firepower is higher, the command and control is multiples greater than it was, and the mobility is much higher.

There won't be any assembly lines.
posted by Ironmouth at 10:48 AM on May 17, 2011

> But Afghanistan was not.

It was absolutely a war of choice. No attempt was made to explore any non-military solution.

The Taliban immediately offered to give up Bin Laden et al - under unreasonable conditions, true, but the fact was that they immediately offered to negotiate and George W. Bush refused to do so. They later unilaterally relaxed their conditions but again, Bush refused to even discuss the possibility of anything other than war.

At the time, this war was sold to us as a way to catch Bin Laden and his gang, but I'd say that we'd all agree that the war in fact delayed the capture of Bin Laden by many years, since so very much of US military and security attention was directed to Afghanistan (and Iraq of course), areas where Bin Laden was in fact not hiding.

Please note that none of the 9/11 hijackers, their managers and handlers, nor the top people in Al Qaeda, none of these people were Afghani and there's no evidence that one Afghani knew about 9/11 before it happened. Ironmouth has pulled out all sorts of evidence in previous threads when I mention this but the very best you can say is that the Taliban were hostile to the US and thus supported Al Qaeda, who were also hostile to the US - that's a very tenuous thread to start a war on, particularly if it's a diversion from, you know, actually punishing the criminals who committed the, you remember?, actual crime we're supposed to be reacting to!

Of course, the people in charge now try to pretend that the War in Afghanistan is some sort of freedom thing - now they get to vote!! - but if US really cared about freedom it'd be so, so, so much easier to start by simply not supporting the tiresome plethora of thugs, torturers and kleptocrats who get our guns and money.

tl;dr: Afghanistan was a war of choice in response to 9/11, and a war that in fact delayed the punishment of the criminals behind the attack by many years.


> Korea, war of necessity.

That was the UN, right? I have no issue whatsoever with the UN doing things. By and large, the UN is about the only country or organization in history that actually has had a positive effect with its warfare. If you recall, their first victory was defeating Hitler, hard to beat, and yes, they've had a bunch of failures, but overall someone has to keep the peace with weapons and the United Nations is what we have.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 10:58 AM on May 17, 2011 [2 favorites]

if you are not in it 100% to achieve your political aims, why would you dare risk the lives of a single person?

That's kinda related to my point. Nothing says "I'm in this 100% to achieve my political aims" quite like putting your own men at risk. And if you're NOT in it 100%, maybe you don't need to be killing people.
posted by ShutterBun at 10:59 AM on May 17, 2011

That's a really odd twist of argument: no war but manly-man war.

The nomal concern of push-button, low-risk warfare is that it would be too easy to engage in, that automation would facilitate wars of choice. The loss of opportunities to die seems an odd preoccupation.
posted by bonehead at 11:16 AM on May 17, 2011

I was just cracking wise. If you're going to fight, fight to win. Try not to fight, please.
posted by polyhedron at 11:22 AM on May 17, 2011

Isn't Libya a war of choice, come to think of it? We're still in that one?

I've been reading a little about Nicaragua, where the US publicly funded the armed revolution against the elected government and even put mines the harbour of Managua, and Chile, where the US systematically and successfully worked to undermine the elected government with violence including political assassination - do these count as "wars of choice"?

They aren't really "wars" per se - but they have the same devastating effect on the people of the countries involved - and they certainly are "interventions of choice".

I'm 48 years old and we're have wars of choice or the functional equivalent for every President in my lifetime except Carter and Bush I (it's not really honest to consider Iraq I a "war of choice").

We "vanquished" our "great enemy" the Soviet Union - and then we simply invented another. If you recall, we had these terrorists actions all the time before and yet we never started a war on terror - because it was treated, and treated successfully, as a police matter.

And in fact if the US had done their police work 9/11 never would have happened in the first place. The 9/11 Commission report is not a pretty thing and one of the things that's completely obvious is that the failure wasn't some random thing, it was due to both systematical and individual failure in the entire system, a universal turning away from the police work aspects of their jobs and into the oppressive and fear-mongering world.

As you read the reports, you see individuals doing police work and coming to correct conclusions - and then their conclusions being trashed due to departments in turf battles with each other, or because the police work end was simply not treated with respect and their reports left to gather dust while the CIA and FBI instead concentrated their attentions on us fucking hippies and leftists and eco-freaks and anti-corporatists and peaceful protestors and long-hairs and drug users who, when it came down to it, are basically harmless - simply for authoritarian, political and doctrinary reasons.

9/11 was a crime - not even the greatest crime in recent history, the human cost of Bhopal was many times greater for example, though that's more a case of homicide by depraved indifference - and should have been treated as exactly such. The US should have immediately made this clear, said, "We will stop at nothing to catch Bin Laden and any accomplices of his, we will not respect the sovereignty of any other country in our quest" but also "Our goal is not to overthrow any of your countries. Give up the criminals and all accomplices for a fair trial and we'll reward you richly."

9/11 should have been a police matter in its purest essence - even if the "police" were the Armed Forces of the United States of America and the scale one previously unimagined.

9/11 gave the US the moral authority to capture and punish the criminals who committed this crime, by any means necessary - and nothing more.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 11:26 AM on May 17, 2011 [5 favorites]

> War is for winning, plain and simple.

> If you're going to fight, fight to win.

There are many reasons for having "rules" when you fight but they all stem from the fact that if everyone has that attitude, conflicts quickly flare to be deadly and destructive to all involved and passers-by too.

Imagine what you'd be like if you were like this in your personal life! When it comes down to it, "winning at all costs" is simply psychopathic.


I remember once 20 years ago I was walking through Times Square when someone came up behind me and hit me - breaking off the tiniest fragment of a canine tooth, only my dentist noticed. I wheeled around, ready to kill - and it was a disgustingly filthy homeless man, "You bumped into me!" (I know that I hadn't, I'm very sensitive to that...)

He really wanted to fight, I was boiling with rage, but I looked at him, he looked so vile and I thought, he has nothing to lose, and I can just walk away, and I did. (I couldn't find a cop, which sucked, this was a long time ago.) In some alternate world I have no doubt that I died brawling with this guy, run over by a taxi on on Eighth Avenue.

The moral is: keep your standard when you are fighting - you'll look back and be glad you did.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 11:42 AM on May 17, 2011

War of 1812--gotta think about that one.

hmmm.....
posted by Kabanos at 11:56 AM on May 17, 2011

"In military threads, making yourself sound like a fool is easy, but avoiding the simplest conflation of fact with opinion is very hard." - Carl von Canhazwitz

The glib assumption that manned planes are obsolete in the age of the drone is a rather large mistake. Two major issues:

One, in the next non-trivial conflict the electronic warfare is going to be intense. Drones are reliant on telemetry links that can be interfered with. If it is a MAJOR conflict, the opening and possible decisive rounds will be fought in space. You can't talk to a drone halfway across the planet if your military satellite infrastructure is gone or severely impaired.

Two, if the next words out of your mouth are "but can't they just run in an autonomous mission mode by default or in case of mission breakdown?" this tells me two things. One, you are unaware of the technical challenges still to be overcome and two, even more unaware of the legal issues and existing frameworks for dealing with trigger authority and accountability that make it a complete non-starter. Short of a World War III, we are not handing kill decision authority over to an AI, which is what would be required.

In other words, while UAVs will continue to rapidly develop, iterate and proliferate in the coming decades, manned platforms aren't going to be obsolete in any of our lifetimes. If they become so, we're probably going to die shortly anyway.
posted by resplendentoops at 11:57 AM on May 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

Drones and "push-button" war tactics are bad P.R. for both the proponents and outside observers. Sending in men to do a terrible & awful thing is mitigated by the fact that they are risking their own lives. Drones may be capable of accomplishing the same goal, but given the lack of risk (beyond money) is seen as gutless and does little to reassure spectator nations of your conviction. (If you're not willing to risk your own boys' lives, maybe you'd better rethink the whole plan, no?)

Nonsense. The whole appeal of drones (and robots) is to negate asymmetric warfare. The majority of Americans don't give a shit how many Irawis have died; the care about a few thousand US casualties, just like the majority of political pressure in Vietnam came not from mass-murder in Vietname or Cambodia, but the tens of thousands of American casualties. War without losses on one's own side is the wet dream of the millitary planner, because you'll not lose on the domestic front.
posted by rodgerd at 12:12 PM on May 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

One, in the next non-trivial conflict the electronic warfare is going to be intense. Drones are reliant on telemetry links that can be interfered with.

True, but, if, as you say:

If it is a MAJOR conflict, the opening and possible decisive rounds will be fought in space.

If this is a major conflict, with balistic missiles and the like, we're doomed anyway.

I remain unconvinced that when air-superiority is maintained, as in the majority of the "assymetric" wars and conflicts of the last half-century, drones will not be both more effective and cost less than manned aircraft. Building an aircraft for that role, in the present, is ignoring both the present extremly poor cost performance for these 5th-gen strike fighters and the very rapid pace of drone development.
posted by bonehead at 12:56 PM on May 17, 2011

> But Afghanistan was not.

It was absolutely a war of choice. No attempt was made to explore any non-military solution.

The Taliban immediately offered to give up Bin Laden et al - under unreasonable conditions, true, but the fact was that they immediately offered to negotiate and George W. Bush refused to do so. They later unilaterally relaxed their conditions but again, Bush refused to even discuss the possibility of anything other than war.

Let's look at the facts, shall we?

This was their best offer:

The statement by Deputy Prime Minister Haji Abdul Kabir did not break new ground. But its timing and the fact it was made to foreign reporters by such a senior figure – the Taliban's third most powerful figure – could indicate the movement was desperate for a way out of the crisis after more than a week of punishing airstrikes.

Kabir said that if the United States gave evidence bin Laden was behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and halted the bombing, "we would be ready to hand him over to a third country" – a country, he added, that would never "come under pressure from the United States."

"If America were to step back from the current policy, then we could negotiate," he said. "Then we could discuss which third country."

their so called "second offer" was nothing new. So there was no second offer, got it?

A third country? Really? turn over evidence to bin Laden? Really?
posted by Ironmouth at 1:08 PM on May 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

The essential idiocy of this military hypertrophy is in a complete lack of examination of the function it's supposed to serve. Presumably you have a military to assure security. What good is a military you cannot afford?

When you spend so much on the military that you starve the country of essential societal and economic resources, you become like a knight that orders a sword so large it's too heavy for him to lift.

We maintain our military advantage basically through superior technology and financial resources. But when you put money into new fighters at the cost of education, you will eventually lose the scientific and then the technological lead. We are fighting over how many teachers we can afford, wondering why the costs of secondary education keep escalating out of reach of more and more people, why our primary education seems to leave our students well behind many other industrialized nations. We have been steadily losing our technological and scientific lead. These things are not unconnected.

When we starve our economy of essential resources by not investing in physical and intellectual infrastructure, the economy will fail to deliver the very financial resources necessary to keep funding the military. That takes care of the other leg our military superiority rests on. Both our science/technology and financial advantages are diminishing, and I'm afraid at some point we may enter a spiral of no return. I don't know where that event horizon is, but it's somewhere not too far, after eight years of bushco and now of Republican dominance.

It would make much more sense to take 90% of the military budget and pour it into education, infrastructure, and growing the economy. We did that after the Sputnik scare, and it paid off. We have been living off the dividends of that, and our post WWII prosperity built on foundations laid down by FDR and successive Democratic administrations. Then came Vietnam and it's been downhill ever since, sometimes slower (Clinton) sometimes straight off the cliff (bushco). Now the Republicans are have us eating our seed corn through the dismantling of any semblance of a sane tax policy and defunding of infrastructure spending. Pretty soon, the sword will be too heavy to lift. The sword is getting bigger and fatter all the time, but the knight is starving and wasting away. There is going to be a cross-over point, where the knight becomes too weak and the sword too heavy.

And so, military hypertrophy is self-defeating. We're destroying our country's future - and now present - so that we can fund a military that for decades has not been serving as a counter to any rational threat we've faced, but has been used in non-stop wars of choice that merely serve as another sink for resources we badly need at home. The proud American citizen, the envy of the world after WWII, is determined to become a ragged beggar, wielding old weapons he can not afford to update. We can still stop and change our direction - radically. But there is no Change we can believe in, and increasingly, no Hope either.
posted by VikingSword at 1:47 PM on May 17, 2011 [5 favorites]

Kabir said that if the United States gave evidence bin Laden was behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and halted the bombing, "we would be ready to hand him over to a third country" – a country, he added, that would never "come under pressure from the United States."

Why, exactly, is this an unreasonable stance? Note that their country is being bombed at that time, hardly a "negotiation" tactic!

You can quibble about whether the first and second attempts were functionally the same but the fact is that Afghanistan attempted to negotiate and was rebuffed.

In fact, the War in Afghanistan diverted us from our main target, Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, who we might have been able to catch eight years ago if we hadn't diverted most of our military force into two pointless wars of "regime change".

The War in Afghanistan was a war of choice - and it was a stupid choice too, expensive, got rid of the oppressive Taliban but not worth it at the cost - the US could and should easily have chosen not to fight this war and simply gone after Bin Laden at a fraction of the cost and at a lot more national satisfaction if we'd caught Bin Laden in 2003 instead of 2011...
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 2:50 PM on May 17, 2011

It's quite sobering that the US spent the USSR into submission, and now can't stop. Peace dividend, anyone? Or look at the way the Royal Navy achieved global superiority, to the point that the UK could impose percentage-of-our-navy size limits on other countries, yet ended up in another arms race where the great battles between the world's greatest navies just didn't happen - it was an expensive and painful stalemate, and the real war was fought elsewhere. I guess that being the biggest, baddest, most gun-floaty boatiest of the lot doesn't work as a peace-time strategy.

There's no country nor group of countries who pose an existential threat to the West through conventional warfare. Nor is it easy to imagine how that might come about, with or without the nuclear factor that's another layer of gunk on top of the lot.

The most potent threats come from a combination of energy supply dependencies, climate change, and infrastructure vulnerabilities, which are interwoven, not mediated by national boundaries, and quite, quite too big and complex to understand without a really hard effort.

Nations don't respond well to complexity, especially when it involves thinking outside the border, which is why we ignore the above and have wartime levels of response (loss of rights and freedom, intrusive state apparatus, argument-as-treason) within our nations to threats which, while unpleasant and easy to characterise, are not objectively that dangerous.

What will change to make things better? I hope, the realisation that around the world, we can grasp both power and responsibility independent of the structures we grew up in. We can build what we need to build and do what we need to do without waiting for permission, and without filtering it first through the prism of nation states. I find it miserable that decades after joining the European Union, my choice of political party is limited to the same national (if that!) slate as was floating around before World War II. It doesn't reflect my world, it doesn't reflect the true dangers to the society and values I love and cherish, and it gives me no power to even start to address the changes that will have to be made.

Perhaps I should grow a beard and start haunting the British Library.
posted by Devonian at 2:52 PM on May 17, 2011 [2 favorites]

I thought I read somewhere that drones are not a good replacement for the aging-but-beloved A-10.

I understand that the low munitions load can be compensated for by adding more drones (in a "rotweiler versus rotweiler's weight in chihuahuas" sort of model), and a drone should be able to loiter longer. Are there other reasons?

A-10s are ridiculously tough and the pilot sits in a bathtub of titanium. They also are specifically built around the GAU-8 Avenger. Drones come nothing close to an A-10.
posted by P.o.B. at 4:58 PM on May 17, 2011

But what is your diplomatic solution in September 2001 when we want bin Laden and the Taliban won't let him go?

I send in Seal Team Six and either drag him out or kill him.

I don't invade an unrelated country.

George W. Bush was the best ally Osama bin Laden ever had.
posted by eriko at 6:19 PM on May 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

The military industrial complex is so rooted that pretty much anywhere in the country, a good number of people stand to lose their jobs if we cut the defense budget, or so goes the perception in any case. It's a tricky pickle to get out of, and an unpopular, if not impossible platform to get elected on.
I worked at a machine shop briefly; the economy was in the shitter and half the shop was shut down, but "thankfully" what kept us afloat was running the lines making .50 cal rounds, 7 days a week, plenty of overtime..
Eisenhower warned us, but even he sensed he was too late. It's depressing.
posted by hypersloth at 6:38 PM on May 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

> a good number of people stand to lose their jobs if we cut the defense budget, or so goes the perception in any case.

You are right that it might be too late but we could retrain all these people to build and operate public transportation, health care and community services.

There are other alternatives to putting the money in a pile and setting it on fire, you know...
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 7:14 PM on May 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

Oh I definitely agree lupus, nothing I want more. Still depresses me that other than here on the blue, I don't hear much about it. Maybe it will change when there's nothing left to cut.
posted by hypersloth at 7:30 PM on May 17, 2011

If anyone wants the opinion of an Australian air power analyst on the JSF, here is a link with more information than i could ever parse.

But in summary, Kopp and Goon reckon that the JSF isn't any good, it'll get it's arse handed to it by PAK-FAs and S300s.
posted by wilful at 7:52 PM on May 17, 2011

For all its claims of air superiority and multi-mission capabilities, the F-35 still can't hold its own against the common 18-wheeler, given the right driver.
posted by Durhey at 8:01 PM on May 17, 2011

Even if the F-35 isn't the best strategic choice for the USA (and I have no idea whether it is or isn't) your allies are very eager to purchase it, which means that manufacturing it gives you leverage over them. Also, by selectively supporting their air forces you have the ability to achieve your own strategic goals: e.g., you can give Israel the ability to take out the Iranian nuclear sites at a time of your own choosing.
posted by Joe in Australia at 8:38 PM on May 17, 2011

War without losses on one's own side is the wet dream of the millitary planner, because you'll not lose on the domestic front.

There's often a big difference between the "wet dream of a military planner" and "what's good for the country, morally and politically, in the long term."
posted by ShutterBun at 12:38 AM on May 18, 2011

Joe, no wonder that Israel is eager to "purchase" F-35s, with Uncle Sam picking up the tab anyway.

Other allies that actually have to pay for their weapons are somewhat more circumspect.
posted by Skeptic at 5:01 AM on May 18, 2011 [1 favorite]

Korea, war of necessity.

And yet - not a war.

Truman did not seek a formal declaration of war from Congress; officially, America's presence in Korea amounted to no more than a "police action."

That is from Archives.gov in the Teachers
Home > Teachers' Resources > Teaching With Documents > Postwar United States (1945 to early 1970s) section, in case some wish to argue that the source is wrong.
posted by rough ashlar at 10:15 AM on May 18, 2011

There's often a big difference between the "wet dream of a military planner" and "what's good for the country, morally and politically, in the long term."

What, and a fervent willingness to sacrifice members of a permanent underclass in order to live up to some imaginary standard of virtù is better, somehow?
posted by kagredon at 5:19 PM on May 18, 2011